The End

       The Doors' epic song 'The End', is heard on the soundtrack of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, as Martin Sheen travels up the river to find and 'terminate' the rogue American Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando.
        This brilliant adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, brings literature to life.
        Another novelist I admire is England's J.G. Ballard, who invokes a similar theme as Conrad, in taking his protagonist, Dr. Sanders, up an exotic river.  The opening paragraph of his novel 'The Crystal World' reads as follows:
         "Above all, the darkness of the river was what impressed Dr. Sanders as he looked out for the first time across the open mouth of the Matarre estuary.   After many delays, the small passenger steamer was at last approaching the line of jetties, but although it was ten o'clock the surface of the water was still grey and sluggish, leaching away the sombre tinctures of the collapsing vegetation along the banks."
         The theme of  a doctor travelling also occurs as Dr. Oliver Sacks joins his fellow botany enthusiasts on a trip to Mexico's Oaxaca State, and chronicles the trip in a book entitled 'Oaxaca Journal'.
      All these rich adventures form a back drop for my own imagination as I celebrate the end of "my wilderness years" in a long protracted withdrawal from a totally unnecessery prescription for an anti- psychotic drug.  That in itself gives rise to numerous conjectures about my sanity and honesty, but I have to persevere in my literary journey to prove myself before the greater public in Cyber land.
      I've encountered a few doctors in these wilderness years, and while I only know them in their professional capacity, (as they silently assess my own 'capacity'), I could invent some characters like the fine upstanding Oliver Sacks, who labours long and hard to help his patients  (See his book, Awakenings), and some doctors whom I would cast in a lesser light.
     But I have to journey up my own river, towards whomever my chosen 'Mr Kurtz' might be...
     This future literary adventure is tentatively titled "Further On Into the Rain Forest".