In the Style section of last Sunday’s New York Times there was a cover story about the emerging Mad Pride movement:
“Just as gay-rights activists reclaimed the word queer as a badge of honor rather than a slur, these advocates proudly call themselves mad; they say their conditions do not preclude them from productive lives.”
In the article Icarus was mentioned and I had a few quotes including this lovely gem:
“Some Icarus Project members argue that their conditions are not illnesses, but rather, “dangerous gifts" that require attention, care and vigilance to contain. “I take drugs to control my superpowers,” Mr. DuBrul said.”
Ah, to be a lunatic swimming in the public waters of the mainstream. This morning I was planning on writing a draft proposal for a future media policy (cause I feel like a bit of a jackass for talking to a reporter when there are lots of other important voices in our community who don't get enough attention) when I came across a thread on our discussion boards about “spirit possession” in the “Alternate Dimensions or Psychotic Delusions?” forum. I got a little distracted and this is what I wrote instead. I hope you enjoy it. If it's not obvious, I’m so in love with this place.


The Spirit of the Times
or
A Sucker’s Bet in the Material Realm

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?

Just a thought to ponder.

I was raised by two people, a "Catholic" from Queens and a "Jew" from the Bronx, and they were both "Socialists" and "Atheists" who raised me in Manhattan. When I was kid I didn't go to Church and rarely went to Synagogue, but I sure did watch a whole lot of Television. All these years later when I try to figure out how I got to be the way I am: “mad,” “crazy,” or sometimes just “really fucked up,” it sure seems obvious to me that part of what explains my situation is that I was possessed by evil spirits coming out of the television screen as a young child.

"What?!?" you might say. "What kind of wacked-out bipolar delusional nonsense are you talking about now?"

Maybe I’m just crazy, my skeptical imaginary friend, but hop on my train of thought for a few moments and we’ll take a ride through the word forest in my head and then you can tell me what you think of my nonsense:

I don’t know where you grew up, but I grew up in the middle of a big city, far away from star filled skies and big trees and mountains. Where I lived we had the Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium, we had subways underground and big tall buildings scraping the metropolitan skyline. I am from a world of people that believed they had conquered Nature with Technology, and it certainly appeared that way from the looks of it. When I was a kid I wanted so badly to believe in magic, any kind of magic, but I really thought "magic" was only in Disney movies and old fairy tales. The language I was taught and the world-view I inherited kept me from being able to see the "magic" in the world all around me.

When I was a kid I'd wish upon stars and my dreams wouldn't come true. My parents were always fighting and my dad was slowly and painfully dying in front of me hooked up to machines in the hospital. This was the “reality” of my “material” world. I would escape into the world of the television where "magic" was everywhere. Part of me really wanted to believe there was another world, maybe on the other side of the television screen, where everyone was beautiful and immortal. I desperately wanted to be one of the beautiful people who lived forever. And I wanted to have magical superpowers.

When I was 18 and had my first "manic break" I believed that I was communicating with "spirits" on the other side of the TV screen. I had been in college studying western philosophy and in retrospect it was just like I was acting out Plato's Allegory of the Cave: I was living out the story of the lone person that stepped outside of the cave and realized everyone else was just looking at Shadows of the Real. I thought I was seeing all these layers of meaning and I tried to tell anyone around me who would listen but they all just thought I was crazy.

With enough psych drugs and time in the hospital they reintegrated me into society and convinced me I was just "bipolar," but it happened again when I was 26: I stopped sleeping and saw straight “through” everything around me and I couldn't integrate what I was seeing with the language and rules of the material world. And it drove me “mad.” Once again, the drugs and time in the hospital allowed me to reintegrate.

Not much more than a year later, around the time we were starting the Icarus Project, I had this realization about "language" and "myth" actually being that “magic” I was missing when I was a kid: that we really do control our realities and the realities of the people around us with words and images. In Cultural Studies theory, which you can learn about if you go to a fancy liberal arts school (or if you're just curious and can hang with the jargon), the theorists talk about how there are always multiple layers of meaning and Myth in every cultural object. And that the meanings are never fixed.

Myths are really powerful tools that have been used to control masses of people for a long, long time. There's this one old Greek myth about a boy with wings who flew too close to the sun and drowned in the ocean. It seemed to my friend Ashley and I, that if we could connect the story of Icarus to the idea that what are now thought of as “mental illnesses” are actually “dangerous gifts” that need to be treated with respect and care--like wings made of wax and feathers--it was like a magic trick: Poof! No more “bipolar disorder.” It’s all just social constructs anyway, and we have the power to change the reality around us if we organize together and break out of the cave. So that’s kind of what we’ve been doing for the last six years.
 
Are you still with me? Ok.

So in the last couple years, in different ways, I've been studying Shamanism and Mysticism, catching up on all the interesting stuff I always wrote off as being New Age self-serving hippy crap: learning how to meditate and control my dreams, listening to the voices in my head and getting them to talk to each other rather than taking drugs to try and make them go away. I still take my psych drugs, though at lesser doses, and I find that my “sensitivities” sometimes really are like the “superpowers” I always had wished for as a child.

So I don't profess to really understand what's going on, but I've come to believe that somehow I, like a bunch of the other people who have gravitated to the Icarus Project, have the ability to cross back and forth between different “realms” of reality that most people do not have access to and usually don’t even know exist. I am very aware that this makes me “crazy” in the eyes of the society we live in. Nonetheless, I believe that I crossed over to the other side of reality for the first time when I was 18 and I didn't know how to handle it and there was no one around to help me figure it out. I also believe really strongly that if I, and the other people around me, had had different language to talk about what I was going through back then—possibly a language of "spirits" and "possession"--that I never would have gotten locked up in the psych hospital and stuck on all those drugs in the first place. 

To really delve into this “spiritual” stuff, especially after being raised the way I was and diagnosed by the Western medical system as having “Bipolar I with Psychotic Features – a serious and persistent mental illness," has taken some real faith in myself, not in small part because of the success of this incredible mad community of ours. The recent collective victories of the Icarus Project have given me a whole lot more faith in the power of big dreams and the power of the “mad ones” to shape the material realm and the public dialog around us. All of you people who have come together to tell your stories like I’m telling mine right now, and the formal and informal support networks that are clearly growing because of our group work--all of what we are doing together is giving us the ability to truly rewrite our Collective History. And more people are starting to listen to us because what we’re saying is not only interesting, but seems to be helping lots of struggling folks who aren’t being helped by the mainstream medical system. There is an incredible amount of visionary power in this mad little community of ours. 

So amidst the growing power of our people, I am starting to have some pretty interesting thoughts about things like "spirits" and "possession." Again I want to be really clear that I don't profess to understand what I'm talking about yet at all, and the language still feels quite awkward in my mouth and typed out on this screen, but I feel compelled to get some of this stuff out of my head so I can add to the conversation that’s already going on.

I've come to believe that there are really old "spirits" that exist in other "realms" that are not the material realm, and do not operate within the laws of linear time. When I say "old spirits" I mean that they are much older than us. Really, really old. They might be Giants (that’s for you Neptuneman.) They might be Archetypes. They might be Saints. They might be Angels. They might be Devils. I don’t really know what “they” are, but for thousands of years, different cultures and groups of people have come up with all different kinds of ways of talking about “them” and taking to “them.”

The fact that Western medicine rejects any kind of spiritual being or force because we can’t prove “scientifically” that they “really exist” seems like a purposely set linguistic trap. It says something to me about political and social control, about how important it is to the ones in power that the people are listening to the “right voices” in their heads. Because the “voices” are all around us, all the time: they’re on the radio and on the TV and the billboards and they’re coming out of your friend’s and your parent’s and your teacher’s mouths. The things people say to us stick in our heads and we hear them, repeated, all the time, whether we’re conscious of it or not.

Whatever language we want to use to describe it, I do think “spirits” or “forces” actually "possess" people all the time. I think whole groups of people can be “possessed” by a “Spirit of the Times”. And I don’t think that’s just an expression of speech. There is a mark of the divine in there somewhere. I’ve begun to pity people who categorically reject this even though I used to be one of them. I think writer’s can be “possessed” by something that they will then write, which will then “possess” other people when they read that person’s writing. I think I watched TV shows when I was a kid that were made by people who were “possessed” and then the spirits in those shows “possessed” me.

I'm sure there are all kinds of fancy words to talk about this in Western psychological jargon, but is that actually the most appropriate language to be using if we want to understand what's really going on? Or if we want to be able to talk to other people about it around the world? I think most people believe in spirits. In the end I can only speak from my personal experience and so that's what I'm going to do right now:

 My father, an "Atheist" who was raised "Catholic", died the night before my Bar Mitzvah, two days after I turned 13. Some very strange things happened around that time, I remember it more like a blurry dream. I was very traumatized and shut down and I stayed that way for a long time afterwards. I was not raised around "spiritual" people so there was no spiritual language to talk about what was happening to me or the people around me. I was raised around political people, and my family’s community of writers and politicians were at a loss for how to deal with a kid like me. So they didn’t.

When I started hanging out with anarchists and punks a year later, we didn't talk about “spirit” either, but we had plenty of it. I was attracted to the anarchists because they were “mad” and weren’t afraid to show it. In the tradition of the Left’s distrust of the Church we were atheists – “No Gods No Masters” and all that – but there was Spirit in those punk shows, there was a lot of power in those groups of people I hung with on the streets. And lots of people, even back then, always said I was really “intense.”

And I think that part of the reason I was “intense” was because I was possessed by the spirit of my dead father. 

“Woah, hold on now, buddy. That’s quite a jump. Possessed by the dead?” you say. “Have you been taking your Lithium? Maybe we need to test your blood to make sure your levels haven’t gotten too low…You do have a history of psychosis after all. You clearly have some unresolved issues from your childhood that need some type of psychotherapeutic intervention…”

At least that’s what some of the voices in my head say to me when we talk like this. But I think it’s actually a lot more interesting than all that. I’ve never written about this before but when I was 25 I was looking through a box of old papers at my step-mom’s house and I found this unfinished typed letter in my dad’s old familiar manual typewriter font that he wrote shortly before he died:

My dearest Sascha:
I am writing this letter now because Death is such a treacherous adversary. I suddenly realized that I might die suddenly and alone, or incapable of communication, or in a hospital--surrounded by strangers. If it happens that way--no matter when--I may not have the opportunity to leave you the one legacy that really counts: my love for you and my discoveries about life.
I know you have always felt the all-encompassing, all-abiding love I have for you. You are the most important person in my life, and nothing can change that. If against all the odds, there is a life after this one, then I will spend mine watching out for you and waiting until we can be reunited. But immortality is a sucker's bet, so I want you to know--in black and white--that you have given meaning to my life, have made possible any good that I have done since you were born, have sustained me and kept me from despair.
Occasionally, I have regrets about my life, but most of them have nothing to do with me; they all revolve around ways I have failed you. For all the chaos in your young life, however, on balance I think you have tuned out to be a terrific human being and I will happily accept a modest share of the credit for that wonderful result.

I’ve read those words to myself so many times. Just now my journal opened right to the page those words were pasted on so I could type them on this screen. Don’t get me wrong here: my father was clearly a mortal man, a painfully mortal man who was actually terrified of dying. He’s been dead 20 years and he ain’t coming back. But I also am convinced there was something inside of my dad that was a lot older than he was, something he carried with him that other people felt, something that was determined to live on after his death. It is that something, that “spirit” for lack of any other word, that I believe possessed him and then possessed me after he died. And I think that spirit is still very much around me. Sometimes I feel it really intensely. Sometimes I feel it looking through my eyes. I think this happens to lots of us in different ways. I think it’s actually happening all the time. I think there are spirits everywhere and they are alive in our words and our actions and it’s only our “rational” culture that blinds us to it.

The implications of this are pretty intense: it means lots of things we think are dead aren’t actually dead. It might mean we have the restless spirits of slaves and slave masters alive in our words. It means the ghosts of put down rebellions and land enclosures and native massacres and holocausts haunt our cities, our institutions, and maybe even are encoded into our very vocabularies we use to speak to each other. I think often we assume we’re saying one thing with our words but the weight of history and trauma is silently heavy in our mouths and we don’t even realize it. We live in linear time together, but there are other realms that are not linear at all and are just as real, and some of us have more access to them than others, whether we want to or not.

Can you relate to what I’m saying at all? I hope so for your sake.

Once in a while I meet someone for the first time and I feel like I’ve known them forever. It’s not a rational feeling, it’s a gut feeling. It’s a kind of familiarity that I’ve never been able to explain with words until I started talking about it in the language of spirits. Because I think there are some of us that have really old spirits that we carry around and they talk to each other through our eyes and our energy. And I actually think sometimes those spirits have agendas that maybe have nothing to do with our material lives.  

 It surely would explain a lot of weird behavior that in this day and age gets labeled “mental illness.”

Does what I’m saying about “spirits” and “possession” explain everyone’s so-called “mental illness.” Definitely not. But I do think the lack of understanding and respect for spiritual ideas in our culture creates many, many situations that drive people “mad.” I think there are many layers of reality and some of us have no choice in our ability to see them and interact with them. And I wish we all had some better common language to be able to talk about it.

So I ask again: 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 actually right in front of us all the time?

I'm 33 years old now and I meditate everyday. I have a whole other "world" inside my head that I step into that is like a mythological realm where linear time does not exist. I have these complex maps I’ve been making of the inside of my mind for years. I feel like I’m psychically tied to all these friends and strangers all over the world because of the work we’re doing together. Sometimes I feel forces pass through my body or I see things in a room that I know no one else is seeing. I also sometimes go walk in the woods behind our farm and "talk to spirits": I have whole conversations with people who aren’t actually there. Sometimes I allow myself to go into trances and be "possessed" and write my fingers off. Sometimes I have “visions” of the future and I’ve stopped being surprised when they come to pass in the material realm. In short: I’m proudly one of the “mad ones” that believes I have “superpowers” and I’m determined to surround myself with others like me so that we can do our part to create the world we want to live in together.

I’m so grateful for the Icarus Project community. If I didn’t have this place I would feel like a lonely freak. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, and I think it’s important for us to understand that on some level people like us really are dangerous to the system because we don’t believe in its future and we actually listen to the voices in our heads. And that’s “mad.” In the eyes of the State we’re the equivalent of Islamic Fundamentalists. Everyone knows you don’t want to fuck with crazy people because you never know what they’re going to do. Because if you’re reading this and not taking me seriously, I guarantee that there are a lot of people reading this who are totally relating to what I’m saying, and our voices are actually getting louder everyday. Maybe just call it The Spirit of the Times.

Mad Love,
S