The U.S. military speaks of something called a “force multiplier.” The term refers to something that magnifies the basic effect of some other asset. There’s a good example from World War II. During the Battle of Britain, radar was a force multiplier for the RAF. It, in essence, multiplied the effect of the relatively small number of RAF planes and pilots going up against the German air attack. In the first Gulf War, American General Norman Schwartzkopf said that computers were a force multiplier for the coalition armies in their fight with Iraq.
The phrase came to mind the other day when I was thinking about art that looks at other art—that is, a work of art, like a poem or a painting, that takes as its subject another work of art. Like a force multiplier, this usually has the effect of letting us see the power of a work of art more clearly.
It was a couple of poems that led me to thinking about this. W. H. Auden was a British poet born in York in 1907. In 1938, in a museum in Brussels he encountered a Dutch painting called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus that was painted back in the 1560s. It shows, in the foreground, a farmer plowing his field, pausing to look up at the sky. In the background, a merchant ship sails placidly by. In between, if you look carefully, you’ll notice a little pair of legs disappearing into the sea, the remnant of Icarus of the painting’s title. It inspired him to write a poem about the painting’s subject.
In his poem Auden says…
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
He goes on to say that...
The ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure;
The expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Auden’s poem helps us understand the deeper human truth behind the painting. A truth about human suffering and human indifference to it. More often than not, someone else’s suffering rarely affects us deeply, rarely prompts us to act—especially if its someone to whom we have no attachment.
Art can let us see such a condition with revealing clarity. We could always use the reminder.