3/30/02 Saturday 8:57 am
The journal, the journal!

In anticipation of viewing the DVD of Apocalypse Now Redux I reread Conrad's The Heart of Darkness.

I began to feel inadequate as I read (actually I "read" an audio book borrowed from the library). My experience with them tells me that, after the act of “reading”, I cannot distinguish having read the book with my inner voice from having listened with the narrator's voice. I, then, watched the movie. I decided taking the trip up river (Africa and Asia) that I could never meet a guy like Kurtz, let alone deal with him, because my life experience left me with a dearth of depth. The words of John Berrymen’s Dream Song Henry echo in my ears frequently, "I conclude now that I have no inner resources."

Yesterday morning I started to seriously structure a story that has been on my mind for some time (about Six Goddam Years, my superego, shouts unkindly. I figure that conscience stricken Joe is really the major perpetrator of the dense block that prevents the composition). I sat with writing software called Power Structure and my basement computer and worked things out with the characters and the story. The more I worked the more vapid the plot became. The more I drew the characters up, the more I was bored with them and then I thought about Conrad and Kurtz and Marlowe and the dark river and my personal situation and a glimpse of Marlon Brando's ivory billiard ball head.

The world that Conrad inhabited was different. Maybe, I divined; the world that all ingenious writers inhabit is different. I could not but wonder for the millionth time. Do I suffer enough? Which turned on, Why Don’t I suffer enough?

I remember a cartoon wherein some character meets a suffering artist (It was probably committed by Stan Freburg). The artist is a flurry of frenetic pencil line, his body as untidy as his hair which grows and flies everywhere. "Ohh!” says the character upon seeing the artist, "man, you suffer too much!"

It's not that I don't suffer. I do. I won’t bore you with my “plights and gripes” (back once again to dreaming Henry who is heavy bored). The question that comes to my mind is do I suffer enough to create? I live in a suburb in the east of Pittsburgh. The skies are blue the days they aren’t gray (Not much of a song there.) Bird’s, that don’t caw, whistle pretty ditties the long day. My neighbor does wake me on weekends with his riding mower. Sometimes the supermarket runs out of Mancini’s bread. The last war fought around here was when Braddock and Jumonville (both pretty inept as it turns out) got cut down by the French.

I grew up in Penn Hills, where I presently live. I left a couple times and broadened my horizons. I did not travel to a combat zone. I did not witness the burning of a Buddhist monk. The most traumatic time I spent in California was when two naked women and a naked dwarf walked down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. On the plus side (suffering that is) I had two bad mothers-in law and my relationships with women have been interestingly unsatisfactory. Okay this is getting close to a gripe so I’ll stop here. I was just making the point that when it comes to really good deep dark dripping miserable suffering, mine has been pretty prosaic.

Add to those facts; I just don’t make such a big deal out of things that many would treat as dire tragedy. Here I sit, after some analysis, in the ridiculous position of suffering because I don't suffer enough. Despairing because I don’t despair enough. It really does make me laugh, which adds to my minus suffer quotient.

I will never write the Heart of Darkness. But I have visited it. Of course, what else could be the reason for Conrad and Coppola's work?

Somewhere it is said, if you want the facts read non-fiction, if you want the truth read fiction. (I guess whoever said that never read Jacqueline Susann.) Finally I have decided to be seeker after the truth. The facts, unlike Joe Friday, merely interest me.

So, I sit, coffee in hand, in the very cold of my winter basement and in the sweated heat of my summer backyard and read works of varying depth. Once in awhile I steel myself for a voyage to some deep, clinging backwater. The only question that I have is how good am I am exploring my depth. Actually the question has become, Do I have a depth to explore?

Now comes the time to bear my dirty little secret. I journal, pretty much daily, and I do try to travel to the heart of my darkness. So far it is pretty bright, but I know how I work overtime to kid myself. When you look up at the night sky and see the universe of heavenly body wheeling over head, it is pretty hard to believe that all that is just for us. As I pass a tributary, a branch and I chose to explore the main course, I figure that there is more untapped in me than even I can imagine.

What was the horror that Kurtz was viewing as he drew his last breath?