Julia Schwartz

October 3, 2003

The Dawn of Darkness

Life is full of uncertainty, yet the only certainty is the oblivion that follows life and into death. As such, the moments we are granted in the present are gifts in which we are able to work toward the ultimate goal: happiness. Living and dying, the why and the how – all of these can be forsaken if we are able to feel that we exit our lives having earned something by living them. Happiness is the key to earning anything in life, for happiness is the present alone, the beauty of life, and the insurance for making the most of the little time we have. Why, then, are so many people unhappy? Wouldn’t it justifiably follow that if happiness is key, the human population would strive to be happy?

Indeed, there is so much unhappiness in our world, so much dissatisfaction, so much horror and terror and everything bad. We are programmed to enjoy life and to live it as best we should, to “live and let live,” yet when we look at the history and present actions of mankind, we are struck more by hatred and violence than by beauty and kindness. For Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for Mary Anne and all of the Vietnam soldiers in “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” from The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, for Willard and Chef and the Chief in Francis Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” – there is no humanity, no kindness. Instead, “horror [is] a way of life” (Coppola), and killing is the routine, yet there is no value to human life, so it matters not.

It is vastly difficult for individuals of a so-called civilized and gentle world to understand the bitter workings of war and the hatred some people can possess that permits them to savagely take human lives with no apparent motive – the  “unspeakable rites” (Conrad 83) of a tragic kingdom. We don’t understand why Mary Anne would forsake her dreams of the future on Lake Erie with Mark Fossie to scrounge in the dark underbrush with the Green Berets in search of Viet Cong flesh, and to sleep under the guard of a rotting tiger’s stench. We don’t understand why a quiet soldier would open fire on a boat full of Vietnamese people and their goods because he feared the cargo – a puppy. We don’t understand why overseers would force Africans to walk in chain gangs with their necks bound by iron collars, nor why anyone would chop the heads off countless numbers of people and decorate a compound with them, forcing hundreds of people to engage in a sort of “pagan worship” (Coppola) that honors death and brutality.

            And so, faced with so much we don’t understand, we ask ourselves, “What is darkness?” What is the motivation for stealing lives, for losing the pride and confidence in ourselves that keeps us going, for relinquishing the desire to be a part of the world which bore us? What could scar a person so deeply that she chooses never to come back to the light, instead to succumb to “an inextricable mess of things” (Conrad 54) that furthers no proper aim? How can there be “so much love inside but the strength” (Coppola) to commit atrocities?

            Darkness isn’t ignorance; it isn’t denial; it isn’t fear, and it isn’t betrayal. Instead, darkness is pure honesty, the grim realization of all hope lost; it is the “pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness” (Conrad 79). When Mary Anne, the sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong – and the sweetness and goodness of mankind – realizes there is nothing left for her, that there is no hope in Vietnam, there are no dances and happy families, she recoils within herself, just as Kathy Wade did, just as the sleeper in “Archetypes” did. This realization, this honesty and the meek courage to stand up to the grim shadow that is the impact and motivation of our lives, is darkness.

            Darkness is the disparity in life, the last hope when there’s nothing left; darkness is the burning fires of Hell frozen in the throes of a cold future – it is the searing fire of an icy smile. Darkness is when you realize the charm of your own life only extends so far; it is the happiness of an illusion, and the reality is disparity, hate, poverty. Darkness is the cold heart, the pessimism inherent in all of us, that which we live our lives to escape but that which is really so easy to find.

            It’s not so much that the Kurtz, Marlow, Willard and Mary Anne went to dark places, for every plane on this earth is a part of the earth as a whole. It is instead that they went to places where there was no way to see the light, where the only person to become was a “sordid buccaneer” (Conrad 54). Light is success; it is happiness; it is living a life in peace and knowing what you want and that you can get it. Light is not American soldiers shooting machine gun rounds into Vietnamese villages, it is not eight year old children butchering other children deep in the Congo, and it is not a woman wearing cotton sweater sets and a necklace of human tongues. These things, horrible images to remember yet impossible to forget, are the stuff of madness and “calamity” (Conrad 24); they are nightmares brought to day. Yet somehow, they were brought into existence by human hands, human hatred, or human greed.

            The situations that these circumstances create are circumstances which go against all the core values we have been instilled with since our very first moments as humans. We are taught not to hate, not to kill, and not to judge. Despite this, these things happen. When the human spirit bears witness to these atrocities, it is questioned. There is a choice when this happens: to turn away, to try to help in hopes of retaining our human values, or to become irrevocably entrenched within inhumanity and turn to brutal acts in some hope of finding personal solace to cure intolerable confusion and misery.

            Vision, then, is the entrance to darkness, for without knowledge of such atrocities, they cannot grip us. When we see so much that the illusion we have been carrying with us, an illusion that sustains our every action in our lives, is proven false by an abundance of evidence contrary to that hope we so desperately cling to, we can no longer believe in the dream; we can no longer believe in pure and untainted good:  “much wisdom is much grief, and increase of knowledge is increase of sorrow” (Ecclesiastes). T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” excerpted in Francis Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” strikes the heart of the matter: “We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men.” These lines directly provoke the concept of too much being not nearly enough, recalling the ways in which darkness takes hold of us: when we see too much, we cease to see at all.

            Kurtz and Marlow both are “hollow men” – they have both set out on journeys through the Congo (“death’s dream kingdom” (Eliot)) from which they expect ease and success, and in which they are faced with disaster and inhumanity. The realities of the depths of the Congo are not the illusions Marlow expected; a quick and easy journey to make some money turned into a life experience. Marlow’s experiences in the Congo River Basin, especially his witnessing of Kurtz and Kurtz’s atrocious actions, as well as the disparity of the natives in the Congo who are being persecuted and abused by the Belgians, make it impossible for him to continually recall a vision of ease, to constantly remind himself that he is on a lark in the jungle that will end quickly – and he will be able to return to his life.

            The flaw in that reasoning, however, is that there is no return to his old life for Marlow; there is no return to any disillusioned life once the journey of discovery has begun. Once the deeds are witnessed, once the stories are told, once the first question is asked – there is no going back. Do or die becomes the choice: the choice to end life with a “bang” or a “whimper,” the choice to succumb to the horrors of “death’s Outer Kingdom,” or to somehow close the gap between “potency / And the existence” (Eliot) to somehow implement some change in the routines that have begun.

            Marlow is able to come out of that deathly, shadowy kingdom alive, and he is able to grasp a piece of the trail of that “perpetual star” (Eliot) that hangs there in the sky for everyone. By honoring Kurtz and being kind to him – by sparing his loved ones from further pain and hiding the true course of his life – Marlow stops the endless cycle, and he faces the shadow: he faces the truth. He is, of course, a changed man. Like so many who set out with a bang to conquer the Congo, Marlow too came close to defeat; he too came close to escaping with a whimper, allowing the Congo to beat him, allowing the truth to break the illusion he once held. Yet Marlow is somehow different from all the rest who succumb to the horrors of the Belgian Congo, because if anything, he is able to come back. He is able to conquer his sickness, an occurrence symbolic of the Congo experience as a whole, and return home.

            The idea of conquering, of battles between good and evil, between light (or life) and darkness, asks the question, “What is the true meaning of apocalypse?” Why does Coppola choose to make the title of his gory and disturbing Vietnam movie “Apocalypse Now”? Curiously, apocalypse can be defined[1] as either “great or total devastation, doom,” or as “the destruction of evil.” From the film and interpretations of darkness, it would seem that somehow the apocalypse – which is essentially succumbing to darkness – is a bizarre conglomeration of both of these definitions. Apocalypse, or darkness, is great or total devastation, but because of the realization that there is no destruction of evil. Instead, there can only be discovery of it.

            Darkness not only is, but it also is not. Using a definition derived from Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, Arcadia is the ideal place – it is a place of completion, of contentment, and a place where one is able to realize that life is ultimately beautiful as it is, even though it may not be filled with aesthetic beauty, for it is left as it is: untouched, an Eden for humanity. Darkness couldn’t be any closer to being the antithesis of Arcadia, for it is not just evil, hatred, or cruelty – it is utter disarray. Darkness is the ugliest condition one could imagine, not only aesthetically; it is too much tampering with the way life should have been, with the way life was created. Instead of leaving life and humanity alone, and appreciating it for what it is, darkness is plowing into it full force with tanks, machine guns, and poverty, and exploiting everything it has to offer. Darkness is everything but the ideal – and if it is the ideal, one has been possessed by it, as Kurtz was in both Heart of Darkness and “Apocalypse Now.”

            Darkness is a trap which we fall into, and one we can never crawl out of, for even if we somehow manage to physically escape, there is no erasure of the memories and the feelings of pain and trauma associated with “the appalling face of a glimpsed truth” (Conrad 113). Truth – raw, sordid, un-Americanized truth – is the ultimate destruction of that innocent and charmed illusion, and the spiral into darkness. Darkness, be it the darkness of one unprovoked death or another, is “a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets” (Conrad 101) that are only revealed to a few. When the darkness dawns, nothing is certain except for one thing which is rigid: life will change, and there will be no new awakening.