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Authority and the failed justification of evil in Cormac McCarthy's Blood meridian, or The evening redness in the West

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Authority and the failed justification of evil in Cormac McCarthy's Blood meridian, or The evening redness in the West

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Content i Authority and the Failed Justification of Evil in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness in the West by Cody Todd _____________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING) August 2013 ii Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank the editors of these publications in which the following poems originally appeared: Arch Journal: “For Lucia Berlin” Bat City Review: “Ophelia dans le noir” Blueline: “Phillip Marlowe” (Published as “Etc.”) The Columbia Review: “In the constellation of what is” Conduit: “The Blue Rose” Denver Quarterly: “Cody Jo” Faultline: “Han Solo” The Florida Review: “O 15th Letter” Forklift, Ohio: “Mayakovsky” The Gettysburg Review: “In Broomfield,” & “Elegy” Grist: “Graffiti Signatures:” (stone Pillars in Venice, Ca) (In slightly different form) Harpur Palatte: “Graffiti Signatures:” (a schoolyard light pole in Denver, The Prague Orgy, within an alleyway in Chicago, under a bridge in Pittsburgh and Purgatory, & painted over earthquake rubble in Santiago, Chile) Hunger Mountain: “Elegy for Miroslav Holub,” “Missives from the Canon Ignoble,” & “Lullaby” Konundrum Engine Literary Review: “Broken Syntax for the Streets of Economy” La Fovea: “Tupac Shakur” & "Whirlpool" Lake Effect: “The Ludlow Massacre of 1914” & “Camera” Main Street Rag: “Dying Astronomer” & “9th Letter Road through Topanga Canyon” The Literary Review: “A Hog's Heart” & “Dearest Iago,” New Millennium Writings: “Prayer” Oranges & Sardines: “West Nile” & “Santa Ana Winds” The Pedestal: “Origami from Folded Money" (robbery at the mint & always two-sided) The Pinch: “Elder in the Grain” Precipitate: “Jesse James Todd” roger: “The Calf” Salt Hill: “Almost Nothing Good” & “Query of a Die” Shampoo: “William Carlos Williams” & “A 21st Letter Turn” SOFTBLOW: “Graffiti Signatures:” (on a rooftop in the 9th Ward: God like a sweater) Soujourn: “Neon Narcissus” Specs Journal: “Turntablism” Spork: “Graffiti Signatures:” haiku stenciled between storefronts along Melrose Avenue: Sub-Lit: "Graffiti Signatures:” (covering a subway car in Brooklyn) & "Origami from Folded Money” (the larceny) “Graffiti Signature” (a schoolyard light pole in Denver), “To Frankenstein, My Father,” “Query of a Die,” “City Elegy,” “Broken Syntax for the Streets of Economy,” iii “Mayakovsky,” “TuPac Shakur,” & “Neon Narcissus” were printed in the chapbook, To Frankenstein, My Father by Proem Press, 2007 (18 pages). “Cody Jo” was the winner of the Edward W. Moses Prize at the University of Southern California in 2011 selected by contest judge Anna Journey. This poem was also featured on the One Pause Poetry Project website (www.onepausepoetry.org). “Neon Narcissus” was reprinted in The Loudest Voice Anthology Vol. 1 (Figueroa Press, 2010). Heartfelt thanks and gratitude goes out to my committee for their relentless patience, support, inspiration, time, and feedback. William Handley is the architect of the critical component of this project. This essay would not be possible without our numerous discussions and seminars on the works selected. Thank you: William Deverrell, who provided valuable insight and feedback; David St. John, for your precious and ample support and advice; and Marianne Wiggins, for your generous advice on my writing and the clarity of my arguments. An immeasurable amount of thanks to my Chair, Mark Irwin, who has not only helped me see these works in radically new lights, but has shaped the artist and writer I will be for the rest of my life. Finally, a special thanks goes to my advisor, Janalynn Bliss, whose selfless commitment to the successes of graduate students in our department will and should never go on without a sincere and heartfelt acknowledgement. This dissertation was made possible with a generous fellowship from the Literature and Creative Writing program in the English department at USC. I also am grateful to Richard Edinger and Penny Von Helmolt for their support in the Thematic iv Option Honors Program, which has allowed my teaching to inform both my creative and critical work. I am also grateful to my colleagues and students at USC, for their commitment and love for both me and my work as a poet and a scholar. Particularly, I would like to thank: Josie Sigler, Jessica Piazza, Genevieve Kaplan, Susan McCabe, Andrew Allport, Seth Michaelson, Amaranth Borsuk, William Hagberg, Kelli Noftle, and Andrew Wessels. Finally, I thank my wife, Starr Todd, my mother, father, and two brothers— Jesse and Kyle—for their endless love and support. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Abstract vi Authority and the Failed Justification of Evil in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness in the West 1 Conclusion 60 Bibliography 75 Appendix A: Graffiti Signatures 78 Notes on Graffiti Signatures 145 vi Abstract In its examination of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness in the West (arguably one of the most violent and enigmatic novels of the American tradition), this dissertation investigates how violence, rebellion, immorality, and Manifest Destiny function in McCarthy’s novel and what their implications may be on American settlement in the southwest. Not considered a dystopia, McCarthy’s dark vision for humanity and the American grain certainly serve as a mirror through which humankind can reconcile with its own violent tendencies. Through a comprehensive critique of Judge Holden, the novel’s villain, I argue that Holden represent a radically figurative notion of evil in which he stakes a claim against the natural order of the universe. While Holden is ultimately the victor of Blood Meridian, I argue that his justification of war as humankind’s ultimate “practice” falls short because his validations for violence are inevitably specious and illogical. Using a rich blend of literary criticism and Lacanian theory, I show how Holden dominates the symbolic order of the novel. Therein a paradox lies for him and the rest of the novel’s characters: while all of Blood Meridian’s outlaws are lethal, savage, brutal, and pungent miscreants, they are effectively reabsorbed by the state for the purposes of empire-building and white American settlement throughout the American west. They inhabit spaces of lawlessness and law enforcement simultaneously and their paradox only further underscores the judge’s unjustified will to power. I also examine the ramifications that Cormac McCarthy’s creative imagination has had on my own poetry. While my work situates itself in the present, the poems of Graffiti Signatures engage with many of the formal questions investigated in the critical vii component of this dissertation. Graffiti Signatures is largely informed by the relationship between humankind and nature, violence, history, and tracking the borrowed psychologies of various renegades such as Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlow, the street artist and political misfit known as Banksy, or the rapper TuPac Shakur. 1 Authority and the Failed Justification of Evil in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness in the West In the tradition of the literary western, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West follows the journey of the Glanton Gang—a brigade of deviants, criminals, killers, and outcasts—in a violent odyssey of scalping and murdering the land’s indigenous inhabitants in order to clear the territories for the settlement of white Americans. Because violence is so imbedded in the landscape of McCarthy’s novel, there is something admirable about the survival of its nomads, no matter how diabolic and unforgivable their actions. It is arguably one of the most violent books in the American literary tradition; in the book’s first chapter, its protagonist, “the kid,” accidentally kills his own mother in childbirth: he is “the creature who would carry her off.” i The novel’s argument assumes that human nature easily succumbs to ubiquitous violence from birth to adulthood. Men also kill for petty and imaginary reasons, as we later see in this chapter, where Judge Holden incites a mob in Nacogdoches to lynch Reverend Green for bestiality and sexual assault on a child. These reasons for Green’s due conviction and punishment later appear otherwise fictive and invented when the Judge admits that he never “laid eyes on the man before today” (9). Motiveless, random, inherent, and altogether destructive, the human violence serves as a primary theme throughout Blood Meridian. While McCarthy’s novel is not qualified as a dystopia, the tenacity of bloodshed and the sheer lack of moral certainty contribute to a dark vision situated in American history. Whereas a novel like A Brave New World or 1984 “looks ahead,” McCarthy’s novel looks backward, acknowledging the depravity and blood-lust of American 2 expansion. While the violence of Blood Meridian implicates Manifest Destiny, the ideological justification of the latter falls short—at least in the minds of its characters. The kid, Toadvine, John Joel Glanton, and company are outlaws. They occupy spaces outside the realm of society. They are mobile, survivalists and men of the frontier. They adhere to very vague (if not inexistent) moral imperatives in this very harrowing portrayal of how the West was inevitably “won” at the cost of Indian removal in the Southwest just after the Mexican-American War. However, their status as outlaws remains unclear because they are elicited into the ranks of soldiers, displaying a will towards, and capacity for, violence that exhibits their usefulness in the national campaign of slaughter and genocide. In short, they both are and are not outlaws, exhibiting a paradoxical relationship between their rebellion against, and subsequent conscription by, a society and greater authority structure they both reject and serve. This study will begin to attempt to answer the following questions: Where does Blood Meridian fit within the context of Western American literature, and why is its violence so excessive and arbitrary? How does McCarthy’s novel treat Manifest Destiny in a context of pervasive violence, genocide, and masculinity? McCarthy’s novel is an audacious statement on the American tendency towards violence, and an even more alarming tendency of the contemporary individual who undergoes historical and cultural amnesia when it comes to addressing or confronting that violence, but what exactly is Blood Meridian’s historical message? What is the role of the outlaw in McCarthy’s narrative and what are its implications in terms of empire building for the United States? Violence permeates the novel’s language, in the landscape of its setting, and recurs as points of conversation and discourse among the characters. Violence in and against 3 nature also repeatedly takes place throughout the novel as well. It would suffice then to say that Blood Meridian seeks to remind us of the indivisibility of the human from tendencies towards violence. If we keep this sentiment in mind, and couple them with the arguments of the novel’s most dynamic character, Judge Holden, we may then conclude that McCarthy’s novel suggests that human violence and warfare is in fact a rebellion against the natural order of the universe. Judge Holden abides by ideas of American exceptionalism, of violence as the most valuable and most inherent of human traits, and in reclaiming and renaming as an ultimate mode of conquest. He is, in short, a radical face of evil in the face of authority. Through him, an odd paradox thus arises for the other bandits in McCarthy’s novel: if an outlaw is defined by its very transgression against an authoritative body, ruler, or society, then what do we make of its rebellion against nature and the tangible world? What role does radical evil and free will serve for the abhorrent Judge Holden? The judge appears before us as radically figurative. His motivations are never forthright, and he evades the critical understanding of both Blood Meridian’s characters and readers. Always proto- Darwinian in his behavior of recording the natural landscape of the novel, we see that he uses a false notion of Darwinian order as a justification of evil. This illustrates his advocacy for violence and warfare and a disdain against the natural world. While he has often been critically assessed as an American Satan, (if one compares Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor from The Brother’s Karamazov to Judge Holden), we can see both characters align on the concept of the failed justification of evil as it relates to free will two reasons. First, that man must rebel against some mythological or theological creator and possess a responsibility for his actions, thoughts, and behavior. 4 Second, that moral or ethical explanations of the universe are unfit to dictate human behavior when its savior has “departed” them and therefore “handed the work” of survival and of morality onto them. McCarthy sketches Judge Holden in a radically figurative manner especially concerning his ideas of war, rebellion, violence, and the natural world. He thrives on deception, illusions, masks, non-sequiturs, and he often speaks in parables that exist beyond the epistemological understandings of everyone around him. Even his repeated grimaces throughout Blood Meridian aren’t terribly explicit in terms of the emotions conveyed behind his many smiles. Moreover, his “radical evil” may compel his men to action, but the rationalization behind it is equally paradoxical. On one hand, Holden seeks to show his men that free will provides the ultimate justification for violence and war. As such, he perpetuates evil through the idea of free will as part of the human condition by dispelling any Judeo-Christian explanations of the world. This also bears implications on Holden’s relationship with nature. His primary need to document natural phenomenon throughout represents his want to avoid his own enslavement by it. On the other hand, Holden also shows us that evil requires control. Violence is organized mechanical, and deliberate in Blood Meridian; much of the fallout that takes place between the kid and the judge in the novel’s end exhibits the protagonist’s folly in thinking he is a free agent outside of the bloody crusade carried out by the Glanton Gang. While Holden (and therefore the rest of the gang) does not ascribe to the ideological and racist tenets that justify Manifest Destiny, he does swear strong allegiances to the necessity of warfare by which American nation building operates. This notion highlights a symbiotic relationship between authority and rebellion in Blood Meridian. 5 For my methodology, I refer to Slavoj Žižek’s essay, “Why is Every Act a Repetition?” in which he identifies two distinct “ethical attitudes” of “sacrificial logic” that better define the role of a scapegoat in relation to a larger collective. In the first, “traditional communitarian,” Žižek defers to Rene Girard, who defines it as “guilt...projected onto the scapegoat whose sacrifice allows us to establish social peace by localizing violence; as if in recognition of this beneficial role he plays, the victim thus gains the aura of sanctity.” ii Applied to the outlaw, society “believes” in the scapegoat’s guilt, and his or her sanctity is preserved in his or her sacrifice. Sacrificial logic, according to Žižek, also has a utilitarian function, where “the organizer of the scape- goating in no way believes in the victim’s guilt, his point is simply that one has to give preference to the interests of the community over the rights of the individual...as it prevents the disintegration of the social fabric.” iii Therefore, the outlaw’s social status depends upon the ethical attitude of the collective committed to othering him or her. As Žižek continues to argue, the problem with both ethical attitudes is that they “[presuppose] and [need] the ‘other’ (‘ordinary people’) in the role of the simpleton who ‘really believes’ in the scapegoat’s guilt—otherwise there is no need for sacrifice.” iv This underscores Žižek’s point that “authority is inherently paradoxical...we obey a statement of authority because it has authority, not because its content is wise, profound, etc.” v If we apply these ideas to Blood Meridian, they explain why and how Judge Holden monopolizes the symbolic order of the novel. The members of the Glanton Gang perpetuate evil and genocide because they have, in effect, “othered” their victims in their crusade. The fallacy in this justification once again comes from Holden, who inevitably shows his men that what they perceive as free will is a guise. However, this revelation 6 comes far too late for the gang; they have already exacted violence and brutality by the novel’s end in order to avoid this false sense of enslavement, either by society or by nature. The result exhibits Holden’s failed justification of his radical evil because the men lose sight of what they (and he) are rebelling against—not any country or government but the natural order of the universe. While it is true that the men have mindlessly committed themselves to indiscriminant killing, there is no philosophical, moral, or rational imperative to their deeds. All that stands is the judge’s radically figurative stance on being: that warfare should exist for its human practitioner and nothing else. When the kid begins his violent odyssey in Blood Meridian, having grown and moved off from his terrible drunken father, his capacities for violence do not exhibit a will towards survival, but customize his experience as a social being. With his eventual comrade, Toadvine, the two fight brutally and almost to the death over the small pride of getting out of each other’s way on one of a few “boards laid across the mud” in the rainy town of Nacogdoches (9). Both men eventually decide to parlay their violence in preference to a more effective union to beat and gouge a hotel-owner, “Old Sydney,” in the eye with a broken bottle and proceed to burn down his hotel with him inside (9-14). While violence in Blood Meridian may prove to function as a primary component in human nature, subsequent chapters exhibit how violence functions within as well as without—to evoke the topography of the novel’s landscape and the lyricism of McCarthy’s prose through which it is described: They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like the blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the 7 sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come. They rode with their heads down, faceless under their hats, like an army asleep on the march. By midmorning another man had died and they lifted him from the wagon where he’d stained the sacks he’d laid among and buried him also and rode on. (46-7) This passage, in its entirety, exhibits how the violence about and within the scene fuses with the cadence, rhythm, and musicality of the syntax and prose, emphasizing the saturation of violence throughout multiple facets of McCarthy’s novel. Where we strain to experience the splendor in the scene, we must struggle much harder to locate any humanity or subjectivity in the novel’s characters, for “death seemed the most prevalent feature of the landscape” (50). As such, the harsh realities of settlement and nation building provide the novel’s important context. In his essay, “Why is Every Act a Repetition?” Slavoj Žižek outlines in The Book of Job a unique dilemma that applies to the bandits of Blood Meridian—the ability to both resist and embrace Job’s role. For Žižek, Job’s fundamental challenge to authority lies in his status as a “subject who resists assuming the role of scapegoat/victim.” vi At first glance, Blood Meridian’s outlaws refuse this “sacrificial logic;” they do not “assume the burden of their guilt.” vii This is evident not only in the kid, whose coming-of-age is little more than an extended acquaintance with his own brutal nature, but also in all of the 8 novel’s men, who after meeting Captain White and therefore John Glanton, are contracted government mercenaries despite their status as lowly criminals. When asked, “Kindly fell on hard times aint ye son?” the kid answers, “I just aint fell on no good ones” (29). Or, when Toadvine asks the then imprisoned kid how he likes “city life,” the kid states, “I don’t like it worth a damn so far” (74). The kid’s derelict morality and material degeneracy is comically juxtaposed with the rider of Captain White who, in Chapter Three, needs only the reasoning of “Hell fire, come on out. I’m white and Christian” in order to proposition the kid in joining the Army of the Filibusters (3). These examples reflect an inherent attitude in the novel: the agents of Manifest Destiny, and of the construction of the American West, were the same people who resisted its civility and laws and therefore are utilized and glorified for their violence. While the men of Blood Meridian model what John G. Cawelti calls “a Calvinistic view of man’s basic depravity,” they achieve a unique social and communal order composed of “heathen stockthieves,” killers, and “felons.” viii When members of the Glanton Gang do not engage in killing, they prove to be men of discourse. During various conversations about the land, God, various philosophies of being, and the nature of the universe, the gang’s leader, Judge Holden, manages to exploit the ideological and philosophical traffic of their discussions. Even the leader of the brigade that bears his name, John Joel Glanton, proves less diabolic and morally empty than the judge, who appears to us, in Lacanian terms, as the “master of enjoyment,” and represents “what Kant called ‘radical evil,’ evilness qua ethical attitude, qua pure spirituality.” ix Holden maintains a Darwinian expertise on natural order, natural selection, and the origins of species. Adept in philosophical inquiry of all kinds and an adroit scholar of hermeneutical 9 and epistemological truth, the judge lures the bandits into regarding him as a supreme father. Echoing Žižek, this Lacanian notion of a surrogate father, stands for an “alternative of ‘le pere ou pire’” or “the ultimate father” for men without any apparent judicial, moral, or ethical jurisprudence, and therefore without government. x Holden proves capable and willing to rise above the ranks of the gang in this Americanized “Heart of Darkness,” and the correlative of victim-persecutor does not seem explicitly defined among them. The result is military-style collusion: strength in numbers. By extension, the band is reabsorbed by the same social order they were initially marginalized from, thereby making them active participants in this campaign of territorial acquisition and ethnic cleansing. Given the judge’s ‘radical evil,’ and coupled with all of its concentration on warfare and American Manifest Destiny, Blood Meridian doesn’t shy from taking an ironic and satirical poke at the agents of this philosophy in the novel’s beginning. This is evident in the initial dialogue between Captain White, the kid, and some of the captain’s company men: The captain pushed his chair back and rose and came around to the front of the desk. He stood there for a measured minute and then he hitched himself up on the desk with his boots dangling. He had gray in his hair and in the sweeping moustaches that he wore but he was not old. (34) Notice here how Captain White struggles with the propriety of an office job and the impropriety of sitting on a horse in an open field. Thus, he makes a bit of a compromise between the two, and while it would probably prove impossible (if not wholly insane) to front-straddle his desk, he opts for the feminine sidesaddle to placate the presumed wild 10 nature of the kid. Even his features seem incapable of indicating seniority (in age) by the obfuscation of his status as a young man with an old man’s silver tint of hair. The exchanges of conversation further contribute to the disjointed discourse between the vestiges of American authority and the kid’s wildness and results in a comedy of errors: So you’re the man, [Captain White] said. What man? said the kid. What man sir, said the captain’s man. ...What happened to you? What? Say sir, said the recruiter. Sir? ...I said what happened to you (34). Unable to establish any real authority of rank or nationhood without the reinforcement of his men, Captain White proceeds to learn more, but each of his questions results in an abandonment into the Lacanian “Real,” a place where the kid’s language fails to adequately describe the horrors of being robbed on the frontier. “Where was you robbed?” asks Captain White. “I don’t know. They wasn’t no name to it. It was just wilderness.” When Captain White tries to get a better idea of the kid’s origins, the kid can only pronounce Nacogdoches as “Naca, Naca...” (34-5). Using Žižek’s terminology, the “real” here becomes “the topological hole or torsion” where the network of place-name results in a lapse in communication and understanding between the rugged embattled kid and the civilized captain (Žižek 238). Manifest Destiny, thus, is not any real ideology in 11 Blood Meridian, insofar as any of the members of the Glanton Gang ascribe to it as a justification for their violence and atrocities. In this instance, the kid cannot even formulate anything but non-answers to White’s inquiries about the ideological and political particulars surrounding the cessation of the armed conflict between the U.S. and Mexico. White’s declarations appear wholly toothless and comic when recited in the presence of an uncivilized killer, “...we fought for it. Lost friends and brothers down there. And then by god if we didn’t give it back. Back to a bunch of barbarians that even the most biased in their favor will admit have no least notion in God’s earth of honor or justice or the meaning of republican government” (35-6). Throughout such odd and ironic declarations of cultural “right” to American land, as well as allegiance to God and nation, White’s short-lived duty in the novel’s subsequent pages further illustrates the limits of U.S. authority. Blood Meridian’s gang flourishes then as a nomadic horde that never seems anchored to one particular setting or place unless injury, temporary occasion, or sickness binds them to it. Its leaders—John Joel Glanton and Judge Holden—also seem removed from fulfilling any easy or immediate expectations set forth as an “ideal” American war hero. Indeed, there is something distinctly American to Glanton’s character, who responds in such a way to a Mexican juggler’s dexterous clown-show: “Aint that the drizzlin shits” (94). Or, ignoring David Brown’s admonishments about taming a wild dog, he retorts: “I can man anything that eats. Get me a piece of jerky” (155). And, certainly, one-liners such as “Did you learn to whisper in a sawmill?” bear a distinct rough wit and aggressive impatience for his fellow company particular to a refinement made possible only for the frontier survivalist. John Glanton may seem a more 12 prototypically masculine, forthright, violent, and self-reliant character than any other in the novel, yet his authority over the group does not countermand the judge’s. In his external features alone, one may perhaps want to compare the judge to a figure that resembles a mixture of Teddy Roosevelt, Ulysses Grant, (facial features—the mustache and the grimace) and Abraham Lincoln (in height), but in fact, the judge is often identified by what he clearly is not: as bearing the baldness of a baby’s scalp or having the face and head of a porpoise. Furthermore, nobody else seems to bear a likeness to this character in previous literary works, except a rather uncanny resemblance identifiable between Holden and The Grand Inquisitor from Doystoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Take the following instance of Dostoevsky’s villain when he rails against Christ: “Yes we’ve paid dearly for it...but at last we have completed that work in Your name. For fifteen centuries we have been wrestling with Your freedom, but now it is ended and over for good. Do You not believe that it’s over for good?” xi Now, compare this to an end-scene of Blood Meridian when the kid has grown to become a man in a bar, where some men have mercilessly killed a dancing bear, while its keeper, a small girl, holds it and cries, “It’s all over...It’s all over,” to which the judge sidles up next to the man and asks: “Do you believe it’s all over, son?” (340) Another declaration by the Inquisitor, “So long as a man remains free he strives so incessantly and so painfully as to find as quickly as possible someone to worship,” (128) seems to inform Holden’s declarations, that “The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos,” (199) and, “Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery” (263). Instances like these are numerous in Dostoyevsky’s episode, but one in 13 particular seems similar to the judge and his slated position to lead a gang of unruly thugs and outlaws into the wilderness of the Southwest: Man was created a rebel; and how can rebels be happy? You were warned...You had no lack of admonitions and warnings, but You did not listen to those warnings; You rejected the only way by which men might be happy, but unfortunately, when You departed, You handed the work on to us. You affirmed by Your word, You gave us the right to bind and to unbind, and now, of course, You cannot even think of taking that right away from us. Why then, do You come to hinder us? (Dostoevsky 125) Such audacity possessed by Dostoevsky’s villain seems unequivocally linked to the audacity of Holden’s claims on ontology, epistemology, and man’s place as an agent of rebellion against the order of the Judeo-Christian universe. Clearly unwilling to ascribe to a theological explanation of the universe throughout the novel, Holden’s philosophies mirror the Grand Inquisitor’s in two distinct ways. First, that man must rebel against God and Christ because he now possesses free will. Second, moral or ethical explanations of the universe are unfit to dictate human behavior because each individual human is both capable and willing to determine an individual moral code for his or her self. While there is a sense of ideological, spiritual, and philosophical authority at work in Blood Meridian, it clearly operates outside of the designs of the Glanton Gang. Therefore, they act and behave under the leadership of Judge Holden, who functions as an antithetical Christ, a “dark God,” echoing Žižek, that requires his followers to exact the numerous instances of bloodshed throughout the novel, but in doing so they seal their fates in something resembling a Faustian agreement. xii Thus arises, in Lacanian terms, another inherent 14 argument of Blood Meridian: “We are our own persecutors and victims, every one of us.” Any attempt at civilizing the Glanton brigade proves faulty. Such is apparent in the novel’s end, for when the gang constructs something of a social order, domesticated and with divisions of labor, the Yumas quickly dissipate the colony, and those who manage to flee the Yuma Massacre of Chapter Nineteen fail to survive (260). Rene Girard’s theories on violence and the sacred may shed further light on the dark and violent vision in Blood Meridian. For Girard, “The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself.” xiii Girard thus argues that violence and the sacred are inextricably linked, and the sacrifice serves as a ritualized abstraction because “Men cannot confront the naked truth of their own violence without the risk of abandoning themselves to it entirely. They have never had a very clear idea of this violence and it is possible that the survival of all human societies of the past was dependent on this fundamental lack of understanding.” xiv The sacrifice is therefore acknowledged or “accepted,” in Girard’s words, as divine and thus we achieve a kind of redemption that keeps us from any reckless abandonment to “violent unanimity” (135). If we apply this theory to Blood Meridian, violent unanimity, as Girard admonishes, is as much a part of the natural world as it is a part of the violent and unscrupulous characters committing the acts. Such would explain the at times grotesque and abominable depictions of nature that exist throughout the novel. In one scene, after the kid and Sproule manage to escape a Comanche ambush, a vampire bat stealthily creeps onto the injured Sproule and proceeds to feed. While the kid attempts to rescue his 15 companion, amidst some confusion in the scene, Sproule is unable to identify that the kid is his protector and not his assailant: The kid was up and had seized a rock but the bat sprang away and vanished in the dark. Sproule was clawing away at his neck and he was gibbering hysterically and when he saw the kid standing there looking down at him he held out his bloodied hands as if in accusation and then clapped them to his ears and cried out what it seemed he himself would not hear, a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world. (69) Indeed, Sproule’s confusion and subsequent wail of horror results in an even greater declaration of human degradation found in the novel. It is not certain who is speaking at this point (only the pronoun, “he” indicates the possessor of speech), but the natural world’s indivisibility with its violence is palpably felt. Moreover, Sproule’s accusation of the kid—seeking nourishment through the sucking of his blood as a vampire would— acknowledges an endlessness of human depravity and indecency that dictates much of the behavior of the novel’s characters: “I know your kind, he said. What’s wrong with you is wrong all the way through you” (69). This scene is described in the synopsis under the heading of Chapter Five as, “attacked by a vampire” (58), which underscores Sproule’s inability to identify his assailant leaving him to assume that the kid would suck the blood out of his sleeping and mortally wounded body. In an even more monstrous and grotesque scene, the Glanton Gang happens upon a row of squatters in the Sonora desert who possess a snakebit horse. The beast is described intricately from head to hoof, as though every facet of its unnaturalness were crucial: 16 this thing now stood in the compound with its head enormously swollen and grotesque like some fabled equine ideation out of an Attic tragedy...its eyes bulged out of the shapeless head in a horror of agony...with its long misshapen muzzle swinging and drooling and its breath wheezing in the throttled pipes of its throat. The skin had split open along the bridge of its nose and the bone shone through pinkish white and its small ears looked like paper spills twisted into either side of a hairy loaf of dough. (121) Even more disarming than the sight of this contorted horse is the plight of its owners. When Irving asks them why they hadn’t killed the horse to put it out of its misery, they respond: “The sooner it dies, the sooner it rots” (122). When he asks the men if they intend to eat the horse even though it is snakebit, so naked and shamed are they by their inhumanity they cannot formulate a response. While the natural world of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian thoroughly resembles the unchecked inhumanity and unanimity of violence of its characters, the bear, in its ferociousness and dominance, seems the most appropriate totem animal of the Glanton Gang. Considering two scenes in particular, we see a striking juxtaposition of two bears in both natural and unnatural habitats. At first, while the gang rides along the mountains, “a lean blond bear rose up out of the swale on the far side where it had been feeding and looked down at them with dim pigs eyes” (143). The attribution of a pig’s eyes to a bear disrupts both the gang’s (and our) reception of the scene. Nature is not a classifiable thing here, contrary to the judge’s later discourse with Toadvine about the proto-Darwinian necessity to catalogue nature in order to master it. Furthermore, when Glanton shoots the bear, it reacts with a regenerative ferocity: “the bear leaned with a strange moan and 17 seized the Delaware and lifted him from his horse” (143). As Glanton fires two more shots, and as the rest of the men join in the fray, the bear does not waver as he “loped horribly into the forest with his hostage” (143). Near the book’s end a very different bear appears, “in a crinoline twirled strangely upon a stage” in a bar filled with a “motley assemblage” of patrons (338). At this point, the only survivors of the gang are the man (formerly, the kid) and Judge Holden. By coincidence, the judge happens to be in the same bar when the man enters. Unlike the ferocity of unbridled nature in the previous scene, this bear resembles something of an automaton or a puppet, its movements robotic and practiced: “the barrel organ was groaning and creaking and the bear with tongue aloll was revolving heavily on the boards” (339). The scene is constructed in shifts of the man’s focus, back and forth, between the whereabouts of the judge and the dancing bear. Once fraternizing with drinkers at the bar, the judge disappears, and the urgency of the dancing bear heightens, described as “dancing for all that his heart was worth” (339). When one of the patrons shoots the bear, its reaction is highly pathetic: He let out a low moan and he began to dance faster, dancing in silence save for the slap of his great footpads on the planks. Blood was running down its groin...The man with the pistol fired again...and the bear groaned and began to reel drunkenly. He was holding his chest and a thin foam of blood swung from his jaw and he began to totter and to cry like a child and he took his last few steps, dancing, and crashed to the boards. (339) plain This bear’s death appears without motive, ceremony, or dignity. Moreover, it performs human characteristics in that it “groans” or “cries” childlike instead of letting out any 18 other sound associated with its species, such as a growl, a roar, or a howl. This bear does not “lean,” “lift,” or “lope” as the bear in Chapter Eleven does; instead, it “revolves,” “dances,” “gropes,” “reels,” and “totters.” These verbs fittingly describe human movement with an appropriate pathos to emphasize the bear’s degraded state. As we accompany the men from massacre to massacre in Blood Meridian, the chaos of warfare is so immediate that characters like Irving, Sproule, Shelby, and the Delaware Indian are simply plucked from the narrative as collateral damage. Moreover, the violence is enacted by its perpetrators in ways akin to the mechanical, robotic, and mindless movements of this final bear throughout the novel. Take, for instance, the feast of Las Animas: “By midnight when the souls of the dead were rumored to be about the scalphunters were again howling in the streets and discharging their pistols in spite of rain or death and this continued sporadically until dawn” (199). Here, the violence of humankind remains automatic, sudden, unstoppable, motiveless, primitive, and childlike. This is perhaps a prelude to the worst violence Blood Meridian has to offer—the final death of its protagonist in the jakes outside the bar—violence left to the imagination. The man’s death is a far more nuanced scene than the first murder of the gang committed by John Glanton, who shoots an Apache woman, causing a wound depicted in visceral and gory fashion: “A fistsized hole erupted out of the far side of the woman’s head in a great vomit of gore and she pitched over and lay slain in her blood without remedy” (103). Instead, we only see a darkened back lot that allows little for us to access: “He opened the rough door of the jakes and stepped in. The judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him” (347). The 19 profane elements of a naked “father” in the lurid outhouse heighten the scene’s dread. Any indications of violence exist in the conversation of two men entering the jakes in a short scene afterwards. The unspeakable atrocity of the man’s death witnessed by onlookers echoes Captain White’s final admission before his own massacre described in the form of “Good god almighty” (348). In both unrepresented acts, it is the “grimace of the Real” in Lacanian terms, the image of external evil posited in the form of the nameless—violent acts committed on the periphery. To date, literary criticism has found few areas of agreement on Judge Holden. As far as characters go, he continues to evade interpretation with the same graceless ease with which he stupefies the characters in the novel. For instance, in “‘Witness to the Uttermost Edge of the World:’ Judge Holden’s Textual Enterprise in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” Joshua J. Masters considers the judge’s role as a trickster, that he “remains free from the telos endemic of a closed system; thus, any role, rule, or law can be invoked or revoked as the situation warrants, for the only ‘end’ the judge recognizes is encapsulated in his own ego.” xv In “Riding For a Fall: Genre, Myth, and Ideology in Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels,” William Carl Brannon Jr. argues: Judge Holden preys upon those weaker than him both physically and intellectually since he recognizes no philosophy involving truth or ethics. Judge Holden adheres only to the circumstances dictated by the realities of his environment, and thus he takes advantage of children, from whom he can derive sexual pleasure or material gain in the form of scalps... for Holden remains the one character throughout the novel that articulates a specific philosophy. The philosophy Holden repeatedly articulates involves an emphasis on the act of 20 warfare. Holden’s philosophy of war occupies a pivotal place within the novel, but the appreciation of the judge’s philosophy by the other scalphunters remains debatable. The judge’s philosophy proclaiming the primacy of war does have implications for the ideas of Manifest Destiny. xvi Critics, such as Stacey Peebles and Leo Daugherty, vacillate between attributing Judge Holden’s role as God, Satan, or both. Others seem content to ascribe the roles of the judge based on his actions—as a cataloguer and a name-bearer like Adam, a proto- Darwinian scientist and a proponent of social Darwinism, a pedophile, or a figurehead of the atrocities of Manifest Destiny and racial supremacy. Critics such as these stand in agreement that Judge Holden represents if not the devil then the abomination of all things human. Certainly, his abilities to incite a mob to take Reverend Green’s life into their hands exhibit the dual disregard he holds for human intelligence and for human life. Repeatedly, we see the judge perform small atrocities without motive or reason. In Chapter Twelve, for instance, he mindlessly scalps an Apache boy he previously coddled with affection. The child appears initially as “strange” and “covered with ash” (167) as “it” sits upon the pommel of Holden’s saddle for some days after the initial slaughter of the Gileños. Only when the child, with its “dark berry eyes,” risks membership with the group by accepting their charities of “jerky,” and comfort with a “blanket,” does Holden feel compelled to kill him and remove the scalp (170). This atrocity is far beyond the moral threshold of others in the gang as Toadvine retaliates by holding a gun to the judge’s head, but retracts when he fails to call Holden’s bluff: “You either shoot or take that away. Do it now” (171). His ultimatum seems to be a caveat that he holds dearly 21 against the novel’s other men and us as well: when confronted with unspeakable violence, what is our reaction? The judge’s blatant disregard for human life is appalling, and yet it is touching to see the benevolence that erupts from Toadvine, who up to this point has benignly killed and maimed similar to the other outlaws and miscreants of the novel. Later on, the senselessness of the gang’s killing would provoke a moral imperative when “they would fall upon a band of peaceful Tiguas camped on the river and slaughter them every soul” (180); the only “tendered defense” comes again from Toadvine: “Those sons of bitches aint botherin nobody” (181). A final confrontation of this kind occurs again in Chapter Fourteen, when Holden overpays a Mexican child selling a satchel of puppies. While admiring them only briefly, he wastes no time in crossing a “stone bridge and he looked down into the swollen waters and raised the dogs and pitched them in” (201). Unlike Toadvine, Bathcat does not turn his gun on Holden while witnessing this atrocity. Instead, he seeks to cancel out the judge’s cruelty by shooting the dogs to put them out of their misery. Nevertheless, the argument here is visible: the judge is the more terrible outlaw because neither law, nor moral or ethical imperative defines his will to action. Judge Holden’s devil-like qualities resurface throughout Blood Meridian and are demonstrated in how he is perceived by the characters and described by the narrator. Reverend Green’s only rebuttal to Holden’s charges in the novel’s beginning is to denounce him as “the devil” (4). In otherwise odd diction about a seemingly human character, the narrator later describes him as a “great ponderous djinn” from the flames (96). Moreover, Tobin, who does not explicitly reference Satan when describing the judge, identifies his cunning and omnipresence with “ears like a fox” (141) and refers to 22 him as “that sootysouled rascal” (124). Certainly, the relationship between the judge and the kid (if not all of the other members of the Glanton Gang) can be argued to represent a Faustian agreement. As John Sepich notes, Tobin reminds the kid that the origins of the Glanton Gang reside between its leader and Holden, who share “Some terrible covenant” (126). This language of “covenants” is not anomalously specific to this scene of the novel. In fact, Judge Holden’s rhetoric invokes the language of binding contracts throughout Blood Meridian. Take, for instance, a speech near the novel’s end that carries with it the imperative rhetorical qualities of a death sentence, where the judge explains to a fleeing kid his obligation to the fates shared by those of the Glanton Gang: You came forward...to take part in a work. But you were a witness against yourself. You sat in a judgment on your own deeds. You put your allowances before the judgments of history and you broke with the body of which you were pledged a part and poisoned it in all its enterprise. Hear me, man. I spoke in the desert for you and you only and you turned a deaf ear to me. If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay. Even the cretin acted in good faith according to his parts. For it was required of no man to give more than he possessed nor was any man’s share compared to another’s. Only each was called upon to empty out his heart into the common and one did not. Can you tell me who that one was? (319) John Sepich accurately observes that Holden’s rhetoric derives from the language of binding contracts, of witness and testimony, and of the recognition of mutual animosities. While this interpretation of Judge Holden as McCarthy’s American Mephistopheles certainly explains a great deal of his immorality and power over other characters in the 23 novel, he does not function similar to any other villain of the Gothic-Romantic tradition, Jacobean tragedy, Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, or morality play. Holden does not seek to extract the souls of men like the kid or Toadvine for their participation in immoral acts of bloodshed and war. Nor do the men receive anything remotely clear to an illuminated Faustian intellect in exchange for their lives and souls. Instead, the judge’s primary motivation is war itself: he believes that humankind is nothing without war. War functions as our definitive purpose, but humankind cannot win, nor subsist in a world without war, for engagement in battle and slaughter in the novel’s context requires everything from the individual: body, mind, and spirit. Thus, the tragedy of Blood Meridian’s judge, as well as of its characters, is that human existence only pertains to paths associated with and related to war. Men do not live long enough to experience old age. Soldiers who do not die on the battlefield remain incapable of returning into civilization. Characters like Tobin the expriest, Toadvine, and David Brown who did not perish in the Yuma massacre with the likes of John Glanton and his gang will only live as bandits and outlaws—without any moral, symbolic, or literal authority. They run as refugees do; they wander aimlessly without destination until they are caught and killed. As Holden explains: “in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once the darkening and the evening of his day” (146-7). To understand Judge Holden, therefore, is to understand the relationship humankind maintains with its warfare. We not only see Blood Meridian as reaffirming the violent tendencies within the human, but in an American context: a country that historically and spiritually thrives, in regenerative fashion, on, after, and because of 24 warfare. Historian Richard Slotkin, in Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860, outlines a 4-part model through which American warfare is unequivocally distinct from that of other nations and cultures. In particular, “American wars are: a rigid contest where all is at stake, and mutual destruction the object.... In an American campaign everything is terrible, the face of the country, the climate, the enemy.” xvii Slotkin’s map for charting the myth of American regeneration through violence goes as follows: 4 basic narrative formats or mythological structures, each of which is a variation on the great central myth of initiation into a new world and a new life that is at the core of the American experience: 1. Conversion (the soul interacts directly with God in spiritual exercises and salvation is achieved 2. Sacred Marriage: the human protagonist is unified with a female who embodies the god-spirit immanent in nature (other half of his individual nature) 3. Exorcism: components of foreign/corrupt psychological, races or powers are no longer repressed but destroyed 4. Regeneration through Violence: myth of the hunter in an intimate conflict between male avatars of the wilderness and civilization for possession of the white female captive—a figure who embodies that white Christian moral and social law that needs to be defended against the aggression of the wilderness. xviii Applying this schema to Blood Meridian proves immediately faulty for one distinct reason: there are relatively scant numbers of female characters throughout the book, and those who do not end up dead (e.g. the kid’s mother, the first casualty of the Glanton Gang, or the “Abuelita” near the novel’s end) simply do not have enough agency as characters to fulfill Slotkin’s formula. We can say, however, that conversion, sacred 25 marriage, exorcism, and regeneration through violence still apply. Does not the kid undergo a kind of “conversion” when he enlists in Captain White’s filibuster and thereby enlists in the Glanton Gang? Does not the judge’s language and rhetoric of binding contracts and subordination of individual wants for the greater good of the group ring true of an unholy matrimony? The vast execution and slaughter of indigenous and non- indigenous alike throughout the novel would certainly ring true of a kind of terrible “exorcism” that comprises the majority of its narrative. Nevertheless, the regeneration through violence in Blood Meridian is not a reaffirmation of male and white dominance against the wilderness, but a furthering of radical evil and brutality as primary to clemency and forgiveness. Keeping this variation of Slotkin’s theory as it applies to Blood Meridian, we take the kid’s first encounter with war: enlisting in Captain White’s filibuster group, where he soon realizes how airless and facile White’s white supremacy logic truly is: “We are to be instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land” (37). The irony of Captain White’s fate is less that his head becomes fated and pickled as an instrument of grotesque oddity in a carnival in a subsequent chapter. Instead, White’s words fall short of what the kid realizes—not that his filibuster division has fallen prey to ambush, but that he has descended into an Americanized Divine Comedy, where warfare’s palpable omnipotence makes itself known. The grotesque depiction of the Comanche army serves to ameliorate the judge’s later arguments about warfare’s centrality to human existence. Instead of hell, the kid’s and Captain White’s nightmares are undoubtedly real, a “legion of horribles” that don the dress of prior victims and their spoils: 26 silk finery...pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella...and one in a pigeontailed coatworn backwards...and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador. (55) Warfare in this instance materializes as “death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than a land of christian reckoning” (55). Current criticism on Blood Meridian has lent some cogent and invaluable ways of better understanding Judge Holden and the novel’s excessive violence. Edwin T. Arnold argues in “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness: McCarthy’s Moral Parables” that Judge Holden is undoubtedly a murderer, “drawn to the very innocence he needs to destroy,” but that “evil is not that simple in McCarthy,” xix Arnold also correctly argues against the “celebration of McCarthy’s exuberant violence” in order to present a less “atavistic” or “nihilistic” interpretation of the morality in the author’s work. He inevitably sees in Judge Holden the capacity of a Christian character, if not one who reiterates the gospel of Christ: “the heart of the judge’s arguments...is that life is infinitely fascinating but ultimately has no meaning other than that man imposes on it.” xx Therefore, it is not some terrible covenant that binds the judge to the kid, but the fallibility of the kid as a mortal in a world where he is unable to discern and act in accordance with it. As Arnold contends, the kid never really changes throughout the novel until its end, where he has aged thirty years and is presented to us by its narrator as “the man.” xxi Furthermore, Arnold argues that our introduction to the kid functions as an indicator of his lack of agency: “His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will 27 there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.” xxii Steven Shaviro, as well, likens the kid to Ishmael of Melville’s Moby Dick, where he “drifts from place to place, never taking the initiative, sidestepping mortal engagements and...keeps his distance from the claims both of destiny and agency.” xxiii As Arnold also argues, the kid fails (as do all in the Glanton Gang, save maybe for Tobin the expriest) to understand what is at the heart of the Holden’s argument. This interpretation rests on the shoulders of Judge Holden’s rebuttal of morality as an imperative of the human condition: The truth about the world...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...Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery. (252) For Arnold, this “talk of parables” comes dangerously close to the Gospel of Christ, in Mark: 10-13, “following Christ’s story of the sower and the seeds:” xxiv (Arnold 63-4): And when he was alone, those who were about him with the twelve asked him concerning the parables. And he said to them, ‘To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; 28 lest they should turn again, and be forgiven.’ And he said unto them, ‘Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?’ xxv This passage also echoes an earlier proclamation by Holden in Blood Meridian, when the gang gets a rather early and brief glimpse of his philosophies: “Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he is in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world” (141). In Arnold’s words, The kid ‘sees’ but he does not ‘perceive’ the truth of the judge: ‘He aint nothin,’ he insists, blind to the ‘secret.’ Tobin says the kid is a ‘free agent’ (284) and thus has the ability to choose. But the judge indicates that it is the lack of choice which damns the kid: ‘No assassin...And no partisan either. There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart,’ he charges (299). (It’s worth noting that Dante’s uncommitted are condemned to ‘chase a whirling banner which ran so fast that it seemed as if it could never make a stand’) [Canto III, 52-54]. xxvi In Chapter Twenty-One, when both the expriest and the kid flee from the judge, their brief exchange about his power explicitly reveals the kid’s misunderstanding: “He aint nothin. You told me yourself. Men are made of the dust of the earth. You said it was no pair...pair...” (309). Unable to pronounce the word, “parable,” and therefore complete this particular sentence, the kid exhibits his limited role and agency in the novel. Furthermore, Arnold’s poignant application of the New Testament here exhibits the moral indeterminacy of not just Judge Holden but all of Blood Meridian’s characters. Of all criticism on Blood Meridian, John Sepich’s contributions may be the most unique and thorough to date because it underscores the relationship between the kid and 29 the judge—between protagonist and villain—as a means of better understanding each. In his “Tarot and Divination” Sepich seeks to unearth a “thematic pattern that culminates in the kid’s death, presenting two complementary motives for the judge’s treatment of the kid.” xxvii The critic further argues that these motives derive from the historical accuracy of George Chamberlain’s autobiographical My Confessions, a document that the author alludes to heavily to illustrate the historical validity of the exploits of the Glanton Gang. xxviii In addition to the copious references to historical facts, Sepich relies on cataloging and referencing various literary allusions, instances, imagery and motifs in order to better explicate the role of Judge Holden in both historical and literary contexts. Without question, the essays in Sepich’s book “Tarot and Divination,” “Judge Holden’s Gunpowder,” and “Why Believe the Judge?” are the most thorough treatment of minutiae and particulars in McCarthy’s novel (roughly half of the book catalogues individual imagery, words, emblems, symbols, tropes and literary motifs throughout, citing its dialogue, characters, narrator, and consistency of cultural, historical, and critical reference). In applying the arcane symbolism of tarot cards to the four characters associated with the game—Black Jackson, Glanton, the judge and the kid—Sepich argues that this scene proves particularly crucial in understanding the employment of classical, Biblical, and Gnostic references throughout McCarthy’s novel. Nevertheless, any attempts to bring this rather obscure scene to light are hindered by the mystery surrounding the judge because the interpretations behind each card are received through him; he functions here as both their linguistic and symbolic interpreter. Furthermore, the “jugglers” conducting the tarot readings speak Spanish, and while their speech is translatable to us, Holden 30 maintains a linguistic authority. For example, Black Jackson’s card reveals “the picture of a fool in harlequin and a cat,” which elicits Jackson’s response, described as a “querent stood solemnly, like a man arraigned” (97). Jackson asks five times what his fortune entails: asking first the company in general (because of his inability to understand Spanish); then Tobin, who disregards his curiosity as “Idolatry,” and finally the judge, whom he asks three times (97). When the kid pulls his card (4 cups (Cuator de copas)), instantly, “The judge was laughing silently. He bent slightly the better to see” (98-9). And, when Glanton takes a card from the juggler, “He reached for the card in Glanton’s hand. Perhaps he touched it, perhaps not. The card vanished. It was in Glanton’s hand and then it was not. The juggler’s eyes snapped after it where it had gone down the dark. Perhaps Glanton had seen the card’s face. What could it have meant to him?” (100) Nobody thus sees Glanton’s card, though a blindfolded woman interprets it: La carroza, la corroza...Invertido. Carta de Guerra, de venganza. La vi sin ruedas sobre un rio obscuro (The coach, the coach...Inverted. Card of war, of vengeance. I saw it without wheels on a dark river)...Perdida, perdida. La carta esta perdida en la noche (Lost, lost. The card is lost in the night)...Un malefico...Que viento tan maleante... (A curse...What a villainous wind...) Carroza de muertos, llena de huesos. El joven que...(Dead Wagon full of bones. The youngster that...). (96) In all three instances, the judge plays interpreter and witness and, as Sepich argues, this serves as an instrumental moment in the novel in better understanding the judge and his motivations against the kid as well as the “fortunes” of Black Jackson and Glanton in the novel’s later chapter at the Yuma Ferry. For when the kid draws the Four of Cups card, he, like Black Jackson, invokes the theme of “clemency” or mercy but in an ambiguous 31 way (ironically, Jackson remains the only member of the gang to be retrieved from danger by the gang’s vital members). On one hand, Jackson’s “death is ‘mercifully’ quickened by the blow of the Indian’s club.” xxix The kid, however, struggles with what Sepich argues is the “clemency of the heathen,” for of all things, the Four of Cups symbolizes “blended pleasure and success, receiving pleasure but mixed with some slight discomfort and anxieties.” xxx Thus, Sepich argues, “McCarthy has twice associated the kid with a card whose symbolism suggests a divided heart and has generally associated him with the quality of mercy.” xxxi The kid’s divided heart results in three different moments in Blood Meridian. His first merciful act occurs when he tries to ward off the vampire bat feeding on the injured Sproule. While Sproule does not identify that the kid is helping him, his vicious charge— “What’s wrong with you is wrong all the way through you”—appears as a duplicitous accusation of both the indecency of humankind and what later proves to be the kid’s clemency (McCarthy 69). The second act of mercy takes place when the kid volunteers to remove the arrow shaft from David Brown’s leg following the slaughter of the Gileños. Mercy is not a popular stance with the gang, even when it comes to members helping their brood survive, evident in Tobin’s volatile rebuke to the kid of sticking one’s neck out: “Fool...God will not love ye forever...Don’t you know he’d of took you with him? He’d of took you, boy. Like a bride to the altar” (169). Tobin’s analogy appears straightforward: had the kid not removed the arrow so smoothly and without breaking Brown’s threshold of pain, Brown could very well have killed him. However, the analogy of marriage again brings to mind the numerous references of covenants and sacred bonds that frequently appear throughout Blood Meridian. When a member of a gang so hell bent 32 on killing and bloodshed commits an act of kindness, he is treated by others as though he’s sinned remarkably. The kid’s final act of kindness involves hiding a wounded rider named Shelby under a bush to conceal him from Glanton and the judge (217-8). These acts do not go unnoticed, for the judge admonishes the kid for exhibiting a conflicted self, or what the judge identifies as “A flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not notice? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved some clemency for the heathen” (311-2). Sepich’s essay articulately outlines the divided nature of the kid throughout the novel and reins in observations such as when the judge declares his “mutual” antagonism toward the kid: xxxii “What joins men together...is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies. But if I was your enemy with whom would you have shared me? With whom? The priest? Where is he now? Look at me. Our animosities were formed and waiting before ever we two met. Yet even so you could have changed it all” (319). Thus, the tarot scene seems for Sepich not a treatment of Blood Meridian’s, as well as Holden’s, paradoxes, but a furthering of them, for in his lengthy assessment of the kid’s divided self, Sepich also analyzes the judge independent of his relationship with the kid: “Holden’s assertions that the ‘fortunes’ of the various elements of the tarot Fool apply to the entire gang is accurate...Thus, the card’s varied meanings distribute themselves and resonate in many places in the novel.” xxxiii Along these lines, Emily J. Stinson argues in “Blood Meridian’s Man of Many Masks: Judge Holden as Tarot’s Fool” that the tarot Fool card pulled by Black Jackson indeed allows for readers to determine a more thorough understanding of the judge’s identity as a trickster character. In an elaborate blend of close reading and Jungian 33 Archetypal criticism, Stinson locates various facets of Holden’s characterization that align him with the archetypal figure represented by Tarot’s Fool: coin tricks, the ability to disappear and reappear, the mixture of devil and god-like qualities, and his affinity for dance and chaos. xxxiv Nevertheless, her attempts to find an “all encompassing role” remain problematic. Certainly, Holden’s enigmatic characterization reinforces his ambiguity, but his adherence to warfare and violence specifically makes Stinson’s interpretation partially incomplete. As Stacey Peebles argues in “Yuman Belief Systems and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” “[i]n McCarthy’s novel [the judge] is given to such various pursuits as geology, metaphysics, the law, sketching, a number of different languages, homicide, and pedophilia...critics trying to pin down the judge often resort to multiple comparisons.” xxxv While Stinson’s work is ambitious in its intent and vast in its close reading of where, how, and why the judge may indeed represent Tarot’s Fool, she overlooks the crucial relationship between the kid and the judge in better explicating the role of each. For instance, if it is possible to label the Glanton Gang outlaws, then it suffices to regard both Holden and the kid as most at odds with this status. The very paradox of authority and rebellion at the center of Blood Meridian lies within the transformation of McCarthy’s bandits from contracted soldiers for the states of Mexico and the United States to renegade murderers, who violate their own legal status when they begin to scalp Mexican citizens and sell them back to the government as trophies of the enemy. This transformation of the Glanton Gang takes place in Chapter Twelve, but it is inextricably linked with the novel’s paradoxical and unique comment upon race. The massacre of Gileños exhibits the gang’s first commitment to indiscriminate killing (e.g. 34 the killing and taking of scalps of non-Apaches), particularly when one of the gang’s own, a Mexican named McGill, is visibly wounded, so Glanton executes him (163). Before Glanton kills him, we again see the kid’s clemency for McGill as he “waded out of the water and approached him and the Mexican sat down carefully in the sand” (163). As the melee continues, “The dead Mexican McGill had been scalped” (165). Furthermore, an odd exchange between Glanton and the judge about a rogue by the name of Gomez, whom the gang has been contracted to retrieve for bounty, further highlights not only the racial indeterminacy that the novel underscores but also a prevalent theme in the book: the outlaw who evades and outruns his or her captors. When the judge peruses the slain of the Gileños massacre he informs Glanton that Gomez’s scalp is not among the trophies collected for bounty. In response, Glanton asks: Who do you think it is if it aint him? The judge shook his head. It’s not Gomez. He nodded toward the thing. That gentleman is sangre puro. Gomez is Mexican. He aint all Mexican. You can’t be all Mexican. It’s like being all mongrel. But that’s not Gomez because I’ve seen Gomez and it’s not him. Will it pass for him? No. (166) xxxvi In both of these examples, the paradox of the outlaw is underscored by the inabilities of the gang to detect, much less care about, the type of enemy they’ve been sent to hunt. The irony of this scene meets its profane and ironic other in the chapter’s end, when the troop enters the city of Chihuahua: “the victors in their gory rags smiled through the filth and 35 the dust and the caked blood as they bore on poles the desiccated heads of the enemy through that fantasy of music of flowers” (172). If we apply Lacanian theory in order to formulate a better understanding of the judge, then we must surmise that in the words of Slavoj Žižek, he is akin to “A madman...the only free man; ‘the madman’ (the Lacanian psychotic) is the subject who has refused to walk into the trap of the forced choice and to accept that he has ‘always already chosen:’ he took the choice ‘seriously’ and chose the impossible opposite of the name of the father.” xxxvii However, in order to remain free, the judge must simultaneously “father” the Glanton Gang into its destiny of blood while separating himself from his impossible opposite, the kid. Much like the Lacanian madman – “[the judge] is excommunicated from the community” by the end of the novel. xxxviii His freedom, in Lacanian terms, comes from the act of “repetition,” a double displacement of the civilized order of the gang’s origins, and the uncivilized chaos on the terrain of the frontier. Such a displacement continuously takes place in Chihuahua, where Soldiers with muskets kept back the crowds and young girls watched the Americans with huge black eyes and boys crept forth to touch the grisly trophies. There were one hundred-and-twenty-eight scalps and eight heads and the governor’s lieutenant and his retinue came down into the courtyard to welcome them and admire their work. They were promised full payment in gold at the dinner to be held in their honor that evening...Old women in black rebozos ran forth to kiss the hems of their reeking skirts and hold up their dark little hands in blessing and the riders wheeled their gaunted mounts and pushed through the clamoring multitude and into the street. (174) 36 The novel’s bandits rove in gallantry and nobility. Whatever filth and dregs tarnished the boots of Toadvine and the kid immediately scrubs off by this scene. A similar displacement takes place in the next town of Coyame: “When Glanton and his men rode in they were fallen upon as saints. Women ran alongside the horses to touch their boots and presents of every kind were pressed upon them until each man rode an embarrassment of melons and pastries and trussed chickens gathered in the bow of his saddle” (178). However, Blood Meridian’s outlaws quickly prove uncomfortable with the inversion of their status as international heroes as such gallantry in Chihuahua subsequently results in scenes of chaos and terror: “Fights broke out...At dawn the shapes of insensate topers lay snoring about the floor among dark patches of blood...and the remains of a bonfire that had consumed a good part of the hotel’s furnishings smoldered in the street before the door...These scenes and scenes like them were repeated night after night” (178). Similarly, in Coyame, “When they rode out three days later the streets stood empty, not even a dog followed them to the gates” (179). As the gang continues on, their will to kill indiscriminately grows, as in the town of Nacori, where after losing a few men to a knife-fight in a tavern, they decimate the entire town of “twenty-eight Mexicans...and eight more in the street” (188). As a consequence of this violent unanimity, the status of the Glanton Gang changes as dramatically as their gallantry transforms into villainy. If McCarthy’s novel depicts lawlessness and brutality as the foundations of Manifest Destiny, then certainly the motivations of the gang’s will towards violence merit investigation beyond the disparities, no matter how slight, between the judge and the rest of the gang. Indeed, while the travesties of the Glanton Gang are measureless in scale, without motive or recourse, the racialized attitudes of the gang are oddly 37 anomalous when compared with the racial supremacy that fuels Captain White’s Filibuster. In the words of John Sepich, “Glanton’s loyalties seem not to favor Anglos over Indians, or Anglos over Mexicans, but gang members over outsiders.” xxxix His accomplished study of the historical sources of McCarthy’s novel leads him to conclude, “The absolutely predatory nature of bigotry in the sources that McCarthy may have used is paradoxically softened in the novel. Little reaction is born from the killing of White Jackson by Black Jackson except the subtle movements of Glanton, who ‘rose’ (107), certifying Barcley Owens’ observation of this scene, that “‘No further arguments or appeals are required’”. xl When the men are in an eating-house owned by a proprietor (coincidentally named Owens as well), near the presidio of Tucson, their response to Owens’ “request” of racial segregation in the dining hall turns into a rather one-sided gunfight. When an American lieutenant and “a half dozen armed troopers” confront Glanton and his men over the murder of Owens, the lieutenant, “stunned at the baldness of [the Judge’s] disclaimers” of the murder, simply retorts, “I be damned,” before he turns and pushes past the men and “quit the place” (247). And while some may argue that both of these scenes seem to exhibit the gang’s complacency in light of a racist charge of one against their own, Jackson is in fact the only member of the gang to be actively retrieved from perish or danger, as in Chapter Sixteen, when Holden seeks his return from Las Animas. The pathetic state of their stranded cohort oddly seems to emphasize their affection for him in his state of despair: “He was naked save for a blanket he’d wrapped himself in. He didn’t even have boots. He was riding one of the bonetailed packmules...and was shivering from the cold. The only thing he’d saved was his pistol. 38 He was holding it against his chest under the blanket for he had no other place to carry it” (205). One of the most fascinating aspects of the novel is that when the men of Blood Meridian are not engaged in some form of violence or debauchery, they participate in some of the most memorable exchanges of discourse in literature. The connections between what these men believe, in contrast and juxtaposition to the judge’s totalities of mind, body, and spirit, help to illuminate the novel’s tension between authority and rebellion. The exchange between the anchorite and the kid in Chapter Two provides for some unique contrasts with the moral and epistemological imperatives of the judge later on in the novel. When the hermit declares to the kid, “They is four things that can destroy the earth...[w]omen, whiskey, money, and niggers,” we cannot but feel purely appalled by his racial and misogynistic hatred. In fact, we may be inclined to admit that the petrified heart that the hermit presents to the kid is of far more interest than whatever it is he seems to know of the world. However, as the two continue to exchange brief words, the hermit’s ideas run on par with later sentiments expressed by the judge on the subject of war. In an attempt to identify with the kid’s plight, the hermit uses the Old Testament as a way to break the ice: “Lost ye way in the dark,” and “[t]he way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didn’t make it to suit everybody, did he?” (20) As with the judge, the disbeliever inside of the kid provokes him to elaborate, to become more ontological, prophetic, and terrifying in response: No. It’s a mystery. 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 don’t want to. Rightly so. Best 39 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 a machine. And evil like that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. (20) The mystery he refers to evokes not just the early age of mechanical reproduction, but the more metaphysical conditions of man in the world—the division between the mind and the passions (the heart), as well as the moral imperatives against what he believes are the inherent wickedness of humankind (with the devil at God’s or man’s elbow during creation). This particular passage carries so much resonance that the hermit functions as the novel’s “Prelude Judge.” The nerve center of this passage admonishes the heart as a guide for human action. Does this not seem similar to the judge’s condemnations of the kid later in the novel for exhibiting clemency for the heathen? As it were, the most elusive line in this passage is “A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make a machine.” On a surface level, are we to assume that the hermit is referring to humankind? Is he referring to perhaps the creation of humankind in the image of God? Then, is the hermit referring to the will of Satan at the elbow of God or the human? By a machine that makes a machine, is the hermit prophesying a twentieth century, where factories not only churn out an assemblage of cars and material goods but tanks, guns, bombs, and battleships? Certainly, the violence of Blood Meridian, as previously noted, is committed mechanically and without motive or any concern for recourse or consequence. Furthermore, the hermit’s metaphor seems remarkably different from the notion of early-industrial man who exerts mastery over nature through his 40 invention and operation of something such as a gun, a tractor, or an oil refinery pump. Instead, man here is depicted as the machine-perpetuating machine of God. Just as God initiates life and death, so does humanity; we, then, are “the machines creating machines,” bestowed with similar capacities of creation and destruction, but we also bear an impaired judgment and an inability to divide ourselves from the “meanness” inherent in all creatures large and small. Thus, the hermit’s admonishments, if paired with the later contentions of the judge, strike a pivotal nerve on the propensity of humankind towards violence that lies at the core of McCarthy’s novel. That propensity is no better articulated and elaborated upon than in Judge Holden’s treatises on war that take place later on in the book. The judge begins his discourse on war in response to Black Jackson’s quoting of scripture to explain violence, “The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword” (259). This of course is a reiteration of Matthew 26:52, where Irving too, chimes in: “The good book does indeed count war an evil...[y]et there’s many a tale of war inside it” (259). The judge’s simple rebuttal aims to upset any moral or religious certainty held by either man: “Books lie,” and God merely speaks “in stones and trees, the bones of things” (122). In a similarly dismissive rebuttal, the judge later proclaims that war is some form of a “game” that exists beyond any application of human inquiry or reason: “It makes no difference what men think of war...War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner” (259). In this vein, the judge reasons, “It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not,” and he likens it to “a game...nobler than work,” adding, “He knows too that 41 the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard” (260). The argument in Blood Meridian about the inseparability of violence, warfare, and genocide from the human condition comes as early as the book’s epigraphs, yet as Holden explains, war and destruction is not only inseparable from the human condition but serves as an active agent in our destiny! A contemporary definition calls to mind something greater than a military-industrial complex, where the mechanisms of warfare extend beyond nationalism, militarism, and/or ideology because a more “inherent” need for warfare exists above being a boon for aggregate capital. Holden, however, formulates here a multifaceted argument. First, he declares for an epistemological need for war because it “is at last a forcing of the unity of existence” (261). Second, he makes an ontological justification for war because “Men are born for games” and, “This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence.” Thus, it is not games that inherently spark our intrinsic intrigue, but the hazard of gambling on them. Third, that the nature of war dwells within us, “whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification” (260-1), since, “Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all” (259). Finally when Irving and Brown seem less satisfied with the pure amorality of his declaration that “War is god,” he provides a moral and ethical imperative for it by declaring that Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by an ultimate test...Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not beggar all questions of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural. (261) 42 Similar to the hermit’s declaration that a self-perpetuating machine can become “evil...that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it,” Judge Holden’s treatise on war challenges the moral paradigms of Old and New Testament alike, particularly the Jobian paradigm, in which one must maintain the perennial role of scapegoat in order to maintain the status of devotee. Or to put in another way, and to echo Žižek, Holden’s reversal of any moral, ethical, spiritual, or natural imperative to avoid chaos and carnage resists the “greatest ethical revolution in the history of mankind: the moment when the social perspective of sacrificing the scapegoat is confronted with the perspective of the victim itself.” xli In brief, Holden’s challenge here is not simply to turn the hearts of the Glanton Gang against the idea of God, or to dispel them of any moral or ethical necessity. Instead, he seeks to show them that their plight on earth bears no parable, that the nature of existence bears the magnitude of kill or be killed, and to undo all legal, ethical, moral, epistemological and mythical imperatives that bind them otherwise. Moreover, just as the hermit begins with his admission about man’s plight as “a mystery,” in an odd moment of call-and-response, the judge holds the femur of an otherwise unnamed Paleolithic creature found shortly after his treatise on war and concludes, “There is no mystery to it...[y]our hearts desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery” (263). Judge Holden therefore is not a fugitive of any written or conscripted law of country, of man, of God, or of kind, but an outlaw against the natural order of the universe. Such certainly stands contrary to the idea of Judge Holden as a Tarot’s Fool, a mere trickster character, a god, a devil, or a composite of all these definitions of his character. It also exhibits why the judge bears the following credo on his rifle when first 43 seen by Tobin: Et in Arcadia Ego, which translates as “Even in Paradise (Arcadia), I exist,” made famous by French painter, Nicolas Poussin, whose works serve to remind us that even in a state of Utopia, the human condition cannot out-maneuver its own fatal end (131). Moreover, this attempt to explain or understand divinity is not something that yields to the novel’s characters; it is imbedded in the novel’s language and its narrator as well. When describing the Comanche horde that ambushes Captain White’s expedition, the narrator describes the multitude as a “horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning” (53). Such an odd depiction yields to the illogic in the narrator’s attempt to describe emotional sensations so immense that they lie beyond the lexicon needed to convey their enormity. In addition, there is an implicit argument that any possible Christian reckoning—of the narrator, of the novel’s characters, and of its readers—is simply not enough, nor would any calculus be enough, “moral or otherwise,” to echo critic Dana Phillips, in order to understand what the judge describes as “the magnitude” of being. xlii This contention about the judge’s magnitude of being, as well as the history of human violence, aligns itself with two of the novel’s epigraphs by Paul Valery and Jacob Boehme. More specifically, the first and last lines of the Valery fragment could be comfortably stated by the judge: “Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint...you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.” (Qtd. in Blood Meridian) Though the moral imperatives of the novel appear at bay from its beginning, the Boehme quote may speak more truly of the human condition as seen in the novel: “It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of 44 the darkness” (Qtd. in Blood Meridian). Divinity, then, does not exist for the bandits of Blood Meridian, and in their numerous attempts to formulate an explanation of the divine from Holden, their ideal paternal metaphor, his answers continually and circuitously lead them back into the darkness. The judge’s very first lecture on religion and epistemology exhibits this circuitous logic. As always, the conversations pertain to the scientific “fieldwork” the judge commits to throughout the company’s travels. The judge, always proto-Darwinian in his behavior, “sat in the compound breaking ore samples with a hammer, the feldspar rich in red oxide of copper and native nuggets in whose organic lobations he purported to read news of the earth’s origins, holding an exemplary lecture in geology to a small gathering who nodded and spat” (122). Here exists a common theme: when confronted by disbelievers, the judge’s logical arguments amplify and become a concerted effort to disabuse their comfortable faith of the Judeo-Christian notions of God and the creation of the earth. This tactic is a larger argument to make the distinction between scripture as the word of God and life on the planet as exemplary of God’s existence. When the judge rebuffs scripture with “Books lie,” a nameless disciple counters with, “God don’t lie,” to which Holden seemingly concedes, “No...He does not. And these are his words...He speaks in the stones and trees, the bones of things” (122). Here, the judge always defers the argument to the apparent: God, thus, is not for him an omnipotent father in the sky, but exists in the making and being of tangible physical things. In the words of Barcley Owens, moments such as this exhibit “man’s feeble attempts at morality...that allow atavistic men an advantage at the game of survival.” xliii This is an argument the judge knows all too well as he smirks upon the motley “squatters in their rags [who] nodded 45 among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct, this man of learning, in all his speculations, and this the judge encourages until they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools” (122-3). While the judge monopolizes the novel as the paternal metaphor throughout Blood Meridian, one of the most disarming moments of his fallibility comes in Chapter 16, when he makes a glaring and pitiable admission of his position against nature. Toadvine, puzzled by the judge’s unconventional bookwork and fascination with nature, cannot help but deliver him a curious gaze. In response, the judge breaks into a rather uncommon (even for the judge) digression of his position: These anonymous creatures...may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us...Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth...a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules where there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgments...This is my claim...And yet everywhere upon this [land] are pockets of autonomous life. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation. (198-9) The logic driving the judge’s position here is an admission of vulnerability; the judge is certainly representative of many things in Blood Meridian, but he is not larger than the world and his awareness of mortality fuels a desire to qualify as the “suzerain” or overlord of the earth. Toadvine, quite aware of the unfulfilled wish derived from Holden’s fear, initially maintains the upper hand in this exchange when he points out the fallacy of the judge’s reasoning: “No man can acquaint himself with everything on this 46 earth” (199). To this, the judge responds, “But that man who sets out the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.” When Toadvine falters, “I don’t see what that has to do with catchin birds,” so does the judge, and his antithetical motives against the group become clear: “The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos” (199). This dialogue represents more than a philosophical divide. For Toadvine, the denouement lies in the acceptance of his fallibility—he is an outlaw because he is incapable of becoming acquainted with others and with all parts of the world, including civil law and the greater society he evades. For the judge, he seeks mastery and power borne from a paranoiac’s delusion that the world sets out to break him apart and “enslave” him from his very beginning. In order to avoid nature’s enslavement, he seeks a retributive kind of enslavement in return, to clip the wings of those parts of the world that flee easily from his study. Both men are indeed outlaws, but in stark contrast, the judge has formulated another argument not just against his fellow kind, but also against the world as a whole. The system, by which he attempts to do this, is his “point of view for his work as a scientist,” which defines his place in rebellion to the natural order of the universe. Toadvine in this scene accepts a delusion of freedom (if not expressing humility in his accepted limitation); the judge seeks not only to disavow the illusion of freedom, but seeks to disavow freedom itself. The paradox exhibits a fascinating point: while the judge attempts to apply order onto the amoral, free and chaotic course of nature, much of the order and unanimity of human nature in Blood Meridian beckons violence, chaos and brutality. Underlying the judge’s “order” and the order of the natural world is violence 47 and its justification through moral, legal, and philosophical language. This discourse concludes when Toadvine concedes to the judge’s point, “That would be one hell of a zoo,” (italics are my emphasis) in the form of an appeal to the place of perdition and torment that the outlaw does not want to see, though his immorality as a criminal may, in Christian terms, inevitably deposit him there (199). To this observation comes, once again, the judge’s affirmation, another “smile,” this time his symbolic admission for his acquisition of power. For all his attempts at authority, the judge is, nevertheless, not immune to the impulses of pride and fear. As John Sepich identifies in his essay, “Judge Holden’s Gunpowder,” “Holden’s coldness and his pride are, in fact, also flaws in the otherwise magnificent creation.” xliv To exemplify this point, Sepich identifies the moment when the judge records a “foot-piece from a suit of armor hammered out in a shop in Toledo three centuries before, a small tapadero frail and shelled with rot” (140). The historical and anthropological worth of such a treasure, as Sepich argues, should underscore Holden’s gift for empirical witness and study. However, in a move against history and against empiricism, the judge “crushed it into a ball of foil and pitched it into the fire” (140). As soon as his curiosity is satiated, the worth of the natural phenomenon is emptied. Similarly, the “anvil an enormous iron meteorite shaped like a great molar” at the end of Chapter Sixteen becomes little more than a thing of sport, a gambling game in which he can wager with his company on whether or not he could lift the meteorite to begin with, lift it over his head, or even throw the “great slag” ten feet from where he stood. Only the narrator seems enthralled with the existence of an object that “wandered for what 48 millennia from what unreckonable corner of the universe,” but for the novel’s most dynamic scientist, it is mere equipment for sport (251). The importance in understanding Judge Holden often comes in interpreting not only his actions or his words, but also his nonverbal forms of communication. John Sepich has catalogued forty-four instances throughout Blood Meridian when the judge either smiles or laughs. Often, these gestures substitute the signified of what is otherwise unstated in the novel (e.g. the idea of what a “world-sized zoo” must look like); other times, they signify the judge’s delight in a potential fracas or in the torment of other characters (e.g. in the former he smiles when Black Jackson guns down Owens, and in the latter, he smiles when he sees the arrow shaft sticking out of David Brown’s leg). Other times the smile merely represents the judge’s delight at the idea of his own heinousness, danger, will to kill and brutality. In each instance, the judge exerts his authority in what in Lacanian terms is “The Grimace of the Real.” xlv Or to put it another way, the judge bars the men from not only their physical and ontological freedom, but also from the idea of freedom itself. Of the psychotic, Žižek argues, “Given the central status of deception in relation to the symbolic order, one has to draw a radical conclusion: the only way not to be deceived is to maintain a distance from the symbolic order, i.e., to assume a psychotic position. A psychotic is precisely a subject who is not duped by the symbolic order.” xlvi As men of action, the outlaws of Blood Meridian are subdued by their own epistemological inaction. The deaths of Glanton, the kid, Toadvine, David Brown, Jackson and Tobin the expriest are due to their failure to fully adhere to the amoral code of the judge’s will to power. 49 When the kid and the judge have finally reached their impasse, the kid experiences a series of sad, pathetic little hardships in the novel’s final chapters before his inevitable death. For instance, at the end of Chapter Seventeen, the kid comes upon what he believes to be an elderly Mexican woman, who he refers to as “Abuelita.” Without any apparent motive other than to make her acquaintance and tell her his life story, “He spoke to her in a low voice. He told her that he was an American and that he was a long way from the country of his birth and that he had no family and that he travelled much and seen many things and had been at war and endured hardships” (328). Much to the kid’s horror, the woman appears to have been a skeletal “dried shell” in the desert all along. In Chapter Eighteen, a similar pathos follows the kid’s unruly plight: a fracas ensues between a youth, Elrod, and the man (formerly the kid) over the authenticity of Toadvine’s scapular of ears. Failing to convince Elrod that the ears formerly belonged to “Injins,” our protagonist provokes him to deny his own narrative of his exploits with the Glanton Gang, “You don’t know where them ears come from. That old boy you bought them off of might of said they was injins but that don’t make it so...Them ears could come off of cannibals or any kind of other foreign nigger” (334). With no other means of authenticating his narrative, the man resorts to killing Elrod to show him his violent capacities. This death is unceremonious and unjustified by the man’s admission that “This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war” (335). More harrowing, however, is the man’s inability to achieve redemption in his life through his hardships and his possession of a scapular that once belonged to his friend. 50 When family members approach the man for Elrod’s body in Chapter Eighteen, they give him a small piece of the slain youth’s history: “They come out here from Kentucky mister. This tyke and his brother. His momma and daddy both dead. His grandaddy was killed by a lunatic and buried in the woods like a dog” (336). This of course may seem benign, but it bears a grim resemblance to the “tale” told by the judge to his men in Chapter Eleven, of a harnessmaker, “unable to suffer the loss of his company” of a rich traveler (150). This narrative bears no relevance to any of the events leading up to this point of the novel, yet it is indeed curious why the judge should go on about it at such length. The harnessmaker stalks the traveler “to a place where the road was darkened in a deep wood... He killed him with a rock and he took his clothes and he took his watch and his money and he buried him in a shallow grave by the side of the road” (150). When our protagonist resorts to violence to authenticate his narrative, we see how the narrative functions as a deferment to another narrative already told by the judge. When the judge’s company initially rebukes him about the harnessmaker’s tale, he simply retorts, “What is true of one man...is true of many” (152). Yet, there is nothing true of any of Blood Meridian’s bandits because the judge commandeers all stories, those of himself and of everyone else. If violence in Blood Meridian appears to lack any redemptive quality, it certainly is regenerative, and the vigorous adherence of the judge to his thesis on power and violence underscores that. All questions of racial struggle, history, and Manifest Destiny received through the judge result in the necessity of violence, both the symbolic weight of it as a means to power and the realities endured by both assailant and victim alike. This is exemplified in one of the judge’s speeches at the end of Chapter Eleven (and sits uncomfortably close to Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor), 51 when the judge again denounces Tobin’s right to use scripture against his thesis on violence, might and power: “If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet?” (153) Nothing could confirm the judge’s symbolic authority more than in the novel’s final paragraph, through which the mythos of the judge comes alive: Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like and enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing, He says that he will never die. (348-9) The tone of this passage is unlike any in the novel, and the hyperbolic language and poetic repetition functions to suspend the narration. All we have here is continuous dancing and fiddling. Descriptions of the judge exhibit the disjunction of symbol and metaphor. He looks like an “enormous infant” but bears a head like a “lunar dome.” At once, he is virile and lively as youth, but he also bears symbolic capacities associated with the moon—its protean nature of waxing and wanes, its associations with lunacy, and 52 that it often appears in the night sky “in light and shadow.” Moreover, notice the repetition of the gerunds that work to stop time—“dancing,” “bowing,” “dancing, and fiddling.” And when the narrator speaks of the judge, he functions as a microphone or a reiteration of the judge’s declarations of “never sleep[ing]” and an inability to die. In Lacanian terms, the judge triumphs as the novel’s pathological narcissist, who “breaks precisely with the underlying frame of the ego ideal.” xlvii Furthermore, “[i]nstead of the integration of a symbolic law,” the Glanton Gang “must have a multitude of rules to follow—rules of accommodation” as proclaimed by the judge himself that details “‘how to succeed.’” xlviii Žižek’s arguments on the pathological narcissist are doubly applicable to the judge who knows only the ‘rules of the social game’ enabling him to manipulate others; social relations constitute for him a playing field in which he assumes ‘roles,’ not proper symbolic mandates; he stays clear of any kind of binding commitment that would imply a proper symbolic identification. He is a radical conformist who paradoxically experiences himself as an outlaw. xlix In this vein, the gang suffers a similar paradox, for as they have “domesticated” themselves along the Yuma ferry, the most memorable members of the gang, one-by-one, are rooted out and executed, either by the Yumas themselves or by some unseen “powers- that-be” that subjected the likes of Toadvine and Brown to conviction and execution for their crimes. The socio-political imperative of Blood Meridian is the necessity to remember history even in the darkest, most chaotic, and most violent instances of our past and present. As Barcley Owens argues, the novel acts as a “mirror,” that McCarthy “holds up 53 to the nineteenth century and reflects the ugliness of our time as well.” l The novel’s final epigraph taken from a June 13, 1982 edition of the Yuma Daily Sun insists that we remember that violence is indivisible from the human condition, that the physical indications of scalping can be detected on even a 300,000-year-old fossil skull. Certainly, McCarthy does not let us forget the importance in confronting our violent tendencies given our selective amnesia about it throughout history. Nevertheless, this emphasis on the importance of history—of overcoming the obfuscation of truth when we are at a vast distance in time—seems parallel to the obfuscation of truths when perceived from different audiences. Historian Karl Jacoby’s Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History chronicles and explicates an 1871 massacre of Apache Indians by a combined party of Mexicans, Americans, and Tohono O’ odham Indians. The form of Jacoby’s book, separated in three parts, with the first and third chapters (entitled “Violence” and “Memory”) further divided into four different perspectives on the massacre from all four of its ethnic participants, is meant to show the obfuscation of historical reality within racial and temporal difference. The effect of its structure is to suggest that history, as a field of critical inquiry, should be all-inclusive and that its participants should take it into consideration in recollection. Jacoby’s imperative is clearly evident in the book’s conclusion when he admonishes: “What this past asks of us in return is a willingness to recount all our stories—our darkest tales as well as our most inspiring ones—and to ponder those stories that violence has silenced forever. For without first recognizing our shared capacity for inhumanity, how can we at last begin to tell our stories of our mutual humanity.” li In line with this sentiment, both Blood 54 Meridian and Shadows at Dawn understand how borders and racial difference situate lives and make historical consensus impossible to come by. Keeping in mind territorial and historical disjunction, we also must reconcile with the trope of the outlaw, a character whose very definition forces us into a critical misunderstanding of the cultural and historical realities that surround him or her. This overlapping problem of historical obfuscation and subjective truth comes forth in a crucial moment in Chapter Eight of McCarthy’s novel, when the gang is situated in a cantina and they come across an old man who identifies himself as “Texas.” Accompanied with this is his personal declaration, “I was in Texas three year” (107). The problem of subjectivity arises when the old man “held up his hand. The forefinger was gone at the first joint and perhaps he was showing them what happened in Texas or perhaps he merely meant to count the years” (107). Elusive here is “Texas’s” personal history residing in his missing forefinger. There are, of course, duplicitous histories behind his gesture, but the narrator cannot and will not discern which narrative more accurately explains whatever it is “Texas” is trying to say. Is he counting the years he spent in Texas, or is he possibly showing the gang how dangerous an area Texas can be, hence his injury? Such is what Žižek accurately calls “the real qua unattainable.” But “Texas” identifies a more unattainable real in the novel when he mentions Gomez, the outlaw bandit of Blood Meridian who bears a large bounty on his head. Nevertheless, Gomez remains a veritable apparition; nobody ever sees him. His legend nevertheless materializes in occasional moments throughout the novel and ultimately remains an unachieved victory for the gang. While Toadvine derides “Texas” as “Craziern a runaway nigger,” this old man continues to explicate the darker journeys in store for all of the 55 men. Five times, “Texas” identifies the elusive Gomez, declaring that if the men “kill” him, “they pay you much moneys” (107), and “Gomez, Gomez...Even Gomez. Who can ride against the Tejanos? They are soldiers. Que soldados tan valientes. La sangre de Gomez, sangre de la gente (What brave soldiers. The blood of Gomez, the blood of the people)” (107-8). “Texas” heralds him as an icon of liberation and martyrdom. In the old man’s vacillation between praising Gomez and admonishing/praising the soldiers, a small moment of uncertainty appears in his final speech: “You are fine caballeros...You kill the barbaros. They cannot hide from you. But there is another caballero and I think no man hides from him. I was a soldier. It is like a dream. When even the bones is gone in the desert the dreams is talk to you, you don’t wake up forever” (108). In his broken English, one wonders if “another caballero” is actually Gomez or Judge Holden. In either case, he evokes the outlaw as a figment of the imagination, someone not wholly realized. It calls to mind a later moment when the kid continues to dream of the judge: “In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other?” (322) An inverse of the unattainable real (Gomez), the judge is an unavoidable specter of the real, often glancing at others (notably, the kid) throughout the book—a smile and a gaze, often received in surprise, as though the subject were unaware of being looked upon and capable of bringing the observer delight. lii In these examples, Gomez represents the mythos of the outlaw, representing his freedom from the symbolic order and his defiance of the law, while the judge represents the immediacy of the outlaw’s threat to that symbolic order. The most convincing argument for the judge as the Blood Meridian’s ultimate outlaw comes in the contrived mythos surrounding his character in the book. Tobin is often the authority on the judge throughout the novel. When he and the kid discuss the 56 judge in Chapter Ten, the kid admits to seeing the judge before in Nacogdoches, so Tobin answers, “Every man in the company claims to have encountered that sootysouled rascal in some other place” (130). As Tobin recounts the story of the judge’s matrix of gunpowder, small particulars of the tale give way to the imported mythological properties of the judge by the members of the gang. For instance, David Brown “thought him a mirage” (131). Irving speculates that the judge brought a rather large rock into the desert to sit upon as the men found him so. Tobin takes further measure to elaborate on the oddity surrounding the judge’s entrance: “He didn’t even have a canteen. It was like...You couldn’t tell where he’d come from. Said he’d been with a wagon company and fell out to go it alone” (131-2). The pause in Tobin’s speculations exhibits his tendency to substitute myth for fact. What is indescribable becomes a borrowed narrative of mythology between the men. The elaboration of this mystery exhibits the growing mythos that the gang contributes to in their efforts to understand the judge. For instance, what links the judge with Glanton in Tobin’s mind is that “They’ve a secret commerce. Some terrible covenant” (132), and because Tobin describes him in this chapter as a “thing to study,” the judge’s character becomes more a persona of projection and speculation than one of inquiry and understanding. When the kid asks Tobin twice, “What’s he a judge of,” Tobin can only reiterate his question in verbatim and illustrates his intellectual limit and predisposition towards mythologizing what he does not understand. For, in all of his “watching” of the judge, Tobin fails to reveal much except that his subject is ultimately one to misunderstand, to fear, and to forget. Furthermore, in his failure to elucidate who or what Judge Holden is, the narrator of Blood Meridian contributes to this mythology in equally dubious fashion. Among the 57 numerous elements of mystery or irrationality of the novel, either the judge plays a primary role, or the narrator is spotted contributing to this mystery surrounding his character. When the judge performs his coin trick while disputing the judge’s “craziness,” as Brown charges, the narrator’s insistence on the implausibility of the judge possessing any kind of “magic” is inferred by this explanation: “It must have been fastened to some subtle lead, horsehair perhaps, for it circled the fire and returned to the judge and he caught it in his hand and smiled” (257). When the judge outdoes the initial trick by appearing to throw the coin beyond sight and have it return to him (as if it traversed the circumference of the earth), the narrator continues to contribute to the judge’s mythos by adding, Even so some claimed that he had thrown the coin away and palmed another like it and had made the sound with his tongue for he was a cunning old malabarista and he said himself as he put the coin away what all men knew that there are coins and false coins. In the morning some did walk over the ground where the coin had gone but if any man found it he kept it to himself... (257) In such a way, the narrator thus loses grasp on his role and becomes undone by the judge’s sleight of hand. By referring to him as a “cunning old malabarista,” a term that translates as “a juggler,” the narrator suffers from a brief existential crisis similar to that of the men in this scene and during the tarot card reading experience. The secondhand quotation of the judge’s reference to false and real coins again brings to mind the idea of an unattainable real; that is, a real that the judge and the judge alone—narrator and other characters exempted—can access. A final moment such as this takes place a little later in the novel when the judge reassures the gang that “The mystery is no mystery.” Tobin’s 58 response to this non-sequitur is a stunted “Aye,” and little else as the pipe has gone “cold in his teeth,” from some exasperation of the judge. The narrator picks up from Tobin’s gasp/stutter and finishes the sentence for him, exhibiting another contribution to the grand mythology surrounding the judge in Blood Meridian: “And no mystery. As if he were no mystery himself, the bloody old hoodwinker” (263). The first of these two sentences exhibits a kind of intellectual lapse, as if the narrator, as stilted as Tobin by the judge’s mysteriousness, somehow stumbles to find the right words to say. This narrative and formal disjunction contributes to the symbolic economy of the judge as the novel’s ultimate outlaw. As John Sepich notes, there are forty-five references in Blood Meridian to carnival. None of these is more telling than that of the judge’s reference to the world as “a medicine show,” as an “itinerate carnival, a migratory tent show” (245). Blood Meridian’s America then is not just one of the “quick and the dead,” of killers and victims, but also one where the confidence man reigns as king. The judge makes a habit of persuading men to do unspeakable acts based on illusions, fictions, and erroneous claims from the very beginning of the novel. As Sepich identifies, the copious references to carnivals and dreams, and to what he calls “the hallucinatory void” exhibit a symbolic economy in the novel, where the possibilities to project, to mythologize and to apply the fictive to the real are abundant. To juxtapose these references with three distinct scenes of emblematic depictions of Christ and Judas—both of which provide for conflicting interpretations of the outlaw as a literary convention—we can see how the outlaw functions as the nexus of mythmaking throughout Blood Meridian. In Chapter Thirteen, Black Jackson “lurched out in to the street vowing to shoot the ass of Jesus Christ, the 59 longlegged son of a bitch” (171). At first glance, such a scene is of a frequent number in which grotesque comedy is applied to offset the novel’s ubiquitous violence. While we know that Jackson is inebriated and his mission is senseless, such a quixotic moment stands as an example of the larger pursuit of the unattainable real in Gomez. That Christ stands out in Jackson’s mind as “longlegged” refers to the phallic imagery of his legs dangling and crossed upon the crucifixion. Furthermore, it comes to us as a great shock that he has singled out a symbol of humankind’s theological salvation as the object of his pursuit. In contrast, in Chapter Fourteen, during the feast of Las Animas, “a Christ jostled past, a poor figure of straw with carven head and feet. He wore a crown of mountain briars...and on his dry wooden cheeks [were painted] blue tears. The villagers knelt and blessed themselves and some stepped forward and touched the garment the figure wore and kissed their fingertips” (191). Both scenes make for a strange dialectic surrounding the mythologized outlaw—in the former he is sought out, hunted and treated with scorn and derision; in the latter, he represents our salvation. When juxtaposed with “the hanged Judas” of Chapter Nineteen, “fashioned from straw and old rags who wore on his canvas face a painted scowl that reflected in the hand no more than a child’s conception of the man and his crime” (260, 263). 60 Conclusion While Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West offers a salient and contradictory treatment of the outlaw in both a historical and literary context, renegades, outliers, nomads, and bandits have consistently populated Cormac McCarthy’s landscapes. They are as memorable as Cornelius Suttree, John Grady Cole, and Billy Parham, or they appear as remote and anonymous as a simple boy and a man who walk the corridor of wilderness, deprivation, and terror in a post-Apocalyptic world. McCarthy’s works confront the intersection of the outlaw’s romanticism of freedom, nostalgia, adventure, and salvation with the gritty and harsh realities of power, lawlessness, brutality, and violence. For example, in the final pages of Cities of the Plain, a very-aged Billy Parham wakes up from a dream of his brother, Boyd, who of course is murdered in cold blood in The Crossing. When his caretaker, Betty, wakes him from his restless slumber and asks about the content of his dream, Billy explains Boyd to her: He was the best. We run off to Mexico together. When we was kids. When our folks died. We went down there to see about gettin back some horses they’d stole. We was just kids. He was awful good with horses. I always like to watch him ride. Liked to watch him around horses. I’d give about anything to watch him ride. liii The haunting reality of Boyd’s death, not to mention the agony Billy feels, both in his culpability of and his helplessness in preventing it, is met with his nostalgia manifesting in such a heartfelt memory that it renders the emotional resonance from a character who remains fairly reticent and emotionless throughout the Border Trilogy. 61 In probably one of his most ambitious and original novels, McCarthy’s treatment of the outlaw takes a different turn in No Country for Old Men, one that seems to draw its own parallels between the outlaw gunslingers of Blood Meridian and the hard-boiled noir protagonists of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler’s works. However, No Country for Old Men is no murder mystery, and its treatment of various generic and formal components of the literary noir transform in McCarthy’s novel. Sheriff Bell certainly operates the way Phillip Marlowe or Sam Spade might as a detective (he is, after all, bestowed the task of finding Llewelyn Moss to protect him from Anton Chigurh, who kills a police officer in the novel’s commencing pages), but his tone and resignation for the task far outweigh any moral or ethical championing of it. In other words, he isn’t really a good law enforcer whatsoever and fails to really prevent any further bloodshed and killing that will take place along the border of El Paso and Juarez, an area ravaged for over forty years by illegal drug and human trafficking and with a high frequency of murder—a cultural context that provides an apt and urgent backdrop for the rest of the novel. In contrast, Chigurh proves to be the more capable gumshoe, who through meticulous detection and fieldwork locates Moss to retrieve his bounty. If “Murder is an act of infinite cruelty” serves as the credo to Chandler’s fiction as he contends in “The Simple Art of Murder,” then McCarthy’s inversion of Chandler’s motto in No Country for Old Men seems to argue that the world is an act of infinite cruelty, that murder is not just isolated from the human experience. It is the human experience. liv For all of his treatments of the outlaw trope in his work, it suffices to say that the imagination of Cormac McCarthy’s works have shaped and influenced the poetry I write now and will write for the rest of my life. His work undoubtedly captures the landscape 62 of the American West with impeccable strength in his numerous descriptions of the barren, arid, majestic, and vast land. This alone is not enough to explain my connection with him as a writer. I find him much more valuable as a novelist in his ability to compress and still time, and to mix the transcendent with the corporeal. But how does one compress time in narrative or poetry? To better explain this, I will cite a passage from Mrs. Alving in Act II of Henrik Ibsen’s play, Ghosts: I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as grains of sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.” lv This passage exhibits what the compression of time entails: the immediate juxtaposition and confrontation of the past with the present, the infallible understanding that the past remains present despite the years, and who we once were versus who we become never disappears with the progression of time. Moreover, ghosts are plentiful in McCarthy. In Cities of the Plain, Billy’s lament for his brother is juxtaposed against a small passage that gives an unflinching and gritty description of his hand: “Gnarled, ropescarred, speckled from the sun and the years of it. The ropey veins that bound them to his heart. There was map enough for men to read. There God’s plenty of signs and wonders to make a landscape. To make a world.” lvi In a microcosm of McCarthy’s more universal 63 themes, the language evokes the romanticism with the often-brutal realities of the outlaw’s world. The hand is not initially a pretty thing here: “gnarled” by age and both scarred by rope from farm and ranch labor and also composed of the “ropey[ness]” of his old veins. Yet, the subsequent sentences evoke the romanticism of the body, likening it to “signs and wonders” of the landscape and the world, and in this somewhat risky move (yet, one that seems appropriate given McCarthy’s general tendency to avoid the sentimental or the romantic in this trilogy, save for All the Pretty Horses, which remains offset by its violence), we are confronted with a general appreciation for life as well as a capacity to wonder and marvel at the body, its place, and the universe. In Blood Meridian, there are countless examples of ghosts fused into the prose. The Comanche horde dressed in the garb and outfits of former victims allows the realities of past wars and massacres to manifest in the frightening present: “A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners” (54-55). Or, it is in the actions of characters, such as in many of the judge’s sketching and observations throughout the novel that exhibit an affinity with history, a need to tabernacle the past so that it doesn’t elude him in the present. The examples are numerous and as time collapses in McCarthy’s works and his narratives appear more as tapestries in which the years are compressed and what should appear as “novel” is really a composite of the ancient, the old, and the present. Or, to put it another way, warfare in Blood Meridian is made possible by the characters’ derelict morality as well as a human propensity towards violence, horses, and guns, along with the idea that war is intrinsic to our being and augments itself in various ways—“attic or biblical” to 64 use McCarthy’s description of the Comanche horde—ancient, historical, and presently, and its timelessness is terrifically resonant. While war is not the only of McCarthy’s ghosts, it is one of many, and his descriptions, his lexical and syntactical choices in their representations, and how his characters exude these ghosts shows how time will inevitably collapse throughout numerous moments in his texts. It is not just that time can collapse in McCarthy’s narrative; there are numerous moments where he can freeze time to embellish a particular image or scene. Faulkner—a writer one may compare McCarthy to with some accuracy—possessed this ability as well. On Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren has called this technique the “Still moment”: That’s the frozen moment. Freeze time. Somewhere, almost in a kind of pun, Faulkner himself uses the image of a frieze for such a moment of frozen action...Some of these moments harden up an event, give it its meaning by holding it fixed. In Faulkner’s work that’s the drama behind the drama...in Faulkner...there are always the very old and the very young. Time spreads and is the important thing, the terrible thing. A tremendous flux is there, things flowing away in all directions. Moments not quite ready to be shaped are already there, waiting, and we feel their presence. What you most remember about Jason in The Sound and the Fury, say is the fact that he was the treasurer when the children made and sold kites, and kept the money in his pocket. Or, you remember Caddy getting her drawers muddy. Everything is already there, just waiting to happen. You have the sense of the small becoming large in time, the large becoming the small, the sweep of time over things—that and the balance of the frozen, abstracted moment against violent significant action.” lvii 65 To give better clarity to what Penn Warren means here, I introduce two contrasting examples on the same incident that takes place in As I Lay Dying. In one chapter, Vardaman Bundren appears only capable of understanding his mother’s death through an illogical yet personal analogy: “It was not my mother. She went away when the other one laid down in her bed and drew the quilt up. ‘Did she go as far as town?’ ‘She went further than town.’ ‘Did all those rabbits and possums go further than town?’ God made rabbits and possums. He made the train.” lviii This of course is as close to an explanation as to why he concludes that his mother is a “fish.” The fantasy emanates from a loss in the belief of subjective being and that the halt in his mother’s life results in her descent into the primordial stew of creation. He thus formulates that his mother has reincarnated as the fish his family was to cook for supper. She is no longer, in his mind, associated with the body that Cash Bundren nailed up. His distorted reasoning allows him to conclude: It was not her because it was lying right yonder in the dirt. And now it’s all chopped up. I chopped it up. It’s laying in the kitchen in the bleeding pan, waiting to be cooked and et. Then it wasn’t and she was, and now it is and she wasn’t. And tomorrow it will be cooked and et and she will be him and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell and there won’t be anything in the box and so she can breathe. lix Vardaman’s bizarre reasoning leads to the frieze that takes place in the following section, narrated by Tull. The fresco, if we can call it that, appears in an aftermath discovery of Vardaman’s handiwork with Cash’s auger: And the next morning they found him in his shirt laying asleep on the floor like a felled steer, and the top of the box bored clean full of holes and Cash’s new auger 66 broke off in the last one. When they taken the lid off they found that two of them had bored on into her face.” lx This horrific and unforgettable scene of Faulkner’s novel is “earned” artistically because it is the product of a narrative equation consisting of the two earlier scenes. When Vardaman conflates his mother’s death and reincarnation into a fish’s a body, she has become a thing and therefore can be subject to cruelty and mutilation—accidental or intentional—without any possible recourse. McCarthy’s rendering of his own stoppage of time may resemble Faulkner, but the employment of it is much more different. Whereas Faulkner builds up his frieze through previous particular moments, McCarthy often goes toward a list of particular images that in turn have no overt connection with the image rendered except through juxtaposition and context. The end of Chapter Five of Blood Meridian exhibits this rather well, where the kid has fallen out from the filibuster and comes upon the pickled head of his former commander at a “primitive circus” in Mexico. McCarthy’s rendering of this frieze follows a lengthy list of particulars of oddities, the grotesque, and the bizarre in order to allow the shocking reunion between Captain White and the kid to manifold. Take note of how the passage starts: “There was a bazaar in progress. A traveling medicine show, a primitive circus” (73). In order to heighten the chaos—a narrative strategy with which McCarthy thrives—he must define the scene three different ways. This is not discursive redundancy so much that it exhibits the terrific chaos both the kid and we must experience in this bizarre scene. The scene then progresses into an odd and lengthy list of particulars that do very little in allowing us to anticipate the head of the former commander pickled in mescal: 67 They passed stout willow cages with vipers, with great limegreen serpents from some more southerly latitude or beaded lizards with their black mouths wet with venom. A reedy old leper held up handfuls of tapeworms from a jar for all to see and cried out his medicines against them and they were pressed by other rude apothecaries and by vendors and mendicants until all came at last before a trestle whereon stood a glass of carboy of clear mescal. In this container with hair afloat and eyes turned upward in a pale face sat a human head. (73) Notice how there seems to be no stoppage of time in the narration; the frieze of course is not rendered until the kid realizes what he is looking at: “It was Captain White. Lately at war among the heathen. The kid looked into the drowned and sightless eyes of his old commander” (73). It is odd that White’s eyes are called drowned, but it seems certainly necessary for the stoppage of time. This scene bears an uncanny likeness with the end of Melville’s Billy Budd quite possibly to embellish its irony and horror. Even in the morass of exotic oddity and grotesque novelty, our protagonist cannot avoid the horrors of warfare and genocide. As it pertains to my own work, I am fully aware that in order to write, I must see the world in terms of friezes and dynamic images that upend and distort the narrative. To introduce an example of my attempts at rendering a frieze poetically, I will cite the entirety of my poem “In Broomfield,”: In Broomfield, it was cold, and the November frost hushed the corn into straightjackets. The town was named after corn, or what you could make from corn, such as broom bristles, pipes, and noses for scarecrows. On a small plot of acreage 68 owned by an invisible farmer, I happened upon a horse tangled in barbwire. Fog exhaled from its maw. Its dark eye froze like a pebble encased in ice. A wound big as an apple in its side. Nothing appeared to enter or exit that wound, but inside, two robin eggs kept warm. The sight was too untouchable, as if to make contact would change and ruin and make damp the world’s large canvas of ash and crumbled dirt and the chirping of birds. I must begin describing “In Broomfield,” with a little bit of context. The city, “Broomfield” is a rather underdeveloped suburb I grew up in the years before my adolescence. It was, as I describe in the poem, named after its original cash crop—corn, where the tassels were shipped to local manufacturing plants to make broom bristles during the late nineteenth-century. Before the city achieved its economic boom in the 1990s (as was common for many suburban areas outside of Denver at this time), the suburb lacked its urban umbilical cord; situated in mostly rural zones, my backyard juxtaposed several larger dairy and horse farms, where it was commonplace to simply walk two blocks east and end up in a sprawling field or pasture where horses and cows alike grazed and looked at you with feint alarm and a greater indifference. The scene in the poem, however, is heavily influenced by McCarthy’s work, most resonant in its central image—an injured horse tangled in barbed wire. That it is trapped on “a small plot of acreage/owned by an invisible farmer” makes its plight more necessary and dire. Nobody exists to tend to or answer for it. Nobody, but my speaker, who sees its grossly pathetic plight. In a possible departure from McCarthy’s snake-bit horse in Blood Meridian, I choose to invoke life in this scene, to make the wound in the horse capable of 69 a nesting place for rebirth. Nevertheless, by depositing two robin’s eggs into the horse’s wound (big as an apple in its side) I hoped for an explicit reference to the Judeao- Christian creation myth of my own. The eggs represent any Adam or Eve—pre-historical and innocuous to experience, judgment, civilization or morality. They, like any egg, simply wait for birth. My speaker admits to the untouchable sight because the idea of something wholly innocent and virginal amidst and because of suffering and despair must be so. Instead, the poem’s final clause pushes back from the image even further. To employ a meditative declaration of the scene seemed right because the speaker of this poem must recoil—not just in slight horror but in an acceptance of life’s fragile and precious nature—to expose the contagion of the speaker’s being onto what can be regarded as the same interference of humankind on nature that put the poem’s horse in its plight in the first place. Needless to say that one particular scene in Blood Meridian leads to the composition of this poem in the first place—in the novel’s beginning, when Judge Holden has revealed to some participators of Reverend Green’s lynch mob that he never met Green, nor had ever “laid eyes on the man before today” (9). Their response might be called “expected;” the judge throughout has always had his way with men of lesser intelligence, but McCarthy so often evokes the human anima conjoined with the natural elements: “There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone bought the judge a drink” (9). In this scene, the judge is Iago-like, maiming and conspiring against a man for no reason amidst the more shocking reactions of the patrons who participated in the lynching. The animation of their effigies from mud to human 70 invokes the act of puppetry and immediately exudes the judge’s power and manipulation. More poetically, however, I appreciate the invocation of Genesis, that the judge’s “God- like” powers can animate human behavior from the earth. For all of the prevalence of violence in Blood Meridian, it is not without its romanticism and wonder. It makes the novel so tirelessly beautiful. Much of this comes in McCarthy’s ability to capture landscape. His prose weaves like a rattlesnake along a Yuma sand dune in his ability to render the magnanimity of the western landscape and the pathos of its inhabitants in their will to survive. His tapestry is never one-sided. It is at times as baroque as it is lurid. Take, for instance, the instance of the kid’s birth on the novel’s first page: “Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove” (3). He couples this passage with “The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off” (3). His novels continuously and poetically stimulate the mind while content to remind us that the body is a corporeal and visceral shell, capable of sustaining and afflicting damage. The world is always both bountiful and offers many means to our destruction, both fast and slow. It is capable of wonder, where a slag of meteorite can incite us to contemplate the vast universe, or just as easily move us to our primitive impulses to sport, gamble, and the pettiness of physical profit or loss. I do not wholly ascribe by McCarthy’s ultimate argument on humanity—that we are a selfish, petty, cold, violent, and murderous lot perennially—but I do think he doesn’t shy away from the fact that we do seek a greater meaning in our lives. Despite violence, despite the coldness in one’s heart, and despite the fact that so many consider 71 material interests far greater than human life, there is still a world filled with value and filled with people and stories, and the wonder of living is not what is taken or gained, but what is shared and given. The beauty of The Road is that despite the unanimity of violence and depravation without abandon in the aftermath of apocalypse, a father can still fight to deliver his son beyond perdition. It is probably the least stylized and most naturalistic of McCarthy’s novels, but unlike a tale from Jack London, it depicts not man versus the sheerest of elements but humankind versus itself. Its fallout is one of the paternal and intrinsic love a father maintains for his son, and the brightest moments of the novel come when the two indulge the splendors of living. Life is unequivocally precious, and no McCarthy novel shies away from this truth. Similarly, the love Billy Parham expresses for John Grady Cole during his death scene in Cities of the Plain is one of the hardest for me to read and experience. John Grady’s last words to Billy mean something in his last moments after he exacts revenge, but like Hamlet, he has to give his Horatio his motive: I worried about her all day. You know we talked about where people go when they die. I just believe you go someplace and I seen her layin there and I thought maybe she wouldn’t go to heaven because, you know, I thought she wouldn’t and I thought about God forgivin people and I thought about if I could ask God to forgive me for killin that son of a bitch because you and me both know I aint sorry for it and I reckon this sounds ignorant but I didn’t want to be forgiven if she wasn’t. I didn’t want to do or be nothin that she wasnt like goin to heaven or anything like that. I know that sounds crazy. Bud when I see her layin there I 72 didn’t care to live no more. I knew my life was over. It come almost as a relief to me. lxi For all of the senseless violence and the diabolic nature of his villain, this novel still weaves the terrible circumstance of revenge that has troubled us for ages. Why is revenge so illogical yet so necessary and so sweet for its exacter? This of course is unanswerable, but John Grady Cole’s explanation contributes to whatever beauty exists in such a chillingly cold scenario. In moments like these, I praise McCarthy’s works for remaining committed to the human condition. While Judge Holden, Anton Chigurh, and Eduardo the pimp serve as abhorrent, immoral, but ultimately memorable personalities in his works, I always admire the moments where his fallen, destroyed, and misplaced protagonists achieve the withheld serenity they deserve. Near the end in The Crossing, Billy Parham awakens from dreaming of his murdered brother, Boyd, and happens upon a team of indigenous “gypsies” hauling an airplane from its remote area where it had crash-landed somewhere in Mexico. That an airplane appears as “of some ancient vintage” in a novel where most must travel on horseback is jarring. That it is hauled through Mexico by gypsies who transport it “disassembled and the wings tied down with ropes alongside and the wings tied down with ropes alongside the fuselage” is almost unbelievable. What is far more valuable is the final conversation of the novel between Billy and one of the gypsies. First, the gypsy offers a simple explanation for the airplane’s being there: it was one of two planes that had crashed into the ground around 1915. However, in retelling the details surrounding the plane’s descent, Billy and he switch the subject of conversation onto the importance of this plane whatsoever, and why the gypsies should feel so compelled to 73 retrieve it. The gypsy calmly answers: “The reverence attached to the artifacts of history is a thing men feel. One could even say that what endows any thing with significance is solely the history in which it has participated.” lxii When the gypsy qualifies this declaration with another question “Yet wherein does that history lie?” the two men engage a lengthy discussion about human fate, agency, subjectivity, and the precariousness of history and the importance one individual plays amidst the billions of others who walk the earth with him. For Billy, the events recorded in the entire novel seem to be the stakes of this conversation. He, it seems, seeks some resolve or comfort by the tragic loss of his brother, Boyd, who only visits him in dreams. The Gypsy offers him this prescient and valuable summation at the end of their exchange: The past...is always this argument between counterclaimants. Memories dim with age. There is no repository for our images. The loved ones who visit us in dreams are strangers. To even see aright is effort. We seek some witness but the world will not provide one. This is the third history. It is the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How make a world of this? How live in that world once made? lxiii These last two questions are dually important not only to Billy’s plight in The Crossing, but to understanding McCarthy’s general aesthetic as a whole. For, in almost all of McCarthy’s works we see his characters doing their best to answer these questions: “How does one live if the world is a maligned and broken place? How does a person find love if the measure of anyone or anything loved is in its loss? How must one make sense of living in a world where the same things, people, the world and its places, and the life itself is both given to us and taken just as indiscriminately?” If anything, the volume of 74 works Cormac McCarthy has produced in his lifetime is as best an attempt to answer these questions than any. 75 Bibliography Arnold, Edwin T. “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness: McCarthy’s Moral Parables” in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999. Brannon Jr., William Carl. “Riding for a Fall: Genre, Myth, and Ideology in Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels.” Dissertation. Texas Tech University. 2003. Cawelti, John G. Apostles of The Self-Made Man. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965. Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder” in The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage, 1988. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. New York: Dutton 1960. Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Vintage 1985. Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972. Ibsen, Henrik. Ghosts in Four Major Plays. London: Oxford University Press, 1981. Jacoby, Karl. Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Masters, Joshua J. “‘Witness to the Outermost Edge of the World’: Judge Holden’s Textual Enterprise in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 40.1. Fall 1998. McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian Or, The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage, 1985. 76 McCarthy, Cormac. Cities of the Plain. New York: Vintage, 1998. McCarthy, Cormac. The Crossing. New York: Vintage, 1994. Owens, Barcley. “Blood Meridian’s Violence” in Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. Tuscon: The University of Arizona Press, 2000. Peebles, Stacey. “Yuman Belief Systems and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian” Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 45. 2 (Summer 2003) 231-244. Phillips, Dana. “History and the Ugly Faces of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian” in American Literature Vol. 68. 2. (June 1996) Durham: Duke University Press 322- 460. Sepich, John Emil. “Tarot and Divination” in Notes on Blood Meridian. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Shaviro, Steven. “The Very Life of Darkness”: A Reading of Blood Meridian.” in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860. Oklahoma City: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1973. Stinson, Emily J. “Blood Meridian‘s Man of Many Masks: Judge Holden as Tarot‘s Fool.” Southwestern American Literature. 33.1. (2007): 9-21. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 17 Jun. 2010. Warren, Robert Penn. Interview in The Paris Review. By Eugene Walter and Ralph Ellison. New York: The Paris Review, No. 16. Spring-Summer 1957. <http://theparisreview.org>. 77 Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 2001. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge: October Books, The MIT Press, 1991. 78 Appendix: Graffiti Signatures 1. He thinks he has a secret buried in his mind and he can’t get at it. —Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye 79 Black Bear The horizon more dark than seemed natural with the boy running without a belt on, and one hand holding his waistline, and the other holding a deer skull. It could be done now. His father’s lamp could be complete. The light bulb, mounted on the stem of a bear’s vertebrae and behind the lampshade, brought its unnatural glow, but now the boy holds a deer skull. To the house, he runs past me, the tiller and the patriarch and the maker of bone lamps. When he enters the house, he sees the lamp no longer standing but burning the fur on the bear rug. The rug with a head always crying from the black bear that I killed from the road. 80 The Calf We were deaf inside the storm cellar to all but our thoughts and myths of the whale, the war, the tormented ship at sea. Just you, me, our father who passed his fifth gallstone, and the dog, suddenly unreliable in its fright. The cellar door tore back and forth applauding and applauding: Here at the quiet limit of the world. Do you know what it is trying to say? he asked us, "Here and everywhere, sleeping with one eye open." The cyclone lifted to drop again near Stillwater leaving behind the annihilated forms of crawdads, suckerfish, and toads in the pasture, where a cow, legless and tipped over, called to us. More unforgivable than winter shutting us out behind his curtains of ice. But some small part of us wanted this, no? To offset the boredom of summer, to let the poor man in Hades steal a bride or two, so we could love ourselves again, and with the knife, he had me cut across the assaulted belly and pull out the calf, drenched and shivering, taking its first breaths and wanting its first want. 81 Mayakovsky looks like it’s after three and it’s you and I again where these nights prove that this muscle is a shell the heart protects everything but not the point when I look into your mouth the stars, a persistent chime at night I can only see what I am capable of for you have known me a pair of years how I change with this skin that ages cleverly the true witness of these lives I wonder if he is capable of boredom you take off this pair of underwear as if you were somebody famous it’d poison your father’s eyesight something is different, this is only dream or memory because your face is puzzle-pieced with the difficulty of a near-forgotten sentence like the oval of a beer-stained kiss-print a strand of spite thrown from the car window falling as an apple in a love-poem by Mayakovsky 82 For Lucia Berlin In this dream, Lucia is alive again and an earthquake has shaken New Mexico to little pieces of bedrock and granite so I am digging in the earth for her, my story of the sundial made of quartz and the philosopher’s statue molded from wet sand, like my life which is mapped out on sheet music for a cellist to break four strings while trying to make it all sound complete and Lucia is afraid that my story is long- gone with the gypsies and the plants with water you can drink inside of them and you can dance all night with the thieves who will rob you blind and break your heart and die with grins wide as sickles on their faces and I am talking about cookies with little happy faces of frosting painted upon them and I am on the other end of the line with a woman drinking lemon extract and honey all night, while the liquor stores opened the same time the schools did and in this dream Lucia is alive and she is walking along the ruins of Albuquerque oh Albuquerque poor Albuquerque we’ve lost you we’ve done all we can to find you your sunsets your sad apples your Indian reservation casino signs blinking like a bag of watches under the tire of a Toyota. 83 Ophelia dans le noir My finger could also rub Yorick’s tooth and thumb the gun’s hammer. One distorted reflection of lipstick, wineglass. I think of life, and I want flowers as a means to rape the moon. Let’s drop them all to death without fear of a wounding swoon. One ghost- stricken moment, drained down forever’s ear. Alas, a shaded window, you gave me no more. My revenge will float to forget you, forget me and all the poppies’ smoke in one friendless, silent chime. Loveless, red matters of sex, death, or rhyme. Armed with so many squiggly words, words, words, and so much lightness in this small bed of time. 84 In the constellation of what is, because how cylindrical the world remains; to live alone, not unfortunate, but of necessity like the recollection of what the hell was said in the over-imagined tunnel, where these great gears show no sign of halt, and time’s artistry makes peculiar work of our bodies. I can’t say this canvas is in place. It extends itself like the infernal spook outside the window, when suddenly you find it in your body, your over-valorized earth. You’re lucky a moon rolls across the night, a pearl along a neck. One star explodes, another implodes. Thus, we stomp the ground's bitterness in your useless world. I imagine your life was a cutout, shaped like patch-work longing, and every time I tumbled out of that broken abode, I threw it to the imperfection of midnight, where I was used to making faces, shapes, and things in the constellation of what is, where your voice is heard, the words, furious bubbles recited underwater. I continue our discussion alone, not unfortunate, but of necessity, for my world tightens like the throat-hole in a weak man. What lurks on these clouded boundaries? Each time, I return bigger, more broken and rain-drenched, as one morning, I stumbled back with hooks and tackle, and you were not sweeping school floors, but reading the bible and taking notes in your red Chevrolet. A restless small-mouth. The suicide in your hand, your cracks in the sky and a head for no taking, where sparrows had been so affirmative that summer, now refused to take flight. 85 Santa Ana Winds So much happening during the dance. Beetles fall from broken piñatas. Scarecrow Judas set aflame. The helicopter’s spotlight: a hot beam pouring over manicured lawns. On a porch step behind the masquerade, a rat chews on a feather, shaken loose from an angel’s broken wing. The more willing, the greater the disorder. How fire turns inward. Now the storms, intent to ruin, will bring the gracious stranger to the door reporting to the father that his heiress was strangled by her own scarf, twisting her away, behind the roadster like a conspiracy: No friends, no secrets to tell! I just never returned… 86 Han Solo Millennium Falcon, there’s razor-wire * in space-travel, and it’s invisible. * I chase women always remained tied to some * obligation between self and space. In * hyperspace, they climax through twelve small moons. * I once caught a toad with nine tongues. The family * wrote me off as Heathen, Smuggler, but I rescued a boy * from becoming his sister, father, or * some armless thing nested in a dirty * cantina. Today, my blaster projected * a tunnel through thief and adulteress— * neither had three eyes between them. I’m ugly, * and the price on my head is bigger than * the rock I’ll die on, but try and catch me * courting fire, you bounty hunters, you stars * with your awful carbonite coffins, with * your bad, bad bronze, tearing my face away… 87 Dying Astronomer His name on a star, just as he wrote it with his eye glued to a telescope and his finger for a pen. Science no longer matters. The bright side to hacking cough is not: "A constellation erupts from my chest each time!" On our walk, he makes habit of spitting on the ground. Ascending the staircase to the observatory is still possible. Of Jupiter's moons, he says: "I once pitied Io but the wreckage of Ganymede is all the rage now." At night, we bundle up to catch the Leonids on top of his trailer's roof. His coat swallows him like a cod and his hat looks pinned to his head at an angle. Things going on in the night sky, all over. The night sky, shivering for good. A fool cries that death is unneeded and so must our fears return, back to hell. "Dying man resembling presidents on money," he says and apologizes to the air: "Hell, I'm gone. May God bless you all." 88 TuPac Shakur Like the nation, the three a.m. bus splits: two parts of the same arm. My headphones hug my neck like a dog collar. The city outside this window blurs into a rash stream of wedded light. Iridescence. Heartbreak on my mind, and for what holy reason? No woman to throw me out of her life in years, but the last pale, sad thing I witnessed was two young men killing a crow for sport. It was inglorious. Perched, lovely on its phone pole at first, then its soft nosedive to the earth. The dark angel, armed with light, will forever muse my dreams of one death in Las Vegas, and none to claim the deed. 89 Cody Jo Car crash on the interstate—bad enough to belong there forever. I was safe; mother in the kitchen, ashamed with the impurity of her solitude, father in the earth with a leaky heart. I watched it happen: a fog settled on the cornfield, which stood just higher than the road. The fog moved. No matter which way I went, it seemed to go in the opposite direction. Up the hill, a doe pissed against a tree. The fog was dense, but not so dense that I couldn’t hear an owl’s shriek, like the witch, alive enough to say to me, I kiss you because I cannot eat you! Morning broke, and a small cat sprinted below the haze with something in flight pursuing it. Fire was an alarm clock for the county. I shut the engine off the tractor. Morning heated up like glass. Two cars collided head-on. It would take the men some hours to make sense of this. The doe broke through the barbwire. It was injured and inside my field. What was I expected to do? I was kissed. I was eaten. I need. I needed my rifle, so I could repair all of this. And my mother, long done calling me, resorted to detasseling the corn by hand. 90 A Hog’s Heart discarded on the road. Poor misguided lightning struck the lovers in the loft. Trucks hauled away the bodies. Pigs ran in potato pairs. Initials branded on their hides. Headed for home cooked red as a family of foxes, foxes, foxes stingy as moonlight. An old, singed meteor was a hair wiped behind the ear. At night, the crucible-moon nears like a clay saint’s face in the phlox. We hung it on the tree limb. Spanish oak stood before us like a flea; a fiddle and a dewdrop of spittle yields a broke instrument. No kind note like a joked horse’s guilt; the wheel spoke over a fossilized indigene. The body looked mush and puddle—a colt curled into its mother. Revolt was the beak shattering the shell. A beagle saved the piglet under the hoof. A seagull ate our onion rings; the naughty little bird hit the ground. We buried it with dandelions. A hog’s heart in a plastic bag. Start ignoring the police as you drive home. It still beats in your lap. Tree trunk like a tomb. A roast-spike just as stiff. 91 Elegy Entering, it enters you. At most, it wants your ears and the mind chained between them like King Kong. Imagine the mind leveling the Big City for the sake of the heart. Wind stirs the leaves into a funnel of little deaths. After the snow appears and takes away the window, a radio across the way, a familiar song and lyrics, then life is ignited paper. Roman candles torching the sky. Joy may not justify defending ones loved. Your absence eats me; I meant to warn you. In late morning, the storm clouds remove escape. It is sound, snow crashing on the ground—this handshake with its audibly warm embrace. 92 O 15 th Letter o full moon teacher of loss perfect contentment with absolute nothing o goddess of squandered light o goddess of borrowed light cat’s eye coin thrown down an alleyway on a wish blimp of hunger and blight telephone for the melancholic bullet hole in the night’s sky the backside of the eye is no tunnel o speck o but we are your faithful and humble servant specks lamplight of the freight train’s hood famed mother of no one amused beating heart of oceans o vapor in a speech cloud o mirror o lovely spot on this favorite shirt conquest that was conquest to be dropped aspirin on black carpet in a hotel, burning this very moment that we speak o to hell with them our songs and our feelings o hell, we want them back inside-out orange o moon o moon protect us if not outlast us 93 2. They’re perfectly visible this evening, about as unobtrusive as a storm of meteors, these questions of happiness plaguing the world.—Dennis Johnson, “The Incognito Lounge” 94 William Carlos Williams By himself, electrocuted; by modernity, his mind snapped taut, that tightrope above the falls, beyond the baseball stadium loaded with a crowd, screaming like wildfire. Ballroom dancing with Marianne Moore beneath the petrified pelican in a taxidermist’s shop. He glanced into the mirror’s modernity and wanted street cars to slalom through the hair on his scalp, wanted Paterson’s newspaper headlines printed on his teeth. A vaudevillian dance macabre when they released Ezra from Pisa. Most of all, Aaron Burr, his outlaw prototype that trumped any cowboy, assassin, or confederacy. Modernity was the path, but less linear, less circular, less step stones and more mud. A pointillist's rain-wet wheelbarrow and white chickens in his old age. They always just happened to be there. 95 Phillip Marlowe 1. Perhaps a lifetime speaking in fragmentary characters of light. Perhaps a poem can be thought of as a new example of et cetera. Meanwhile, dawn lifts like the shrug of a god in charge of sweeping stars under a rug, and this daughter blew a backdoor through her skull. 2. Perhaps it’s best to begin: Here lies the body of a woman on the floor. Summoned to figure out why this happened, he picks her brain the way he plays chess or sifts his fingers through a bowl of nuts separating the garbage of cashews, until he digs deep enough to see her face, blue as a fish’s pigment, a mouth filled with et cetera, et cetera. 3. He is stifled by a woman outside the window carrying her laundry as if it were a basket of heads beneath a guillotine. It is six, and morning looms and he drinks from his office bottle while Los Angeles is illuminated with all the hilarity of the cosmos. He wonders, “Who wouldn’t like to go away even without promise of return? Children smash gnats onto the butcher’s smock of their palms. They were drawn to the heat in the head—coming and going, coming and going—these bodies blessing bodies of water and stone. Remember: that fire-eater, practicing at dusk in the cemetery because the shadows of headstones convinced him the graves had been exhumed? Remember: staying celled in night’s quarters 96 with old gin to make you wild? Back to the dead girl’s mother: lotus-eater as well, and her father once went out to rob a liquor store and returned as a sponge. He sung like Nero when the sacked cities burned to ash. She whispered under a small rain on the top of Laurel Canyon: Young, naïve, stupid, and beautiful thing, stay here. Picture this, the girl, when alive, rolled around on a wood floor covered with thumbtacks and broken glass, until her body was a picture book of scars. Weapon. Snowflake. Woman with a handgun. Or check this out: Marlowe is the man who rolls around on a set of train tracks, on the ampersand’s venture. In the cycles of ground and skies that pass the eyes, I hope for a silence, an ugly silence, an ugly nothing, or melted ice cubes, or a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window, or headaches and cops, or the murder like any city’s fire, or a body, not blood, zipped up with a toe tag and a mortician who peels that gape into a smile. They’ll say: you, is you, was you, as if the moments were stitched into a tapestry. Remember: et cetera, et cetera, et cetera or nothing: a fingernail shaving, a bug, and every book I have ever read is a metaphor for death.” 97 Graffiti Signatures: stone pillars in Venice, CA Beneath the sky, its baffling, garrulous banner: you exist. Under the coughed dead of flickering neon, waves forever, and manifest drained of its gleam. Please redeem the trickery of the world, so says a beachfront Christ hauling a refrigerator box, flattened and charioting puppies, into eternity. Wave goodbye to the night, but never to imagination, that fits us all like a suit that feeds these buses, painted blue, mauling me and they and you. The truth is that ruin becomes gold brick, even if its rubble anthem will crush us, as you stomp out a dance to our departure: yes, we were all here too. 98 a schoolyard light pole in Denver Tagged scrawl of lettered, star-shaped selves. Glossed and wet, gold marker paint beneath the lamp. Your face in its maze, its architecture. Illegibility contesting the moon's matter-of-factness. Permanent longhand: before the letter became the letter, it would morph into a face, this shaky planet hanging in space, with a thousand feet of braided hair going everywhere on the schoolgirl punching the daylights out of the tetherball. 99 triptych in Lima, Peru: 'Proteas in Bloom' * Not an open palm but a closed fist, a hand best hacked off at the wrist. Dull-faced and dangerous, confident and brass, in their shrimplike posture. Desire does this to you with scissors and pliers all night. * Not the pity for the blind seraph, but the blues in her purgatory. Describe her transplanted mouth as other-worldly, as a monster's lashed neck blooms colors on the leash by its master, a toddler. * The detritus of flora. Admirers hovering above you in throes. Compassion compels them to place you in a bath of water. To sing without the voice. To burn and burn brightly, without the fire. 100 Prague Orgy Waltzed into the city. Waltzed onto the tongue. You could have stitched me to your shadow all night. The tongue discloses nothing. Hear lips. Hear thighs. An earthquake rattles the fish tank. A penny to a piranha that floats up to the top. We sucked oysters and built a village out of tissues. We died warmly as song and resurrected coldly as noises of kiss and suck, where the city was the lost book, of disordered chapters and stolen missives, where the message must not leave its sender to be received. 101 within an alleyway in Chicago for Stuart Dybek Windy names congealed faster than rain turns snow. My meal was air. Grace hid in a saltshaker inside the Nighthawk’s Diner—a flame we all huddled around to stay alive. Ironweed scenes and boxcar transience, or city scenes through each paper lantern of a veiled open window. Where rain paints the wet cement city into a cloister, a heart where the trains vein between each chamber. 102 outside the condemned Packard Plant in Detroit Today, snow fell wanting to smother. Old mother ran herself over and covered her brother. Snow from the lake in clumps, white lies carried in a breeze to your face. Stuck, killed, and hid a cannon from the Civil War atop a snow-covered hill. I remember when this was all trees. Battle and blood, hence machine man's ballad of eye-patch requiem and bathtub cider. Snow making a city with its bare hands. Snow throwing automobiles in a tailspin. Toledo braces itself. Kalamazoo goes cold. 103 covering an entire subway car in Brooklyn The passengers' heads inside each train car form a raiment of light. Remix that, wheels on the tracks are one DJ Red Alert beat smacked by the tongue on the roof of the mouth; the collage comprised of hip-hop concrete and these speedy snails of steel. Remix that, if a train is a train, then a train is a subway in the guts of one bad mother— a woman running in heels, squealing breaks, the tune of the second hand's knock-knock ticks. Remix that, the collage comprised of a gust, behind the train, saluting the station and leaving its trajectory of flung sparks amidst the porch space of bivouacs for nesting rats and knifing through the dark. 104 under a bridge in Pittsburgh and Purgatory for Sean Thomas Dougherty Blue on blue in two separate tones and hue reads: Live, from Planet Rock! Wondrous digital music from the heart inside the owl, watching the bucolic get gutted for the aqueous dream of the metropolis, watching our conspiracy with rust. 105 in Tokyo Much before daybreak, picturing the self reflected in the window is only picturing the self in everything you read, listen to, or see. Picturing the self with hands over my eyes; just briefly, the face pulled from the skull, as in Rilke or in Kabuki or on one building, in its storefront window, a neon sign crookedly hung and flickering its fish-like message, flailing in a puddle on the floor. 106 of Lascaux on Leake Street in London In the beginning, beasts drinking from a cup formed by human hands. Light, the lie. Sleep shrouded the fear. Other questions hid in the dirt, not always the dirt, but animals, our companions, beneath us, about us. Are us. Somehow, to sterilize, to wipe this all away with turpentine oblivion and. To build and to tear it away again. Echoing always, and forgetting, always, What of the fire? 107 painted over earthquake rubble in Santiago, Chile Toyota covered in land crabs. Imagination is a stone wall covered in lichen. Imagination is a spire splattered white with guano and pigeon. Imagination is the half-mouth, gnarled lips pulled back from the gums and buckteeth as crooked as duck feet. Imagination is the possibility of the bricks when the rubble speaks for itself, the song of locusts and honeybees, bitching and bitching some more. 108 on a rooftop in the 9th Ward: God like a sweater Night dark as rain-beaten rum. Somebody had stole his shoes in County. No matter. Life was enough and life, blessed to hear the ambulance siren undulate far away, the police sirens surely coming forth. The gulf grew arms. A chill took his sight from him. How else could one describe it? God was there, in the upper corner, above all the ugly. Rain grew legs and crawled inside to form one body with the wind, to touch the sad and miserable faces. 109 on the side of a NATO military vehicle, transporting troops to Ankara: Indigo hearts, searing with profanity. A sweet little Fuck you! embrace. Love me until explosion, dear children. 110 haiku stenciled between storefronts along Melrose Avenue: * Silhouettes through ice: I battled Tyrannosaurs for the bronze-medaled world. * Timelessness mimics two Cyclops dolls blinking the mosquitoes away. * Waxen effigies. Take my face. Take every dime. Mannequin malice. 111 * Crazier than light. Like water, beating itself. Black face, white face, yours? * Banksy One-Thousand: is an original thought worth mindless quotings? * Mural for Cody: I am you; you are not me. We will meet halfway. 112 Dearest Iago, Chameleon. Reptilian. Defector of the orderly. A face with no face. Your purse. Your fingers sticking inside. And I suppose I loved you back. We converted him Christian. You turned him Turk. A dangerous thing to have—an artist on the stage with that audience looking on. A proposition? No, thank you. A preposition attached to a word is its undoing. See, your husband has fallen in-sane with jealousy. Or, such a misunderstanding is in-tolerable, or not holy, as your wife in bed when you are not at home with gloves on be-cause when you return, you mean to strangle her. x o x o -Desdemona. 113 Camera Take I. Drinking at The Sink, I watch two women converse over cosmopolitans. They arm wrestle vanities, race to beat time, substitute cell phones for one another, and freeze graciously as mannequins. If you blink rapidly, people become stop-motion, but I am no dinosaur devouring shrunken Argonauts. The first picture of me was an old Polaroid that later burned. On television, Rockies host the Giants, and while Barry Bonds bats crowd-cameras flash like the croaks of mute toads. Robert Redford once janitored here. It’s true, you can look it up. A woman lends me her Fuji for an autographed picture while she and her husband honeymoon Tinseltown. Rain sits upon a filming lens. A tumor sits in a breast. In the bar, Redford’s photo hangs above the cash register, and above a photo of my buddies and me screaming our laughter in one trapped moment, and above Nick, the bartender, still as a photo, leaning against his cruel jewel case. Outside a rain-streaked window: the smeared motion- picture of a police car, chasing the Cadillac with cadaver rhythm blaring from its stereo. Old Craig smuggled forties inside his wide-legged pants. After his accident, they mounted his plaque in the corner to watch over us: we’re over being us, like New Year’s Eve, where the cameras erupt at midnight, a strip of backfiring trucks. 114 Take II. Some nights I shiver muttering mutherfuck endlessly because I know I’m being watched. Just once, Old Craig called drinking: swallowing tin for the sake of rust, and now a chalked line traces his frame. It seems like the only untold story occurred: one night, he drank until they tossed him upwind where a pair of young ones snapped a shot of him sleeping on the ground, between here and the bodega, under the horizontal rain of streetlamps lining Broadway. They saw him. He was famous for drinking bottles mistaken as ashtrays. I start a dialogue with a girl on imitating the eye, but she exits for the other end of the bar. Despite it all, we’ll never see each other again. Stand together, smile, and say, Cheese. Trace the walls with your fingers, sing of cave paintings— those dear, dear buffalo speared, shut off from, the dead-center of the eye. 115 9 th Letter Road through Topanga Canyon Listen, fall’s rain-song beating the ferns and fronds. A mute airplane tearing through the clouds. The night has caught goose bumps. Its many-punctured flesh is the net of prayer, for the dots on the i’s drop to the floor like the heads of heretics. I lean on my disbelief in the ghost horse led by the walker, shrouded in his coat, his blue disappearance beyond the ridge of the descending canyon. Life could stretch beyond like that—traced-over, on a map, or it speeds by like the flipbook of history and its disorderly pages. A raindrop only knows of one meridian. A straight line. One half of the cross. 116 3. Loneliness—huge, suddenly menacing and no one is left here who knows me anymore —August Kleinzahler, “Family Album” 117 Lullaby for Elizabeth Knapp Decanter of bourbon. Father’s lone shotgun. Fifty sparrows springing from the old elm shattered my uncle’s prosthetic face. How our other selves fail to flee such a storm: birds’ hearts like a million pieces of plastic burning again and again and again. Then you snaked from the yard to the barn’s backside to show me the odor of cauterized brains, burning hay, and the screams of those penned horses in that October night. O, the rain’s obscenities streaked the windowpane with laughter. O, sucker-punched, until Father fell on the lamp stand as though it were a bed. Pinched his nostrils until he went black. Forgot his name until he woke up. He never forgave his brother, his disappearance without waving farewell. His eyelids fluttered from smoke at the stake. The starlight of the dead will rage on. Something in this dance of shadow caught fire. We watched for hours and did not learn a thing. Erase parts, erase text next morning, for those swallows cannot be but unbearable lies. They scissor our moon, its armor of light. 118 Missives from the Canon Ignoble Lattice of bones. The moon is a hook in the meat of the night. When the snow falls, you become mute as the night. They are burning the Jacarandas downtown. I own a watch made from the bones of a mouse. Right on for the darkness! sings Curtis Mayfield, and Painted red and brown I am a ghost, writes Bradley Land. Stick your head inside that hole beneath the house. What do you see lying there in the snow? What figure moves? What garment of language is its name? * * * The wind is strong. Only an ocean would make it a gale. A tornado so fierce it pulled houses away like rice paper. Houses like jack-o-lanterns with roofs for hats. That jack-o-lantern with his dopey Come follow me! facial expression deserved the punch in the face that time gave it. Old men play chess in the park to mask their game with death. Sweet wind obscures the moon’s reflection and prevents you from finding your way home. The wind says it’s time to go, now. Forget your legs. Forget your puny, waxen wings. * * * The mother is pregnant again with fire. She sings and peers at a night so star-ridden that she believes she could drown in it. What is your ignoble edict? Wishes undelivered? Lives ruined, but foreseen by all of you? A cigarette drops and she crushes it with her bare foot. Her rice wine smells like California. A cricket fiddles somewhere in the great nothing that stands right beside her, save for a tree, robed in time, 119 standing like a many-limbed man with each palm open: begging her to set him ablaze. * * * In the afterlife there is nothing but bones and rain. There is a great ocean and you with no boat. All are forgotten and unremembered. All are so free they grow hungry for bondage. I know this like I know that the moon is an old, hollow bone that whistles at night like the man who has purloined your wallet at knife-point and walks away, otherwise unnoticed. See the possum strain upwards from its meal of avocado to listen. It agrees. Like the moon, it too will shatter. 120 West Nile Itch goes unscratched. Spruce trees dying. Dried blood caked over shards of mirror-glass in the bathroom sink. Dirty scent of marigolds on that southwest corner behind the shed. Crows died all summer long by the beaks of mosquitoes. The locksmith’s father arrived from Leadville perished by the beak as well. A life is made up of one’s infinite and useless tugging at the knot made by bodies of mother and father. He took two socks off. One wrapped around his fist to stop the bleeding. The other the mother slept on naked beneath the stars. 121 Query of a Die 6. These peculiar stripes on a bee: * antithetical selves, endless points, in rows of two: * the winner’s stacked chips in a craps game: * empty chambers in a revolver: * in an unlit room, the attempt to focus upon the machined eyes of my lover: * seen from above lines forming endlessly: men on one side women on the other * this road to where else, but death? 5. * Electrons swirl around a nucleus; the planets commence dance to annihilation as core magma swirls and flares. * Open your palm, emphatically, in celebration for the cosmos: try to connect each point without running over the same line twice. * 4. * Maybe we are. flame Slow to realize we are. earth 122 Not the center of. water Ambience and dimensions. air * 3. * Destroy the tree, and the cross will be ours for some time to come. * The spacecraft explodes between this next, enormous rock and the approaching sun. * Waiting upon the signal even when the stoplights are broken and awkwardly hung. * 2. Downward, double helix. * Notice how one is always on top of the other, no matter which way it turns? * Accumulation, negation—this one equation disrobes the impossible. * 1. * Oh, perhaps: * a dilated, holy vowel? * The holy vowel, no apple’s * invocation or punctuation. * Concentrate on one star, ignore the rest. * Just crouch tight enough, and fit inside. 123 Jesse James Todd for my father Bullets in the rye bottle. Wasps crawling out of the walls. Alright then, sting me like the breath of a ploughman in Omaha, or a train conductor checking his invisible watch for no time in particular. Like cold rain answering the brothel’s prayers. Like the river sparing the church taking the town. A ghost in every cider mill. Pockets filled to the brim with snakes. 124 To Frankenstein, My Father I. Don’t look up a brain resisting change in sleep, a body left without choice want life after want to dam all traffic channels want defiance of summary; a child’s neck snapped like an icicle both contrivance and being galvanized electric, galvanized in language crush the sparrow, avoid drowning in the amnion welcome rust like cancer one bruised apple stolen always ready to live forever through memory, depletion II. Give it all disease, blue in the vein slow build of the heart’s music 125 a bad cell, a loose wire, cancer like rust direction from the cosmos hole: you and I gained shape launched to the stars, each half of the face freezes, incinerates conviction of data and result, the one true evil is breath, don’t breathe III. Tell me what I am. giver of names giver of body, tools obstruction: dancing, making, destroying a brain of wires, tangled ivy, swallowing homes and universities the heart, an extinguished match a mind’s weather cancer and rust, anything more blessed than nothing. 126 Whirlpool If you cup your hands around a small globe of wind. If you open your eyes and watch the dusk form like a rash. Darkness: an invisible punch to the gut. Ravens are indifferent and threatening as headstones. They circle over fists of smoke, trees and buildings along Colfax Ave., where a strange man finds the road, his home. He meanders, like a battery-powered toy released from a child’s hand, with a mind tattooed by the blinking dollar-sign. Neck not a stem but a hinge. He watches the day’s aperture and ambivalence. All void beating light. It twists away in a wind one shouldn’t pretend to own, a strand set free from amalgam. Energy released from its source. Listen to that, can you hear? A stifled cry beneath this spectacle of an extended family of crows, embalmed in black, and swirling like metal flakes in water. 127 The Blue Rose April's light deceives the trees and settles down like an old cat. It burns everything colorless. I have this lens: my hand grows plump as a leaf, ready to become leaky and fall to the earth in a frost-robed October. But darkness on your face and mine, friend, and that the wet of your laughter rises above dove and crow, two stones held in the trees. An answer wears a trench coat without sleeves, opening, or hem. You confess your possession of the handgun you kept in a locker. It went in your book bag and under your books on the bus home from school for one day, just to see what it felt like: one fucked movie, starring yourself. Wind, the small despot goes wild and teamed with rain, it destroys the valley, where daybreak's sun-spilt owl recovers. You are next to me. These trees say goodbye to too many of us. Hence, they wave without any motion. 128 Almost Nothing Good Early morning, my mother arrives home from work with that smell of the graveyard shift at Saint Joseph’s E.R., where she aided the everyday world that crashed into night’s obsidian all her life. Disheveled and sleepy, while a rosary and an empty inhaler remained inside her pockets, she spoke of the almost nothing of the elderly woman who drank bleach and wore the same heart-covered smock as the paralyzed man with the abscessed tooth. Breathing ventilators like the music of washers and dryers as she recorded their 3 a.m. charts. A beer bottle on her forearm to the medic resuscitating the drowned baby in the bathtub. Little thing, still alive, she admitted, but after midnight for the blonde girl, her face tattooed by nothing good, her little wrists opened by a table-saw. Death, of almost anything that comes, my mother could handle it well, except for the boy who slipped on a puddle and cracked his skull on a liquor store floor trying to swipe a bottle of Ten High. He was almost beautiful, not the nothing of a CPR mannequin. Might have been, almost, your father if he lived, and if I were younger, but my God, nothing good—she covered her mouth to arrest them, to beat back those bashful, invisible words, after midnight, like spiders descending from the ceiling to fight the broom. 129 4. Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand technologies of ecstasy boundlessness, the world that at a drop of water rises without boundaries, I push the PLAY button —Frank Bidart, "For the Twentieth Century" 130 The Ludlow Massacre of 1914 The mine caving in on a grandfather. The brother, crawling through a half-mile of horizontal chimney space to plant the dynamite. Eleven mothers and two daughters charred like hens in a tent. The soldier wrote poetry: History's mischievous act of body-snatching: This dead magician chills the audience far worse than the sawed body on the stage. They say the victims ran with eyes wide as a horse's, that those tears matched the echo of galloping hooves. Your words are objects of suspicion. Your history’s kaleidoscope. Clear its dusty lens. 131 Origami from Folded Money I. robbery at the mint When I first saw the thief in face paint, he vanished into the frog-slicked night. He later reappeared in the smoking section of the Sundown Saloon hammering back Pabst cans, chain smoking, staring down everyone, and extinguishing each cigarette into his tongue. Yesterday, after years of absence, he made a point to elbow me as he passed by on the street. His forearm was saturated heat, an iron. He tossed his apology: this dime could not buy salvation. This dime on the train tracks had two choices: Roosevelt’s smeared face on the one hand, E Pluribus Unum on the other. 132 II. always two-sided Sunset shrinks, an imploding sky infested with clouds. At Christopher’s party Manuel Lazar has a compass of ash painted upon his forehead. Dirt falls like people. A story and a joke as he makes a pass at Evelyn, and then his words resemble nothing, sweet mirth. He wakes from a bed of levitating leaves. With the wind he rises; a mask of earth blankets his face. He opens his palm revealing a nickel with wry, old Jefferson, smirking about the Danse Macabre in Spain, a meteor shower in Paris, and how the bone-white girls in the courtyard looked above, then indifferently at the one who covered her eyes. 133 III. the larceny Snow fell in unison, sweet calamity, like the collapsing pearls snatched from the collarbone of royalty. A Christmas-loving transient, warm with fever, stopped me at an intersection and shook his change- cup like a tambourine. Can I have it, my friend, comrade, dear brethren, or is your soul cold, gray ice floating along in your urine? 134 Broken Syntax for the Streets of Economy Nobody feels it moving into the chest; only what we see: the relationship between the vanished and responsibility; contact is ground to locomotion: radio, television, habitual coverage of skies falling… this anthem rings like a telephone removed from its hook— economy— a paste poured across the way; streetlights left hanging, illumination no longer, but parcels of permanent darkness on street corners; what of the fear? what if we all prayed, including you, for immobility, or the super- nova within: sweet nectar approaching outward, waiting idly? I stood where I stood, looking out while praying that the sea didn’t begin where it ended, praying that night wasn’t disease or gift— buildings that remain: baby’s fists to greet the floating hours; my song, narrating the plight of a pugilist; swearing that I knew you, I’d 135 known you all along… but never naïve, you and I could not, cannot tell the difference between chasing the aroma of colors, and blood not chasing anything 136 Elegy for Miroslav Holub Of death? Imagine impossibility, says the woman pronouncing, Dlouha in birdsong directions. Nighthawks warble and digest another evening of precursors and forewarnings: My hand was cold too, as if I’d touched the milky-way…How long it takes for a train like that to pass by within this journeywork of stars and in memory the image disperses like cloud tufts. The Tyn Church—as empty as claustrophobia: six sides of wood— front, back, top, bottom, and around. Lose music, lose ivory, and a coffin is a lesser grand piano. A spider was crawling on the wall tasting the stone with its forelegs. What came first, poets or festivals? Beneath the glowering statues, waiting for something greater. What to long for first: thirst, hunger, or the cool crash of rain on my brow? When I stumble, I kick loose stones at the Basilica of Saint George, humbly bent: knee-and-elbow execution. Knee-and-elbow: the hungry along bridges and intersections. Drop a coin into their cup, take them from my eyelids, and feed as many as you can. Brothers, sisters: they parted us—night spills forth its wild money, its impossible wished for most. Open your fist: my last ticket into the folds of your need. If permitted, just one last request: to see broken glass, pained light, night’s shudder and utterance, to hear a tale 137 on the slow, articulate ear of that river. 138 Elder in the Grain Iced December wheat from the lips of dead men. That flower is not me, father, who mistook me for your shadow. The night will not praise me for my mask. My lies covered a once proud skeleton. The lies I live are hats. 139 Turntablism Turntable to the left, turntable to the right. Music is the splendor and weight of thought. If it dwells inside the fabric of the world, it dwells inside the mechanical heart of the world. Watch my hand study the vinyl; sentences of song pressed upon the-the-the- darkness, my shroud, my quiet commotion. Its message: Reside among the torpid tar pits of the city, sprouting towers of light that pray outward. Reside, like the speaking star we gaze for beneath its indignation. Time feigns movement. Time camouflaged in a skin of twilight. Voice, continuation, wet fire. Lulled by sleep, this symphony of smoke. Burn that reminder, love it, and pass it to a friend. They dance inside the sound: a trumpet break- beat, where movement brings an attentive halt. As a mass, our mind is an animal. As a mass, we are the divine snail waiting for a graceless, shattering punch to our shell. Economy bullies the spir-spir-spirit. Samurai’s hands wrapped around sword handles. My willing head lobbed above the crowd like a beach ball. 140 Neon Narcissus Fogged mirror. Las Vegas hotel. Reflection gives me this putrid glare, as if to say: What on earth have you done? It’s only me, I remind myself, and hold one ball bearing of a countless group. Understandably, I peek at the shrunken convex version of myself, choked between fingers and thumb, and when it’s late, the television holds me in its sad sack. Twice, I’ve caught myself staring into the white-flamed lens of static. Fireflies swoop and linger on this dead pond to appease their reflections. Life’s headlong onslaught ends one night, before the crash. A face appears, and I can’t help but laugh. 141 Prayer Ask the dusk what it believes— the sensation of arrival, only to transform into something far more spectacular and empty. Of the price, ask the stars that swing westward as the conversation lulls and the men are left to ponder what aches inside their hearts. Ask the mother, baking her breaking heart inside the oven, or the father polishing his shoes one sheen and his liver, another. Ask the child, supine on the earth and her head delirious with wonder, counting meteorites. Ask the flesh, this suit of light and unmaking. Ask the mouth, the wound from which the world has never healed. Ask the word, ask the people, for now they're everywhere, even the ones time has pulled from their corpora; when you open their books 142 you can hear their declaratives, imperatives, and interrogatives burrow subway tunnels through the mind. Ask the meadowlark flying too fast for you to see. Ask its entrance, but do not, do not wait to ask of its departure. 143 In Broomfield, it was cold, and the November frost hushed the corn into straightjackets. The town was named after corn, or what you could make from corn, such as broom bristles, pipes, and noses for scarecrows. On a small plot of acreage owned by an invisible farmer, I happened upon a horse tangled in barbwire. Fog exhaled from its maw. Its dark eye froze like a pebble encased in ice. A wound big as an apple in its side. Nothing appeared to enter or exit that wound, but inside, two robin eggs kept warm. The sight was too untouchable, as if to make contact would change and ruin and make damp the world's large canvas of ash and crumbled dirt and the chirping of birds. 144 A 21 st Letter Turn Night, the animal that keeps you alive. Night, the u-turn of the self. Hear sad cows moo their way into the fire. Write the great American novel, and it scatters into the poor American madman’s thoughts in the small tornado of your life. Pull flower petals like prudes. Put on woolen tube socks, boots, and march through your animal rage on Pluto: one big ball of ice too far away. Shoo away friends like flies. You're no more you than he or she was you. Blue sadness was a happiness that turned its back on you. Poor you. Fuck you. Love, you followed the same path until it finished. You died. You turned the other way and walked it all again. 145 Notes: “The Calf”-- Here at the quiet limit of the world is from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Tithonis.” “For Lucia Berlin” references her short-short called “Unmanageable” from So Long (Black Sparrow Press, 1993). “Phillip Marlowe”: The line, “…that fire-eater,/practicing at dusk in the cemetery/because the shadows of the headstones/convinced him the graves had been exhumed…” is a variation of a character that appeared in Denis Johnson’s Already Dead. The line: a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole/in a stained glass window is taken from Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. A few of the poems in “Graffiti Signatures” are in conversation with various street art— many of which are graffiti, and stencil murals attributed to the notorious street artist, Banksy. Notably, “painted over rubble in Santiago, Chile,” “of Lascaux on Leake Street in London,” & “outside the condemned Packard Plant in Detroit” are in direct conversation with street art attributed to Banksy. The line: “I remember when all this was trees.” is taken from a Banksy piece in Detroit, MI (www.banksy.co.uk). “Graffiti Signatures”: Prague Orgy is the title of a novella by Phillip Roth. “Graffiti Signatures”: within an alleyway in Chicago contains references to Stuart Dybek’s short stories, “Nighthawks” & “Paper Lantern.” Ironweed is a novel by William Kennedy. “Graffiti Signatures”: in Tokyo: The allusion to Rilke is from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. “Graffiti Signatures”: haiku stenciled between storefronts along Melrose Avenue: “Banksy one thousand:/ is an original thought/ worth mindless quotings,” is a syntactical realignment of a Diogenes quote cited on a Banksy mural: (www.banksy.co.uk). In “Camera,” The Sink is a bar in Boulder, CO., and yes, truthfully, Robert Redford was once its janitor. “Missives from the Canon Ignoble,” “Painted red and brown I am a ghost,” is a direct quote pulled from Brad Land’s memoir, Goat. “West Nile” is dedicated to Kenneth Lark and is in memory of his father, Edward Lark. “Elegy for Miroslav Holub:” Italicized lines are originally by Czech poet, Miroslav Holub, except “Dlouha,” which refers to a street in Old-Town Prague. 146 i Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian Or, The Evening Redness in the West (New York: Vintage, 1985) 3. Subsequent reverences will be given in parentheses within the text with specific page number cited. ii Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 2001) 84. iii Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (See Note 2) 84. iv Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (See Note 2) 84. v Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (See Note 2) 94. vi Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (See Note 2) 56. vii Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (See Note 2) 73. viii John G. Cawelti, Apostles of The Self-Made Man (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965) 51, 86. ix Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (See Note 2) 158. x Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (See Note 2) 75. xi Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov. (New York: Dutton 1960) 124. Subsequent reverences will be given in parentheses within the text with specific page number cited. xii Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (See Note 2) 55. xiii Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972) 8. xiv Girard, Violence and the Sacred (see Note 13) 85. xv Joshua J. Masters, “‘Witness to the Outermost Edge of the World’: Judge Holden’s Textual Enterprise in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40.1 (Fall 1998) 25-37. xvi William Carl Brannon Jr., “Riding for a Fall: Genre, Myth, and Ideology in Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels.” Dissertation. Texas Tech University. 2003. xvii Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860. (Oklahoma City: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1973) 232. xviii Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence (See Note 17). 179. xix Edwin T. Arnold, “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness: McCarthy’s Moral Parables” in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy Eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999) 62. xx Edwin T. Arnold “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness” in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (See Note 19) 63. xxi Edwin T. Arnold “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (See Note 19) 64. xxii Edwin T. Arnold “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (See Note 19) 62. xxiii Steven Shaviro “The Very Life of Darkness”: A Reading of Blood Meridian in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy Eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999) 151. xxiv Edwin T. Arnold “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness” in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (See Note 19) 63-4. xxv Arnold “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness” in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (See Note 19) 64. xxvi Arnold “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness” in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (See Note 19) 64. xxvii John Emil Sepich, “Tarot and Divination” in Notes on Blood Meridian (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993) 105. xxviii Sepich, “Tarot and Divination” in Notes on Blood Meridian (See note 27) 105. xxix Sepich, “Tarot and Divination” in Notes on Blood Meridian (See note 27) 108. xxx Sepich, “Tarot and Divination” in Notes on Blood Meridian (See note 27) 106. xxxi Sepich, “Tarot and Divination” in Notes on Blood Meridian (See note 27) 106-7. xxxii Sepich, “Tarot and Divination” in Notes on Blood Meridian (See note 27) 105. xxxiii Sepich, “Tarot and Divination” in Notes on Blood Meridian (See note 27) 107. xxxiv , Emily J. Stinson “Blood Meridian‘s Man of Many Masks: Judge Holden as Tarot‘s Fool” Southwestern American Literature. 33.1 (2007): 9-21. MLA International Bibliography Web. 17 Jun. 2010. 147 xxxv Stacey Peebles, “Yuman Belief Systems and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 45. 2 (Summer 2003) 231-244. (Quoted page 234). xxxvi See Sepich “Biographies” in Notes on Blood Meridian (See note 27) 22. Of the historical John Joel Glanton, Sepich cites Paul Horgan’s Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History. Vol. 2: Mexico and the United States. (New York: Rinehart, 1954), “Displaced emigrants were turning into horse thieves, gamblers, and even murderers. One set up a business killing Apache Indians and selling scalps to the Mexican government for two hundred dollars each, and collecting two hundred and fifty for each prisoner. If Indians were scarce, he even killed Mexicans to profit from their scalps” (787). xxxvii Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (See Note 2) 76-7. xxxviii Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (See Note 2) 76-7. xxxix Sepich, Notes on Blood Meridian (See Note 27) 11. xl Barcley Owens, “Blood Meridian’s Violence” in Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels (Tuscon: The University of Arizona Press, 2000). 13. xli Žižek, Enjoy your Symptom! (See Note 2) 56. xlii Dana Phillips, “History and the Ugly Faces of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian” in American Literature Vol. 68. 2. (Durham: Duke University Press) 442. xliii Owens, “Blood Meridian and Literary Naturalism” in Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels (See note 40) 47. xliv Sepich, “Judge Holden’s Gunpowder” in Notes on Blood Meridian (See Note 27) 122. xlv Žižek, Enjoy your Symptom! (See Note 2) 113. xlvi Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge: October Books, The MIT Press, 1991) 79. xlvii Žižek, Looking Awry (See Note 46) 102. xlviii Žižek, Looking Awry (See Note 46) 102. xlix Žižek, Looking Awry (See Note 46) 102-3. l Owens, “Blood Meridian’s Violence” in Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels (See Note 40) 20. li Karl Jacoby Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin Press 2008) xviii-xiv. lii See Sepich, Notes on Blood Meridian (See Note 27), who catalogues the various times the judge smiles at the kid: pp 14, 79, 125, 134, 143, 283, 305, 306, 307, 310, 327, and 333. Pp. 156-8 in Sepich. liii Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (New York: Vintage 1998) 291. liv Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder” in The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Vintage 1988) 19. lv Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts in Four Major Plays (London: Oxford University Press 1981). Act II., page 126. lvi Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (See Note 53) 291. lvii Robert Penn Warren Interview in The Paris Review. By Eugene Walter and Ralph Ellison. (New York: The Paris Review, No. 16. Spring-Summer 1957. <http://theparisreview.org> lviii William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (New York: Vintage 1985) 66. lix Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (See note 37) 66-67. lx Faulkner, As I lay Dying (See Note 37) 73. lxi McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (See Note 53) 259. lxii Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (New York: Vintage 1994) 401 & 405. lxiii Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (See Note 62) 411.

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Creator Todd, Cody (author)

Core Title Authority and the failed justification of evil in Cormac McCarthy's Blood meridian, or The evening redness in the West

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 07/30/2013

Defense Date 07/30/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American West,Blood meridian,Cormac McCarthy,Graffiti,Judge Holden,Manifest Destiny,OAI-PMH Harvest

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Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Irwin, Mark (committee chair), Deverell, William F. (committee member), Handley, William R. (committee member)

Creator Email codytodd@usc.edu,codytodd67@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-308412

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Legacy Identifier etd-ToddCody-1896.pdf

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Document Type Dissertation

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