The Church at Night: Apprehending Life’s End in Dark Souls

Stone braids together the commonalities of a contemporary video game–Dark Souls–and a childhood spent in the church.

by Michael Stone

Dehydrated, sepia, undead, your face is distorted. You kill things, die, come back. Why? Non player characters reference life in riddles which float untouchable above you.

When I’ve clenched at meaning it’s slipped away. In fundamentalist Christianity I was the hero. Of what? I wanted to know everything but like the Teacher in Ecclesiastes discovered everything is meaningless.

I puked up my malformed worldview. Clarity floated by in blots of language and throat tightening sense memories. Melodies, hallways, exit signs.

Life is missing fundamental information. Horror writers know this. Language requires an active force, a human, to make it interesting. We can never tell all but try nonetheless because we’re the implicated subjects of our questions. When answers let us down there’s a new anxiety: dread.

Death looming nearer. Action impossible. Revelation a disappointment.

Dark Souls offers no explanations. A brief opening sequence, then you cobble together understanding from scraps. Ideas fade, resolve away, disappear.

Bonfires mark places you sit down to rest. They are silences in the onslaught of violence. Shades of players move in and out of the flickers of fire wearing familiar clothing. You glimpse others.

In Dark Souls humanity is an item. No one explains its function but it restores your features until you die again.

You evaporate in ash and the trudge is done. If you had discovered everything in life you couldn’t put it all together. Did you enjoy racing through the dark? In a bonfire the lucid dream of another person is a consolation.

When you flicker out forever will you mourn or celebrate or twinge with each? Untethered spheres may align in unexpected ways but you don’t get to see it.

Observing others in the glow I forget floating confusions and suddenly people are meaning and death is a light by which I see life and it is precious, all of it. Exit signs in the dark church hallway sing and someone laughs running underneath.

Michael Stone is a poet from Kalamazoo, MI but the only way to read his work is to make him food. He works in youth development in Grand Rapids and makes music under the name Desert Golfer.