Booknotes: Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian

by
Cormac McCarthy

I seem to be in a mood to read books that give shape and meaning to the violence I’m seeing around me, that my country is creating and manifesting. I’d avoided McCarthy’s magnum opus for years; now seemed the right time to engage with it.

My experience of reading this book was of punctuation. I would breeze through long sections, of travel, of dialog between characters, of some of the bloodiest violence I’ve ever read. And then I would come upon a passage, a few brief lines, that would stop me, and I would re-read it, again and again, following the arc and melody of the language, conjuring the wild imagery and metaphor, wondering at McCarthy’s skill and boldness.

So what follows is not so much my notes and thoughts as just a collection of passages that I couldn’t stop thinking about. Better readers and thinkers than me have called it the Great American Novel, but as with, say, “the Great Gatsby”, this is a novel about the void of America, the empty and vicious heart of this place, thinly papered over as it is with self-satisfaction and explosive pageantry. And, for a “Great American Novel”, it’s literally a book about American killers of Indians and colonialism, describing their inhuman and bestial activities with poetically lush and shockingly viceral language. If America is a void, emptied of the European languages and cultures that forged it, what fills that void and anchors it to the land is violence.

I could find so many more things to say about this strange and powerful book, but I think it’s easier to just let McCarthy’s prose speak for itself.

1.) P. 20, the words of the old hermit who takes in the child after he first flees arrest

A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

2.) P. 152, Judge Holden, describing the abandoned cave dwellings of the [ancestral Pueblo]

All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us.

3.) P. 158, the Glanton gang, riding across the deserts, seeking Native people to kill

Under a gibbous moon horse and rider spanceled to their shadows on the snowblue ground and in each flare of lightning as the storm advanced those selfsame forms rearing with a terrible redundancy behind them like some third aspect of their presence hammered out black and wild upon the naked grounds. They rode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.

4.) P. 117, the landscape as antognist, as persistant adversary

Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some said they’d heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang. Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what? And if the dried and blackened shell of him is found among the sands by travelers to come yet who can discover the engine of his ruin?

5.) P. 180, the Judge, as scholar, as archaeologist, and as iconoclastic defiler

The rocks about in every sheltered place were covered with ancient paintings and the judge was soon among them copying out those certain ones into his book to take them away with him. They were of men and animals and of the chose and there were curious birds and arcane maps and there were constructions of such singular vision as to justify every fear of man and the things that are in him. Of these etchings–some bright yet with color–there were hundreds, and yet the judge went among them with assurance, tracing out the very ones which he required. When he had done and while there yet was light he returned to a certain stone ledge and sat a while and studied again the work there. Then he rose and with a piece of broken chert he scappled away one of the designs, leaving no trace of it only a raw place on the stone where it had been. Then he put up his book and returned to the camp.

6.) P. 316, the Child, on the coast of San Diego, seeing the ocean for the first time, with a wild horse and foal walking along the shore

Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship’s light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

7.) P 322, the Child, hallucinating after recovering from surgery and fleeing the Glanton gang

In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there symstem by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing. In the white and empty room he stood in his bespoken suit with his hat in his hand and he peered down with his small and lashless pig’s eyes wherein this child just sixteen years on earth could read whole bodies of decisions not accountable to the courts of men and he saw his own name which nowhere else could he have ciphered out at all logged into the records as a thing already accomplished, a traveler known in jurisdictions only in the claims of certain pensioners or on old dated maps.