Chester Bennington and King Hamlet

Last night, I watched Kill_mR_DJ's mashup of the Linkin Park songs "The Emptiness Machine" and "Guilty All the Same." Yes, watched, and not listened only. I don't usually watch music videos, but I watched this one.

The video begins with the new, Emily Armstrong-fronted Linkin Park performing. When, around the 45-second mark, the late lamented Chester Bennington runs onto the stage, as if returned from the sunless house of Hades, it caused an unexpected emotional reaction: goosebumps, tears, and the sudden thought of a line from Hamlet: "In the same figure, like the King that's dead."

He and Emily are great together. As the top comment on the video puts it, "I love how Linkin Park sounds together with Linkin Park."

Today I noticed in my blogroll a new post, "Far Over Misty Mountains Cold," by The Saxon Cross, a blog I haven't visited in a good long time. It turned out to be a video, and I was no longer in a video mood, so I just read the Tolkien poem of the title, reprinted below the video. At the bottom of the page were a few links to older posts. One called "Black Hole Sun" caught my eye because that phrase has been in the sync stream from time to time, so I clicked. It's about Chris Cornell but also includes an unexpected reference to Chester Bennington:

If you do a quick google search on the issue, you will quickly find claims that Cornell was working with DJ Avicii (Tim Bergling), Linkin Park lead singer Chester Bennington, and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain on a documentary film about child trafficking before all four were suicided by the elites they were going to expose. The rings they were going to expose apparently involved Jeffery Epstein.

If Chester was indeed "suicided" (i.e., murdered), that adds potential meaning to last night's spontaneous thought connecting him with the ghost of the murdered King Hamlet, returned to earth to seek revenge.

HAMLET.

Speak, I am bound to hear.

GHOST.

So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.

Here's another excerpt from the "Black Hole Sun" post:

Occult groups have always been obsessed with youth, there seems to be some idea of sacrifice in exchange for the extension of the material life. It is reminiscent of Cypher's betrayal in The Matrix, where he decides to live in blissful ignorance inside the machine rather than face the hard truth. This is what Saturn offers.

That sounds like "The Emptiness Machine." Bill has connected me with the character Cypher before. Cypher, spelt like that and capitalized, is Shakespeare's word for "zero" in the Prologue to Henry V, and "The Emptiness Machine" is from the album From Zero.

At the bottom of the "Black Hole Sun" post was, again, a handful of links to earlier posts, including "Idylls of the King." Tennyson has been in the sync stream -- most recently earlier today, in "The white pebble, Peter, Humpty, and the key" -- so again I clicked. Unsurprisingly, the post begins with a quotation from the poem from which it takes its name:

Strike for the King and die! and if thou diest,

The King is King, and ever wills the highest.

Hamlet's mission, too, is to "strike for the King," and in the end he dies.

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Note added: The Linkin Park video even includes a bald bearded guy with a headset, more than a little reminiscent of Cypher in his betrayal scene: