Icarus in Chains
At first he was aware only of the
figure in the centre of his vision, crouched low like a dancer about to
perform, his right knee touching the ground. Before he could sense the
movements he could hear a rustling. It filled his ears as it followed each
movement of the figure, however slight. As he rose his right knee left the
point at which it had been in contact with the ground. It seemed as though the
contact had been so light that by merely willing his legs they had rippled and
begun to rise.
His sweat and blackness raised a
polished sheen from itself, and as he rose and extended his arms outward, his
skin was outshone only by the metal links which circled his arms, legs, waist
and neck. Each link was equidistantly wound around his limbs at regular fifteen
centimetre intervals from each other, from joint to joint. And from each link
there was a chain, which was tautly extended far out of his vision. It seemed
as though the chains were fixed to the ground but he couldn’t see them; they
were fixed too far away for him to collect within his vision. Somehow, though,
he knew that the chains were bound to the earth.
His movements grew more
constrained as he rose; the tautness of each chain increasing, drawing him
towards the tension in each of them as his muscles flexed at the growing
restrictions which accompanied his rising form. As he sought to stand upright
it seemed he became contorted in one direction or another, his rising frame
unable to find a stable posture as each chain negated his muscles, seeking
rather to will each limb towards a bound constancy.
The rustling! Every movement of
his seemed connected to the roots of the chains, moving the world with him. The
roots ended in nerves that ran through the earth, merging the movements of his
form to the far reaches of its landscape. As he moved, the earth moved with
him, and sought to resist him, pulling itself towards itself as he attempted to
do the same. The tussle of push and pull played out in a cosmic dance, the
Nataraja enslaved, each movement reshaping the world as he moved to free
himself of restriction.
Subtle movements were met with
subtle resistance, and he would twist and turn, lightly at first, attempting to
use finesse to find the sleight of hand required to free himself from the
resistant interplay that his movements coevolved with the reluctant earth. In a
sense, the earth became a muse upon which he played out his dance, trying here
and there to let his movements towards freedom reach the nerve endings that
would unlock the codes required to free him of the chains which kept him bound
to, but not understood by, the global everything beneath him. He never seemed
to actually look at the ground; he seemed determined to feel it through his
chains.
It seemed that in all his
movements he never could quite arrive at a stable equilibrium, and he would
contort from one direction to the next. Gradually, he would grow more uneasy,
and would begin to buck. He seemed to ripple before he reared, like Dumile
Feni’s horses. The shock of it would bring about a sharp jolting from the
chains and their rustlings would collect into a coherent violent chime. The
jerking, a chaotic catastrophe of meta-stability, would pull him into a
restricted rearing, not quite able to break free but brought under control, for
a moment.
Then he would begin to move slowly, again. Over and over, caught in a cycle that would always escalate towards collapse before he would begin his ascent towards the sky again. Icarus chained in wax-iron clasps, he was visible only in dreams.
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