Milkman

The book keeps getting stranger, the surreal mentality of those who live on Not Doctor street becomes more obvious every time, the characters seem to lead a perfectly normal life but there are little bits and pieces of insanity that tweak the way we look at them. Milkman is a perfectly normal kid inside and out: rebellious, confused and inexperienced but he is able to have a standard social life simply because he has become an expert at hiding the fact that one of his legs is shorter than the other. The leg is a symbol of how Macon Jr has to try harder than most to be average ever since they found out about his mother's secret, its represents Milkman's strength as he deals with embarrassment from day to day, having to cope with something that is not his own fault in the first place, "The deformity was mostly in his mind" (62) a shorter leg is something you're born with. Like the everyone else that lives on Not Doctor street, Milkman has no reason for staying but does anyway. He was born the alleged reincarnation of the man who jumped off a building and the first signs of him wanting to fly away have started to appear. "Why everybody on this side of the street?" (78) he wonders, questioning the natural state of the inhabitants. When he starts seeing the nonsense after living in it his whoile life, he separates himself from the rest of the Not Doctor people, he looks at them with a critical eye like they have looked at him his whole life and begins to discover that there is nothing keeping him there, that he can cross the street whenever he feels like it. I still feel bad for Milkman but now I see he has hope.

First Impressions

Song of Solomon so far has been surreal. I feel like the author wants to shock the reader at a realistic level, all the characters and the events that have happened so far are completely possible but incredibly unlikely. It takes certain kind of community for these things to happen, one that doesn't punish severely, one that gives a lot of freedom and one that is too shattered to care anymore.

The African-American population described int his book is one that had been put down for so long they have lost care for the line that divides acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior. Those are people that have seen so much that they cannot be easily surprised anymore. It takes a mother breast-feeding her eight(or so)-year-old child or a man jumping off a building with silky blue wings strapped on to really earn attention.

Control

The preconscious awesome.
It is having control of you body without having control of your thoughts. It is knowing what you are saying but now knowing where it came from. Being honest with yourself is not only an incredibly generic piece of advice but it is also impossible to do. Freud' theory hat dreams were the representation and interpretation of our deepest, most repressed ideas was refuted and replaced with the theory that dreams are nothing but the processing of thoughts.
Our brain works really hard to make us socially acceptable and the best way to do this is to repress any behavior that wouldn't be approved of by the people that surround us and thus assuring us of survival. The more taboo a though becomes, the more we keep it hidden and the less we dream about it. I Marlow was really in a preconscious state we were hearing what he thinks happened, not what really happened. His mind and his brain are convinced that what he describes is what really happened but there is an angle between reality and Heart of Darkness.
Under different circumstances Marlow would've simply not said anything but the preconscious brought out his thoughts and put them into words that his tongue speaks but his superego is a stranger to.

BIg Fish, Little Fish

I try to be as open-minded as possible when it comes to foreign cultures, they sometimes have beliefs that I don't agree with but it doesn't hurt me to respect their freedom. Cannibalism is one thing I cannot bring myself to justify. It makes me sick thinking about people eating each other, cooking human parts and selling them separately, it simply cannot understand how it ever seemed like a good idea in the first place. Not even after I did some research.

There have been many cases of cannibalism attached to cultural behavior as well as people resorting to it in cases of extreme need. You hear the stories of stranded hikers that end up having to eat one another for survival and facts about bugs eating their hubbies for natural selection purposes but it surprised me to see how many documented cases of cannibalism there actually are. Criminals that have an obsession for human butchering, a rugby team that got lost in the Argentinean Andes mountains and those who eat those who are already dead. Cannibalism is more common than I though it was and it just makes me wonder where the boundaries of human insanity really are.

When the colonialists first saw acts of cannibalism with their own eyes their realities must have cracked. You can't live through something like that, learning about cannibalism is different from having to see it happening. The European men had this as proof that the native Africans were an inferior beast-like community. Anything that is strange or is "wrong" according to our standards should be criminalized and avoided and suppressed because a life time is enough to get you used to certain ideas. They used this behavior as a justification for their own cruel acts of treating people like cattle an treading them like they traded human limbs. Were the natives really that different?

Both tribes, the European and the African, have no sympathy for their fellow humans. They both had a demeaning view of those they "owned" and consumed them for their own benefit. The "savages" didn't put themselves in the position of those they consumed but the Belgians didn't either. "Consuming" has a flexible meaning, in this case it refers to both the act of devouring as well and the acts of slowly killing trough menial work one can't be bothered to do.

Cannibalism may not be okay for me still but I can understand at least the basic idea behind it, one that has a will haunt our behavior forever, the idea that using other humans for our own benefit is simply survival.

1+1=?

With my focus being the lighting in "Heart of Darkness", I took some of the quotes that prove my theory of light representing knowledge, (Light=Knowledge). Knowledge is a funny thing because it can cause as much harm as it can bring benefits and Conrad shows this in his trademark metaphor-filled narration.
Marlow is telling the story of his life experiences and how they cast a light on himself, "No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light"(70).
So, if Light=knowledge, then Light+ Journey= Discovery, in this case self-discovery, a complicated process that even in the situation that bring out your raw personality we aren't able to absorb a lot of it by fault of denial. Denial= -Light.
Marlow then makes an important connection, he states that when he was given the power to drive a steamboat he became an "emissary of light"(76). Marlow is a white man and by having the possibility of traveling he becomes light, he will obtain light as well as spread it through out traveling. The savages on the other hand, cannot absorb knowledge according to Marlow and his men. They are trapped in a primitive state of perpetuate ignorance that will be given the variable Darkness. White= Light. Savages= Darkness. Light + Darkness= 2Light. Light absorbs darkness.
Knowledge "Lighted up everything and collapsed"(90). Fire is light. Fire brought by the Belgians is used to destroy, it is uncontrollable and the savages don't know how to use it to their advantage to the extent of creating firearms like the colonizers.
Fire destroyed the hut and spread and conquered the savage race. Ligh x Light= Fire.
Fire + Darkness= Light.

PS:I searched "Conrad" on Google images and Lauren Conrad came up. Turns out she's a writer too.

The Eagle Ray Sensation

Heart of Darkness is filled with paradoxes. I though the word “paradox” meant “a popular belief, a universal truth” but I was wrong. According to Princeton (haughty haughty) a paradox is “a statement that contradicts itself”. For example, when Marlow says he is “tired of resting” (p.70) we can say it is a paradox because being tired of resting beats the purpose of resting in the first place.
Or is it irony?
Princeton defines irony as being an “incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs”, so if Marlow rested he expected to be revitalized but ended up getting tired of that too it would be irony. If I look at the types of irony I don’t see this fitting in any of them but at the same time it stand pretty close to each without really stepping fully inside of a definition.
Another example of this paradox/irony comes in the phrase “the serenity became less brilliant but more profound” (p. 66). Since we’re talking about seamen I find it appropriate to point out how this immediately made me think of the sea. In shallow waters everything is vibrating, all the tiny little rainbow fish are friendly and you can see them even form the surface but one you go deeper, you can’t see much and you’re skin is covered in goose bumps but once a big, gray eagle ray swims by it makes sense you’d submit to the shivering and the boredom. The contradiction comes in as the “serenity” loses some qualities but gains others of a completely different nature and manages to remain serene.
The reason I don’t feel satisfied no matter how much I read is how Conrad takes a simple phrase and turns it into a never-ending philosophical debate between me and myself. As you look at every single bit closer you find that a single idea branches off in a million directions that have branches of their own which give me headaches.
~wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Greyscale

I’m going to make a confession: my book is highlighted all over. This means I can see what whoever did it was seeing that moment and certain patterns are created slowly. I complement the pink ink with notes of my own, little piece of paper stuck everywhere with arrows that point here and there bringing ideas together.
What I noticed upfront was the insistent appearance of dark, darkness, gloom. He describes the end of the world as being “the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke” (68). The image that comes to mind of a windy sea drawn in pencil, it brings to oneself a feeling of and infinite space lacking of promises. A sailor must feel like that when he is at sea, surrounded by a capricious mass of water millions of times bigger and stronger than he is.
In the middle of a very grey and dark environment Kurtz manages to find a speck of light. As Marlow begins to speak he describes the light brought about by the Romans “We live in the flicker- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday” (68). I chose to interpret light not only as life, but as knowledge as well. The Romans were the imposers of great quantities of civilization in their time and I think Marlow refers to their ability to sail- they sailed around the world conquering here and there, bringing light through the water.
The River Thames is also mentioned to be a connection between men, a mean that brings all men together under the same goal and the same passion for discovering and therefore sailing. A boat filled with light making its way across the water waiting to arrive and break the darkness that was there "just yesterday."