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| Photograph by Thomas Hoepker |
On my last post I uploaded a short film I'd shot, showing the clouds of steam created by Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, billowing away in the background - like the explosion of a bomb. This was filmed from a great distance and from the tranquility of a rural landscape. I like this contrast, this incongruity.
It reminded me, admittedly at quite a tangent, of the controversial '911' photograph (by Thomas Hoepker) I saw a year or so ago - see above. This photograph seems to show a group of young people oblivious (or perhaps just ambivalent) about the tragic historic event occurring behind them.
Not the least of the people offended by the image were some of the people in it. Though at first sight their relaxed attitude seems shocking, one said: "that they were in shock and did not know what to think about what happened." Another declared: “it was genetically impossible not to be affected by this event.”
I don't have any reason to suppose that they were experiencing anything other than shock. The photograph simply catches an extraordinary instant when that doesn't appear to be the case. But to expect them to be constantly weeping and wailing at the sight seems a little unreasonable.
Anyway when I saw the photograph it brought to mind, for me, W. H. Auden's poem 'Musee des Beaux Arts'. The title refers to the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, which Auden apparently visited in 1938 and where he viewed the painting 'The Fall of Icarus' by Pieter Brueghel. Here is the poem:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
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;
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.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: 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.
Copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears,
Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden.
On the website where I found a copy of 'Musee des Beaux Arts' there is the following quote from W.H. Auden:
"In so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate."
