The day, the hour, the second one smells fear is a moment in a place called ‘fear’, but it is, in reality, the moment just in advance of it (to be or not to be). It is a place of anticipation, expectation, deliberation, prevarication but mostly it is a place of dreaded premonition; the last moment of now. Flowers never smell so fresh nor fragrant, nor do colours seem so vibrant nor the faintest sparkles of love so intense as a time to decide; to walk towards the unknown; the present moment - a moment of high definition - before the plunge. There lies the colour of fear; as though orchestral strings pull through a lingering refrain, where a viola follows and somehow metal and wood and human blood conspire to pull the diaphragm close to the core of hurt - of things past and known - and tears rise like distant final kisses; the moment before a sigh of almost eternal resignation.
There are no accidents in a universe in which planets circle as they spin by the billion, by the unfathomable zillion. What could be more unknown or unknowable than the universe? Yet, why do we not cower in fear when we look at the stars? In the infinitesimal diminutiveness of our humanity lies a truth.Fear is not about what is out there, it is about what lies within.
In the baking heat - upon a parched broken apron, staring into the fusilage of a small over-serviced aircraft, propellors revving, the earth shaking, that man’s hand pressed against my chest (“ wait!”), heads stooping, sweat, heat, fuel, the carcasses of old planes broken into the weeds and earth - my only thought was - how beautiful, even this place - yet, how potentially, beautifully final; this Heart of Darkness.I remembered Sundays and Jonny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan and Cheetah and black and white cliffs and black ‘sherpas’ carrying head loads over broken rope bridges and terrible cliff falls (before ever Sylvester Stallone took to rock climbing). I remembered the ROAD TO . . . with Hope, Lamor, Bing. But this was nothing like that. I remembered rohdodendrons (is that how you spell them?). I remembered falling into water; cerulean, deep, silent (my first lesson in vulnerability (and rescue). I remembered sparkling things - bright turquoise, purple, deep blues, and Red - like my first toy sports car. And, I remembered the pitch of sorrow, losing my friend. Why? I remembered flying around my room in a cardboard plane (was it this?). Alone. I remember sitting in my superman tee-shirt in warm sunshine, it hugging my skin like a shell.
As the plane was about to land, I remembered how I had held hands with my eyes, though mine were full of fear. I offered a biscuit (biscuits make even a thumping heart go still). The dark viridian sheen of jungle loomed until an orange streak of earth appeared and we ditched towards it, engines roaring.
Later, in the suffocating water-drenched air, my eyes lurched about. In Darkness. Black. Blinding blackness. Even the crickets had died. No shadows. No ghosts. The sky was drained of stars and hope; or so it seemed. Yet, even here, I learned, hope does rise and it rises early. Before the sun lifted, voices began to sing. Somewhere in the shadows, while another generation of Conrad’s men lay in the crucible of fear, dying, the morning air filled with song. Others gathered and the voices sang on; sweet, low, chanting, rythmic, flowing like the river, thick, deep, eternal, scattered with the debris of broken things. Layers and layers of melodic incantations spiralled into the morning dew, inviting the dawn, outsinging the myriad birds.
The chorus was tuned to the debris of broken lives; aware, conscious, alive to all their starvations, sicknesses, poverties and desperations - no place to bury the dead (too many to remember), - no place to go for the educated (they risk death anyway), no future for talent (what is to eat today?). Men mourn with brutality and women just grow into old men. And yet, these voices float like silken veils, haunting adagios on every sunrise. So it seemed, in those first hours, in the Heart of Darkness, mankind looks to the universe but does not cower with fear. Here too it is the soul, not the eyes, which looks to the stars. And it is not weeping, hopelessly, but awaiting rescue - patiently. 
Words and Images (C) Colm V Fahy 2012
(MBANDAKA; DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO, DECEMBER 2011).
As an adjunct to the above scattering of diary notes from my first days in Mbandaka, Western DR Congo, Province of Equateur in 2011, I realised that my long held suspicion of Joseph Conrad's much heralded "Heart of Darkness" was well founded. Apart altogether form the fact that it is poorly written and often unreadable, it is the product of a fantasist and a rascist, from the mind of a man who may have claimed to have experience of the Congo, but is more likely to have observed it form the safety of a a colony enclosure and bothered little to have any contact with those beings on the ground who happened to be suffering humans.
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