Mangled Mythology
I’ve been blamed for a lot of things in my life, and some of them were even legitimate.
I built the labyrinth. I admit that. I am not proud of it, though I will say the workmanship was exceptional. A man may regret a structure without denyin’ the corners were true. I’ve also been accused of arrogance, schemin’, excessive cleverness, poor workplace boundaries, and, once, by a priest who couldn’t lace up a sandal, “defiance of the gods through unnatural craft.”
That last one is what people call engineering when it works before they’re ready.
But I won’t sit here and be blamed for the sun.
The sun was there before I arrived. It has been hangin’ in the sky ever since Creation, blazin’ away without supervision, and no one has yet thought to indict it. But let one boy fly too high after his father gives plain instructions, and suddenly I am the villain because wax has a melting point.
I specifically mentioned the sun.
Ask anybody. Well, ask anybody who was present and survived, which narrows the field, but I said it. I said, “Icarus, my son, don’t fly too low, lest the sea dampen your feathers, and don’t fly too high, lest the sun melt the wax.”
That’s clear. That’s balanced. That is fatherly. It contains two hazards, two directions, and no poetry whatsoever. If anything, the warning was overqualified. I gave the boy a perfectly reasonable vertical corridor and asked him to stay inside it.
Do you think he did that?
Now, before you get sentimental, understand that I loved my son beyond reason. I loved him more than my tools, more than my reputation, more than the pleasure of watchin’ a king misunderstand a diagram. Icarus was bright, merry, restless, and had the sort of confidence nature gives young men before wisdom has a chance to object.
He wasn’t stupid.
That’s an important thing to remember.
Stupid boys fall off fences. Icarus was not stupid. He was young, which can resemble stupidity from a distance and sometimes even from very close up.
We were imprisoned in Crete by King Minos, who had the gratitude of a scorpion and the administrative style of a locked pantry. I had built him a labyrinth because kings have a way of askin’ for favors in tones that include implied funerals. After Theseus escaped it with Ariadne’s help, Minos decided the fault lay with me, which is how kings keep from lookin’ inward and spoilin’ the furniture.
He shut us in a tower.
Now, a tower is a poor sort of place to imprison an inventor unless you remove his hands, his eyes, his patience, and every bird within studyin’ distance. Minos removed none of these, being less clever than advertised.
So, I watched the birds.
Gulls, mostly. Shameless creatures, gulls. They’ll steal your lunch and then look offended that you noticed. But they know the air. They rise, dip, turn, rest on currents no king can tax. I watched them till my eyes hurt, then I began gatherin’ feathers.
Icarus helped.
At first.
He was enthusiastic in the way all boys are enthusiastic, which is to say he wanted to do the glorious part immediately and considered preparation an insult. He would hand me three feathers, ask whether we could fly yet, then wander off to see if echoes could be improved by shoutin’ at them.
I sorted feathers by size. I shaped wooden frames light enough to lift, strong enough not to shame us. I softened wax. I twisted thread. I measured my son’s shoulders while he complained about standin’ still, which is a sentence that contains the entire tragedy if you have the heart to hear it.
“Will they work?” he asked.
“They must,” I said.
That’s not the same as yes, but children hear what they want to hear.
The night before our escape, I slept little. I checked the wings once, twice, twelve times. I tested joints. I worried knots. I prayed, which for an engineer is mostly arguin’ with silence in technical terms.
At dawn, I strapped the wings to him.
He looked ridiculous.
Glorious, but ridiculous. Feathers stuck out behind him like a goose had lost a bet. The harness rode crooked no matter how I tightened it. His hair was in his eyes. He was grinnin’ so hard I feared he might take off from that alone.
“Listen to me,” I said.
He nodded, not listenin’.
“Icarus.”
“I’m listenin’.”
“No, you are performin’ the appearance of listenin’. These are cousins, not twins.”
He rolled his eyes, as sons have done since the invention of fathers.
I took his face in my hands.
That stopped him.
“Middle path,” I said. “Not too low. Not too high. Follow me.”
He nodded again, softer this time. “I will.”
And for a while, he did.
Oh, you should have seen us.
No, perhaps you shouldn’t. It would only make the end worse.
Still, there was a stretch of morning when the plan worked. The tower dropped beneath us. Crete shrank. The sea opened wide and blue as mercy. The wings held. The wind took us, and for one shining piece of time, I was not prisoner, builder, servant, exile, or fool. I was a man in the air beside his son.
I looked back at Icarus and laughed.
He laughed too.
That was my mistake, maybe. Not the wings. Not the wax. The laughter.
Laughter can make safety seem rude.
He dipped, rose, tilted, played with the wind as if it were a puppy he’d just met. I gestured downward. He corrected. I gestured again. He waved.
Waved.
To this day, I have strong opinions about waving during emergencies.
Then he climbed.
At first, only a little. Enough to feel the sun warm his face. Enough to see what higher meant. Boys are drawn upward by the same foolish law that pulls smoke, prayers, and unpaid ambition.
“Icarus!” I shouted.
The wind took my voice and went somewhere else with it.
He climbed higher.
The wax softened.
I could see it happen. That’s the mercy I wasn’t granted: ignorance. A feather loosened and spun away. Then another. Then a whole bright scatter, like the sky itself was comin’ apart.
“Icarus!”
He looked down then.
Not scared at first. Surprised. Betrayed, almost, as if the sun had violated a private understanding.
Then the wings failed.
I have built a lot of things in my life. Some were useful, some regrettable, some clever enough to cause trouble. But I have never built anything that could catch a fall already underway.
He dropped.
I followed.
Don’t ask me why I didn’t save him. That question has teeth, and it has lived in me longer than any of you have been alive. I dove until the sea came up hard and bright. I reached with hands that had measured stone, carved wood, shaped wax, deceived kings, and made flight possible.
They closed on air.
The sea took him.
Later, men named that water after him, as if a name could soften it.
They said I flew on.
I did.
What else was there? If I had fallen too, poets would have called it devotion, and two bodies would have fed the fish. Survival is often mistaken for indifference by people tellin’ the story from dry land.
I buried what I could find.
Then I kept livin’. And that’s the cruelest craft I ever learned.
So, blame me for the labyrinth, if you like. Blame me for servin’ a rotten king. Blame me for cleverness, pride, wings, wax, hope, and every calculation that didn’t account for joy.
But don’t say I failed to warn him.
I told that boy about the sun.
I told him about the sea.
I told him to follow me.
And if you’ve ever raised a child, or loved one, or tried to save a soul furnished with its own wings, you know that sometimes instruction is a net with holes in it.
Sometimes they hear you.
Sometimes they don’t.
Sometimes they hear you and fly higher anyway.
olbigjim 