Sunday 7 December 2008

Apocalypse Now... and again

Flashes of torn things keep coming back to us. One of them is a scene from the film "Apocalypse Now", in which Martin Sheen is on a small boat heading up a winding river into the dark depths of Vietnam in search of Kurt, played by the unforgettable Marlon Brando. Somehow Sheen is handed his mail along the way, begins reading a letter from his wife, and reflecting, which is when we hear him say that when he is in the jungle he thinks of his wife, and when he is with his wife he thinks of the jungle.

In our experience, it is not necessary to spend time in some God-foresaken Vietnamese jungle in order to experience this ambivalence towards both domestic life and its opposite.

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