The legend of Icarus

As we prepare for a week at the beach, my mind wanders to Icarus, a young man whose fault in life was to fly too close to the sun, becoming a metaphor for human ambition and unintended consequences. In Bruegel's depiction of his plight, he hits the water, a blip, unnoticed by the farmer on the hill overlooking the bay and unnoticed by the ships sailing out to sea. Since I wrote my library science thesis, the Iconography of the Book, wherein I used a sculpture of Icarus depicted as an open book face down in marble, I have thought about this myth frequently. What is it about this young boy, son of the great architect Daedalus, who crafted the labyrinth and made the mechanical cow for the queen, Pasiphae, to mate with the bull of Poseidon and produce the Minotaur, which had to be imprisoned in the labyrinth (for the good of every one). Is it his fault that his father was so crafty that they had to escape Minos via the device of wings held together by wax? This tale is so messed up that the least problematical aspect is that Icarus fell. It's no surprise that Icarus fell. The injunction to not travel too near the sun or too near the waves guaranteed failure. Or we could say that it required Icarus to fly a very level flight in turbulent circumstances.
Circumstances are weighed against Icarus. That he is criticized for flying too close to the sun, seems a moralistic embellishment to me. Indeed Icarus has no choice but to leave with his dad. He would be dead in the palace, otherwise, under the watchful eye of king Minos, who didn't want to share his crafty father's skill with anyone else. Icarus's father, Daedalus perhaps didn't give his son detailed enough advice. Don't fly too near the sun, don't dip too close to the waves - lacks an exact guide, a definitive course.
In our modern version of Icarus, the boy dives into the waves, only to emerge, blasting back into the air as on a jet ski. Cue the Bond music: !!!. That's an Icarus for today: bold, decisive, suave. The Icarus that simply plummets into the briny deep (the Pinot Noir 2005 dark sea) and is no more heard from is fine for a more romantic time: a time that savors the myth of lost youth and rolls over the memory of what-might-have-been like a loose tooth, delicious and painful at once; but that isn't our time. Our time demands instant resurrection, indestructability - Icarus plunges into the ocean with wings of wax and feathers sewn together; he blasts out with arms turned rotors, like Popeye. Godlike he declaims, "I am what I am." And then he opens a number 10 can of whoopass.