Throughout Green Roses Bloom for Icarus, the mythic Icarus is the floating signifier of desire
that circulates among us, and whose meaning and value fluctuate arbitrarily. Thus, Icarus is the
superseded superstar, the haunting specter, and the symptom of our collective disease, like a
randomly floating coronavirus particle. Icarus is also, a bad penny (or its flipside, corroded
obverse), a flipped bird, an obscene signifier-hermaphroditic diva, and graffiti scrawl.
To extricate ourselves from the circuitry of desire that the fall of Icarus catalyzed, we celebrate
the green rose, the symbol of emerging art in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man. Celebration converts the green of copper corrosion, of self-corrupting envy, into the green
of lyric seabloom and redemptive hope. Thus, Icarus plunges into the sea of green roses, only to
be resurrected endlessly.