Mistah Kurtz - he dead

This was T S Eliot's ingress to the poem The Hollow Men, and by that he refered to Joseph Conrad's short story Heart of Darkness. As you know, this story is also the basis of Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now. In the final scenes, Kurtz reads from The Hollow Men to Willard, who is there to kill him.

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Well, Kurtz may have felt hollow, but he did'nt have so many other men to lean together with. He had left the world and was ready to die, ready to fold up his uniform for the last time.

I'm doing Kurtz exit monologue about The Horror in method class, and that is a real challenge. I chose it because I have a lot of recognition with Kurtz when it comes to taking things to the extreme, and ending up isolated by it. I feel like I'm constantly moving on a razors edge, all the time at the risk of making too much of myself, making to much noise, scaring people, embarassing them, if I act in a way that to me feels free and natural. It has happened in method class too. I may tell you about that some day.

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion.

This, also from The Hollow Men, is a perfect way of expressing how I often feel when we do the sensory exercises in class that are meant to make us receptive and able to express ourselves. And when it feels like that, or when I let loose and end up making too much of myself; disturbing other people, annoying them, I'm afraid of ending up in some way isolated, unable to express myself freely in any forum. And that frightens me.

On Monday I'm taking a shot at Kurtz again, this time doing the monologue while polishing the closest I came to a pair of military boots, in order not end up just sitting rigidly in a chair, like a stuffed man.If you hang on, I'll tell you how that went. I'll also tell you more about how we work with ourselves in method class.

The boots, by the way, are by oxs, Italy. I bought them at Zanzibar, one of my favourite shoe shops, in Hegdehaugsveien, which together with Bogstadveien makes the most important shopping street for clothes and shoes and things in Oslo. As you can see, they are definitly not army boots. But the may pass as that at some distance.