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Daedalus and Icarus

© Mary C. Legg

Just as the pigeon tries to imitate the hummingbird at the feeder, so man yearns to fly. In dreams, flying is symbolic of our wish to attain the unimaginable heights of our abilties-to rise aboove human clumsiness and the mundane to take wing to heavenly achievements. Flight symbolizes our deepest yearning to succeed, to overcome or weakness and to be unfettered by human frailty.

Daedalus was an inventor who created the subterranean maze for King Minos of Crete. Every year the maidens of Athens were sacrificed to the bull that lived beneath the island palace. The maze was created as a means of fortification to the island so that invading militia would be trapped and confused. Siimilarly, the fortress at Terezin, built during the Napoleonic Wars, also has an underground maze which was designed to trap the the invaders and confuse them.

However, Daedalus became trapped by his own trap, the snake biting back on its own tail. How ? Why? He became caught like the spy who has learned too much. As the designer of the maze, he was not trusted by Minos not to reveal the secret. Knowledge frees us, but if we learn too much, it also traps us, making us victims of our own understanding. Where do old CIA spies go? How does a spy tell his wife that for twenty years he lived a lie? True some intelligence officers do make fine novelists: Ian Fleming and Le Carre; but what happens to all the others?

There are limitations on what is socially avcceptable to know about your neighbor-or intimate friends. Listening at doors is strongly discouraged and oftentimes we find out what we least want to know. Knowledge implicates.

But the myth is also about escape-the longing and yearning that man has to esacpe from the known; to escape from his constrained environment; to flee confinement. If we know too much about a thing, it becomes psychologically repressive and burdensome, so that we yearn to forget, to escape the past. Mazes appear in nightmares, the symbols of anxiety, of confusion and of being trapped into dark places of psychological torture. Few dreams are as terrifying as those of wandering through a maze of halls in dim lighting, searching frantically for the exit, but not finding it. Read Kafka if you want to drive yourself crazy. Take up an issue regarding Freedom of Information if you want to find out the frustrations of government bureaucracy. Just try to de-classify a document.

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