and it's rough. it's all posts on the icarus discussion forums from the winter and the spring. i'll come back and format it better, maybe edit some.

it's like some kind of spiral dance,  a manic-depressive schitzo-coaster spiral dance of fate. it's familiar, like i've been here before in a different life and i already know the path. there are a lot of us dancing to our mad music, and we're figuring out how to be together and work together and live together in ways that have never been tried. this place really is like a bridge between worlds where our stories connect to one another. i feel you all out there from this little kitchen in brooklyn, at least i imagine i do. whenever i'm about to finish a little piece of writing like this it always somehow feels like i'm connected into the collective consciousness and i'm moving upwards. like i'm spiral bound, connected to people i've known in the past and places that we've been too before.

As a mad activist with an analysis of collective trauma, it seems painfully clear to me that my people, who have been so oppressed throughout history and most recently under Nazi Germany, are acting out the role of oppressor in the same way a traumatized individual will lash out and perpetuate the cycle of violence with the people in their life. In the same way that I’ve come to believe that the hardest and scariest parts of ourselves hold the secret keys to our problems, I think that politically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the equivalent of our darkest fears and secrets. It’s as ugly as it gets and we have to stare it in the face and take action or else in the long run it will destroy anything good and just we are working towards.

For years the tension of being a bunch of radical anarchists trying to influence the dominant culture while staying out of it ourselves has been one of the most interesting aspects of working on the Icarus Project. Early on we developed a metaphor to talk about our role in the movement, that of the dandelion pulling the good stuff up from the underground with its deep taproots, influencing the mainstream culture to evolve the way soil structure builds and changes, slowly over time.

What if it turned out that our so called Rational language is actually a complex set of linguistic traps that cleverly veils the power relationships of a Spirit Realm which is happening around us all the time: buzzing on our computer screens, pumping in our blood, and growing out of the ground we walk on everyday?

from where i'm standing it feels like such a mystical riddle, no one could have written a more interesting story: the cold war that became the war against terror nightmare puppet show, the neoconservatives are old trotskyists, the oppressed become the oppressors, the blacks and the jews actually have to figure out how to talk to one another about what went down in the late 60's, all the political prisoners and ghosts from put down rebellions waiting in the sidelines, a generation of mad kids struggling with monocult voodoo labels and psych drugs communicating with lightspeed technology...

from where i'm standing it feels like such a mystical riddle, no one could have written a more interesting story: the cold war that became the war against terror nightmare puppet show, the neoconservatives are old trotskyists, the oppressed become the oppressors, the blacks and the jews actually have to figure out how to talk to one another about what went down in the late 60's, all the political prisoners and ghosts from put down rebellions waiting in the sidelines, a generation of mad kids struggling with monocult voodoo labels and psych drugs communicating with lightspeed technology...