Love & Theft: You Can Hear Bob Dylan’s New Blowin’ in the Wind and That’s Alright
“I was blinded by the sun for a second. This big orange sun was coming up. I was driving straight into the sun, and I looked up into it even though I remember someone telling me a long ago when I was a kid never to look straight at the sun ’cause you’ll get blinded.” ~ Bob Dylan to Sam Shepard, 1987
Above my desk is a framed reproduction of “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” The work is attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, although some academics argue that it was more likely executed by an apprentice of Bruegel’s, a detail taken from a larger, lost, work by the Master. It would explain why the shepherd in the center is staring into empty sky — in Bruegel’s original he may be looking up at Daedalus, the horrified father seeing his son disappear into the sea as an indifferent world moves on.
“… how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman 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.”
