APOCALYPSE NOW. The horror, the horror

Mad – insane, if judged by the standards of ordinary life, morality deemed revealed, and the laws and dictates of the world that sent him into the heart of the jungle. But can anyone truly be insane – there? In a place where the human heart becomes nothing but a vast desert, so immense that it can engulf gallons of faith, hope, and feeling without feeling anything at all? Where hours turn into days, days into months, months into years so swiftly that suddenly the question arises – where is the meaning, where is the duty, overwhelmed by the absurdity of one’s existence beyond all law and memory. Horror becomes an apparition, cruelty – an oracle. And the man who wants to perish without judgment, judgment other than his own, a sentence other than the one the jungle has passed on him. Apocalypse now.

He saw no more than others could see there. He openly admits it himself, does not arrogate to himself the right to purity of perception. He decapitates heads, judges by his own law, reigns over his part of the world undividedly, tormented still by one thought, to kill, to destroy, to annihilate, to bomb them all, not to allow for more, not to look at more, not to think anymore – and let others not think anymore either. He is mad – for amidst all he does, he still feels, sinking deeper and deeper into darkness, sees clearer and clearer and cannot restrain and control it. His humanity is a challenge – he looks into the eyes of those he condemns to death. And there earlier, down by the river, napalm falls on a village full of women and children, a seventeen-year-old dies listening to a tape with his mother’s voice, the one who pierced the woman with a series of rifle shots reaches out to her. But this is not madness. This is war. Apocalypse now.

The full measure of destruction is not gauged by the hundreds of fallen beings. It is measured by the downfall of that one man who was simply perfect. By venerating his genius, one venerates the apocalypse that has occurred, and he looks upon it fully aware that hell is growing, that words cannot change it, that there, in the heart of the jungle, there is no war, no strategy, no homeland, that there is only man, alone, with his fear, with his suffering, with his death. Where is that boundary – where is it? Was Colonel Kurtz worse than those he commanded? Did he become different because he refused obedience? By killing on command – wouldn’t he be mad already, just a – good soldier? Sent on a mission to eliminate, Willard traverses the same realm of hell, the same circles of initiation that Kurtz successively overcame. He reaches the limits of the world, where the laws of nature prevail. Power lies with the strongest male in the herd. The death of a man – means nothing. For there are no longer men there – there is darkness. Apocalypse now.

Sometimes the will to live, which has become a herd instinct, a species drive. Kurtz does not assert his power by delivering manifestos. He is – and whatever he says, there will be those who see in his words a gospel. He is powerless – he knows it. His kingdom is a kingdom of shadows and ashes. Willard wrongly judged him at first, from a distance, thinking that it was easy to succumb there, in oblivion, the desire to become a god. Kurtz achieved nothing of what he could desire. He did not overcome anything or anyone – not even himself. He failed to destroy himself or to disappear. He failed to separate from the scream that was growing inside him, from the tearing that drained him of strength. Did he lose his senses? Did he lose his mind? Perhaps it would have been better for him. But he is real. He is as real as the madness of war around him. Beyond the law of war – and therefore beyond the law. And there is one rule – to survive or to perish. The problem is that he did not want to choose either of these options. Apocalypse now.

Willard becomes an angel of Kurtz. An avenging angel, a messenger, perhaps even an angel of mercy, if such mercy had any place in a world like that. He no longer follows orders – he is above orders. He fulfills a mission. Captured to understand, held under guard to observe, finally free to accomplish what had to be done – in the end, he stands beyond the law and the task entrusted to him by his superiors. He kills Kurtz, without judging him. He kills, sharing with him the conviction that all of this is “horror…horror.” He looked long enough and clearly enough to understand, he was too strong to surrender, too indifferent to scream. Willard is not the order that one day remembered Kurtz. He is the jungle that caught up with him, the war that destroyed him. Apocalypse now.

Kurtz will allow him to act only when he is no longer a “boy on errands,” but a conscious individual decision-maker, a person who, on his own will, without the command of the staff and the general, will reach for a weapon. Kurtz is a victim sacrificed on the altar of absurdity. Differentiating him from hundreds of similar soldiers who daily became such victims is that he experienced the curse and the honor of knowing it. It was the only choice left to him once he had suffered complete defeat. He failed to concentrate all the horror of the world within himself. He failed to master evil by gathering it in his own soul. Yet, such a perfect soul was too imperfect to liberate itself from its own limitations. The jungle will persist. And there will be another god who will try to impose his laws upon it. Recognized as long as he remains strong. Forgotten when someone defeats him. As it is in the herd. Apocalypse now.

We await the apocalypse, and it has already occurred more than once… because the world has fallen more than once. The apocalypse gives birth to and consumes successive Colonel Kurtzes. One can survive. One can be both – human and animal. To love and to kill. Survival – in the end, it is a merit. For the next destruction. The horror. The horror.