Thursday, 19 January 2012

No fire. In time, I believe the cosmos will lay its inner workings before us, though not in the way Stephen Hawking (for example) might predict. Rather, we shall see, for instance, whether Kurtz himself is the heart of darkness, or merely an old maniac lost among a darkness that has no heart. In much the same way that Scarecrow enters in the second half of the film to embody the theme of fear that dominates the first half, and Two-Face enters in the second half to embody the theme of duality (light vs. dark, legitimate vs. illegitimate justice) that dominates the first half, I believe we shall see an "embodiment" (though whether he/she/it will have a "body" to speak of remains open to debate) of the dominant forms of strife that have dogged humanity during its life to date. Milton, and to a lesser extent Blake, would undoubtedly approve of such tangential meanderings, although the chirping of mobile phones on the 176 between Waterloo and Dulwich might suggest otherwise.