Who lived it, knows it.
The tremor of the phone that breaks sleep at dawn.
That silent anguish in the hospital waiting room, where we remain silent with a silence gnawed by fear.
An accident, a duel, a diagnosis, a dismissal, an economic rope, sudden suffocation.
There are moments of no return, jolts that throw us into a thousand pieces on the ground.
Our falls and broken wings make us heirs of Icarus.
It is said that Daedalus, an Athenian architect, was imprisoned with his son Icarus in the famous labyrinth of Crete that he himself had built.
Grief-stricken, the father watched the birds fly freely through the wallless sky.
So he devised wings of wax and feathers that, through a harness, allowed them to flee like birds.
His son rose higher and higher, in daring flight.
Then the sun began to melt the wax and the wings gently unraveled, feather by feather, until the young man, as in a cartoon scene, waving his bare arms in the air.
He plummeted and the blue waters engulfed him.
Life is to and fro, we have to live with its ups and downs: we make wings for ourselves — deluded —, we think we can fly, but adversity throws us off a cliff.
The slogans we hear daily —your fate decides, success depends only on you— try to bridle fear with promises of power, but we are not masters of the future or captains of our destiny.
Those who call crises opportunities end up accusing the most destitute of their shipwreck.
You can't be totally safe, even less so when uncertainty, darkness and difficulties rush in upon you.
According to Homer, the god Zeus had two vessels and distributed their contents among humans: from one he drew goods and from the other evils.
For some unfortunates everything is calamity, but nobody receives only benefits.
In
The Fisher King
, director Terry Gilliam created an unlikely comedy of bruised heroes.
The arrogant Jack is a radio star who lives in a luxurious apartment in Manhattan, until, inadvertently, his sharp words instigate a shooting in a restaurant.
In full spiral of self-destruction, he befriends a beggar, Perry, who survived the same massacre, but saw his wife die in his arms.
Since then he suffers from a recurring hallucination where a fearsome red knight wrapped in fire is chasing him.
Jack and Perry, that couple of filthy and charred Icaros, are obsessed with reviving the Arthurian legend in the euphoric New York of the nineties, between choruses of homeless people and psychiatric patients, dances in Central Station and modest declarations of love in the section porn from a filthy video store.
Only these two broken heroes can find the grail.
In his descent to marginality, the filmmaker seemed to notice the wings of wax that held in the air that mirage of ephemeral prosperity.
Our ancestors thought that falls and peaks portray two inherent faces of life.
That is why they also imagined myths of redemption and rebirth, such as the search for the grail or the phoenix, a miraculous bird that, sensing its own death, wrapped itself in myrrh, cinnamon, cinnamon, aloe and tuberose.
Suddenly the sun set fire to that nest of aromas, the animal burned and thus was reborn from its ashes.
The Phoenix is a universal symbol that, in addition to giving its name to the American city of Phoenix, is related to other magical creatures of traditional folklore: the Egyptian Bennu, the Arab Anqa, the Chinese Fenghuang, the Mexican Quetzalcoatl.
These legendary birds symbolize human tenacity as they take flight after every bump.
As Emily Dickinson wrote, hope is that feathered being that sings its wordless melody in the blizzard.
Ancient wisdom, so far removed from positive thinking, reminds us that the usual thing is not success, but crashing and getting up from the ground with scratches and the smell of singe;
knowing the two vessels, the melted wings, the red knights or the black heralds;
fall high and then try to resurface.
The future is never subject to infallible recipes, it is an enigma:
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