Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy

I’m not even 100 pages in to Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West and I already feel backed up with information, impulse, response … there’s so much going on, and the writing is so off the charts … that I find myself feeling almost anxious. It’s like I want to slow it all down, so I can savor it … but that’s not possible. I must just keep going. And not try to hang onto this experience, or prolong it, but let it go … as it is happening. The book itself is brutal, one of the most brutal I have ever read. It’s casually brutal. This is not a world that is fair, or just, or clear. When something terrible happens, there is no preparation. Cormac McCarthy does not ease you into the horror. Because that’s not how it goes sometimes. Horror begins, and leaves you – the participant – in a frenzied state of playing catch-up, trying to interpret, organize, make sense … But life doesn’t give you that time.

For some reason it makes me think of one of my favorite small moments in the movie True Romance. Patricia Arquette’s character, Alabama, comes back to the motel room to find Jim Gandolfini, the murderer, waiting for her. The fight doesn’t break out right away. Alabama knows she is going to be killed. Jim Gandolfini knows he will kill her, so he’s relaxed. He chats with her, reminiscing about murders he has committed, in an almost calm fond manner, totally psychotic. She giggles, trying to stall for time. Finally, the fight breaks out. And when it comes, it is horrifying. Sweepingly so. She gives as good as she gets. She’s just a girl in a jiggly bra and skintight leopard pants but she wants to live. She fights hard for her life. At one point, Gandolfini throws her into the tub and she crashes through the glass shower door. She falls into the tub, covered in broken glass, bloody – and with a roar he comes at her – and Arquette is so brilliant in this next moment – Instead of screaming, “No” or “Stop” … she screams at him, “WAIT.” Wait. (Clip here) Wait for me to get myself together so we can keep fighting. I’m too bloody, I’m all a mess, I can’t see, my eye is swollen closed, I need a second to regroup … just WAIT. She hopes for a fair fight. I so relate to her in that moment. It makes no sense. Why should he “wait” for you to get yourself together, clean yourself up, before attacking again? But of course she is on another plane, not a logical plane – but a truthful plane nonetheless. It is her life force, her determination to LIVE – even if it means killing him – that makes her scream, “WAIT!” Violence happens suddenly. A car crash comes with no warning. You are chatting, or listening to music – and suddenly you are flying off a bridge. There is no “wait” – and yet as humans, we want it to “wait”, so we have a fighting chance. It’s desperate. It makes total sense, despite its illogicality. And so Blood Meridian reminds me of that moment of Patricia Arquette, bloody and cut up in the shower, her nose broken, screaming, “WAIT” up at her brutal killer.

At times I feel brutalized reading Blood Meridian, and feel frightened that I wasn’t given time to prepare. And I scream “Wait” up at Cormac McCarthy, but by then it’s too late. The attack has already begun. And I just have to endure it, the best I can. But that’s the way life is sometimes. The moments of kindness (like the cavalry guys giving the kid a blanket, and some food) are few and far between – and end up making even less sense than the moments of violence. Kindness doesn’t add up. It’s nice, sure … but it has very little resonance. Not up against the violence of that world – its people and the landscape. So there’s that level of reader experience … which actually works on two separate planes: the writing is so fucking good that I am having a hard time even processing it. It’s not clever or verbose or … it doesn’t even feel literary, although it is indeed literature, of the highest order. The words on the page thrum through me, like a drum heard in the distance. I read Michael Chabon and think, My God, I wish I could use words like that!! Cormac McCarthy doesn’t bring up that response in me … it’s something else entirely. It’s like being confronted with something grand and eternal and terrible … and having to somehow process it, or try to understand it … before just giving up, surrendering to the mystery. Throwing up your hands and saying, “What the hell. I have no idea how to process this.” It’s language that doesn’t even feel written to me.

And so – in a similar way that the characters are confronted, on a visceral level, by the landscape – the desert, the mountains, the lack of life anywhere – the way it makes them feel small, and yet also highly visible – frighteningly visible – I am confronted by the book. I have no words for it, I can only speak in metaphors about it. Plot seems secondary, although I am already aware of events moving into place with a terrible inevitability. I am only 100 pages in. It leaves me wanting to cry out, “Wait”. I had a similar sensation when reading The Road (excerpt here). I do not know how he does what he does, and I find it difficult to even talk about, or try to describe. It is an experience. It comes through the senses – it’s an overwhelmingly sensory experience – which is why I sometimes find it hard to process any of it. Sensory overload. I can feel that major themes are coming up. That this book is Biblical in its scope and intent. But meanwhile, I am blinded by the sun, and I can feel the parched dehydration, and I am dazzled by the endless plain in front of me. Hard to focus. Hard to hone in on what is going on. Fantastic. And then there’s the moments of violence which surge forward, take over with no warning, and then dissolve – as we all move on. The Comanche attack is one of those moments … and you realize that McCarthy has been building up to it in the chapter before, with the endless trek through the lifeless plain … the landscape itself takes on a malevolent aspect. Like it is out to get them. Or like it is trying to communicate something to them … but they don’t know how to listen. All they know is that everyone has a really bad feeling. So when the Comanches appear, as one, out of the dust – too late to flee, too late to mount an attack – you feel a dread, overwhelming … and then before you have a chance to prepare, you’re in the thick of it. And it feels like McCarthy writes the attack in one continuous sentence – although I went back and re-read it, and no … there are many sentences. It’s written in a normal grammatically correct way, with commas and periods. But it feels like one unbroken flow of terror, events hurtling forward at breakneck speed, horrors witnessed and endured, horrors upon horrors. You scream “Wait” … but no one hears. Or if they do, they certainly don’t give a fuck that you need more time to prepare for it.

Here’s an excerpt. It’s lengthy. It’s from the section before the Comanche attack, that I mentioned above. I read it in probably 5 minutes my first time through – and I could feel the depth of it, the bottomless pit of it, I could feel the sheer mastery of this writing – almost invisible in its skill – it feels like a first-hand experience, but my God, it is not – it is writing. And as I read it, I found myself thinking – “Okay. Gonna need to re-read this. I can’t take it all in right now.” Had to just keep moving, keep going, don’t stop, don’t look back … let it wash through, over, under … don’t interpret. Because interpretation is laughable in such a universe as the one McCarthy describes.

EXCERPT FROM Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy:

In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the wagon-tired grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now.

They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the wagons and the wheeze of the animals. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick on their moustaches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.

All night the wind blew and the fine dust set their teeth on edge. Sand in everything, grit in all they ate. In the morning a urinecolored sun rose blearily through panes of dust on a dim world and without feature. The animals were failing. They halted and made a dry camp without wood or water and the wretched ponies huddled and whimpered like dogs.

That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses’ trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlighning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream.