Resubmitted Post-A Museum of Ideas

I just realized that my recent post did not get posted accurately. Here it is corrected.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, based on lost orginial by Pieter Breughel, circa 1560s

Musee des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden 

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 Breughel'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.

This is one of my favorite poems by Auden, written after his visit to the museum in 1938. Others have written about Icarus as well (Anne Sexton among them); William Carlos Williams even wrote about the same painting, which in the 90s was reinterpreted as a copy of a Breughel original for reasons including that he worked in tempera and this is an oil painting. But, all that detail aside, Auden manages to observe in his poem an apathy about life, as well as the painting itself and Breughel's particular talent at showing the ordinary setting in which extraordinary moments happen.

Conversion of St. Paul, Pieter Breughel, 1567

The Conversion of Saint Paul, above, also illustrates this rather well. A dominant feature of the painting is a horse's ass. Beyond that, the viewer must squint to see the man fallen from his horse. That clutz becomes the theologizing Saint Paul. But the soldiers and horsemen continue. Or, as Robert Frost said, "I can sum up in three words everything I've learned in life: it goes on."

The poem by Auden seems to me a particularly engaging angle on Breughel's picture. Words do not always speak well to their visual counterparts, in fact so very often they do not. That there is such a gap between the two is particularly noticeable now as we get increasingly blinded with images and yet can not, or are not permitted to, decipher them for ourselves, but need sociologists or museum curators to explain to us what we see. We have learned to focus on drama as the sole view worth having, when drama is itself surrounded by the mundane events that constitute a larger portion of reality at any given moment. As we succumb to the news flash, the idol, this moment in time, we easily lose sight of the significance our own quotidian actions can have in adjusting our life, our families, our world for the better. Even if we can not see the larger relevance at the time.

There is great value in acknowledging a war, the one in Afghanistan right now or the World War II that dismayed Auden, but artists need not only present the horrors in order to impact. Just as usefully can be a poem, painting or even installation that recognizes the rest of life, reminding us in so doing of what we hope to still have when the war is over, what it is we hope to enjoy when the dead are buried, and hopefully, through those pleasures to respect the losses entailed.