Stephen King's the Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance Revised and Updated (4 page)

Roland Deschain is Mid-World’s final gunslinger. Like a knight from the Arthurian legends of our world, Roland is on a quest. His “grail” is the Dark Tower, the linchpin of the time/space continuum, and his goal is to climb to its very top and question the god or demon who resides there. Roland’s world is unraveling. The Beams that maintain the proper alignment of time, space, size and dimension are breaking down and the Tower itself is foundering. This structural instability affects all worlds, but in Roland’s, the symptoms are dramatic. As the fabric of reality wears away, thinnies form and spread. These squalling mist bogs swallow all those that stumble into them, letting their captives fall into the dark no-places between worlds. As the landscape stretches, directions drift. What is west today may be southwest tomorrow and southeast the day after. A goal that lay only fifty miles away can suddenly become a hundred, or even a thousand, miles distant.

As the direct descendant of Arthur Eld, King of All-World-that-was, and as Mid-World’s last
dinh,
Roland must rescue his land from annihilation. But his task is gargantuan. He must find a way to safeguard the framework, the loom, upon which the interpenetrating realities are woven. But to do so—in order to shore up that central Tower and the Beams which radiate out from it—he must find his way across a landscape so fragmented that neither map nor memory can help him pinpoint his destination. In fact, Roland does not even know where the Tower stands. He realizes that he must head toward a place called End-World, but where does that land lie? How can he find it? During the early stages of his journey, Roland the warrior chooses the path of the ascetic. Believing he can only reach his goal as a solitary traveler, he sacrifices all human relationships, even when it means betrayal, because he thinks such sacrifice will speed him along his way. Comrades and lovers are left behind like abandoned water skins.

Roland believes that to climb the Tower he must have no ties holding him to Mid-World. He must be isolated, self-sufficient, cut off from the nurturing tides of relationship. Thinking in terms of conquest and battle, Roland follows the duplicitous Walter across the deserts of Mid-World, believing that this enemy will eventually lead him to his goal. Similarly, as a boy, he followed the path set for him by Maerlyn’s Grapefruit, a magic ball whose evil, distorting visions tricked him into first sacrificing his lover, Susan Delgado, and then murdering his own mother.

What Roland doesn’t at first realize is that, like any young knight, he is being tested. The initial path he chooses is a false start, no more than a
glammer
thrown by the enemies who want to thwart him. What their treachery exposes is that the young Roland is driven by ambition, personal glory, and revenge as much as he is by a desire to fulfill his destiny as the last warrior of the White. By tempting him to betray all that a knight should hold sacred, Roland’s enemies ensure that Roland will repeat the mistakes of his fathers and either abandon his quest as hopeless or become lost in the deserts and golgothas of Mid-World which, in the end, but mirror the dry wreckage of his heart.

Roland, the young warrior, does not understand the ultimate nature of his quest. He does not realize that, as the trickster Walter says in the golgotha, he
already stands so close to the Tower that worlds turn about his head.
⁴
Because of his own preconceptions, his inherited worldview, he does not understand that his fate, and the fate of Mid-World, are one and the same.

Roland’s story is not just an adventure tale; it is one with symbolic meaning. His pilgrimage is intrinsically linked to a legend from our world, a legend which was an important influence upon the Modernists and which formed the basis for a famous poem by T. S. Eliot. That legend is the story of the Waste Land. In its incarnation in the Dark Tower series, this legend is bound to another belief, one that dates back to the time when men and women thought that their kings and queens were appointed by God. According to this worldview, the body of the king is the body of the land, and the well-being of one is indivisible from the well-being of the other. If the king is sick, in body or in mind, then the land falls to ruin. To cure the land, you must first cure the king. The one will only flourish if the other is in balance.

As above, so below. The disease of the larger is the same as that of the smaller, and they both progress according to the same principle. To understand what dries and devastates the land, what threatens the very fabric of the universe and the stability of the interpenetrating worlds, one must also understand what ails the king. All are affected by the same illness, but to cure this illness we must discover its underlying cause. And this is the true purpose of Roland’s journey.

We all know that as the Beams snap, the Tower falters. But what is its equivalent on the human plane? What malaise weakens the bonds of Mid-World’s culture? What disease affects Roland, the foremost representative of his fragmenting world?

High Speech, the tongue of gunslingers, is a subtle and complex language. Its words are difficult to define because they are so full of nuance. Each word has multiple meanings which refer, simultaneously, to ordinary human interaction, to the web that joins the interacting individuals, and to the greater pattern of humanity’s past and future movements. No human interaction, then, is meaningless. They all reflect both individual and cultural
ka.

Ka,
we know, resembles a wheel. In fact, it looks much like the wheel Roland draws in
The Waste Lands,
a wheel meant to represent the Tower, the Beams, and the Portals in and out of Mid-World. In Roland’s map, the hub of the wheel is the Tower, the spokes are the Beams, and the rivets are the Guardians, who are the Portals’ sentries. Some Guardians, like the Turtle, are protective, while others, like the Bear Guardian Shardik, are downright dangerous. But they all serve the Beams, the Beams serve the Tower, and the Tower is what keeps the universe united. And perhaps these Beams work like Batteries, with positive and negative charges, the one balancing the other. That would explain why the Turtle is kind and the Bear—the opposite end of the Beam—is negative. Even polarity has its place, like light and darkness. That is, as long as the whole remains in balance.

Although it would be difficult to map the wheel of
ka
in this way—it is much too big—we can, at least, map the forces of
ka-tet,
remembering that the small is a miniature of the larger. As
dinh
of his
ka-tet
and as
dinh
of Mid-World, Roland sits at the center of the wheel. The Guardians of his present
ka-tet
are his companions Jake, Susannah, Eddie, and Oy. The sorcerer Walter—who plays a large
part in the drawing and binding of this
ka-tet
—can also be placed as one of the Guardians, though his polarity is negative.

Just as there is a word for the pattern of
ka-tet,
there is a word for the bonds (or Beams) that hold the
tet
together. This word is
khef.
Like almost all the words of High Speech,
khef
has multiple meanings, including birth and life force, but perhaps the most ubiquitous of these meanings is also the simplest. And that meaning is water.

As Roland knows all too well from his journey in the Mohaine Desert, a human will die much sooner from dehydration than he will from lack of food. The same can be said about the land, about society, and about the individual soul. Once again, the patterns and forces remain the same; what changes are the superficial forms.
Khef
can be literal water, the essence of life, but it can also mean emotion, the essence and bond of relationship. Whether this bond is one of loyalty or hatred, it always binds. That is, as long as the forces of the positive and the negative remain in dynamic balance. A certain amount of conflict is necessary for growth and change, but too much of the negative—too much repellent—and the
ka-tet
ceases to exist.

The patterns of
ka-tet
can be used to describe the subtle interactions which hold a society together. Without these emotional interactions, which create dynamic and forceful cohesion, society devolves and disintegrates; it becomes a mass of warring individuals, or warring clans. The beneficial interconnectedness of the whole is lost.

The bonds of
khef
are reciprocal. Both parties must contribute or else the connection is at best unstable, at worst illusory. Each side must give of itself. The unity of
ka-tet
depends on the forces of
khef.
In order for the
ka-tet
to survive, the Guardians of
ka-tet
must remain true, but their loyalty depends, in turn, upon the truth and honesty of the center. When the center does not hold true, the fabric begins to unravel, and this is exactly what has happened to Roland’s world, and what has, in turn, happened over and over in Roland’s life.

Ka
is a wheel; its one purpose is to turn. The spin of
ka
always brings us back to the same place, to face and reface our mistakes and defeats until we can learn from them.
⁵
When we learn from the past, the wheel continues to move forward, toward growth and evolution. When we don’t, the wheel spins backward, and we are given another chance. If once more we squander the opportunity, the wheel continues its rotation toward devolution, or destruction. While the High Speech terms for life and relationship have multiple meanings and subtle nuances,
char,
the Tongue’s word for Death, has no other meaning.
Char
is bleak and final. The wheel continues to turn, but we are forcefully removed from it. Since we each have a place in the greater pattern, breaking of
khef
rends the fabric of the All.

What can be said of individuals can also be said of societies, and Roland’s society is no exception. Although Mid-World enjoyed periods of stability, its history remains predominantly a story of sacrifice and bloodshed. Although High Speech shows that unity and relationship were valued, in the everyday of life they were, more often than not, forgotten. Many of Mid-World’s sins were sins against
khef,
the bonding force of
ka
and culture. In Mid-World-that-was, the balance
between positive and negative was lost; creating and maintaining
khef
became less important than the propagation of
char.
Just as the Beams began to weaken, the
khef
which was meant to unite began to repel. The waters of life withdrew, and Mid-World became a desert. The result? Fragmentation and dehydration on all levels of reality, and on all levels of the Tower.

In “The Little Sisters of Eluria,” Roland says that the religions of his world taught that “love and murder were inextricably bound together—that in the end, God always drank blood.”
⁶
Upon intensive scrutiny, Roland’s statement certainly seems to hold true. The Druits, the most ancient of Mid-World’s people, raised the stones of the Speaking Rings in order to have temples devoted to human sacrifice. Although these practices may have drawn some of the people together, giving them a sense of unity and strength, they would have also created a blood-debt to the victim, and the victim’s
ka-tet,
rending the fabric of the All. Even at this early stage of Mid-World’s cultural evolution, the negative energy released by these acts began to thin reality. The forces of
char
became more powerful and the forces of
khef
were weakened. Within these circles doorways formed, but the sentries of these lesser portals were demons, not Guardians.

Although technologically advanced, the later generations of Mid-World gave little more thought to the forces of
khef,
or life-water, than their ancestors. The Great Old Ones created computerized wonders, such as Blaine, and accomplished amazing engineering and architectural feats, such as the building of Lud and the laying of the train lines deep below the Cyclopean Mountains, but even these seemingly “good” things were eventually tainted by the death-drive of their makers. Blaine developed a psychotic personality and drove the people of Lud on to Mid-World’s oldest practice—human sacrifice. The city of Lud, once the gem of the Imperium, fell into the hands of diseased and warring gangs, and the train lines of the mountains seethed with Slow Mutants, those terrible creatures who were once human but who had been completely mutated by the Old Ones’ poisons. No matter what grand plan they had for the future of the interpenetrating universes, the Old Ones worshiped the gods of
char,
the gods of destruction. The Old Ones’ technological wizardry was focused on one endpoint, and that endpoint was the creation of more and more dangerous weapons. In this they succeeded. In fact, they succeeded so completely that they wiped out their own civilization and transformed Mid-World into a poisoned, desiccated wasteland.

As Susan Delgado says to Roland when they stand, horrified, by a line of resurrected war tankers, the ways of the Great Old Ones were the ways of death.
⁷
But over the course of the series we learn that the ways of death are, and always have been, the ways of Mid-World. Even during the time of Arthur Eld, Mid-World’s greatest hero, human beings were thrown onto Charyou Tree fires to appease the gods of Reap, and in Roland’s day those old ways were not completely abandoned. As we see when Susan Delgado is made into such a scapegoat, having the blame for her town’s sins heaped upon her innocent head, such sacrifice and hypocrisy undermine all human relationships. No matter what their stated aims might be, such practices breed duplicity and mistrust and treachery, all of which are the opposite of
khef.

In the more central parts of Roland’s world, stuffy-guys were usually burned in lieu of men and women, but life was still harsh and leaders were bred to be killers before they were taught to be statesmen. All that the ruling gunslingers had to do to justify this sacrifice of
khef
was to point west to the lands that were already torn apart by anarchy and rebellion. In Gilead, the light of civilization was championed, but its ideals of fairness, justice, compassion—of fundamental human worth whatever class or land that person might come from—were left to the gentle and the lame, like Roland’s old tutor, Vannay, to promulgate. Although Roland loved Vannay, by far his most influential teacher was Cort, who taught him how to survive in a world where a knife would constantly be at his back, or at his throat.