Blood Meridian

For the sake of Alex, Bo and George, I really wanted to love this book. While I didn't love it, McCarthy gave me a key at the end to liking it. Here's the key, from p. 328-9, as forty years later, the judge explains things to the kid, who perhaps not so miraculously ends up watching the same dancing bear get shot in a Texas bar:

This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance in
fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper
time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is
the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its
own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers
contain these things within themselves as well. In any event the history
of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none
here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of
knowing eve in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know that he
might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the
plan if plan there be.

Until this time, I knew what I was reading was good, even though I haven't read Faulkner and don't know how this novel outFaulkners Faulkner. I just knew that McCarthy was writing sentences no one else could write, using a lot of words no one else knows. But being aware of the opera singer's talent doesn't mean you're necessarily enjoying yourself.

For me, the problem is about protagonists. If you were to read other posts on this blog, you'll find that my thing is the redemption narrative; I don't necessarily need a happy ending, but there's something in me that needs the possibility for redemption, be it in a Raskolnikov or a Dmitri or Ivan Karamazov or even a Holden Caulfield. Carton's redemption at the end of A Tale of Two Cities even allows me to enjoy wearing my reading helmet while Dickens bangs me over the head with symbolism. And despite the namelessness that characterizes the characters in The Road, I liked its forward movement, forward toward a future.

Not only did Blood Meridian deny me a name for the kid, but I wasn't even clear that he was my protagonist until Glanton met his hatchet-wielding Yuma friend. Until his time in the desert with Tobin, he was part of an ensemble cast. For me as a reader, the ensemble approach doesn't work, especially when big chunks of the story move my attention to pure evil like David Brown and forget all about the kid.

I remain puzzled by the judge. From the time we meet him in the revival tent we know he's a loose cannon, but he seems to be the one character who has sense - not just learning, but sense. And I guess this is what makes him the real villain, because he knows that other worldviews exist, but he chooses nihilism. Nothing exists beyond his perceptions. In the offense he takes to the freedom of birds, I sensed humor; perhaps I was wrong. His worldview comes from a world without the concept of a savior, of deliverance from the ongoing cycles of war, occasionally interrupted by peace. Thomas Cahill, in Desire of the Everlasting Hills, argues that the world before Jesus was a world in which war was the norm, and peace the exception. So it is with the judge, one who believes in an intelligent designer, but not necessarily in God.

Despite these uneasinesses with the story, the ending, like the end of a poem, gives me a way of thinking about the beginning. Where there is nothing greater than oneself, there is no meaning. Where there is no meaning, life is cheap. When life is cheap, there's no need to think or feel anything beyond the moment, no need to consider the existence of others.

So Blood Meridian, with all its nihilism, leaves me with nothing at the end, not the shock of Inman's end, not the anger at the fate of Tom Joad. Nothing, really, but the recognition of the fact that some men are beyond redemption, and that very few authors can use the sentence or the language like McCarthy.

I wrote a poem that I don't dislike. It happened one morning when I was waiting for a professional development day to start, and as hard as it is to believe, the poem held my interest more than the PD program.

The first line isn't true, but it's close enough. I was given permission to write something that isn't true by Franz Wright when I saw him speak at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival. He was talking about a poem he wrote about writing his first poem; in it, he changed his suburban house to a farmhouse. Why? Because he has an imagination and the permission to use it. Everything else is true, but without that first liberty, the poem doesn't happen.

I write all this stuff because I ask students to write the story of their poems, to write what they like about them, and to write what they're unsure about. For this poem, I like the way I wrote lines, and I like the way the ending found me without any heavy-handedness on my part; it was one of those moments when you feel that deep satisfaction of having something happen in a piece of writing that serendipitously fits what you're trying to do. What I'm unsure about is the word "tropes." I initially resisted it because it's not exactly the literal right word, but the more I think about it, the more protective I get about the word. Still, there's probably something to my initial misgivings.

Is that enough prelude? Here's the poem.

Absence

A woman I know is mourning a baby
she never held, a little girl
buried under the rubble of an orphanage

in Port-au-Prince. How ridiculous,
the cynic in me thinks,
to fall in love with the idea of a person.

Something there is that nags me
this morning, something there is
that tells me to write about something

that isn’t there.

A pregnant woman walks into the room
the moment I write that line.
She is expecting, and her hope, to her,

is real. Inside her, someone lives. She
feels it kicking in her belly. She sees,
through the miracles of science,

through a little gel, a little electricity,
a round head, little arms, little fingers.
She hears the thrumming of a little heart.

One wonders what her husband hopes.
He’s expecting, yes, but images unfelt:
a swaddled face asleep in the cradle of his arms;

a baseball midair backgrounded by a boy
in an oversized hat on a sun-kissed green field;
the rite of passage of a first beer together.

I had a boy, maybe, once;
it was too soon to tell. He was
the third child we never had,

but the first one I made real.
Through him, I lived all the tropes
of American fatherhood.

And then, on the last Easter morning of the second millennium,
at the moment perhaps that Mary Magdalene finds
an empty tomb, that dream died.

How obscure, how elusive, the movement of the soul!
A bee flitting from flower to flower
in a field of goldenrod;

a leaf falling from a tree, scattered
by the wind; a moon waxing and waning,
always full, always halved, always quartered;

a wave crashing against the cold cliff wall,
reabsorbed by the vastness from which it came
that it might lick the fine sand of some warm beach

to chase a child back to his father’s embrace.
I’ll never let go of that boy,
the one I never held.

So I gave the class the challenge of finding a poem they like but aren't able to interpret. Here's my attempt, with "Song of the Seven-Hearted Boy," by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by Jerome Rothenberg.

Song of the Seven Hearted Boy

Seven hearts
are the hearts that I have.
But mine is not there among them.

In the high mountains, mother,
where I sometimes ran into the wind,
seven girls with long hands
carried me around in their mirrors.

I have sung my way through this world
with my mouth with its seven petals.
My crimson-colored galleys
have cast off without rigging or oars.

I have lived my life in landscapes
that other men have owned.
And the secrets I wore at my throat,
unbeknonst to me, had come open.

In the high mountains, mother,
where my heart rises over its echoes
in the memory book of a star,
I sometimes ran into the wind.

Seven hearts
are the hearts that I have.
But mine is not there among them.

This poem was chosen because I have wanted to become better acquainted with Garcia Lorca. There may be a convergence of things here - Nick did his Walt Whitman project first semester, Slemp was looking at Ginsberg, Ginsberg wrote A Supermarket in California, which contains both Garcia Lorca and Whitman, a further perusal through the collection of Garcia Lorca poems I brought took me to Ode to Walt Whitman, which I wish I'd found first semester so I could have given a copy to Nick Horstmeyer. When I copied the poem into my notebook, I copied the original Spanish version, also - though Rosetta Stone may be coming to me at a pace apropos its name, I can try to get a head start on my line-by-line Spanish education.

So why did I select this one when I was looking for a poem to like? My first guess is its symmetry. Something in my nature demands the sense of balance and proportion, and I guess I heard echoes of The Tiger and the very pleasing could/dare of its first/last stanza symmetry. I like the way the first two and last two stanzas hold this song together. Maybe I had The Tiger on the brain because of the way the sevens of the poem lead me to something biblical, and if you know anything about me, you know that my sacreligious, blasphemous sensibility is somehow ironically attuned to anything biblical. While I have no idea what to make of "my mouth with its seven petals," I find the deliberate incongruence appealing. I'll have to ask someone to explain to me what I'm missing.

In the high mountains, mother,... There's someting in the tone of those stanzas I can't put my finger on. I feel like I get the feeling of "my heart rises over its echoes in the memory book of a star." There's a serenity, a solitude in that that isn't present in the seven girls with their long hands carrying me in their mirrors. As I look more closely at the two stanzas, I get a kick out of the inverted lines, and I am much more drawn to the one that closes with "I sometimes ran into the wind," which seems to be a way of being alive in the midst of that solitude.

Other lines that I really like: "My crimson-colored galleys have cast off without rigging or oars." Yes, I really enjoy "or oars." For truth, I love "I have lived my life in landscapes that other men have owned." I notice the translator's alliteration now that I've typed it again, and I wonder if that is done to preserve something that's already in the Spanish - I'll have to check tomorrow when I have both versions. But there's a fact in there that speaks to me. I know the word is paisajes, and for some reason my reflex saw that word and thought "countries." Nevertheless, I have done this as well, and knowing that no man owns the wind or the stars (or their memories), I sense the freedom in this poem, a spirit capable of its own freedom but connected to the mountains, to his mother, who exist together in the hearts of the poem.

I couldn't explain the seven hearts, or the reason the translation takes Siete corazones/tiene and translates that as something other than "Seven hearts I have." But the idea that my heart somehow isn't mine, I get that. I like it.

Anyway, this is what I would have done had I assigned this assignment to myself. As always, I avoided the direct entry into the subject by making connections (see any Brothers Karamazov entry if you want to see what I'm talking about). That's it for now, though. Nice to throw a few more logs on the blogoplace.

Why The Inferno?

So I was thinking a little more about Andrew’s question in class yesterday, which I interpreted as a question about the relevance of The Inferno. I talked about it as a text that gives us a glimpse into historical values, as a bridge between the dominant values of the Church in the Middle Ages to the balance of faith and reason that resulted from the Renaissance. And I talked about art and beauty, and the literary achievement that is The Divine Comedy.

Those are all bona fide reasons to read a text like the Inferno, to read a text that has informed the content of so many Western texts that its imagery is almost unconsciously present in the minds and works of novelists and non-fiction writers alike. Plus, the outcome I have in mind through the Fun Times in Hell assignment will push your writing in directions it would otherwise never go.

The pragmatists might understand and accept all this rationale, yet it may or may not answer the question of relevance. What I think I wish I’d done when Andrew asked the question was refer to my Arnaldo Momigliano quote, the one I cribbed from one of Thomas Cahill’s Hinges of History books. It goes a little something like this:

“In all these civilizations (Chinese, Indian, Persian, Greek, Roman) there is a profound tension between political powers and intellectual movements. Everywhere one notices attempts to introduce greater purity, greater justice, greater perfection and a more universal explanation of things.”

I would have emphasized the idea of greater purity, justice, perfection, a more universal explanation of things. It’s important to recognize that Dante doesn’t establish a system of justice; he explicates and existing system, and using the writer’s toolbox, shares his perspective on the genesis of sin, as well as the appropriateness of punishment. He places both enemies and allies in Hell, for better or worse, and chastens himself for hubris when his pilgrim questions God’s will. And by writing in Italian, he does something else that speaks to me through a Thomas Cahill quote:

Languages bring values with them, and one cannot learn a language without making one’s own the things the civilization that developed the language considers important. One could not learn Greek without reading Homer, and one could not read Homer without encountering the Greek heroes and Greek gods.

And one can not read Dante without encountering the corruption of religious and political authorities, without encountering those names that are to be revered and reviled in Western civilization, without encountering a tension between human mercy and vindictiveness, between human mercy and divine, absolute justice.

Sorry for wearing on your patience, but I’m getting to a point here, and the point is this: our sense of justice is in a constant state of flux between our belief that wrongdoers should be punished and our hope that they can be redeemed; between our desire for retribution and our sense of compassion. In one generation, our Supreme Court makes decisions that strengthen the ability of law enforcement officials to catch and convict criminals; in another, it makes decisions that protect the rights of the accused and handcuff the police and other agencies.

Our sense of justice has to come from somewhere, and it may be found as much in our nature as in our nurture. We are appalled at the idea of cutting the hands off of thieves, or stoning adulterers, but these are forms of justice that exist today outside the Western world. But think about the degrees of guilt we accept in our society: if you beat the crap out of someone and say “faggot” or some racial slur while you’re in the midst of the beating, you’ve done something worse than just beat the crap out of someone. If you kill someone…well, just think about it from your experience of watching Law and Order: how many degrees homicide are there?

At the end of the day, the act is the same – there is a killed and a killer – but we have so many degrees of culpability. And where do they come from? I think they come from our desire for greater justice, for a more universal explanation of things. Motive matters because we have compassion for people who we like to believe would not otherwise have committed a crime unless some external stimuli had prompted the action. But should it?

Consider these hypothetical instances of dead-making:

My mother is in a bank. The bank is robbed. The gun goes off. My mother is killed. The crime: felony murder, a capital offense in some jurisdictions.

My mother is in a crosswalk. A banker who has had a few pops drops his cell phone, doesn’t see her and plows her over. (My poor mother – if she knew I was doing this to her, she’d disown me.) The crime: ultimately, probably some sort of aggravated driving crime that would result in no jail time.

I don’t think these comparisons are hyperbolic. We don’t sympathize with the bank robber because we think it was his choice to commit that crime, and he has to deal with the consequences. We sympathize with the impaired, distracted driver because, you know what?, that could be us.

For society to achieve a sense of fairness, it has to let go of perfection, or at least the idea that perfection is the reconciling of everyone’s individual good with the greater good. We have to be willing to acknowledge that certain contexts establish the forms justice has to take. How do we do this? We have a set of unyielding, absolute standards, standards that are immune from our compassion, that are sturdier than the fleeting nature of our emotion. At the same time, we use the prevailing feeling of society (terrorism? I’m willing to sacrifice some civil liberties in the name of security) to interpret those standards.

I don’t know about you, but I feel a little better about my response to Andrew’s question now.