Journey into the Heart of
Darkness
The Primary Interface
Racked
with pain. You cannot close your eyes. The surface area is directly
proportional to incumbency. Flesh as decay. I took a moment aside from the
hyper pixel transfiguration and morbidly found death. It limped home from
none/filiation/instigated/geometry.
That is. Opening up and out from a previously
unrecognised position inspires something like dependency that dances at the
slightest suggestion of anything other to or besides /the enigma/ "always
mute with an air of whispering." P.29. (HoD). We are far away now. We are
travelling majestically along a sublime coast. We are beckoning towards
retrospective aspects; it is an ultimate and intangible mystery. We are belying
the tendency to make it straightforward/unblemished/internal/branded. Some have
called -it- <the meat>.
IRL. Caught by a delicate
cobweb spun in the corner of a daydream
that quickly spirals out of
control. The smell. I have an image of an
interminable number of dull
cattle waltzing through a grid in the middle of a vast plain. This vision
frames the question and leads us into the paradox. Simply spoken, it is the
caveman concern. What or who makes the thing whole? Not until midnight or death
or an unholy alliance with a largely ‘defunct’ uncle; does the bitter
recollection of life’s mysteries make the body come alive to us, "this
papier-mâché Mephistopheles." P.48. (HoD). At this point, all meat,
atrophied flesh, rains down and fills in the space.
It is as if we were looking
for the space all along. That unresolved difference is the place where the meat
grows. We know nothing else. I am surprised and dismayed as I begin to
understand the after effects as visually determined phenomena. Reality? The
wafting flakes of loosely charred muscle, unhinged from torn and mangled
ligaments; hang from bones strung out and made into tribal ornaments that
signal and direct the gods. A beat starts. It ricochets in silence and settles
on skin recently made naked. It’s like looking at your children and seeing
yourself. "The inner truth is hidden – luckily, luckily,..... its
mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks...... as sane men would be
before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse." P. 60/62 (HoD).
Only the tremor remains. The
undermining bass sound and the spectral figure of Kurtz. He is lost in the
shadows. He appears to be coming towards us, but one is never sure. It is the
sound of his voice. It somehow goes in between the fibres of the flesh, and
infiltrates the tissue of the meat. Once you have heard him, it is as if an
indelible memory has been planted into your mind. Try as you may, the fixture
cannot be removed. Take a moment to relax, and you will find the sensation
empty and devoid of any meaning. Go towards that point in your consciousness,
and it will move around like a target on a gypsy fête stall. You can’t ‘hit’
it. You are impelled to be passive. Before the singular reality of a man’s
voice that has crossed the divide between civilisation and barbarity; stillness
is personified. "The gift of the great,......other sounds, full of
mystery, desolation, and sorrow.......the ripple of the river, the soughing of
the trees swayed by the wind, the murmurs of wild crowds, the faint ring of
incomprehensible words cried from afar, the whisper of a voice speaking from
beyond the threshold of an eternal darkness." P. 121 (HoD).
It is likely that Kurtz had
swallowed up some tropical wind from the jungle and it had entered him to fuse
the missing flesh. His meat has become complete. We may tentatively suggest
that this is a type of transcendental materialism, in that the material
concerned reaches towards a higher plane on which unbridled diversity sits at
its deepest ‘core’. In other words, the civilised man made whole through
integration into the mores and the lifestyle of the primitive, has repaired his
meat that was damaged in the course of sedentary practises, and the social
games involved with the empire. For example, the embarrassing silences. The
confounded obsession with regulations. The communication and accounting systems
that ‘channel’ the raw material in an effort to translate it into a quantity
and therefore a commercial success. All these processes interrupt the
development of the meat. It is cubed, diced, wrapped up and sent somewhere
else. Presence is lost. The meat is evacuated.
However, Kurtz was also a
monster. He sums up this monstrous movement in his last words, "the
horror,.... the horror." P.112. (HoD). He knew what he had become. Of
course, this self-consciousness is not reflective. Looking into a mirror at
this point is a diffractive process. The break up of the personality is the
most notable aspect that may be seen. Awareness of exactly how and where your
personality is going, only increases the momentum to pour forth and to ‘become
other/willing/inside/moreover/’ - i.e., you are zombie flesh. The revelation that Kurtz was a
zombie, does not, however, help us to understand him. He dealt with the
sedentary damage to his meat and regained the primitive posture. At the same
time, his consciousness kept working and his thought processes embraced the
regenerated vigour of the animal body. It could be said that he was watching
his own zombie movie.
So do we have in effect, a
conscious, primitive zombie? The meat is made whole, yet any residue or
knowledge from the empire enterprise creeps through the flesh from the inside
and takes away the very animating force that was propelling it. Kurtz was a
living dead. As Marlow drew towards him in his floating coffin, death filled
the ensuing environment. Perhaps this was enhanced and controlled by the
immanent power of the ivory. Just as an elephant’s graveyard is a reverent and
serene place, the inner station, filed to the brim with ivory, was thick with
the death of elephants. Kurtz stood in the middle of it, "it was as though
an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand
with menaces at the motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering
bronze." P. 97. (HoD). This is a picture of Kurtz taken from the novel, in
which he is portrayed as an ivory zombie that is animated by a strange force
that comes from no place Marlow may comprehend, i.e., the primeval jungle.
Marlow himself partakes in
this monstrous, ‘becoming ivory zombie flesh’. He meat has been torn away from
Europe and the familiar confines of empire society. It begins to be infiltrated
and fused with animism as the boat chugs up the spiralling snake river. These
‘gaps’ in the positive empire ego are made deeper by the layers and levels that
were constructed as the Europeans made their commercial networks throughout the
world. Ravines in the flesh are also forms of variegation. They are the dark
and light patches of which Conrad speaks. As Marlow glides into the jungle,
these contrasts become more apparent as blocks of impenetrable nature and
shifting groups of Africans that are dehumanised, abstracted and demonic. Marlow
describes the ‘becoming ivory zombie flesh’ in these terms, as the variegation
settles upon him like the shadows of exotic leaves that are blown by a hot
wind. This transfiguration coincides with his perceptual universe and alters
his subjective knowledge. It is also the madness of which he speaks. "It
was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable
intention." P.60. (HoD). Or, in other words. "That commingling of
absurdity, surprise and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that
notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of
dreams." P.50. (HoD).
The journey through the
waterways of Africa is also a pathway through the fibres of the flesh. Ivory
zombie flesh penetrates the sedentary layers of fat, muscle and tissue in a
similar way to light spreading in the morning through a dusty plate glass
window in an abandoned church somewhere in northern Europe. Light and dark
shades creep over the derelict interior and give us an image of a religious
place that has been lost to the touch of human kind. Marlow is heading towards
his rendez vous with his lost self in the jungle. Kurtz manifests more
than the selective ‘other side’ of civilised man toasting the efficiency of
colonial enterprise in the sweaty tropics. He is the force from whence the
enterprise arises. This is not a plainly figured unconscious or primitive drive
animating the repercussions of the ego through the id and gradual inculcation
with civilised standards. But it is a shadow on the surface of the personality
of civilised man. It could be said that it is an ominous movement, and one that
is powerful, penetrating and complete.
The fused meat of the
communal primitive animates tribal dances and the worship of the shadow. This
is because they recognise the power of the ivory zombie flesh. Kurtz has become
more than human, and the Africans understand that. They perceive a basic truth
of animism come alive: this is that the spirits of the dead elephants may
transmigrate and become solidified in the form of one man. Kurtz was that man,
and he became their God. Marlow saw this and he is repelled by it as his empire
body is assailed on the micro and perceptual level by the presence of the ivory
zombie hordes. Marlow turns away from the possibility of becoming a second
Kurtz. He has a civilised story to tell, and a narration that takes us into the
hollow core of the heart of darkness: and that hollow core is ‘full of
echoes’......... "the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from
a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal." P.114. (HoD).
References
(HoD): Conrad, Joseph, Heart
of Darkness, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995).