Icarus Flies
Illustration by Annie Harrigan
Countless corpses lie in the air above my head.
Their tiny black bodies flew too close to the overhead lamp that hung from the ceiling, and somehow, they got stuck. Logic would dictate that if they were able to fly themselves into the lamp, they could reverse this process and somehow make their way out of the lamp, as well. But the mass of dead bugs I see whenever I turn on the bathroom light in this stranger’s apartment and turn my head towards the ceiling begs to differ. Logic fails here.
Their bodies are formless, fuzzy, and collide one into one another, making any distinction between them impossible. They just look like a mess of brown spots all mushed together. Sometimes I look up at the dead bugs and have to avert my eyes from the sight, lest I grow nauseous. Other times, I look at them, pensively, and I wonder about their lives. Did the seductive glow of the lightbulb beckon them to their Icarian demise before they had their chance to grow old (what is old for a fly, anyway?)? Did they get to fly among the clouds, or at the very least, among the trees in the park?
There are always one or two flies in the lamp that are still alive, most likely the latest victims of the cruel vixen. I see their shadows scampering around the edges of the lamp. I wonder if they still bother looking for an escape, or if they have resigned themselves to their needless fate. I wonder if they think the light was worth it.
Like Icarus, the unfortunate Greek, these bugs were compelled by the light. And just like the unfortunate Greek, their desire to touch the light will now be their end.
Icarus is always characterized as an impetuous boy who grew too cocky for his own good — but it is important to remember precisely why he took to the sky in the first place. On that fateful day, Icarus and his father Daedalus flew away from Crete, the island where Daedalus had been imprisoned for an act of kindness that King Minos had taken offense to. However, a joyful Icarus failed to heed his father’s warnings and flew too close to the sun, melting the wax that bound the feathers of the wings he used in his doomed escape.
Can Icarus truly be blamed for getting carried away in excitement during the first taste of freedom of his fleeting existence?
Some might argue, yes, he can be.
The whole world is currently in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Everyone has grown weary of it—of fearing it, of adjusting to it, of responding to it. Merely hearing the word coronavirus is exhausting. Like Icarus, the world is discontented with what feels like years of imprisonment. Americans especially struggle with adapting to measures such as wearing masks and keeping six-foot distances—as a wise professor once told me, America is notoriously bad at sacrifice. It reflects in the data as the country barrels towards a third surge.
The compulsion for freedom makes sense. The flies wanted it, Icarus wanted it, the world wants it. No matter how good things are, things could always be made better somehow, and it is human nature to gravitate towards one’s desires. However, what Icarus failed to realize was it was not the glorious act of flying that he should have prioritized, nor the sublime sensation of weightlessness. He should have focused instead on the long-term game: floating softly down to dry land with his father, exploring a new world, and building the better and brighter life which he had been deprived of. Instead, his wax melted, and he plummeted down into the waves below him. The flies in the ceiling lamp should have realized the temporary satisfaction of a lightbulb would pale in comparison to the bliss of a life lived illuminated by the sun. One can’t blame an insect for not being capable of such higher thoughts, but we are not insects, we are human beings. We can be stronger than the superficial desire to post an enviable Instagram story. We can be stronger than the sincere desire to wrap all of our loved ones in an embrace at once and never let them go. If we truly want things to be better and brighter, we must look beyond the glow of the lightbulb and commit to doing the work that will get us over the horizon—before we plummet any further into the dark Icarian Sea.