(One night in 1955 - Two men on horses on a mesa overlooking El Paso/Juarez.)
It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it?
Yes. It does.
There's a lot of things look better at a distance.
Yeah?
I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one.
Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.
― Cormac McCarthy, "Cities of the Plain"
Been pretty sick the last couple of days. The kind of sick where you're worn down to nothing and you sleep all the time and you've coughed so much that your ribs are on fire and your throat is raw as hamburger. I've been gritting my teeth and holding it together in front of the Beneficiary. I smiled and told her it was nothing, just a little fever, and the only reason I wasn't going to get up and go to work was that I have time I have to burn before the end of the year.
If she'd gotten a glimpse of what was going on inside, she'd have called off work and made me go to a doc. But it's a virus, docs can't do anything with it, and she'd have wasted a day and day's worth of worry and I'd have been the same except with a pocketful of whatever nostrums the doc prescribed to get her out of his ass and a miserable car trip I didn't need into the bargain.
She wasn't convinced. She knew my history. She knew my pain tolerance. All my life she's talked to my docs, and they'd told her the same things they'd told me, that if I was ever really feeling bad I need to go in because if it was bad enough for me to notice it, I might be in real trouble.
I wasn't worried about it. I get this sick every couple of years or so with some damned thing or another, which, being honest about it, is a fair enough trade for not getting sick at all the rest of the time, not being allergic to anything up to and including poison sumac or ivy, and having a cast iron stomach that seems utterly immune to everything from foods way past their use-by date to stuff that most people — most Americans, anyway — wouldn't even count as food. Putting up with this bullshit is just me putting in my dues, y'know? Certainly not worth her missing a couple of days work over. It's bad enough that I can't drag my own busted-up, raggedy corpse in to the job without compounding it by getting her time and job into it.
But you've heard all this before. Look back a couple of years, you'll probably see me bitching about being knocked down by some little sliver of DNA strands arranged in a quasi-life order. Might even be the same bug as got me this year. Pretty sure it's not flu. (shrug) Who knows.
At any rate, after two days I pulled my shit together this morning and went in. I had to. There were things pending there that had to be done, no-kidding important things, things to change the directions of lives, and I have no patience for this bug getting between me and those who need to be touched.
But I'm done for now, another ҂҂҂҂҂҂ ҂҂ ҂҂҂҂҂҂҂ under control, another ҂҂҂҂ ҂҂҂ ҂҂҂҂ ҂҂ ҂҂҂ ҂҂ ҂ ҂҂҂҂҂҂ ҂҂҂҂ ҂҂҂҂҂҂, and I've congratulated myself, slamming a couple of double vodkas in the hope of sleep, and immersing myself in McCarthy's[1] Border Trilogy, all while headphones subject me to the gentle, vicious blooding of Dolores O'Riordan songs from probably twenty years ago, stropping that glittering razor against my flesh, bleeding herself white through my wounds…
All my life
Is changing every day
In every possible way
In all my dreams
It's never quite as it seems
Never quite as it seems
Do you believe I was a huge fan of the Cranberries? Me neither, but there it is. That little Irish girl sang to parts in here that surprised me to find. Still surprises me, actually. I never saw her more than a couple of times in a row when she even looked the same, but she was always right down into the middle of me every time she opened her mouth. Fascinating. Check these three out, for example:
When You're Gone
Dreams
Promises
Anyhow, back to McCarthy. The trilogy is the story of two men — boys, really, 16 and 19 years old — who never meet until the last book (Cities Of The Plain). And at the end of their adventures (which word doesn't begin to express the depth and complexity of their stories through southwest Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Mexico,) they are about 19 and 28 years old, and it's 1952. The last few lines of the main story describe the departure of the older from the ranch where they'd been working as range cowboys, and then…well, read it yourself:
What time will you be leavin?
Early of the mornin.
You told Oren?
No sir. Not yet.
I reckon you'll see him at breakfast.
Yessir.
But he didn't. He rode out in the dark long before daylight and he rode the sun up and he rode it down again. In the oncoming years a terrible drought struck west Texas. He moved on. There was no work in that country anywhere. Pasture gates stood open and sand drifted in the roads and after a few years it was rare to see stock of any kind and he rode on. Days of the world. Years of the world. Till he was old.
In practically the next sentence, it is 2002, and he is 78 years old, sleeping rolled in his bedroll under highway overpasses, dreaming of his family, all dead since the 1930s (described in excruciating detail in "The Crossing" — the second book of the trilogy.)
And there's the thing: Two novel-length, high-density books to describe a couple of years out of a ten-year patch of his life, and a single paragraph for the rest[2]. I almost got vertigo when I read it. And I realized that pretty well describes my life. A few years that are writ large where I learned to be who I am — then, suddenly, I'm banging up against the end of it. The path I set in those blazing years launched me on autopilot to here, the entire ballistic parabola describable in a single short formula. Maybe that's everyone's life, I dunno. Seems like I ought to make some effort to do better. Or write larger. Or something.
__________________________________________
Notes:
[1] Cormac McCarthy, in case I've not made it clear, is probably the best American — maybe best English-language - author in the last hundred years. As I've said before, if I could write like he does, I'd quit my job and do nothing else the rest of my life, happy even if I never sold a word of it.
[2] Not quite accurate — there are a few more pages of story to be told as he comes to an understanding. He was dreaming of his little sister who had died 70 years before when he was eight years old:
He woke and lay in the dark and the cold and he thought of her and he thought of his brother dead in Mexico. In everything that he'd ever thought about the world and about his life in it he'd been wrong.
In Our Next Episode: I consider whether this should have gone on the other blog. Then, whether it matters. Also, I finally manage to cough just hard enough to actually separate and blow through the sutures between the bone plates in my skull, making "blowing the top of my head off" more than just a colorful metaphor. Should be a good time.
Ditto. Got all three of their CDs when they were current. I don't do that.
ReplyDeleteCormac, a great old Irish name, the best of the High Kings. Greatness in writing is harder for me to know. It's not in his style. His style reads clumsily to me. There must be a depth of understanding I'm just not deep enough to get. This separates the writer from the artist, I suppose, or the artist from the mage.
He's a different kind of read, and no doubt, and I imagine he's not everyone's cuppa. All I know is that I'm an enormous fan of his southwest books and series. I've spent a fair chunk of my life up on the high desert, and been around all his characters most of my life, seems like.
ReplyDeleteMy grandmother came west as a little girl in a wagon (literally,) moving into what was then "Indian Territories," in what was later far west Oklahoma. They'd settle for awhile, and as soon as her dad started bringing in some money, he'd get the itchy foot and pack up the whole family and move again, all over Oklahoma and Texas. She died at 106, still telling stories of those days.
Recently had the latest husband of one of my aunts die. He was nearly 90, and was killed (although the dying took a long time) of a horse he was breaking rolling on him, breaking his pelvis and his leg in two places and mashing all his ribs to powder. All he gave a shit about in his whole life was his little ranch up in the wasteland of the Texas panhandle, a few cows he kept, and his horses. He lived and breathed horses, and I think knowing he wasn't ever going to be back in a saddle again killed him faster than the busted up parts. He was, as they say in these parts, a good ol' boy. If he said something, it was Word from the Mountain. He never once told a lie or didn't keep his word that I know of, and I don't think he understood people who could.
To this day I go every couple of years to camp for a week or two in the high deserts of Wyoming or Texas. And when I read McCarthy's writing, I can practically smell the campfire and the sagebrush and creosote and mesquite under a cloud-scudded moon and remember my uncle's and gran's stories of the old days. So, a different background probably contributes to what I get out of McCarthy. But more than that, I just love his writing.
"...she said that rash men were a great temptation to women and this was simply a misfortune like others and there was little that could be done to remedy it....she said that if women were drawn to rash men it was only that in their secret hearts they knew that a man who would not kill for them was of no use at all.” (The Crossing)