#a lil meta a lil ooc a lil personal wordvomit

[charyka-a]

Sometimes grief demands to be healed. It will ask for it, stitch by stitch, sew shut its own wounds on your body, demand the blood it paid you back. Roland Deschain’s grief begins and ends with his own hands and heart: his hands that killed Susan, Alain, Gabrielle, his heart that had to bear the death of Cuthbert, of Steven, of Eddie.

The death of Jake Chambers is placed at the crossroads of this pain: the first death, Jake’s blood is on his hands: he lets him fall. He lets him die. The second death, he has to understand the intricacies of it to allow himself to begin to mourn it. One of his first thoughts is: I cannot bear to let him go. So shortly after Eddie’s death, losing Jake for the second time skins Roland alive in ways he hadn’t been hurt in years, forces him to his knees for good. There is a moment perhaps where he believes this quest will truly claim this life, if only because it will rip his heart out of his chest completely. By the time Jake dies for good, it’s done so all but physically.

The events of One Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, seeing the Tet Corporation, seeing how despite the horror the fight for the Tower is still alive and well, even in Keystone world, the reminder anew of how fundamental this fight is, the awareness, keen and sudden, of how much of a necessary evil finding and protecting the Tower represent the conclusion of Roland’s journey of mourning, from the moment he must place Jake beneath the ground to when he must return from Keystone Earth to Mid-World. One Dag is the beginning of the end: the moment where the light shines through the cracks as bright as it could ever do.

I visited One Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza today, and felt the ground shift beneath my feet. Dark places, as they say, are Holy places: there is a tower there that breathes and dances with the curvature of the Earth. I didn’t think it could affect me. I didn’t think it would affect me, but it did, and it has, and it is. There’s little to be surprised: so much about my own experiences with Stephen King and the Dark Tower have been so intimately tied to grief, its essence, its healing. Its healing especially, perhaps because The Dark Tower came to me exactly when I needed it as a sixteen year old addict in a very, very difficult situation, and even before that Stephen King came to me as a thirteen year old victim of CSA who needed the comfort of a horror outside my skull. 

This year has been, first and foremost, about coming to terms with my grief and my pain. It’s been a year of transformation and healing done painfully and with terrible force and strength, a healing that was never pretty nor was it bloodless, a healing made perhaps to make me feel the light all the strongest when it finds me. So, at the end of a year made of sweat, spit and blood, I finally found One Dag, or One Dag found me, or I let myself be taken there exactly when I needed it, wanted it, knew it would stitch it clean. 

Roland’s grief, after all, finds new shape and meaning beyond the doors of a dark tower so much more merciful than his own will ever be. It beings here, in One Dag, as Irene Tassenbaum waits for him patiently beside the turtle I also sat beside, as the Tet of the Rose gifts him a watch and he realises how purposeful Jake’s sacrifice was, how much there was at stake for him and it and the world at large -- not the world, the worlds. Roland finds here the meaning and purpose of his grief, the price of his own agony in the notion that it is necessary. Grief as rebirth. Grief as the darkness that cannot swallow us whole, grief that is cracked enough to let the light through, as Leonard Cohen sings. In a place where my own heart found the song in the breath of concrete, I felt the pieces falling into place: Stephen King as catalyst and martyr and messiah and my very own salvation underneath the blood of my nails and the dark ink of a page. There are few moments where I feel close to G*d and the beauty He has created, and today was one of those days, perfectly pure moments where it all spins exactly in place, where the harmony of the spheres is delicate enough to be heard past the white noise of our world as it rotates. Beside the turtle, finding every bit of hurt and watching it become something clear and crystalline, with purpose. Reach the culmination perhaps of a year of healing in the same place my favourite character understands the roots of his: Ves’Ka Gan, song of the Turtle, wheel that spins and never tires.