They call it the Frequency Illusion (or the Baader–Meinhof Phenomenon), that once you see something, you can’t stop seeing it.
And now all I can see is Icarus flying, falling.
It started with Private Rites by Julia Armfield. Our queer book club loved Armfield’s debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea so much so that when her sophomore novel came out, we immediately placed it on our to-read piles. The novel’s drenched in literary allusion – a retelling of King Lear that also points to Macbeth’s three witches, and Romeo and Juliet’s impulsive quest for love and peace despite turmoil. (Wondering about the “drenched” comment? Pick up the book, grab some galoshes, and wade through the sodden loves the Carmicheal sisters endure after their famed father’s death.) And dropped daintily into one of the sister’s narratives is a reference to WH Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”.
And that poem references Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Just noticeable in the corner is a wing, peeking out of the water, a splash. Something so momentous for Icarus – namely, his death – yet the countless others in the painting make no note of him. His tragedy is nothing to them. He falls, and they live on.
So. Now we’re at two Icarus sightings. Maybe the one in Armfield’s novel isn’t explicitly Icarus, but there are no shortages of falls from great heights into the depths throughout her story. So, yes. Two sightings.
Then an assignment for The SHOUT to cover Marco Hernandez’s show ‘Reclaiming My Roots.’ I’ve never claimed to be an art critic, but I do love art, and I love writing, too. (Am I musing much?) And it is at Hernandez’s show that Icarus showed up for a THIRD time in fewer than three days.
Here’s the image that made me think of the Frequency Illusion.
And here’s what I wrote about it:
In “El Luchador y el Nopal” (“The Wrestler and the Cactus”), the wrestler evokes an Icarus figure, though whether he’s falling or flying is unclear. And whether the cactus is open to embrace the wrestler or obliterate him is up to the viewer to unravel.
I can’t help but see Icarus in the relief. You see it, right? And maybe now you see my interest in the Frequency Illusion.
Will you see Icarus everywhere you go? In the lake that sits outsides your back window? In the feather that you find while out for a walk in the park? In the corner of a painting you see at a museum? Because Icarus is there. I promise.
shelly. walston. writes. 