THE DARK TOWER
The Dark Tower is Gan’s (God’s) body, a living entity representing the creative power that makes and unmakes the world. Through the cycles of birth and death, Gan holds everything together. The power and beauty of Gan’s purpose are represented in the rose, the fragile interconnectedness of all living things. Everything that dies gives itself to feed the life of what lives on.
Creative power brings into being things as they are. Imagination (dreams, inner voices) is the source of what Gan brings into reality. Reality is what is experienced by the characters in any story. What is imagined in one reality is drawn from what is experienced in another. Reality is thus, simply a matter of perspective. All perspectives, all stories are interactive, following the path of the Beam, the ultimate purpose laid out by Gan. That’s what holds everything together.
Ka (destiny) is the ultimate purpose that carries creation (the evolution of all the stories) forward. The individual choices of any character in any story are their own, not predetermined, and yet every choice serves Ka. There is no way around or out of the influence of what is destined to happen. There is only participation in its unfolding.
The writer, the creator of the stories, is simply a character in a story. All the writer’s stories follow the path of the Beam. They are drawn from the ultimate purpose that Gan has woven into Ka through the light of inspiration. The writer, through imagination, touches into the stories playing out in other realities than his/her own. What is written is the result of the interplay of the writer’s choices and destiny. The writer does not live for the end of the story, not for wrapping it up into a satisfying completion. The writer knows that “the joy is in the journey not the destination”. S/he lives for the love of discovering and interacting with whatever story Ka is unfolding. Writing the story gives life to the writer, and not to do so is to lose his/her place in the story, and to die. Stephen King found his life purpose and life force in being true to the stories that showed themselves to him. When he stepped away from this purpose he nearly died. His near death experience woke him up to the purpose and value of his life.
The gunslinger is the bringer of death, a necessary agent in the unfolding of any story. Things must be unmade so that something new can be made. Characters live and die to move the story along. The gunslinger is the agent of Gan in a way that other characters are not. Death cannot die. The gunslinger is doomed to live his/her life again and again because death is necessary to the making and unmaking of the world. The gunslinger brings death to all s/he loves, thereby paradoxically, bringing meaning to their lives just as mortality does for us all. To know there is an end is to live with purpose that provides meaning or worth as the end approaches. Roland brings value to otherwise seemingly meaningless lives by awakening them to the creative power in death. Though they die in one reality, they are able to live on, with renewed clarity of purpose, in another.
The gunslinger (death) serves creative power (Gan + Ka) but cannot him/herself create life. He had “no sense of humor and little imagination, but he was steadfast. He was a gunslinger.” He aims with his heart, not with his eye or hand. His aim is always true. He is finality incarnate.
And the story always lives on.
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