ABSTRACT
The metaphors of a group’s free-floating discussion can lead to metamorphosis as they generate a language of change.1 Between metaphors as agents of change and metamorphosis, their ‘products’, there is a world to be explored in this chapter. We can make a beginning with a mythological fable from ancient Greece retold for a second time in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, his Books of Transformations that shaped Rome’s cultural life (Ovid 2004). In the story of how Daedalus and Icarus, imprisoned on the island of Crete, escape from captivity on wings fashioned by the father, Daedalus cautions his son not to fly too high or too low. Low flight would expose their wings to the sea’s dampness, impairing buoyancy, and flying too high would pose other dangers. In the exhilaration of flight Icarus ignores his father’s advice, goes too close to the sun that melts the wax binding his wings, and he falls to his death in the sea. The allegorical meaning of this powerful, cautionary story – its ‘message’ – warns against hubris to underscore the classical ideal of moderation, the middle path. The Flemish artist Breugel retells the story for a third time in the 17th century in a painting that hangs in the Musee des Beaux Arts, Brussels, The Fall of Icarus. Its ‘message’ is captured in the moment of Icarus’s fall as he plunges headlong into the sea whilst a heedless world continues about its every day business. The scenes drawn from Ovid’s poetry are pastoral with cruel undertones and capture the continuity of
the commonplace. This story’s ‘message’ – that an individual’s fate is to perish in tragic isolation – arises from the way these scenes are juxtaposed against the boy’s lonely end. Auden retells the story for a fourth time with yet another ‘message’ in 1938 when he visits the museum and describes what the painting conveys:
Musee des Beaux Arts
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.
