The Fall of Icarus

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Pieter Bruegel 

퇴근을 몇 분 앞두고 있을 때. 모니터를 응시하던 중 갑자기, 카레를 해먹어야겠어, 라고 느낌을 주며 큰 소리로 말해버렸다. 말하면서 나도 모르게 무릎을 탁 친 정도였던지 옆자리에 앉은 언니가 깜짝 놀라며 어이없어 하셨다.

전철도 오랫동안 오지 않고 대부분 피곤한 얼굴의 사람들로 북적북적한 퇴근 길에 진을 좀 뺐지만 집에 도착해서 의식적으로 천천히 손을 씻고 음악도 걸어놓지 않은 채, 집중해서 재료들을 씻고 다듬고 썰고 볶고 끓였다. 카레가 다 거기서 거기지 뭐, 하는 사람들 코를 죄다 눌러줄만큼 기똥차게 맛있는 카레가 탄생되었다. 하하하. 감기몸살 기운도 물러나고, 기분이 좋아져서 그림과 시를 찾았다. 이렇게 영 가둬지지 않는 것을 나란히 놓아두는 것은 다름아니고 그냥 시시한 소유욕.

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breugel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may 

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, 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.

- W. H. Auden

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

According to Bruegel

when Icarus fell

it was spring

a farmer was ploughing

his field

the whole pageantry

of the year was

awake tingling

with itself

sweating in the sun

that melted

the wings' wax

unsignificantly

off the coast

there was

a splash quite unnoticed

this was

Icarus drowning.

- William Carlos Williams