Going Native

At university, in days long gone, I remember submitting a lengthy essay on Joseph Conrad.

Conrad is one of those writers whose ideas are far more interesting than his prose.

A strange polyglot, born to members of the Ukrainian resistance struggling for survival inside the Russian Empire, he escaped following the death of his parents to France, where he joined the British Merchant Navy in the 1880s.

This voyage of discovery took him all over the world and allowed him to explore the dark complexity of Britain’s late-Victorian commercial empire.

His most enduring character is Mr. Kurtz, the sophisticated ivory trader who becomes seduced by his own mythology and goes native deep inside the jungles of the Congo.

Kurtz sets himself up as a demi-god amongst the locals who worship him and becomes the ‘Heart of Darkness’ that gives Conrad’s most famous short story its title.

I bring this up because I’m currently sitting in a café, just off Amsterdam’s Nieuwmarkt.

Amsterdam is an interesting place.

Its own Heart of Darkness is undoubtedly the Red Light District.

And, like much of Conrad’s work, it contains its fair share of lost souls.

Now, I’m no stranger to the charms of cannabis.

In fact, at this point, I feel like we have an increasingly nuanced relationship.

I love the way it makes music sound, how it loosens up the synapses and makes thinking more associative, how it sends you to sleep on a bed of clouds.

But I also understand that it’s too easy an escape from real life—and that can always be dangerous.

We know intrinsically, as human beings, that every choice in life comes with a trade-off—it’s a ubiquitous idea, found everywhere from the Garden of Eden to Newton’s third law of motion.

Nowhere reminds you of that more than Amsterdam.

Yesterday I was served an Americano by an Englishman with shifting, paranoid eyes; a huge spliff tucked behind his ear, who muttered in bursts to his fellow bartender about how his manager, who had ‘just come back from holiday,’ was ‘pissed off with Mark,’ who ‘never does anything.’

He must have been in his thirties, about my age.

He reeked of unhappiness amidst what I imagine he must once have thought would be the happiest of possible lives.

I couldn’t help feeling like a man of his age should have more serious problems that troubled him less.

For a second, I felt like I was staring into the windows of a life gone terribly wrong.

Likewise with the skeletal Irishman with a metal stud in the gap between his eyes who sold me a lighter.

Another man living out a twisted fantasy in the center of Amsterdam, untethered and unmoored from reality.

Stoners like these look haunted—you can spot them by their sunken eyes.

It’s like they move through the world half asleep, lost inside their own brain.

They’re living reminders, much like the novels of Conrad and William Golding, the book of Genesis, and the films of Francis Ford Coppola, that norms and conventions serve a purpose.

Maybe the guardrails are there for a reason.

Ironically, creativity, purpose and originality often require some outer limits in order to exist.

Tennis wouldn't be much fun without a court or a net.

Music becomes meaningless noise when it isn't structured by the varied repetition of patterns and anchored in rhythm and key signatures.

There’s a strange irony in the way that the people who denigrate normality and structure  and the stultifying effects they have on the human imagination are often the least imaginative people you can find.

You find them everywhere, and not just in Amsterdam.

I see them in quirky independent coffee shops in Manchester—places so cool that all the joy has been frozen out of them.

They abandon homogeneity and convention just to become their own predictable parody of the unconventional.

Because what’s less original than the slightly too-old, heavily pierced, dyed hair and edgy nonchalance of the man who has left it all behind to dispense marijuana in Amsterdam?

In his own way, he’s just as much a contemporary archetype as the suburban accountant with 2.5 kids and a golf addiction.

He is a Kurtz without ambition.

I suppose the point of Conrad’s novella is to remind us that the ‘heart of darkness’ exists in all of us.

That we are all fallible, vulnerable to the lure of temptation, resistant to responsibility, vain and lazy, and capable of taking the stories we tell about ourselves too seriously. We're all tempted sometimes by an easy way out; our own vision of paradise.

Sometimes, though, it’s important to remind ourselves of what's real—the slightly sharp, the slightly too bright, the often unforgiving and uncomfortable, experience of living.

Not just escaping.

Keep dreaming,

Rob