Werner Herzog’s Reflections on the Natural World

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I had an encounter with a big boa constrictor, which poked its head through the chicken wire surrounding its wooden cage and looked at me fearlessly in the eye for a long time. Stubbornly confronting each other. we were pondering the relatedness of the species. Both of us, since the relatedness was slight, felt sad and turned away from each other.

A drunk spat at a beautiful monkey, black, with limbs that go on forever. He looks very intelligent. He is sitting with his tail wrapped around his buttocks, his knees under his chin and his arms around his knees. I realized I was sitting the same way. Does the monkey dream my dreams in the branches above me?

Next to a surfboard, a cormorant popped up from the water, looking so out of place and artificial that for a moment I thought it was plastic, like the fake ducks that hunters put out on ponds as decoys, but then it suddenly dived so elegantly that I gained confidence in cormorants.

Flesh-eating flowers oozing oily invitations lure insects to their death. On rotting wood, slimy fungi brood poison. The jungle, existing exclusively in the present, is certainly subject to time, but remains forever ageless. Any concept of justice would be antithetical to all this.

Why do these animal dramas preoccupy me so? Because i do not want to look inside myself…and would prefer to observe the jungle revel in its debauched lewdness.

Excerpts from Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless.

Pink Soda Dance

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Hands came over my face, a sharp young woman in sunglasses and nothing of a dress. She pretended it was an accident but demanded that I get out of the way so that she and her friends could post a video.

She feigned shock when I told her that she was being rude. They passed out the drinks, mostly pink soda, and danced, the last one in a blue head band, a feather tied to that, her face pressed close to a wall, near a screwed-down pipe.

I had to get a picture, especially with the ocean and trees in the distance, but was locked out of my phone and had to resort to AI.

Bequeathed Baby

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Winds came hard from the east, carrying my ex to the sands she loved and an urn, a bequeathment from her father, now chipped, his old apartment full of former students.

The water flooded up into a pool, the students playing and spitting, little to say, the phone – the phone again! – half burned in the muddy sand, unable to grip, to move back, even with the kids trying to throw rocks, thinking he might never come back, and then having to go to the bathroom, always that.

He was a baby. He wanted everything for himself and then none of it, vanishing into nothing. And not even that.

Needing to Wake

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Turning a playing card over and over, the same thing on both sides…unable to open your phone, the wrong password, wrong fingers too.

Opening the door, seeing your partner half dressed with a stranger, knowing it would be like that, feeling sick and afraid.

The climactic end to a film oozing down from the floors above, the passage getting narrower and narrower until you can’t find the right door and are on an elevator that twists sideways and stops on an impossibly high floor, everything glass all around.

The terror digs deep, and all you have to do is wake.

$20,000 is Not My Number

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I’ve been offered $20,000 buyouts twice in my life, once from a job, the other from a relationship. I didn’t accept either.

I was asked to make a counter offer for one and I suggested a million. There was only silence after that.

Sisyphus: The Hour of Consciousness

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Sisyphus watches the stone rush down toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again. It is during his return, that pause, that hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering; that is the hour of consciousness.

Greenlandic trail

The evidence is in the absurd divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, a nostalgia for unity; those are the contradictions that bind together. If the descent is sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth.

Grecian cave

Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. “I conclude that all is well,” says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred.

(Extracts from Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.)

Where to Go Next

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You go to a place and, from there, you go to another. And another. And so on.

And then you go back or on to another place and get to where you started or to a new place that is the same as any other and think about where to go next.

Or as Albert Camus phrases it in his Myth of Sisyphus: Living under that stifling sky forces one to get away or to stay.

Parlaying on Something Super Good

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I try to make sense of the absurdity on my social media trough, a progression or regression of something only machines can process now. It’s not like it’s really bad, nothing super terrible. It’s just the sounds in my head. It’s stupid to even think about. Reason will prevail. Once you climb the mount and see what’s out there, everything’s good, super good.

I’m fine. I have the golden afternoon, and I’m thinking it might go on forever like this. Damn the noise. Happy endings. That’s what we’re all about. That’s how I was raised. No matter what death and destruction, especially with everything on the verge, something good will happen soon, super good. Anyway, that’s what I’ve got for my parlay.

The Pithy Wisdom of Evelyn Waugh

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Having just read Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, I’m reminded of what excellent writing can be – not only vivid and humorous, but more importantly, deeply cutting.

My wife knew what was wanted. She had neat, hygienic ways for that too, but there were both relief and triumph in her smile of welcome; later we parted and lay in twin beds a yard or two distant, smoking.

Brideshead Revisited, BBC 1981

I was a free man; she had given me my manumission in that brief, sly lapse of hers; my cuckold’s horns made me lord of the forest.

I can understand a man wishing he hadn’t married and trying to get out of it but to get rid of one wife and take up with another immediately is beyond reason.

Finally, while not his words but his actions, it is interesting to note that Waugh, a failed writer at the start, attempted suicide, leaving his clothes and a note on the shore, only to retreat from the sea when he was stung by a jellyfish.

Crime in Mind

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The music was muted, not the way he remembered it. It had been loud not so long ago. He wanted to get off the plane and go nowhere, stay where he was and face whatever he had to face. The consequences, that’s what they were called. He hadn’t done anything wrong. It was in him as much as it was in anyone.

Crime was an interesting word. He had never really thought about it. He had just thought that a crime was a crime, just that. There were necessary laws in civilization. That was how the world was made to work. But the world how? The world why? To propagate what? What system was being kept in place? He was justifying now. He knew that. But there was no crime, not according to the law now or ever. He would be cancelled, maybe that, lose his friends and family. That was the punishment, even if it wasn’t wrong.

Wrong. That was another word he wanted to understand. He felt like he had done something that he shouldn’t have done, something he would regret. Or was that just a thing in his head, convincing himself of that because of what he had been told by his parents and their parents to them? The world was a fucking mess, all of its laws and rights and wrongs being followed, institutions constructed like that, for the greater good, whatever that was supposed to be. He was justifying again.

There was something to all of this, following this path to wherever it was going, on this plane, away, even if that was all inside of him and he was just doing it to himself. He turned the music up until it was distorted. He liked it better like that.