excerpt
Ask Walt Disney why he did things on a large scale, Ken suggested. Or
she could ask the Rolling Stones or the Maple Leaf hockey team. “Those
people who paint pretty little pictures in their little studios aren’t going
to amount to a fart in a windstorm. If I’m going to do things, then they’re
going to be done in a way that is commensurate with the power of my
ideas. I’m going to do my ideas justice. If it mangles me in the process, so
be it. But to live other than as who I am, and the way I am, is simply to be
living in a matchbox – and eventually becoming mentally unwell. If doing
it my way isn’t suitable, you tell me.”
“What is driving this?” she asked one day. “There’s something behind
this and I’m missing it!”
No, he said, she wasn’t missing anything. He had told her so much, but
never about his life in the Arctic or his passion for the land and its people.
When he told her the story she gaped at him. Why had he never spoken to
her of this – this most important and pivotal story of his life?
“It’s been so difficult for me,” he said. “The pictures that are in my soul
and in my mind of what happened in the Arctic – the things that happened
to me and to those who I so love and respect – they won’t leave me
alone. These pictures sear me. To talk about it is difficult and painful. It’s
also unbelievably frustrating, because at the end of the conversation I’ve
put people off and they invariably say, ‘Who the fuck do you think you
are! How do you think you can fix this?’ At the end of it all, it amounts
to little more than entertainment, and I have never had any tolerance for
using the misery of others for someone else’s entertainment.”
“I wish I had known all of this before. It would have explained so
much.”
“Well, that’s me and that’s where I’m going.”
“At any cost?”
“Any cost.”
“On a scale of things, where do I fit in relative to the Arctic?”
“Painting and the Arctic are number one, two, and three – you’re four.”
“I’ve never met anyone like you before. I think you have delusions of
grandeur.”
“Relative to who? Relative to the average soul walking the earth – constrained,
thin-lipped, pinch-souled, angry and utterly neutralized? Compared
to one of those, do I have delusions of grandeur? If you want to
call it that, okay. You can call it what you want – it doesn’t make any difference.
The fact is, that before I die, I will accomplish what I’m after. As
Francisco said in Portugal, ‘when you’re dying, hell is not having lived the
life that was yours to live’. That has never left me. I hear it every day and
I’m going to live that life I was meant to live, no matter what.”
The show at the Columbus Centre grew in scope. Marsha and Rocco
Libros Libertad 