In Fellowship With Icarus

by Psychotenor

Myths tell us more than we realize about human thought patterns throughout the ages. The fact that this illness we have was first recognized as some kind of disorder in ancient Rome testifies to its impact on history. While Emperors and Kings forged nations in manic inspiration, the lowest beggar was jailed or later thrown naked into Bedlam for manic delusions.

I've always found the story of Icarus to be my own personal symbol for the cycles we go through. Briefly, here it is, via Edith Hamilton's seminal book of Mythology many of us studied in high school or college...

King Minos of Crete has imprisoned the architect Daedalus and his son Icarus in the very labyrinth of the Minotaur that Daedalus originally designed. (King Minos was kind of dumb, in my opinion.)

[Daedalus] told his son, "Escape [from the labyrinth] may be checked by water and land, but the air and sky are free..." and he made two pairs of wings for them. They put them on, and just before they took flight, Daedalus warned Icarus to keep a middle course over the sea. If he flew too high, the sun might melt the glue and the wings drop off. ... As the two flew lightly and without effort away from Crete, the delight of this new and wonderful power went to the boy's head. He soared exultingly up and up, paying no heed to his father's anguished commands. Then he fell. The wings had come off. He dropped into the sea and the waters closed over him... (Hamilton, Mythology, pgs 139-140.)

To me it is the boy exulting in the sun who flies too high and loses his wings to drop to the sea that I think of when I think of bipolar disorder. It's a minor myth - sentimentalized by Ovid, told simply by Apollodorus, who is the source Edith Hamilton used.

But when you read, doesn't it speak to your own cycles? I have flown straight for the face of the sun. I was a small child when I first had trouble sleeping at night and I was up until the TV stations signed off, one by one - it seemed each had the video montage of the soaring jet fighter and the resonant voice reciting the poem that ends "...and touch the face of God." I would go to sleep wondering about that, and when the great thunderstorms of July would boil up in the distance at sunset, I would watch their towering faces, fuchsia in the setting sun, and imagine myself like Icarus there, winged and hurtling about the steppes and cliffs of cloud.

Perhaps I write this - I don't know, essay - to say something about what we share and why it is good to come here [to the Forum] and read your words, all of you, and know that in my stuck record, film loop of flying into the face of the sun before my brazen mind plunges to the sea, I no longer feel so alone, or feel that the cycle is endless. I will not be Icarus forever. My brother was Icarus, and finally the sun shot him down with fire. He could not see how it was to NOT be Icarus.

Here, sharing with you all, I no longer feel alone in the sky or panicked, hurtling toward the hard glass face of the sea that can swallow me. There's a flock of us, the world over. May we soar the middle way of peace as the birds do here in the winter. I see them just after dawn, in their strange concert with each other, flying just above the housetops in a singing river, undulating, winging steadily toward home.

We all have a fellowship with Icarus. But he was only one, and far from home. Thank you.

Psychotenor was a member of our Bipolar Disorder community, and originally posted this essay on our Forum.