In search of the miraculous
Bas Jan Ader
But the young Icarus, overwhelmed by the thrill of flying, did not heed his father's warning and flew too close to the sun whereupon the wax in his wings melted and he fell into the sea.
In 1975 Ader embarked on what he called “a very long sailing trip.” The voyage was to be the middle part of a triptych called “In Search of the Miraculous,” a daring attempt to cross the Atlantic in a 12½ foot sailboat. He claimed it would take him 60 days to make the trip, or 90 if he chose not to use the sail. Six months after his departure, his boat was found, half-submerged off the coast of Ireland, but Bas Jan had vanished.
Ader's mother, Johanna Adriana Ader-Appels, wrote the poem "From the Deep Waters of Sleep" on 12 October 1975, after having what she described as a premonition of his death:
From the deep waters of sleep I wake up to consciousness.
In the distance I hear a train rumbling in the early morning.
It is going East and passes the border. Then it will stop.
I feel my heart beating too. It will go on beating for some time.
Then it will stop.
I wonder if the little heart that has beaten with mine, has stopped.
When he passed the border of birth, I laid him at my breast,
Rocked him in my arms.
He was very small then.
A white body of a man, rocked in the arms of the waves,
Is very small too.
What are we in the infinity of ocean and sky?
A small baby at the breast of eternity.
Have you heard of happiness
Springing from a deep well of sorrow?
Of love, springing from pain and despondency, agony and death?
Such is mine.
Icarus, blinded by the elation of his ascent, failed and fell: fell to fail. His was a journey up that came down. Crowhurst’s was a journey along: flat, doomed and sorrily human. His fall was wretched, unimagined, unannounced and wholly practical. But for Bas Jan Ader to fall was to make a work of art. Whatever we believe or whatever we imagine, on a deep deep level, not to have fallen would have meant failure. Tacita Dean, And He Fell Into the Sea
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1555, Pieter Bruegel
© Bridgeman Art Library/Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
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