Fall Mountains, Just Don't Fall On Me

The wind blows. Birds chirp. It is a bright, busy day. Θεοδουλος (known to us as Theodulus) awakens early in the day before sunrise to arrange his tools. Today he continues to plough. Theodulus was born into a family of farmers. Both of his parents were farmers, and their parents were farmers. When Theodulus has children, they too will be farmers. His blood tainted with soil, a seemingly divine act of predestination that would doom him to a life of peasantry. None of Theodulus’s family members will be remembered for longer than Theodulus’s life. An entire life, a full 70 years, becomes nothing more than a speck of a speck of dust along the timeline of humanity.

Theodulus was not observant of society around him; the fields were the only important thing in life. He was too busy and too preoccupied with his own work to pay any mind to the aristocrats in town. Every year, he sets aside a significant percentage of his yield and places it in temples of Demeter. He prays for a healthy crop and a plentiful harvest. No one is listening, and he burns the grain for nothing. Theodulus hopes, and as far as he is concerned, assumes that the gods hear his pleas.

With his mule strapped to the plough, Theodulus begins his work. Soil churns and the cold, newly-unearthed dirt warms in the baking sun. Theodulus hears the sea birds’ discordant conversations. He wonders how well they understand each other.

His mind continues to wander; a farmer’s quiet life leaves lots of time for reflection. Theodulus struggles to remember his father. What did his voice sound like? How old would he be if he was still alive? As his mind ambles, so do his eyes. The mule pants and Theodulus takes this opportunity to gaze out at the sea.

Ships dot the wide open blue. They are carrying men who live under the same set of rules as Theodulus; all are god-fearing men. A sharp horizon line divides the far-off landscape into two opposing blues: one mysterious and deep; untamable. The other glowing with invitation; an infinite canvas. A cruel trick by the gods to fill the sky with such an expanse, but chain humankind to the Earth. Theodulus tracks something in his peripheral vision as it slapped into the sea. He whips his head around to see large ripples emanating from a central point a few hundred podes from shore.

If Theodulus was asked what it sounded like, he might have said something like a watermelon being dropped from the roof of a temple. It felt more powerful than a splash. But Theodulus was not paying attention to the object as it fell, so its true identity will remain a mystery to him forever. He hypothesizes that it was a fallen comet sent from the heavens to send him a message. This was not unheard of, and what other explanation could it be? Theodulus was certain that this was a direct sign from the gods that some ill was to fall upon his life. Will his crop fail? Will his mule fall sick? Was he to be smited by Zeus himself? Theodulus vowed to visit the local oracle to find out the source of this omen. It had to be a message for him. Nobody else was around.

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I chose to adapt Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape With the Fall of Icarus (1555), which is a painting based on the Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus. I chose Bruegel’s painting because I am fascinated by the ahead-of-its-time ideas that he expresses through his art. The painting is an adaptation of the Icarus myth, but Bruegel deconstructs the concept of myth by portraying Icarus’s great demise as a tiny pair of legs tucked away to the bottom right side of the frame. Icarus’s climactic death is nothing more than a small piece of the larger landscape. Bruegel does this to challenge the idea that anyone can rise above the flawed state of humanity, which was a prominent theme in the original Greek myth. Depending on the retelling, the death of Icarus has two different subjects: Icarus, namesake of the painting, or his father, Daedalus.

In older iterations of the myth, the fault lies on Daedalus for believing that humans could place themselves in the hierarchy amongst the gods as equals. Daedalus bestowed the godly power of flight to humanity, and thus he is forced to pay for his hubris with the life of his son. In modern versions, we see Icarus as he who flew too close to the sun; he is a warning against recklessness and a praise for level-headedness. Bruegel creates a new retelling of the myth in his painting by setting the capital-G Great Icarus against a much wider landscape. According to Bruegel, Icarus’s story is no more important than that of a peasant farmer. They are posed directly next to each other in the frame and the peasant and his word take up much more space than Icarus’s tiny flailing legs. This fits in nicely against Bruegel’s portfolio of genre paintings which focus on common, lower-class subjects. If anyone was to believe that no one life is worth more than another, it would be Bruegel.

This is a theme I focused on for my adaptation. I find the idea that no life is worth more than another to be filled with potential. While developing the adaptation, I had plans to include other stories. They included ancient human ancestors, a young peasant girl who lived and died in feudal China, a sculptor during the Italian Renaissance, and a modern-day teenager browsing Twitter. In order to represent all of humanity, it is necessary to examine a diverse range of human experiences. Despite this, I settled on adapting the painting as one story because I wanted the themes to stand out and had fears that the historical fiction would cloud the audience’s understanding of the adaptation.

A proper adaptation should aim to not only encapsulate, but expand further upon concepts present in the original work. I chose specifically to adapt Bruegel’s 1555 painting, not the millennia-old original myth of Icarus and Daedalus because I was more interested in the ideas that his painting offered and felt that they could be expanded upon by use of words and written language. I worry that an audience might interpret this not as an adaptation of Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, but rather an adaptation of the original Greek myth. I wrote this for an audience who is able to derive meaning and understanding of Bruegel’s painting. I don’t feel like prior knowledge of the exact Icarus and Daedalus myth is necessary to understand and appreciate Bruegel’s painting, and I intend for my audience to be able to derive meaning from my adaptation without prior knowledge of the Greek myth as well.

One goal of the adaptation is to inspire thought about how humanity ascribes meaning to things we don’t exactly understand. In ancient Greek rituals, they would place the tails of animals into a fire and watch them curl up, as if being coiled by the gods. They would interpret this as approval from Olympus, because how else would a tail reanimate in such a way? Scientists have (relatively) recently discovered that the heat from the fire makes ligaments inside the tail contract, causing the tail to twist and contort (Ekroth). This was a prominent theme in my adaptation, as main character Theodulus hypothesizes that the splash he heard in the water was a direct message from the Olympian pantheon, specifically for him. He witnessed something he did not quite understand, and was forced to believe that since now he is aware of it, the splash becomes a part of his story, rather than vice versa. From a different perspective, Theodulus is a background character in the story of the “comet”. Let’s say it was a comet that landed in the water. Wouldn’t you say that it has a long, much more interesting history surrounding its origin and journey to Earth compared to Theodulus’s brief interaction with it? But it is such a natural, human reaction to place one’s own ego at the forefront of any situation. Of course a Greek peasant may not be aware of the origin and study of comets, but regardless, it is possible to view the fall of a comet as just an act of nature. Something fell into the water? Could have been a bird. Maybe a fish jumped, and Theodulus’ eyes were playing tricks on him. There is no right answer as to what Theodulus witnessed, but it is understandable that he attributes personal meaning to what is most likely a random act of nature.

In my spare time, I have been reading Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was written in conjunction with Stanley Kubrick’s film of the same name. Interestingly, they are adaptations of each other. They utilize the same plot, but each are crafted in specific ways that benefit their different mediums. In the “Dawn of Man” chapter of the film, and in the “Primeval Night” segment of the novel, apes discover a mysterious monolith that teaches them how to use tools, laying the groundwork for their evolution into homo sapiens. In the film, Kubrick explains this nonverbally, utilizing film techniques like the Kuleshov effect in order to create meaning. In the novel, Clarke is able to flesh out themes by providing more detail on shared plot points or by explaining ideas through the written word that may be too complex to portray visually.

It’s plain to see that 2001 has been particularly influential to me. I admired how Clarke touched on the ambiguities of Kubrick’s film, so I attempted to touch on the ambiguities of Bruegel’s painting. I aimed to portray the scene with little emotional connotation attached to the diction and style of writing, similarly to how Bruegel portrayed the death of Icarus in the painting and how Clarke translates visual storytelling into the written form. I used a website called Hemingway Editor in order to trim up my writing and follow in the great Ernest Hemingway’s terse, reporter-like footsteps. I limited my adverb usage, spoke in an active voice as often as possible, and presented the story in present-tense so the reader can follow the events along with Theodulus. This specific style prevents themes from being weighed down by excessive narrative or dialogue. While writing the adaptation, I intended the themes to be present but still ambiguous enough so that the reader can develop their own opinions.

Bruegel’s nihilistic brand of egalitarianism was a pretty modern, progressive-thinking mindset that has more and more relevance to modern day. Isn’t it the typical adolescent coming-of-age to spend time searching for meaning? What if the meaning of life is that there is no meaning of life? This is a little too heady for a paper for English 103, but these ideas are ones that branch off from Bruegel’s original belief that no one is better than one another. No one is above one another. We’re all chained to the same Earth.