Upon Viewing Bruegel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" Lyrics
"God sent me a vision of the future in a dream on a Saturday night and I see no reason to celebrate, for when I saw it I wept like a child. It came to me like a knife in the chest. You and me and everyone, forever, to ache and ache and ache."
god DAMN this part is so good!
I could be wrong but I feel like it's from the point of view of Jesus? How many other people were born into self-actualization? He also didn't exactly get to be buried on the side of a hill. Though, the lyrics seem much angrier than Jesus, so it's iffy...
the beginning of the song seems to be a meditation on Icarus, and this might be a stretch or just a really good model for thinking about why it could be Icarus, but Joyce's Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man seems quite analogous as well. That is, Stephen Dedalus' relationship with Icarus, his view of being father and son at once (Dedalus and Icarus), the tormentor and the tormented, the corrupter and the innocent. The latter part presents itself to me as a logical conclusion of the first, essentially getting at the futility of enjoying life in the face of everything terrible, and ends with him (whomever the narrator is) giving up to it all and going on, empty. It's also beneficial to ask how this relates the title painting. I think the assumption is that these thoughts follow from the profound sadness onset when seeing the painting and realizing we're all separate necessarily, everyone goes on living because they have to, ignoring the tragedies all around them.
I think much of the lyrics refers to W.H. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts," whose title is the name of the French museum that houses the painting of the song's title and paintings depicting scenes from the Gospels of Christ. The poem, which has much to do about suffering, alludes to a Christ-like "miraculous birth," (i.e., "I was born into self-actualization") and also a "dreadful martyrdom." This idea of a dreadful martyrdom is important, especially when you compare the last lines of the song to Jesus' words in the Garden of Gethsemane (a place that T. Andronicus refers to in "Joset of Nazareth's Blues") before his crucifixion: "Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt." (Mark 14:26)