Endymion

I was reading Joseph Campbell's Creative Mythology: Masks of the Gods and happened across a 16th century Italian representation of the Music of the Spheres as it corresponds to the return of man to the throne of apollo (the state of dream imagination). It brought up the general picture of man returning to his origin, passing the planets and leaving with each the elements of his composition. It made me coincidentally re-read, without a sense of why, Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

I found in HD the images that corresponded generally with the figure in Campbell's Book: The figure sported a snake with three heads upon which man enters in his mission, as Marlow describes the river as the serpent and he the bird to be swallowed. The fates make their appearance in the white city, their trinity corresponding with the snakes three heads: past, present and future. (Just like Erebus before the gate of hell.) He also seems to leave behind him the elements which colured civilization and presupposed stasis. Its a rehashing of symbolic concepts that birthed present day practices of transubstantiation.

What I always hear are the negative aspects of man returning to his nature. Primal though it is in a moral face I love the feeling behind it, the nakedness and freedom of shear arbitration from the frountain of self-knowledge. But there is also a huge ?mystery. What does this darkness signify other than a passage into the unkown, as the knights go errant into the forest in the Grail Legend: the darkest and most dense path chosen.
I can't help but feel a tremedous admiration for what I believe Kurtz was partaking in. But it is formless. I want some substance from which he exacted this state of Apollo to which is attributed
enlightenment, or a higher state of being. Or would I not understand being a civilized person born of my world?

I also want a more conventional comparison of archetypes. If there is any reading, preferably not to difficult and of a more literary nature than academic, I would be much obliged.

Please contribute and tell me your feelings of Kurt and anything at all about the book. I've got no one to talk to about these things and I'm very interested in all opinions.

three4jump

Endymion, my reading of HD ties in nicely with my readings in consciousness studies and mimetics, both of which suggest that the self is not a real thing at all. As Marlow travels up the river, he finds Europeans clinging to the accoutrements of culture in ways that are impractical and even absurd. He see them as "hollow men." He comes to identify with the cannibals who outnumber him and who could certainly eat him if they wanted to, but they show restraint based on pragmatism rather than any cultural taboo. After all, why shouldn't people eat one another? People might say it's disgusting or immoral or against the will of god, but it really comes down to an agreement that makes life easier for us. Since we're at the top of the food chain anyway, we can simply come to agreement that we won't eat each other, and everyone gains by not having to look at every other human as a predator, at least in that sense.

The cannibals don't have centuries of religion and greek mythology and cultural tradition in the same sense as the Europeans. Their culture is minimal, and tied to the jungle and the river. They may still have erroneous beliefs, just less so than the Europeans. Kurtz finds that he can do what a good ivory trader is supposed to do--exploit people and resources--if he drops the facade of European culture that constructs a convoluted charade of "enlightening the natives" in order to steal from them. He simply sets himself up as a warlord and kills his competition, accomplishing the same thing in a more honest fashion.

Susan Blackmore, in her book The Meme Machine suggests the likelihood that the whole concept of self is a social construct born out of tribalism. "Are you one of us or one of them?" Further, it is not government or religion or philosophy that creates this mythical self; it creates itself simply because it can and it sustains itself because it is a phenotype that the genes can be tied to for the purposes of natural selection. Government and religion simply exploit this tendency. Kurtz may have gone native in order to find his "true self," and perhaps "the horror" was that any self he might construct would be a sham. All of this enlightening and colonization and war and suffering was in the service of bolstering a false sense of self. Perhaps Kurtz realized that none of our cultural elaborations can make the self real. Marlow sensed Kurtz's realization, but he didn't have the courage to follow that path to its apparent dead end, so he goes back to European civilization, and reduces all of his experiences to a story about what happened in a strange land far away, as if Europe was safe from the implications. He chooses not to tell Kurtz's widow what his last words really were because the meaning would be lost on her. He lets her go on living with the false comfort that all of her culture is somehow real and can protect her somehow.

Of course, Conrad would have known nothing of genetics, memetics, or consciousness studies, but he would have known about the arbitrariness of cultural constructs as he watched his Poland being eradicated in favor of other cultures. Perhaps as he tried to become assimilated into French culture and English culture he became aware that it was all contrivance. He did not especially like being married and he never had a kind word for his wife; it was simply what one does, a facet of society he had to accept or risk being thrown out. To me, HD was written as a cautionary tale: don't go stripping away all the cultural artifice to find your true primitive self because you might find that it was all artifice and we are all hollow men. For many people, the discovery that the self is a sham can be discomforting. Marlow embraced the emptiness in a bhuddist fashion, but he understood that not everyone was prepared to. He lets people assume that he is "one of us" simply by being of European decent and by not openly contradicting them.

Endymion

It makes straightforward sense. But I'm curious to know 'the horrors' of what Kurtz is experiencing. Suppose Kurtz acknowledges this artifice of the self. Does the feeling of horror rise up out of his attachment to illusion. He went into the jungle with the goal to civilize the savages but comes out stripped of his own pretense as a primitive whose goal really has nothing to do with the ideal reformation of individuals, just ivory exploitation. According to those hallow white devils he did an extraordinary job, all the while never really under the guise required for the job.
Does he find his appearances and pretenses for these exploitations sickening.

What is the origin of 'the horror?'