STAR MAN

I’ve gone right off Daedalus.

All these years of thinking he was a devoted father to Icarus; turns out he’s a bit of a shyster. Sure, he pulled off a cunning stunt by escaping from the labyrinth with his son using wings made from wax but he really was a stunning criminal, or so I read in a paper written by Professor Andrew Melrose.* Guilty of murdering his nephew Talos out of jealousy for his inventions, dodgily involved in the death of King Minos and that of others close to him, he is prime suspect for tinkering with those wings that melted when Icarus surpassed his father in flying higher to the sun. The ‘Daedalus touch’, unlike that of Midas, was certain death, not gold. Apparently his Greek name translates as ‘cunning artificer’. I missed the connection. 

 

Some aim for the sun, some aim higher, for the stars and some, to quote Oscar Wilde, though down in the gutter, are nevertheless looking upwards - 'We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.'

Talking of stars, my favourite pop star was always David Bowie. When I first heard ‘Star Man'on the radio as I looked out my bedroom window in Wales at the unpolluted starlit sky, it sent shivers down my spine.-

‘There's a starman waiting in the sky
He’d like to come and meet us
But he thinks he'd blow our minds’

And then his ' Space Oddity’ even topped that, with poor Major Tom floating helplessly in space leaving his earthbound fame and loving wife behind:-

‘This is Ground Control to Major Tom
You’ve really made the grade
And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear.....

Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do’...

Did Daedalus work in Ground Control I wonder?

Shame, despite six nominations, that David Bowie failed to get a single prize at the recent Mercury Prize 2013 event.

Whereas Don McLean was presented with his BBC lifetime achievement award in February last year in a show broadcast live on British TV and worldwide on radio.

‘Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze....

In Amsterdam I saw the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, to whom Mclean sang this tribute, and was quite shocked, yes, that’s the word, by the vibrancy of blues and yellows in his paintings. Until I saw them in real life I didn’t really recognise their dazzling star quality.

Another starry knight in the making would be Brian Cox; currently a mere OBE .I really enjoyed his Science Britannica series on TV lately. I learnt a lot from watching those. Unwrapping Isaac Newton’s death mask from its covers in the Royal Society building, Cox reminded us of Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation which is still used to this day to send vehicles into space.

Mind you I’m learning a lot of fascinating things at the moment including two new words!

Graphomania, from the Greek words meaning γραφειν — writing, and μανία — insanity, refers to an obsessive impulse to write . It labels a morbid mental condition which results in writing rambling and confused statements, often degenerating into a meaningless succession of words or even nonsense.

Thank you Wikipedia.

Well, fancy that! Does that mean that all Bloggers are ipso facto graphomaniacs?

Hmm. Seems a bit close to home.

No chance of me become a typomaniac....’someone obsessed with... seeing one's name in publication or with writing for being published, excessive symbolism or typology.’

I readily admit to having some twittish tendencies but I don’t have a Twitter account....yet.

At my age it’s probably too late to attain those starry heights now.

Ah well, perhaps I’ll just content myself with sitting down here, looking up.

* Intimacy and the Icarus Effect