Certainty and Ambiguity

This morning, I'm reminded of the opening scene in Apocalypse Now when Martin Sheen's character, Captain Willard, is lying on a bed in a steamy room in Indochina staring at a ceiling fan.  In his whiskey-induced dreamlike state the spinning fan could be the blades of a helicopter.  He's about to embark on a secret mission to "terminate with extreme prejudice" the rogue Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando.

When I wake these days here in Florida's heat I, too, see a ceiling fan but the only thing daunting about my day's mission is to just get out of bed.

Coppola's movie is based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and is my favorite of the several movies that have been done about Vietnam.  Who can forget the young Larry Fishburne, water skiing to Satisfaction behind the patrol boat, or Robert Duvall declaring that napalm in the morning smells like victory?

The movie became an arduous project. The filming was done in the Philippines at great expense, and Coppola suffered a heart attack.  Appropriately, in the final frames of the flick, there is the haunting Jim Morrison dirge, The End , that plays over the flaming jungle that results from a US airstrike.

Coppola captures the phantasm of the Vietnam war with its combination of certainty and ambiguity.   Men dying is certainty.  The cause is ambiguous.

After the pandemic was in full swing this Spring, I wrote a song in which I tried to combine some certainty and ambiguity.  I was motivated by intense dreams that I was having, ones from which I was relieved to emerge and see the spinning ceiling fan.

The song is called Only a Dream.