Rejected Article Archives: LOINCLOTH (FROM DARK SOULS III: THE RINGED CITY)
I'm starting to use substack for articles that have been rejected from other projects. Here's the first: a close reading of the "loincloth" item from Dark Souls III
Undergarments combined with an overlayer, the former never intended for public display.
Indeed, all manner of things are bound to accrue at world’s end.
--
How does time work at the end of the world? This is the question that hangs over Dark Souls III, and perhaps the series as a whole.
Early on in the original Dark Souls, you meet the knight Solaire, who introduces you to the concept of summoning friendly NPCs and players for help (which he famously refers to as “jolly co-operation”), by explaining the nature of time in the game’s setting, Lordran:
“The flow of time itself is convoluted, with heroes centuries old phasing in and out. The very fabric wavers, and relations shift and obscure. There's no telling how much longer your world and mine will remain in contact.”
The strangeness of the flow of time in Lordran is belied by the fact that Lordran is, in its actual design, realistically contiguous and more or less geometrically coherent. The incoherence of time in Dark Souls is therefore limited to the appearance and disappearance of its characters. That is, until its DLC, Artorias of the Abyss, which sees the player-character travel back in time in order to directly bear witness to the deeds of the eponymous character Artorias, a warrior of legend whose mythology we learn about in Lordran (We also learn that Artorias’ legendary feats were actually those of our time-jumping avatar, who kills an insane, hollowed Artorias and takes his place). Dark Souls II would elaborate on this convoluted flow of time, first by repeating the Artorias time-travel in sequences where the player-character travels back in time to participate in a war between the Kingdom of Drangleic and a race of giants, the ruins of which you spend much of the DSII exploring in the present. Dark Souls II, much to the chagrin of fans of the first game’s spatial coherence, also makes the instability of time in its level design: whereas the separate regions of Dark Souls’ world can co-exist in one consistent Euclidean space, Dark Souls II’s Drangleic bends back onto itself, its seemingly contiguous spaces messily overlapping over each other impossibly (the game seems to sign this messiness as an intentional decision in an infamous sequence in which the player takes an elevator at the top of a Windmill, which travels upward, into the previously open air, to spit the player out in a lava-covered castle). This incoherency of Dark Souls II’s spaces was initially taken to be a sign of the game’s lesser status, but has since been recuperated in interpretations which treat that lack of coherence as a way of making Drangleic into a shifting and obscure locale.
Dark Souls III takes this messiness from its predecessor and further elaborates on it, taking the affective strangeness of Drangleic and using it to make a forceful thematic point about time, history, and the form of revolutionary agency.
The item whose description inspired this Codex entry is the loincloth that lies near the bottom of the Dreg Heap. The Dreg Heap is a colossal mass of ruined castles that lies just outside of the Kiln of the First Flame, the site where the Ashen One may relink the fire and continue the Age of Fire. Or usurp the flame, and become lord of the undead. Or snuff the flame out, and plunge the world in the Age of Dark, whose coming has been locked in a state of perpetual suspension, postponed over and over again by the linking of the fire. The loincloth is presented to the player in the manner of many ‘joke’ items in the series: something you might risk death to make a run for, only to find that it isn’t worth it. The loincloth is in a poison swamp in the valley of the ruinous mountain of the Dreg Heap, surrounded by Poisonhorn bugs and in the line of fire of a grotesque flying enemy that is referred to, in the Design Works concept art book, as an “Angel.”
However, the unassuming loincloth alludes, in its description, to the nature of the place where it is found. It is one among many items which accrues at the end of the world. In its description the loincloth acts as a microcosm of the Dreg Heap: a piece of the collection of the ruins of the past, converging in a hurled wreckage at the base of the First Flame.
The Dreg Heap, in its sublime state of suspended ruination, appears at first to be a radical break with the rest of Dark Souls III’s world design, which feints at the coherent and literal design of DS1 by providing the player with a contiguous world with constant visual references to where they have been, and where they are going. You can see the Undead Settlement from the Cathedral of the Deep, and so on. But this simulated coherence only lightly conceals a deep incoherence which Dark Souls III happily teases you with from its opening moments. As in Drangleic, your undead avatar can warp between bonfires from the start, and you begin the game proper after a brief tutorial section by warping from the Firelink Shrine, the game’s hub area, to the wall of Lothric Castle. This innocuous warp masks the fact that Lothric and the Firelink shrine are not and will never be made contiguous: the Firelink Shrine which is connected to Lothric castle is hidden behind an invisible wall, behind the mad dragon king Oceiros, sunken into pure darkness. The game’s first boss, Iudex Gundyr, lies still in his former boss arena, yet to be taken by the writhing tar of the Abyss. It is implied that we have stepped into a past that lies hidden within the present, impossibly; two times co-existing with one another within a continuous space. And the Firelink Shrine which we call home is somehow both present and absent within our own time.
This opens up two questions: what kind of spacetime makes up Lothric? And what kind of being is the Ashen undead, those unkindled that traverse this spacetime through the network of bonfires? The first answer is easy. It’s right there in the first line of the game. The narrator tells us: “It is called Lothric. Where the transitory lands of the Lords of Cinder converge.” Lothric is not a self-contained kingdom, not how we encounter it: it is a place where ephemeral spaces collide into a single mass. In other words, it is a place where things accrue. And so, again, we are drawn back to the loincloth, found in the midst of the Dreg Heap. The Dreg Heap is the space which dramatically unveils the Lothric’s nature as a site of convergence, a wreckage of the past accumulated into a sublime, nonlinear conglomeration of debris. When you travel to the Dreg Heap in The Ringed City DLC episode, you come across an old woman sitting atop the pile, staring out at the endless cascade of rubble beneath her. She says: “Great kingdoms and anaemic townships will be one and the same. The great tide of human enterprise, all for naught. That’s why I’m so taken by this grand sight. This must be what it’s like to be a god.” I think she is correct that there is something like godliness in witnessing the Dreg Heap. Not quite godliness, but close.
There is a famous essay by the Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin, titled Theses on the Philosophy of History, in which Benjamin develops a theological approach to the project of historical materialism. What this means is that Benjamin wants to apply Christian mythological tropes to better conceptualize how historical materialists should engage with the act of writing history. What Benjamin sketches—in an obtuse, poetic fashion—is a method for writing history in a way that unveils the moments of revolutionary potential which existed in the past, and settling the accounts of the past generations by writing these moments into a history which activates the radical potential of the working class in the present to deliver an end to capitalism. This is something of a redemptive project, in which the historical materialist understands themselves to be caught in a struggle which began long ago, and has stakes for those who came before: “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” The centerpiece of this essay which is a moment where Benjamin, inspired by a hilariously ugly painting by Paul Klee, describes the Angel of History, a being which is able to attain a kind of total vision of history, but is made perpetually unable to intervene in it. He writes:
“A Klee painting called “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
The precise meaning of the Angel of History is the subject of much debate which I am not able to resolve here. But what I can offer is an interpretation, that The Angel of History is a metaphor for a revolutionary subjectivity—subjectivity here simply referring to a particular stance from which someone views the world, which is created by certain social conditions and in turn permits certain thoughts and actions—being ejected from its moment of possibility by the force of progress, a force which Benjamin goes on to critique. The Angel’s position towards history mirrors that of the historical materialist, which Benjamin opposes to the historian. The historian nostalgically projects themselves into the past by forgetting the history to come, in so doing empathizing with the ruling class and joining them in the “triumphal procession” of historical progress, whereas the historical materialist takes on the position of the “distanced observer,” “for without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror.”
To my mind, the Angel of History observes from the position of the historical materialist, who exits the obscuring linearity of historical progress in order to see history in its totality and its horror, as an accrued wreckage of ruination. You, the historical materialist, see the wreckage of the past and want to intervene, but you are blown away from it by a storm you cannot resist. This storm of progress is the form of a linear, causal history which sweeps the revolutionary subjectivity away from its moment of action, allowing the ruling order to maintain itself in perpetuity.
Does that not remind you of the Age of Fire, and how it maintains itself through the ritual of the linking of the flame? To link the flame, as is well-established among scholars and online lore circles, is an act of repeatedly maintaining the Age of the Gods at the expense of humans, possessors of the Dark Soul, who are destined to inherit the Earth when the light of Fire dies out. But that inheritance can only come through refusal of the Fire, and the destruction of the order of reality that exists. Dark Souls III tells a story where the linking of the fire is at its most ritualized: the waiting thrones in Firelink Shrine, as well as the reliefs of the 3 possessors of Lord Souls in Farron Keep suggest a structure that awaits the Unkindled Ash, a ritual ceremony that reorients humankind away from their historical power and towards a nostalgic maintenance of the ruling order of the Gods.
However, 3 of the 4 endings of Dark Souls III involve a refusal to link the fire, and linking the fire itself is as anti-climactic as it has always been in this series: it is an understated self-sacrifice that keeps the present order of reality around for a little while longer. The player-character, the Unkindled Ash, is incited to act in a manner that ends the Age of Fire, to enact a revolutionary change in the metaphysics of Dark Souls. What’s more, it is their very status as Ash that seems to give them the proper standpoint from which to enact this change.
How might the undead’s nature, as Ash, relate to their status as navigators of a nonlinear time? For this answer, we can turn briefly to Jacques Derrida, the philosopher perhaps most preoccupied with the interplay of presence and absence that characterizes the world of Lothric and the subjectivity of our Undead, Ashen playable character. As theorist Akira Lippit summarizes, for Derrida, cinders—which Derrida does not differentiate from Ash—embody an ontological paradox. Cinders are the remains of a body which has vanished without a trace. Cinders are not remains of a body, they do not signify an absent identity; cinders are anonymous, material residue in which the body, and the identity which once belonged to the scorched body, are absolutely annihilated. In other words, cinders are a trace that leaves no trace. They are the ashes of an identity in which the identity is irreconcilably lost: remains in which nothing remains. All cinders represent is the “absolute divisibility” of the body: cinders are a form of material remains that only represent the capacity of the body to be divided into nothingness.
In his treatise on cinders, Derrida briefly cites Nietzsche, who insists that our world is “the cinder of living beings” and that we must “guard against saying that death is opposed to life” because “the living being is only a species of what is dead.” By way of Nietzsche, Derrida argues that the paradoxical present absence of the cinder implies a kind of historicity, a presence of death in life. We could call that a form of undeath.
For Benjamin, what is at stake in historical materialism is vengeance for the dead: in seeing the messianic potential of the generations who came before, we can write a history that redeems their struggle and ensures that we are the last enslaved humans. The historicity of historical materialism is itself undead, a vengeful realization of a past potential which must be reconstructed in the present.
To be Ash is to be both present and absent: here and not, to remain but to be gone. It is to be undead, to be the death—the absence—which is present itself in life. The Ashen One, Dark Souls III’s player-character, is a figure which embodies a unique revolutionary potential in their ability to experience Lothric as a space where time collapses in on itself. At the end of the world, the end of the linear progress of time, the Ashen One sees history as a wreckage piled at their feet, where loincloths and great castles converge together into a single mass. The wind of progress no longer blows them away, and the Ashen One can act on behalf of all previous generations of undead, who were fooled into linking the flame and sustaining the Age of Fire, prolonging their suppression under the order of the Old Gods.
In summary, to be an Ashen Undead is to embody the subject-position of history itself. To experience time not as progress that sweeps you away, but as a great ruin that can be righted in the name of all that came before you, who are annihilated but present, in you, forever.