Link to OCaEN's lyrics:
http://www.darkillity.net/lyr_of_chaos_and_eternal_night.php (thanks Nt3N).
I had to go and read part of Paradise Lost
and OCaEN again the other night just to refresh my memory about the main themes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found Milton's poem much easier to digest than DT's song.
To be honest, I don't think the two are so closely related that it's possible to make a direct comparison between them, either plot- or inspiration-wise. PL is one of those examples of very good literature that is only
supposedly serving a certain purpose, while in fact it's just plain beautiful because the author was very inspired and really managed to channel immortal imagery while basically deciding that there was going to be a moral/religious background for his work. OCaEN is - I believe - a song about subversion of aesthetic and intellectual standards, where religion and morals appear rarely and almost by coincidence. On the one hand you have a great epic about the Fall of Man, while on the other there's a personal take on how opposites merge, repel, affect.
I'll get to OCaEN in a bit. It makes sense that its title is meant to create a mental connection with Milton's PL in the listener: in PL a variation on the phrase occurs three times, each in one of the first three books: "Of Chaos and
old Night" / "Of Chaos and
ancient night" / "Of Chaos and
eternal Night". In the context of the poem the repetition with an increasingly powerful adjective is a symbol of the descent of Satan's rule over mankind: the darkness that engulfs the world is progressively understood by reason and senses as long, then remote, then everlasting. Chaos, of course, doesn't just sit idly by: by definition, it's impossible to qualify something chaotic without breaking it down to its components, and I imagine Milton wanted to preserve the feeling of incomprehensible turmoil intact without adding anything to the word. This is as far as my limited literary knowledge goes. But, as I said, I don't think DT's OCaEN probes the depths of PL much further than this: the connection I think I can recognize is one between the idea of darkness as - basically - a sign of evil, and the desire to rehabilitate the night as the immediate connection with the world of the spirit and the creativity it may inspire.
DT's song begins with the declaration that we're about to read a short
tale. But what is this story actually about? Not much "happens" during the narration, as shown by the fact that the present tense prevails, and many verses lack a complete structure in terms of subject, verb, and so on. Clearly this is not random* and the "tale" of the first line is simply a mental journey into the darkness of the spirit. The author has decided to willingly subject himself to the torture of exploring the recesses of what lives in the darkest realms of his mind: several visions follow during his descent, and human passions such as pride and fear are mentioned as examples of residual traces of feelings that are left behind during the journey towards the core of the self.
Soon after the first contact is made the author realizes in very certain terms that the metaphorical substitution of all that is light (good/pure/right) with all that is dark does not prejudice the ability to live or - what's more, although this is certainly less apparent - the ability to create.
Fire, as a symbol of chaos, replaces subdued emotions where they used to dwell: why settle for one
strangled teardrop when you can let fire invade the whole throat, fill the self? The process of approaching total darkness soon becomes a transfigurating experience meant to liberate primal forces in some sort of mental chthonic ritual (note the pounding of drums, the striking of chords, the screams)
Everywhere in the song there are passages where conflicting emotions clash or dance with each other, except they're not always
obviously conflicting, or obviously clashing, because luckily for all of us DT is not a band that goes for the banal and the repetitive. But consider
vanity re-interpreted as a demonic (
hooved) turbulent force in someone's set of values; or
grace which finds its outlet in
hatred.
As ever so often in DT songs, the dissolution of the self is the looming danger/desire the lies at the end of the narrator's path: I think it's undeniable that the observation that even opposite forces in the world can be reduced to one single pole compromises the idea of defining
you as "what is not me" and vice-versa. It's even possible that, waiting
in shadows for our mortal enemy we realize that the image concealed was our own as seen in a distorting, imperfect
mirror
My favorite part of the song are the lines about
fires weaving patterns: how keen is the observation that destruction is not the only function of chaos and turmoil, but also creation and reason (
patterns are discernible, they belong to the realm of logic).
Other than this, I've got nothing. It's all Villain's fault anyway.
*It's never random. And if you're the author and you're thinking: "Wait a second, that was so random!", well, you're wrong. Critics always know.
