A Kalpa for Brama and Lordran: Thoughts on the Upcoming Dark Souls III
Dec. 9, 2015A Kalpa for Brama and Lordran: Thoughts on the Upcoming Dark Souls III
This cycle is like the dog of lust. You can feed it, whether you light the flame and set upon the world a gold Age of Fire or dim the lights and let the Dark encroach upon the world in silent sleep, but it will always come back with the same appetite because it’s playing to the same cycle. The curse and the cycle of the worlds inDark Souls, as we see many characters considering it, is not merely a push between fire and dark, to push away one or the other. One cannot be considered without the other; the two come from the same center. It is tempting to lean to one side, working tirelessly to achieve the fruition of the great dark or the ember sheen and scarlet skies of a brilliant fire. So, as Aldia spoke, we chance upon the great illusions. Ideas of “destroying light” or “destroying dark.” There is no Dark without Fire; there is no Fire without Dark.
This is the great disparity, and yet neither one is detached from the other as the pushes of gods and men, trapped by the lies of serpents or no, imply them to be. Fire is Dark; Dark is Fire. Men and women in this world play the game that black does not imply white. It’s tempting to think that lack might win, or white might win, that the sound of Fire or the silence of Dark might never again be heard; that there might be a universe of endless shadow of deadened cinder. How awful. But you’d never know Fire without Dark. You’d never know Dark without Fire. Dark is not Fire’s enemy; Fire is not Dark’s enemy. We forget they go together. We forget there there isn’t one without the other. Interdependent, interconnected, and altogether one.
When you recognize the duality of lies and truth, good and evil, hunger and satiation, you can no longer destroy knowledge of their dual state, but like the ideas you may find in Buddhism, where you might ask: What is your original face? The one you bore before you were born? You can start to think and realize that though we’re playing with 2s, the two are still 1 whole, no matter how divided they’ve become. That, too, cannot be destroyed. The trick to the whole thing, I think, will not necessarily consist in “beating the game” or “surpassing the cycle” because if you think about it, that idea is foolish. The cycle is you. You are a part of it, and you can no more escape that than you can escape your flesh…
All these people in these games cannot accept the cycle or the unity or the disparity. They’re all running around in circles constantly afraid or trying to light this fire or rub out this ember or stomp on this flame. In the Age of the Gods, it seems they couldn’t even conceive of an “outside” of the cycle. It was either let it fade out or light it, but it gets circular; it gets fallacious and confining. Humans, in real life, do this too. It’s something I really love in Dark Souls because I know men do this, and for all the tremendous power of those of that age and those with Lord Souls, their narrow perspective ultimately kept their doom. Even the mighty everlasting dragons, surely immensely powerful, perished, but in their nature, perhaps in some sense they truly were everlasting, largely more in tune with it all than those of the Lord Souls could be said to be.
All that is a part is a whole; all that is a whole is also a part. So is disparity. So is the original countenance. The madness we see inBloodborneof men grasping at enlightenment, but many falling ever so short, is key to this, because sometimes out of that jumbled, confused state arises a blinding lucidity that intuitively perceives things just so and there we have more of a whole than the broken, disparate fragments of shattered, sharp glass Gwyn and all of them run with and upon which they impaled themselves. When has there ever been but left and right, with no up and no down? No forward and no backwards? To choose only: Fire or Dark? When breath of men and all that blink living sleep awake with a bouquet of flames surging from their lungs and a blanket of darkness crowning their heads.
What is the sound of one arm clapping? Here, where we are, even if in atomic dust all arms were the same. Here, come before disparity, what is thesound? We cannot return, but the whole remains. All those who came before have served a purpose, intended or not: To educate all those who come after, in faint echoes strewn upon the ruin in the ages in the Cycle, precisely what it is and how to proceed; with each game came new knowledge, and in 1 you could not much ever deviate from the cycle, and in two, it become coherent to seethe beyond either/or decisions. And inDark Souls III, perhaps we shall, as did the Good Hunter, lift our worn, weathered bodies above these callous vestiges of time and see sideways – to know something more than what other men and women, good and ill and all else altogether, knew from within their belltower that always rang at 12 o’clock. Outside. Beyond the reaches of classification and the tomb of duality.
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Great write up. I’ve always liked the emphasis on duality in the context of universality or wholeness or whatever you wanna call it. It’s one of the few series where I can honestly say that I have near zero regard for the “story.” I know I’m supposed to go mess some stuff up and there’s some reasons on the surface, but the overall Souls nature as you described is freeing in that your character can just exist and that’s all right. Whatever the outcome and reasons, I actually feel like a part of the universe.
In most games I typically need a connection to a character or the story because the investment in the specific is thrust upon the world. In a spiritual sense, perhaps Cloud or Revan are greater pieces of the cosmos, but in the game there’s no sense of that.
I should add though that, for various reasons, this applies far more to Souls for me than Bloodborne.
This was a really interesting read! I loved the closing paragraph, this is really great stuff. I hope we see more comments
Glad you enjoyed it. I was scrutinizing the living hell out of it after I made it because I can always see room for improvement, but apparently, reader’s experience =/= creator’s experience. Glad to know someone enjoyed it.
I’m very interested in these sorts of things, and these aspects bleed through prominently in the series. It’s very exciting for me, and this was, in part, born of a desire to share that excitement.
Loved reading this, I’ve definitely picked up on the taoist dualities of light and dark, heat and cold, and the samsara cycle of birth, death, rebirth in the series. Add in all the alchemical imprints and strong archetypes and you’ve got a deeply psychological game. It’s so strong that I’ve determined most of my impressions of what the story is (especially the more cryptic questions) by the symbolism being used rather than by any lore notes. It’s such a “feel” game(s) in that way.
