HEART OF DARKNESS

Ideas travel and migrate and breed and bring forth. The boat painting has given thoughts to an installation. In the same way that when you learn a new word or discover a name, you suddenly hear it spoken numerous times within a day... so that within finally committing to the making of an installation with an actual boat, I had two vessels offered to me within a pair of days. If one can finally embrace an idea, the world opens before him.
I'm the new owner of a 16 foot monstrosity that may have floated at one time, that may float yet again, but certainly not on water.

I SHALL CALL HIM MINI ME
(no, scratch that)

MARLOW

I'm in the middle of reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the narrator's (Marlow's) conscious stream is keeping me afloat:

The yarns of sea men have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. To him, the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze.

The life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination- you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all looked that) I would put my finer on it and say "I will go there" There was one-the biggest ,the most blank so to speak, I had a hankering after. True by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery- a white patch to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird-a silly little bird.

Here the earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but here- here you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were----No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remoted kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.