Tidepools Of Primal Blood - Re-reading Cormac McCarthy

 

Random Note From Tumblr (user "iskarieot"): 

"....try explaining wtf this man is up to like so its like the twilight zone but not as a western where a greek chorus is metaphysically present at all times during the destruction of sodom and gomorrah while ur english teacher gets off on trying to make u spell the most obscure words known to the english language also OLD TESTAMENT RETRIBUTION...." 

No shit. In that same post she also says:

#u cant recommend his books to anyone like
#u need to be in a Headspace a specific one
#couldnt explain what it is tho
#just gotta know
#cormac mccarthy

 This may be one of the truest "street" evaluations of McCarthy's work I've ever seen. I mean, really, how do you go about reading stuff like this:

"He sat watching while the sun dipped hissing in the swells. The horse stood darkly against the sky. The surf boomed in the dark and the sea’s black hide heaved in the cobbled starlight and the long pale combers loped out of the night and broke along the beach. He rose and turned toward the lights of the town. The tide-pools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. 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."

 ...without eventually becoming lost in the imagery and language, finally giving up on even bothering to discover a thread of it to stitch it to the story about two seconds before you realize it is no more separate from the novel than fat and muscle and tendon and viscera are separate from the body?

I so get why so many people hate his writing, I really do. As "lizziemack" says: 

#because like brah i like me some punctuation in my dystopian fiction

But, as I've said before, if I could write like that I'd walk away from everything and do nothing else for the rest of my life. A dream, that, bound by reality:

The  world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Anyhow, there are a lot of literary critics who consider "Blood Meridian" the finest American novel ever written, head and shoulders above anything Melville ever did. Is that true? I dunno. 

 

I know it's ultraviolent, practically every page soaked in blood, but I also know that the book is as much about violence as Moby Dick is about whales. I know I'm nearly the only person in my life who's actually read it. I know that fanatic readers are not infrequently called "masochistic" by those same critics. And I know I won't argue either description -- that it's the finest American novel ever written nor that immersing oneself in it is an act of masochism for the sake of art. Maybe for the sake of truth, too, although they are often only vaguely related. As McCarthy would have it:

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Eh, OK, enough fanboy shit. Perhaps a real post next time. It's just that I've again started plowing through "Blood Meridian"; long overdue really, but as always the reading is wrestling a mule-drawn blade peeling black furrows through thick loam unbroken for years. The dark organic smell of it so rich you can almost chew it and the sweat of the hard work put into carving down through those layers always sets in me a jealous rage of admiration.

Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.

Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

 The only question at this point is how long it will be before I pull my head out of the book long enough to post here. Or do any other useful thing.