Fitzcarraldo Writings

The Explorer: I’ve come to believe in the world’s complete and absolute disinterest in me.

Disembodied Voice: Disinterest?

The Explorer: You’re already questioning my word choice. I see where this is going. No! No no no no, not disinterest. Indifference. I see, I see. The world does not have and does not not have interest. Nameless and faceless. I know I am not alone in thinking this way. From all I have seen. And I have seen most of it.

Disembodied Voice: Iquitos?

The Explore: Iquitos. Rome. So on.
I've even been here before.
I rise. No. I am risen. My body is risen above the Lady City and I see her, as I so often imagines others do from a distance, in longing. But I’ve been lifted, lifted from being in and amongst it.

There, and there she lies. With her wide hips and thin, strappy legs, her luscious hair hanging in curls against her arching back – her tummy (her stomach), oh, like a ballerina - pushed forward ever so slightly, held, protruding to suggest contour inside her silver brown grey dress. I reached out to touch her and I am swirled, as if under the influence of a hallucinogenic. I swirl upside down and then twirl back to see her again from a distance. Each time I try to reach out I am taken up and over again. Twirling and twirling. Each reach, I am thrown back up and over myself.

When I land, drunk from my rising, I again am amongst her, in her, and the fervor of loving her but a memory. A memory that had this sort of name: of seeing her at a distance and realizing the Accomplishment in Mounting Her. But the fever remains: knowing what I had seen. Once inside the confines of the Lady City, oh her parallel lines, her spinning wheels, her smoke fumes, and the intersecting sections of the beautiful and wretched: I knew that my dream must be a reality, one I could acheive. To fly with her, this inhumane love of mine, This Lady City: Or I would go absolutely mad.

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I am hearing something and responding to it. I see a man with a cap who they call The Explorer, or maybe they don't call him that, maybe that's what we call him? We know him as the The Explorer, everyone else knows him as Stub.

-Adam

Committing to the Asinine

Reading Werner Herzog's CONQUEST OF THE USELESS, the journal he kept while filming Fitzcarraldo, and I am struck by this notion of obsession. An image or idea that stays with us that we must complete, despite its obvious uselessness or riduculous nature. See, like Nikolas Weir, I hold the notion that it is commiting to the asinine and once you have committed, it doesn't matter - your commitment will create something important, significant, and as we always talk about, rhythm changing.

More to come as we digest all this material....