You murky, fortified, heart-of-darkness river out of which expeditions were issued to the ends of the earth, into the darkness beyond, not long after courageous expeditions traversed your upstream in turn to unravel your darkly beating heart, the one others were faced with back when this place was the end of the earth and other geographies the center of it.
The expeditions continue unabated. The clean rivers turn to silt and waste duct. The heartbeats echo in the jungles like drums of war, in the midst of bush and concrete, wilderness and savage nature.
This, dear London, is your vein, and a thick toxic blood runs through it, and the walls of concrete you’ve erected both shelter and oppress those who venture here, and the emissions you spew cause disasters that reach as far as Texas, and vice versa — Texas spews disaster unto you, as do Shanghai and Beijing, Mumbai and Tokyo, Cairo, Mexico City, the whole of Nigeria, the infrastructure of Russia. The hearts of darkness of today’s world, inside which one encounters the terror of a way of life intent on cannibalizing the world’s resources, running amok in the name of companies and economies gone insane.
This, dear London, is the world into which more civilized worldviews will one day issue forth, like in the olden times, taking home stories of madness and mayhem, writing books that capture and immortalize your high-end pandemonium — the entire world’s descent into a state of mind unbecoming of intelligence and civilization.
Dear London, until you and others like you curb your emissions, turning your footprint into a non-toxic, green signature, rendering your development conducive to life in general, you cannot but be deemed a place of horror. Perhaps more alluring and accommodating and sophisticated than Conrad’s Britain and Europe and Africa, but horror nonetheless, the kind that eradicates life around the world.
From your Marlow-driven, 21st-century-minded Spin Doctor,
Eyes open, mind sharp.