Bones of the Father

The primary preoccupation of the level design of Dark Souls is in ruin, in spaces long after they’ve served their peak. The Darkroot Garden is all that remains of what was once peaceful groves surrounding the city long lost to the Abyss. Anor Londo is empty, populated only by the guardians of its few true inhabitants, whose death triggers the end of the illusory kingdoms they uphold. Izalith, New Londo, and Oolacile appear as ruins, half-sunken in chaotic forces that swallowed their glory. At the deepest levels of the map, the ruins of primordial cradles, the Tomb of Giants where death was born and struck down the first life, the giants, and the kiln of the first flame, the primordial site of origin in the birth metaphysics of the world.

At the end of Gravity’s Rainbow, Slothrop’s disintegration is almost orphic. He returns as a ghostly spectre, haunting the few who can see his personage in the paths they all walk, after he enclosed the mandalic mytharc of Der Raketenstadt’s birth. His self though, dissolves, at the center of the mandala of the text, into the crossroads of 0,0 on a cartesian grid. When the text loops back around, we encounter Slothrop again, a spectre showing the path of the text, the text now a landscape, a world to inhabit, to walk across by the paths he made by his first steps.

Thomas Hobbes imagined the nation as a body, as depicted on the frontispiece of Leviathan. The sovereign is the kingly head of the nation, thus being the personhood of the nation, while its body is composed of the numerous lives and existences within him. The King himself becomes far greater than even an individual possessed with powers over all, but instead becomes the apex of the state, which itself is the head of the entire corpus of the nation.

Composing the institution as a body, heraldry has this same form. Flying over the kingdom, the flag shows the kingdom composed with all its organs, with the vertical heads made to dissolve once again into the overall picture. The stability of the crown dissolves in this as the flag becomes territory, as the body of the king sinks backwards into the landscape to become the nation it once ruled over.

Hitler once made a directive to his architects to construct buildings such that they would decay gracefully. No doubt in his mind, visions abounded of the Hellenistic ruins, now sprung alive with gardens of forest over their cracked marble, the half-ruined parthenon symbolizing the ultimate glory of his thousand year reich.

In the canonical ending, the player of Dark Souls becomes one of many who answered the siren call to link the flame. Taking themselves into the fire, they disintegrate to ash as many after them will. In doing so, they fulfilled their ultimate end as men. When the father dies, his buildings erected, his cities constructed, his name remains as his bones. The masculine obsession with “legacy” is thus, the wish to fulfill the purpose of the height of manhood, to make oneself present to such intense degree, that one can finally annihilate themselves, becoming the landscape they have built, their bones becoming as everpresent as the trees or mountains.