Yes... there he is Icarus... the fallen apple of the stoic eye...

Greek mythology is deep in our cultural wellspring.  The Icarus metaphor shows up frequently in the arts... he has descended from the rafters of theaters, taken flight in Irish novels, singed his feathers in heavy metal music, been suspended motionless in canvas & stone...  and surprisingly for a mythological person he has been photographed many times... also by me when he shows up at the beach.

When I encounter Icarus here I get the end of the story... barely there like a mothprint on a window... he will disappear with the tide... the flight is over... the wing is already broken... 

I once had a problem with the Icarus metaphor... I don’t believe it was his fate to fall... I do not believe that extreme liberation is doomed to failure.

The failure to me is in the Stoic mind that created Icarus... he was a mirror of their conceptions and a victim of a technology that had failure as an intrinsic component of it’s design. The Stoic consciousness resided within the philosophy of ‘fly right’ and do not deviate from the middle path...  Icarus is given a structure within which he cannot manifest his true nature... the paradigm of escape is as stringent and confining as the maze.

I always photograph Icarus when I see him... but not as a spiritual metaphor of defeat... something else is going on and Icarus turned out to be for me a way to a different perception of the landscape... Icarus helped me fly.