was in traction for six weeks, broken bones and compressed vertebrae. He hated the army, didn’t want to go back, and was never happier, they told me, than when he was lying there, immobilized, contemplating his mad descent.
A couple of years later he went missing in Dundee after a night’s drinking and was believed murdered, or drowned, until they found his body in a disused factory. He had been climbing on the roof, and it had given way.
*
In 2012, at the age of forty-two, I decided that I would travel to see the forty-two or so extant paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. A mania for Bruegel had recently gripped me, and I had been thinking about little else. And then in early May of that year I realized that all of the paintings (except one) hung in public, or publicly viewable, collections. All were reachable. I suddenly saw that there was a great Bruegel Object out there, dismembered like the body of Osiris and strewn around the museums of Europe and North America, and I set myself to reconstitute it. I drew up a spreadsheet on which I recorded where the constituent limbs and parts of this prostrate god were located, and started to plan my journeys.
The Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, while it is on my spreadsheet, has been downgraded to a section devoted to probable copies, misattributions and mislabellings. Icarus is not one of the forty-two, is not authentic Bruegel but most likely a copy. It is unsigned and undated. It is painted on canvas. Most spreadsheet Bruegels are on wood panel, and can be dendrochronologically confirmed, and those that are on canvas are not in oil but in tempera. Radiocarbon dating of the Icarus is inconclusive – there are ambiguities in the calibration curve, thick layers of oxidized varnish which mask colours and throw off precision – but the samples of the oldest canvas harvested suggest a date from the end of the sixteenth century or the beginning of the seventeenth, thirty years after Bruegel died.
In January 2011, however, this doesn’t much matter: the spreadsheet is a year off, and the Icarus is the reason I am in the Bruegel room. I am drawn by its fame. W. H. Auden wrote a poem about it. So did William Carlos Williams. Everyone has seen it, in reproduction if not in fact.
I am in Brussels waiting for a friend whose flight is delayed; we are supposed to be on our way to Bruges, but I have a few loose hours to fill. I leave my bags at the station and walk up into the centre of the city, and locate what Auden called the Musée des Beaux Arts.
Museums are safe havens. International space. No one looks twice at you in a museum. No one expects you to speak French, for example, as they might elsewhere in Brussels, in the real city. So I have a cappuccino and a croissant, and I automatically belong. I start to breathe easy.
The museum is extensive, however, and, my coffee done, I get a little lost wandering in the modern wings. It turns out there is such a thing as nineteenth-century Belgian art. And a big thing it is. But eventually I clamber up to the upper galleries where they have constructed a chronological circuit from Van der Weyden to Rembrandt and Rubens, more or less. I pick a door at hazard: it is the wrong door, and I make my progress clockwise, back through history. I freefall past Rembrandts and Van Dycks and other brown paintings, start to meet some shuddering resistance around the end of the sixteenth century, and I am still some distance away from the fifteenth-century Flems where I expect softly to touch down and walk with the strange beasts in Eden, when I happen into the corner room of Bruegels.
Here is Icarus. My idle descent through the gallery may have come to an abrupt halt, but my life has just accelerated without my realizing it. I have entered the slipstream of an as yet invisible project, a dark mass lying in the future. If I could look down on myself, see myself situated in all the meaningful relations of my life, my hair would be streaming, my cheeks juddering, in the chill jets of air.
Gravity is a weak but insistent force. Perhaps not a force at all, but a geometry. Who knows where its centres lie, or to what we are tending?
My notebooks of the time are sketchy on the subject of Bruegel. I see that I made a solitary note about the Icarus. That ploughman, I observed, was never going to be able to turn his horse and his plough at the bottom of that field.
It is not a profound observation. I have picked up on an oddity of composition – the narrow, constrained hundred, the clodhopping ploughman and his lean horse. But it leads, I see now, to others. The ploughman’s weight distribution is all wrong. The sheep, also, are ill-managed, crammed into a perilous corner of a field.
Clodhopping ploughman: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, detail.
And the ship is wrongly rigged. Bruegel made a number of drawings of ships for a series of engravings in the early 1560s, caravels and sloops and brigantines and oceangoing three-masters, all accurately observed and set down, their complex unreadable rigging read anyway by a sharp eye. An adopted son of the great port of Antwerp, he would have had time to learn. Anyway, this Icarus ship is wrongly rigged or cack-handedly painted (the anamorphic hull would suggest the latter). Expensive delicate ship, Auden calls it. But those tiny seamen are furling all the wrong sails, leaving the lateen at the back, the absurd straining foresail caught in a squall or a hurricane – how is the ploughman’s cap not blown off, zipped up into some vortex of winds? – the billow of the sail at odds, seemingly, with the play of its cross-spar, the whole contraption flapping about chaotically. The shrouds on the foremast are wrongly positioned (or again, poorly painted). Much too much sail, in too narrow a space (although a second ship in the background is charging into port with a full spread of sail and an apparent death wish).
The ship still manages to be a conception of no little beauty, stupidly buoyant and energetic, a Dionysiac vehicle.
Three of Bruegel’s ship engravings are ornamented with scenes from classical mythology: one, of three caravels in a rising gale, has Arion riding on his dolphin, playing his harp; another, of two galleys following a three-masted ship, has the fall of Phaethon unfolding like a great pantomime in the sky; and a third, of a ship not at all unlike that in the painting (only better done, and with a full spread of sail), has both Daedalus and a tumbling Icarus overhead.
Dionysiac vehicle: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, detail.
Bruegel rarely painted classical gods or myths. His themes were biblical, vernacular. But ocean-going ships, with their whiff of impossible distance and difference, seem to have brought it out in him. And so this ship, fabulous technology, churns up Icarus in its wake.
Experienced paragliders will skip from thermal to thermal, or dance on the uplift over a ridge. I never attained any such level of skill. I could only lumber off a hilltop like a misevolved seabird, and then hang inert beneath my canopy while it and I floated softly earthwards at an angle of, approximately, 11.5 degrees. I could take off from and land at given points, the one a straightforward geometrical projection of the other. And that was it. There was to be no soaring. Dan, or Icarus, I was not.
It was extraordinary, nonetheless. As I picture it in memory, the world stretched beneath me like a Bruegelian landscape, blue mountains on the horizon, sea skirting the world, little villages in the distance, tiny copses below, miniature cows grazing the verdant champaign. I would survey all this, rigid in my harness, listening to the calm directions of my instructor, Zabdi, whose voice was relayed over a radio strapped to my shoulder.
In the evenings Zabdi and her boyfriend Chris would share their folklore: tales of paragliders colliding, their cords twisted into some double-helix of destruction, or of gliders veering off course, into mountains, out to sea, disappearing.
Most striking of all were the tales of paragliders sucked up tens of thousands of feet into black storm clouds before plummeting to earth again, frozen and asphyxiated. These stories of cloud suck, as it is known, may be folkloric, but they are also true. Survivors tell of encountering marvels up there: furious, volatile darkness, hailstones the size of oranges, incredible forces of updraught and precipitation. They would be tossed around in regions of lurid physics, as though buffeted in the red eye of Jupiter, would black out, and