Who is Icarus? And why? D. and S. have different ideas about what led to the wax holding his wings together to melt, and consequently about what caused him to plunge into the sea. It’s undeniable that Icarus got too excited. D. says that makes him a hero, arguing that the outcome implies that you have to fall yourself, that warnings (in this case, his father’s, and especially because of that) are there to be ignored. Sure, you fall. So what? It's very important not to listen to your father. You need to fall for yourself. So what?, S. says, that story only shows that vanity is a doom. He sacrificed his life for this vain. He could’ve kept flying.

It’s hard to hold on to that. Flight is a path, not a place. A situation. Promises can’t be held unless they vanish by either holding effectively or breaking. You either hit or miss. K’s take (the fourth person at the table, seated by the window) is that Icarus had to die, for otherwise the story would be boring. That’s how it is: you peak and then you go down. The descent starts once the peak has been achieved. You can choose to land smoothly or fall by exhaustion, in which case the pleasure of flying is prolonged. All of a sudden, it’s gone; the wings no longer work. It’s about finding the right timing to quit.  

Time is exactly where it gets difficult. Every trace is a stretch of a vanishing movement, opened up to the future. Remembrance has a part. So you try hard to understand the situation. It takes time. You take the time to look longer–a slow, elongated gaze (time should not be complicated): a gesture traces a line. A line is a sketch. A line traversing a line is a cross. Then it’s already an encounter, a situation. Then another gesture, another line, another encounter, and the situation is a grid, a web. A grid is composed of many grids connected to each other – another situation. Sometimes it’s a mess. How do you go through all the facets of a situation? How do you make the best out of it? How can you exit it smoothly?

2025

So there I was alone on this beautiful island and somehow turned that shitty feeling into something, something like a falling bird, or a rising bird, or just one flying bird, D. heralds at a later stage. She then goes on to ramble about washed out acrylic mixed with water and dyed like a t-shirt, how she would hang those irregular pieces of cloth outside to dry, how they got sticky from the salt hovering in the air. My coffee is nearly gone. The waiter asks me if I want some more. I nod and then go back to doomscrolling, going through my feed once again. Lots of images. Gestures. Traces. Images of someone pointing. Lines on images, grids. Images of lines on (           ). Words. 

I sip from my coffee, I don’t have much to say. I recall that passage from Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room where he claims that everyone goes the same dark road – “and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright – and it’s true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden”. Maybe. There is certainly something about a garden being inaccessible, somewhat hidden. But who would want to be stuck there? In the end, gardens are domains of control. Maybe Icarus wanted to lose it. Maybe that was the flight. Some things can’t be fenced. Blossom can’t be tamed.

Written for ‘Situations - and it’s true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden’