Water Moths Don'T Rush In Comments

Another variant of the Icarus myth has him falling overboard en route to Sicily and drowning. Maybe this is the one Pieter Breughel was referencing in his famous painting, seeing as the drowning victim's leg is seen quite close to the side of a passing sailing vessel. However this myth variant posits Icarus' ship as the first ever to feature sails (supposedly invented by his father Daedelus, just as he had supposedly invented waxen wings in the predominant variant) . The peasants would have been gawking like Roman Coliseum audiences, flabbergasted by the spectacle. So my thought on Breughel's painting is that it does show Icarus having fallen from the sun (witness the shining reflection of the sun covering a wide swath of ocean surface) . And I'm guessing the nearby ship's crew (if Breughel would have painted their visages) would have been just as focused on their daily tasks as the peasants, so much so that they would have ignored the splash of Icarus and perhaps taken the sound for a large fish breaching the surface and landing hard back upon the waves.

My clown whose wings sizzle and who plummets into the mire to drown shares with Icarus the fate of having longed for the wrong kind of brilliance. I think Peter Brueghel was on to something by focusing on the steady, everyday brilliance attained by the peasantry working the land. This is not to say serf-brilliance is all brilliance, but merely to tip my cap to the finer elements of the elemental Everyman.

This is brilliantly surreal....I especially adored this line, 'Swim nearer to a murky, ! What a line. Grinning at you, swimmingly quite well, Tai