Musée 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 long; 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
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
There are many who have passed by John’s Lane over the years, just carrying on their business. Walking a dog, on their way to work, perhaps even claiming to be “bird watching” yet never seeing the suffering of the wildfowl. Whilst the Albright and Wilson UK company and cherub “Icarus” was falling, so too were the wild birds, somehow tied to the fate of a failing polluting experiment.
Whilst some social historians bemoan the “loss” of companies such as this, and vast amounts of copy can be written in local papers about it, in reality no-one could really care less. Perhaps this is poetic justice. I could not care less that Albright and Wilson disappeared and that jobs were lost, just as those who worked or contracted for them including the Matty boat dumpers could not care less about what toxic filth that they were filling into a pit and the deaths of birds that resulted.
For those who are not privileged to be able to view this work in the Brussels museum, just try opening your eyes to what suffering man inflicts on Nature. It is easy to see why Nature looks away and does not care when men fail and fall.
C. D Coppard – Portrait of a chemical company