Of The Kingdom Of Darkness grew from a swan dive down a rabbit hole littered with mythology, largely threaded with tales of the Leviathan. I’m sure there are facets of those stories that have become lodged in Of The Kingdom Of Darkness, but at one point or other the track became it’s own story. The catalyst occurred after coming across a document called Leviathan by, Thomas Hobbes, a deep tome about western statecraft. Part four of the book is entitled, Of The Kingdom Of Darkness, and it tries at length to reconcile christian scripture, secular law, and the common views of the times, and this is decidedly not what the musical work that now bears the same title is about… but it did form a part of the inspirational ingredients from which this particular sound dish was stewed.
After reading Hobbes book and in particular part four, Of The Kingdom Of Darkness, my original concept of a great space faring being, a living ship perhaps (a whole other rabbit hole awaits there….), a great derelict drifting through the Void, altered to the current concept; the story of the craft’s origin. From whence did this great ship come, what culture, what beings, could create such a ship that I perceived through my mind’s eye?Details of the ship, its construction, materials, decoration, purpose, all became small insights to the place from which this massive vessel was launched. It was ancient, traveling through the cosmos across untold eras, eldritch symbols visibly worked into the construction, some almost painfully familiar but still alien, as if encompassing a prototype, but also something pure, unembellished, and unflinching in purpose. Like the utterance of the first word, understandable only by the speaker, yet the power of that simple thing perceivable by all who heard it. All these perceptions seemed to change after regarding the vessel for any length of time, much as the meaning of words can change after numerous iterations or a change of locus… focus.
Over the course of many days, or nights, I coaxed ancient tales from this ship that rested becalmed in my mind. The oft fluid and changing shapes of the hands that formed its bow, the length of the crew’s stride, or slither, the unknown lands from which ores were coaxed to the surface, there to be smelted, diluted, flayed, and eventually stretched across the frame of the ship to form the hull’s skin…. The strange stars that these worlds orbited, the spaces in-between that birthed the beings that would navigate on the great ship’s decks, this was the source, the kingdom of darkness…
The kingdom of darkness appears to have no stars that light is sky…. it is cloaked in unending night, stretching endlessly in every direction. Immense in its scope yet akin to claustrophobic in its feeling. This is a place of the unknowable, a place of human ignorance as we are bereft of the senses to perceive what is here. I strive to grasp this place, to hone other senses so that I may know this place. It is impenetrable and will not yield before my pitiful powers to comprehend…. but in a moment of quiet, my struggles to understand subsiding in gentle waves that wash over me, I am changed, relieved from my relentless pursuit to grasp the ungraspable with hands that have no fingers and eyes that see nothing. In that moment it is as if the veil of light is drawn back and darkness becomes us.… and now spires rise across the horizons, filigree dresses the corners of my vision, hinting at the shapes beneath that undulate like a familiar lover’s sigh…. the darkness is abundant with, flowing with, distracting the eye with, even as the heart sings a new melody that, and I relax into, and I need know no more, Of The Kingdom Of Darkness….