Disaster artist
Something’s only a disaster if we notice it.
So says Elisa Gabbert, a poet and essayist, who was tapped to do a close reading of W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” for the New York Times. It’s a wonderfully rich poem, and the interactive format is worth a few minutes of your time especially if you miss the classroom or enjoy a Wikipedia wormhole.
The poem itself is inspired by Pieter Brugel’s “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus” (pictured above), named for the mythological man’s fall to earth even though it barely depicts the splash. Instead, Brugel centers a ploughman dutifully ploughing his field, unaware of the calamity unfolding behind him.
To Auden, who wrote his poem in the run-up to World War II, the painting is a commentary on how “everything turns away / Quite leisurely from…disaster.” The ploughman keeps ploughing, the shepherd turns his back, and “the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, /
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”
While we need look no further than our local unhoused population let alone the rubble in Ukraine for tragedies that are hard to watch, I interpret the scene as less about the ease of looking away and more about the difficulty of staying focused. If we dial it back from life and death (As Gabbert points out, “[Icarus] also looks pretty close to the shore, like … maybe if he just stood up?”), it’s a reminder that the road to anywhere is filled with distractions and if we stop every time someone yells fire, we’ll stand still.
There’s a difference between burying your head in the sand and tending your own garden, and that difference is growth. There will be disaster. There will be setbacks. No one is falling out of the sky, but the forest is on fire, and the ice caps are now ice cubes. It’s bad out there, but if you put your own mask on first, you’ll be in a better position to pick up the pieces of someone else’s crash.
Everything’s a disaster, I’ve noticed, but only fools rush in.