Heart of Darkness

Since visiting the sites on the Thames, I have been thinking of many potential ideas. The two books Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens seem to be natural starting points for creative work. I have read that Dickens used to take regular walks from his home near Gravesend to the marshes, sometimes walking upto 20 miles. His writing was done in a unique wooden chalet which was built in the grounds of his house and looked out upon the estuary. Conrad spent time in Essex on the opposite bank of the Thames estuary at Stanford Le Hope. I don't know so much about his life but in the introduction to Heart of Darkness by Paul O'Prey, the estuary clearly has a profound impact upon his writing. Conrad talks of the sky as a 'benign immensity of unstained light'. He draws parallels between the Thames and the Congo river through the suggestion that 'all seas and rivers run into one another: from the 'end of the world' the Thames 'stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway', 'leading to the uttermost ends of the earth....into the heart of an immense darkness'.

O'Prey, P. Introduction to Heart of Darkness, Penguin Books 1983, page 8

This literary image conjures up notions of the 'sublime' and I wonder if Conrad was provoking ideas around this? I was watching a fascinating programme about Yellowstone Park called Unnatural Histories (BBC4 9.00 pm Thursday 16th June 2011) where the image created of Yellowstone was associated with this search for the sublime. This was a connection to God, a place where one could feel the danger and true sense of a wonderful landscape. In the case of Yellowstone it was through the spectacular geisers, the mountains or waterfalls.

Yellowstone was basically a construct of a wilderness where native Americans had been ejected so that the land could be appropriated for use by settlers. Below is the information from the programme.

As the world's first national park, Yellowstone has long served as a model for the protection of wilderness around the world. For Americans it has become a source of great national pride, not least because it encapsulates all our popular notions of what a wilderness should be - vast, uninhabited, with spectacular scenery and teeming with wildlife. But Yellowstone has not always been so. At the time of its creation in 1872, it was renowned only for its extraordinary geysers, and far from being an uninhabited wilderness it was home to several American Indian tribes.

This film reveals how a remote Indian homeland became the world's first great wilderness. It was the ambitions of railroad barons, not conservationists, that paved the way for a brand new vision of the wild, a vision that took native peoples out of the picture. Iconic landscape paintings show how European Romanticism crossed the Atlantic and recast the American wilderness, not as a satanic place to be tamed and cultivated, but as a place to experience the raw power of God in nature. Forged in Yellowstone, this potent new version of wilderness as untouched and deserving of protection has since been exported to all corners of the globe.