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 plowman 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, Musee des Beaux Arts.
Suffering, well, i know a thing or two about that.
Like keats said, 'ay in the very temple of delight veiled melancholy has her sovereign shrine'. Or, as soon as something happens to go right in your life, another area of it will become such an entangled mess you don't know what to do. And like i said, i know a thing or two about that.
Auden did as well. No stranger to the suffering was this man, and he wrote about it in such great amount, and such eloquent verse that it is hard to ignore. How right he is, that suffering, the pain and the hurt of real suffering, occurs whilst children skip in the playground and lovers hold hands over coffee and cake. Life rolls merrily by as you suffer, parts of you that you didn't even knew existed aching in ways you never thought they could.
Maybe he wrote this poem in a particularly dark frame of mind, and perhaps the last imagery of the poem, that of sailors ignoring the drowning icarus, who fell from the sky after the wax holding his machine wings melted from the sun, is a little harsh. But then again, is that not what modern people are like? Yes we may be curious at times, but on the whole are we not more self-absorbed than anything else? Our lives, our business, our problems?
Having said that... could we merely be ignoring the suffering of others as we ourselves indulge our own suffering?
[foto_decadent]There is something deeply unsettling about the images of Paolo Roversi. In a very good way, that is.
There's not many photographers nowadays that you can say take photographs that grab at your heart, clawing at your emotions. You can feel the drama and angst dripping off the page (or screen). You can taste the suffering.
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