It’s Big City Waxing
No one cares that Superman’s dead. Did you spot him in Chris Ware’s illustration?
Foot on the ground in big city, there are millions of things you don’t notice. Most are banal. Some incidental. A few, tragic.
But you keep on keeping on. As long as it’s not your tragedy. Tough luck for Icarus (he’s kissing the fishes, bottom right).
No doubt cursing himself on a design oversight. Wax for wings? To the sun?
That’s not the style of a Renaissance man. Gotta see outside the grid to plough on in the big city.
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You’ve picked up on what Auden did in Musee des Beaux Arts – “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.” It’s an odd poem – it doesn’t feel very poetic somehow. Partly Auden’s style but also somehow apt: this extraordinary happening is almost a footnote and the language is bordering on banal. Brilliance and insight as footnotes and flashes in the mainly routine ordinariness of life. Ah! Too bleak?