Colonel Walter E. Kurtz

The walls were cold. The air bore a distinct sterility. There were words (confidence, dedication, ability, extraordinary, promotion), but these had turned to meaninglessness, leaving a line of suddenly empty-headed men with mouths working at predictable intervals, heads bobbing in automatic agreement. He had seen these men before, but never like this, never near so stark and true. Seeing now through their words and into their unfounded formation. Sense of desolation. And, suddenly, Kurtz had seen enough.

The change that came wasn't physical. He continued to stand unmoving, firm against this cold. None of the faces--fundamentally blind as ever--perceived the change, and he determined directly that they would not. Allowed them nothing to discern (already he was taking control, natural instinct as always, a movement in which he shifted and manipulated almost without meditation). They would be unable to understand. Best that he remain in appearance a soldier, in the facade that even he had believed.

Believed it, subscribed to their ideas and instructions, yes. Because he had not not questioned deeply enough, had failed even to recognize that it was possible to question so deeply. And so he had missed this hollowness that must have rung without substance all through the training and the pushing and the esteem. He should have sought to understood this, should not have been so distracted by their end goals of medals and formalities; there were truer matters at end, and he should have felt this sooner, much sooner. Somehow, he had become and remained distracted.

This air. The goddamn sterile air and its ideas. Somehow, he had mistaken these for meaning.

"Artifice. All of it. An elaborate, half-conscious artifice..."

For an instant he thought that these words had come in a foreign voice. Certainly, it was one he could not recall having heard, not speaking so close to him... But hadn't he heard it before, if only in whispers and suggestions to which he had never given ear? Breaths that he had dismissed as--what--fancy? Foolishness? Or nothing at all, because they had failed to fit with the rules with which he had been entranced. Yes, it seemed that they had perhaps been there, and so he perceived that the voice was his own (there, again; he has known... no excuses, he had known), his long-neglected truth.

Truth. It was a foundation, something solid, something firm upon which he could stand against the world itself, if need be. He understood this truth to be something that the men seated before him lacked. He found strength in the fact.

And, at the same time, he felt something--not quite fear, not quite misgiving, but some slight... uncertainty--that must have been a warning.

Bullshit. Nonsense and bullshit. It was caution, nothing more. False bells signifying nothing more than paranoia. This was a product of his training and, recognition of truth or not, it would take time and effort to adjust. He had learned to exercise his caution in a wayward fashion. He had learned to be wary of truth, for truth--he understood this even now, though on a slighter scale--was distinctly opposed to military purposes.

( Those purposes were wayward, as well. )

Too often, the purpose of silence is misunderstood. Most men prefer speaking to listening and stillness, and when they talk, they say nothing at all.

But there are moments, mere moments when they realize... Something that they see or hear connects and touches too deep to be ignored. Then they are silent. Then only do they stop to think, to consider: what is it? They do not ask what it means--they do not know even how to begin to ask this--but for a moment, a man may be almost aware of silence.

It is necessary to be still, to hear this silence. That there are moments in which words cannot suffice... I am not certain that this is true, but it approaches truth. Certainly, it is true that very few men are able to give proper voice to these moments. The rest remain awestruck, and it is perhaps best that they remain silent. Their words would emerge jumbled, nonsensical. They cannot understand.

What you call silence is itself required. Silence in this sense defines the space in which men do not speak, in which the ear can strain but never capture the sound of voice. Man has no role to play in this silence, save to listen. It is very difficult for almost any man to come even this far.

In itself, this is not enough. The man who is able to comprehend silence must move further. He must begin to hear that this silence is not truly silence, that there is never silence. Our "silence" is filled with sound, with the noises of the earth itself, the echoes of forces seen and unseen. Unseen, perhaps, but always very real, true. This is the nature that we so often overlook. Because we do not understand it, because we do not know how to encounter it, we convince ourselves that we might ignore these sounds, that we can control sound and silence if only we wish to do so.

We fool ourselves in believing so much.

It is remarkably easy to believe in silence, far more difficult to hear what truly waits for every man. To listen beyond the silence requires a stillness unknown to most men; most are unwilling even to attempt such quiet. Yet to become perfectly still is to open yourself to a deeper experience, a deeper sounding of meaning. It waits in all places, however crowded. It waits to be heard, and it cares not whether it is heard; it operates without recognition. It is what might be called reliable.

I first heard the sounds faintly. I cannot say that I was trying to hear--perhaps you cannot try the first time; it only occurs--but I had been silent, I had been growing into stillness, and I heard noises. Murmurs without syllable, sounds rising and falling as if on a current of uncertain static. And I knew that this was the first time I had heard its like... I knew also that it would not be the last. There was far more to come. And there still it something more, something far deeper, still.

The sound is different here. Closer. There are no distractions, there are no false noises, and the jungle speaks even to those who prattle and ignore. Even they cannot fully avoid its rhythm, its call. It is too clear... Yes, perhaps almost... too clear. We are closer to its heart, here. We are closer to its origin and substance.

I have heard sounds... Laughter, I could swear the jungle laughs. It comes more often now, because I am better equipped to hear it. This laughter is a hollow sound, a sound of decaying wind, stifled anguish, and it has at times shaken me to the soul...

It is nothing that most men would recognize as natural, and yet I ask you: How can it be that anything of the jungle, of nature itself, is unnatural? It is impossible. This is the natural state of being, these are the whispers that man cannot ignore. Somewhere within these voiceless whispers, there crouches some veiled truth.

The deepest moments of a man's life, then, are not silent; they must operate in the area beyond his sham of silence. A man may fool himself into thinking that he believes in his peace, his quiet, but belief does not create truth. The jungle bears a life of its own, and cares little for any moment of a man.

They say that I am mad. That I have become mad.

For years, I lived in sanity. So they will tell you, and so I might allow. Through my youth, through the first stage of my career, I lived in this sanity. They will tell you that I retained this sanity throughout the second stage of my career. That so long as I remained allied to their army, I maintained a sound mind. This is diplomacy. This is their protection.

Amongst themselves only will they make their confession: that I have become a madman. They cannot accept this "madness," as they call it, this altering of the mind. This refusal to obey.

They fail to see the truth. This comes as no surprise, cannot even become a disappointment. I expect nothing of them. They have fixed their minds within their own constructions, and so they are unable to see what I now know. There is nothing wayward in my mind, now. There is no unsoundness. I have never seen with greater clarity, and I see because the buffer has been destroyed, because I perceive with my own eyes.

Do not believe for a moment that I misjudge them, that I misunderstand their ways. I know them all too well. I lived under their regulations for years. I followed their rules. I had, after all, learned their impressions, committing them to my own mind. There was no trick to it, no secret key; it was a matter of perception. The man who perceives what it is that they admire and even worship is the man who will succeed in their world, seeing better than they are able the clearest path to the top, their presumed success. I was that man of perception. I saw and could comprehend ambition, drive, ability. I was able to translate this knowledge into action. For this, I was celebrated and promoted. It was logical.

You should understand, then, that I have always been blessed (and cursed, perhaps) with remarkable clarity of vision.

That I remained blind to the broader truth in those years may be attributed to their confines. To those who dictated the scope of my knowledge, yes, and to myself for failing to see beyond. I knew that there was something beyond, something indefinable for which I reached and onto which I could never grasp. The truth spoke in vague whispers to me, and I--misdirected as I was--groped in shadows and false images. My mistake was in believing that the answer rested in their system of promotions, in the acquisition of power within their ranks. My mistake was that I misjudged the origin of those secret whispers.

No, I only maintained belief within their boundaries. So I believed, and so I strove. I acted according to their rules, all the while searching, expecting that one day, I would understand. There, at least, I was not deceived in myself. For there came a day on which at last my eyes began to open, when a certain whisper of the truth struck me with implications and ideas--understandings--that I could neither shake nor distort. I was left to contemplate the burning, painful face of this truth, however minuscule it may have been.

It was when they spoke of promotion, when they began in earnest to voice their notion that I might and must become a general, that I began to see beyond. This was to be glorious, they said. There were titles, there were ribbons, there was security, there was prestige. There was a name. I would join the ranks of the higher echelon, I would be held in regard with them, I would be revered as a man of intelligence and of power.

But whose power? What was this power, who granted it?

It was a notion manufactured at their hands. And I began to understand... There was no glory to this. No everlasting name. No true power. Hundreds of men had filled these posts, and what had they achieved? What did their names mean? What had they become?

I reviewed the faces that I had seen, pondered the image of their cheap, useless ribbons, and made what I could of these men whom I had striven to join. I stopped, I was quiet, and in that stillness, I saw what those men meant, what I must think of them. I could count them only as nothing.

On that day, I vowed that I would not become this nothing.

And I rebelled. I rebelled before the knowledge itself--and, yes, there was a fury to this, a frenzy that comes with the first inclination toward knowledge--and I rebelled against their wishes, wishes that I had formerly mistaken for my own. I changed. I altered my position. And they yielded, because they did not see the inescapable path down which I had started, because they believed that I would return to their treasured interpretation of my senses. Because they perceived the alteration of my own behavior and could not ignore its reality, could only assure themselves that this notion (it was not then considered to be madness, that option seeming an abhorrent impossibility) would pass. In yielding, they allowed my final course of development, opening the way for the growth of my supposed madness. It was in this alteration and its consequences that I was able to discover darkness. And I discovered myself.

I am no longer bound as I once was. I am able to act according to truths outside of their knowledge. For this, they call me mad. And I care little. Their definitions mean nothing more than do their their names and decorations, nothing more than their mistaken brand of power. What have I to do with them?

Their "madness" means nothing at all.

"I have seen the darkness creep along the wall
I have heard my madness chatter before day
I have seen the world roll up into a ball
Then suddenly dissolve and fall away."

Those are not my words. I have no words so suitable. There are secrets in those words, secrets heard by men who know how to listen, who allow themselves to hear and to understand.

Do you understand? Do you hear the meaning, do you see where or how that meaning exists... if it exists at all?

It is a terrible thing, to understand. Painful. There is more pain in the smallest hint of truth than in the most excruciating form of physical torture. Physical pain, we understand. We are able to perceive how it occurs and why, to know that fire--when applied to skin--will bring pain, that slicing off a finger will also bring pain. We see this evidence. It is substantial. We feel safer in this.

Truth is vague. It is nothing that we are able to touch, to see, or to define in terms proven by equations and evidence. Truth is insubstantial. It shifts behind impressions and misapprehensions, never to be caught in its full revelation. We fear this unseen, scarcely perceived notion of truth and what it might signify.

"Shape without form, shade without color."

Truth is difficult to identify. It is particularly difficult because we avoid it, or look upon it only with partial attention. We allow ourselves to be distracted, we allow other ideas, other falsehoods to catch our eyes and therefore our minds, because we realize that there is danger in gazing upon the truth. We know somewhere, on a level of consciousness scarcely recognized, that to see the truth, we must face our fears. There is more, too, more that we almost know, that very few men recognize, that forces blindness with even greater strength... But it is this aversion to fear that deters most men.

Do you know what you fear? Do not deny that you fear, for all men must live in terror of some object, some idea, something not fully explained. The story of humanity may be defined as a struggle to evade or to stave off fears. Most men would rather die in ignorance, fighting off these fears, than live with the knowledge of horror. What is this horror that they run from? What fear drives them back? What is behind this fear?

To understand, it is necessary to confront these ideas. It is necessary to experience these thoughts as actualities, to discover what they become in practice. Words will explain part of the truth, but only part. A man must feel the consequences of ideas if he is to understand what it is that he calls good, and what he calls evil. Until he feels these actualities, he will never comprehend his fears, and will never see the truth of himself; it is only through violent confrontation that a man may come to understand what he is.

What am I? I am one who understands fear. I am one who knows himself beyond the limits of society's morality. I am beyond their rules, and I am beyond them. I am everything. I am the man who has embraced horror and so become Almighty. And I am an abomination... so they say. They call me a menace. A renegade. They will imply that I am what they call--though they cannot directly speak the word--evil.

But what do they know of this? What do they know, when they are unable to look beyond their petty fears? They call my methods unsound, they, who every day waste countless lives on nothing. On nothing. They order their men to throw themselves against yard after yard of an entrenched enemy, to burrow themselves deeper into an inescapable hell, inescapable because they will only act so far, because they will not take the final, necessary steps. They order attacks, but advise mercy. They will not allow for such "slaughter" as would destroy their enemy. And so they send their men to die, and they gain nothing. They remain stagnant, expending without cause, without understanding.

I advance, I conquer, and so I am counted a renegade. Because I disregard their command. Because I trust myself, what I have seen and know, above what they order in their ignorance. Because I order executions. Because I allow my soldiers to murder, to slaughter, and to torture all who stand in our way. Because I kill outside of their rules.

Their rules are unsound, ill-matched to the circumstances. For civilization, their assumptions are harmful enough. For war, for the jungle, they are deadly. They destroy us with their restraint, arguing futilely that we must have mercy, that we must act with compassion. That we must kill only those whom it is necessary that we kill, only they do not understand the meaning behind the word. They perceive a necessity bound by their restraints, and they base their laws on these restraints.

This is a mistake. Law must come only from he who comprehends true necessity, who understands what it is that we are facing, this bleak strain of survival, this horror.

To battle the jungle, this dark wild, there must be extremes. If you are to fully comprehend these words, these ideas to which your speech breathes substance, it is necessary that you live at these extremes. Very few people do. Very few people are able. To the vast majority of men, a life of extremes is repulsive. Savage, they call it, and so they call me.

Yet I have come closer to the truth than any of them ever dare dream. Discarding their absurd restraints, I have explored the very boundaries of my self, of the world, and of every fear you can possibly imagine. I do not flinch to say this, any more than I flinch to discard mangled women and children, to hang their husbands. I do not flinch to see these actions for what they are, for I know that they must be. And I understand...

"But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear."

The deepest truth comes in flashes, evasive even to those who seek its face. I have seen this in moments, the dark moments in hidden corners of the world, and I will continue as long as I live to seek it, to face its silent, terrible truth. In an instant I understand, and this understanding is the deepest horror that I have ever known.