Ghostwood Farm

The ghostwood box.

(I usually pick a relevant song title for my post title. I couldn’t think of one. So I grabbed a Dark Tower sparklet that seemed particularly apropos.)

On 2 February 2020 I started a read-through of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. You may be putting together that the date I began this particular journey was about one month before the world moved on (to lockdown and pandemic). On 3 January 2025 I finished the final book, The Dark Tower. The purpose of this read-through was to gather florilegia, or sparklets.

I learned of this practice through the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, hosted by Vanessa Zoltan and Casper ter Kuile. (As an aside, I just learned that, after completing this entire series, Vanessa Zoltan went back through the entire series with a different co-host! Insane! So I was inspired by Series 1 and have not listened to Series 2). Our hosts used several different traditions to deep-read the Harry Potter books as a sacred text. The most intriguing to me was the use of sparklets. Sparklets, or florilegia, are explained by Vanessa here. Essentially, the reader pulls out words, phrases, or sentences from the text that strike them as important, beautiful, or that otherwise “sparkle.” Those sparklets can then be read as their own sacred text.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I actually think that the Harry Potter books are not very good. I like the story and the world, but I think the writing is sloppy and the plot is at the very least inconsistent (how can a permission slip possibly be required for a visit to town but not to play quidditch??!). And yes, I thought this about the books before we found out that Rowling is a terrible person.

In listening to the podcast, mostly with my kids, I started to think about what books I would like to treat to such a deep read. I am an atheist but the idea of sacredness is fascinating to me. I do not believe that a thing must be divine to be sacred. Vonnegut famously said that Armistice Day was sacred and Veteran’s Day is not. As The Hold Steady says,

There’s gonna come a time when the true scene leaders
Forget where they differ and get big picture
’cause the kids at their shows, they’ll have kids of their own
The sing-a-long songs will be our scriptures

(Side note: As one of the former kids at the shows who now has kids of their own, I have been threatening for years to compile a book of sacred lyrics. Imagine a Book of Joe (Strummer), a Book of Elvis (Costello), a Book of Billy (Bragg), a Book of Eric (Bachmann), a Book of Tom (Waits), a book of Neko (Case), and a Book of Bruce (Springsteen). But that is a project that will have to wait, like so many others. So it goes.)

So what book could I choose? What book or books mean enough to me that it could stand up to that kind of deep read, that kind of scrutiny? I read a fair bit, and there might be others that I could do (Patrick Rothfuss, if you ever finish The Doors of Stone, I would definitely read The Kingkiller Chronicles this way), but only one series stood out as obvious: King’s The Dark Tower.

The Dark Tower is the story of the last gunslinger, Roland Deschain of Gilead, and his quest for the Dark Tower across a world that has moved on. The first book, The Gunslinger, was one of the first novels King wrote. First published as a novel in 1982, The Gunslinger took five previously published short stories and put them together. It is very different from his other work, the language being much sparser. When I first read it as a teen, I did not like it at all. King revised the book and re-published it in 2003, making it more consistent with the six novels that followed.

From February 2020 to January 2025, I exactly filled this Field Notes memo book with sparklets of text that I found compelling. I took a few long breaks in there, and I read lots and lots of other books in between. The first long break occurred in late 2020 into early 2021, when the darkness of The Waste Lands (book 3), in concurrence with the world at the time (COVID-19, American fascism), was negatively affecting my sleep and dreams. As I said to a friend at the time, “It’s hard to go into Lud when you know what is there.”

I took another break during book 4, Wizard and Glass. It’s my favorite book of the series, but, well, I know how it ends and I postponed that inevitability for a while. Charyou tree.

When the reading was finished, I entered all of the florilegia into a spreadsheet. Each book has its own sheet, with all of the sparklets concatenated in the last sheet. There are a total of 546 snippets of text. Most are phrases of a few words, though some are full sentences and a few are multiple sentences in length. Each is numbered in order so that I can return to the original order in which they occur in the text when I want to.

I then assigned each a random number and sorted by that number. I wanted to see how they would recombine randomly. I looked at this randomized list before I spent much time with the list in the original order. I had a thought, vaguely, that this integration of florilegia with the cut-up method of William S. Burroughs might produce something interesting, maybe even inspirational. Maybe poetry? Possibly even lyrics?

What I found astounded me, honestly. My first attempt to derive meaning, or at least comprehensiveness, resulted in this:

That was when you died / A study in severe blacks and whites / Guileless and dismayed / Truth is sometimes not the same as reality

To get this one, I let my eyes skim. They settled on the first line, followed immediately by the next two. Then I skipped over the next two lines to find the fourth line. So this little snippet of poetry, four lines, represents six lines of my spreadsheet. I think this first one that I found is among the very best so far.

I went back to the top and started at the very first line:

The amusement of a lunatic / A pleasing sense of redemption / Cozy as the devil / If that puzzles you / As though I’d lost gravity / For every hand stayed from violence / Wolves of a kind / An arduous party / The unconscious distaste of the ascetic

This represents the first 14 lines of the randomized list, skipping 5 lines in between that didn’t seem to fit. I found when writing this one that sometimes the sparklets work better in concert with the others with slight changes. “Pleasing sense of redemption” became “A pleasing sense of redemption.” If I take those lines and play with the structure a little, I get

The amusement of a lunatic–
A pleasing sense of redemption, cozy as the devil.
If that puzzles you, as though I’d lost gravity,
For every hand stayed from violence–
Wolves of a kind, an arduous party:
The unconscious distaste of the ascetic.

That feels like a poem. Is it a poem? Sure. I guess.

Some of the combinations truly feel like song lyrics. I play guitar, but I’ve never written a song. I wonder if sai King will sue me if I use these sparklets to write my first? Like this one. These four lines followed one another directly! It doesn’t seem possible that it’s random (but of course it is). I made one small change to the first line (changed the “could” to “can”) and another to the last (made it present tense, from the original “was it any wonder that wonder had run out?”).

Memory can be bashful / It is the voice of the Turtle / Tell me, for your Father’s sake / Is it any wonder that wonder has run out?

Some of the lines and combinations are clearly detectable as lines from The Dark Tower:

Depthless eyes / Wonders and miracles / The boy found the oracle and it almost destroyed him / A short but undeniably interesting life

To get that one, I had to skip over the lines from the previous grouping, but the last two lines randomly appeared together—a remarkably good pairing, do ya kennit? Other combinations seem to channel those who seem to have been inspired by the series, forming a potential closed loop of inspiration. For example, the following could be Nick Cave lyrics:

The unhappy wisdom of unhappy children / That prescient part of him / “I come unarmed and mean no ill” / But voices screeched and hollered / And a quicksilver shimmer / Rose up righteous

Or this one, that could be Tom Waits. I had to play with the structure, combining two lines into one a couple of times, but it reads brilliantly:

Almost untethered from the world
My very words, burned by her regard
The ageless stranger won’t worry that old knot
He must go on alone
The antithesis of emotion
The last time pays for all: These are memories he denies.

And I’ll end here, with sai King commenting unwillingly, out of context, and out of order upon our current state of affairs: Fascism, cruelty, and fear ascendent in the land.

It is the custom of this country: Relentless unmeaning cruelty.
The word degenerated, bitter as tears,
Like the world upon whose hide he walked.

It feels like I did a thing, even though I don’t know what it accomplished. I will continue mining this source and finding new meanings. I will look for combinations of meaning in the original order, and I may even continue re-randomizing them to find new ones over time.

Anyway, this trip through the waste lands to the Tower is done. It’s never easy. You say true, I say thankya.