Burn but never fall
For I know the smell of salt here
Renders me prey
So
Everyday I swallow sea water
That only longs to see air.
"One of the most tragic things we learn in life is how to act alright when we're anything but."
Tears swell in wells behind the white Burn but never fall For I know the smell of salt here Renders me prey So Everyday I swallow sea water That only longs to see air. "One of the most tragic things we learn in life is how to act alright when we're anything but."
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The violence of Cormac McCarthy’s work has often been described as gratuitous, and in that sense can seem at times exhausting to digest, repellant to the senses, and overbearing. This leads to descriptions of his tone and his work in general as being bleak and disparaging. I’ve heard people ask in regards to this violence, “What does it mean?” or “What’s the point?” Yet, when considering true violence, that is the violence that our everyday realities present us with, one is often faced with these same questions… “What does it all mean?” “What’s the point?” Now, when applied to the Universe at large and whatever meaning may be contained within these questions cease to be critiques of an individual author’s choice and intentions and instead become quite existential and philosophical in nature. And that, I believe, is exactly the point. McCarthy is an extremely existential and philosophical writer, and his work challenges us to stomach violence without meaning, devoid of metaphor, absent of symbolism, precisely because it is this sort of violence our own world offers us to make sense of. His work challenges us to consider reality, however abrasive when unadorned, however appalling the naked truths of this world seem, as something that cannot be made symbolic or significant in the name of making it more palatable. If the purpose of an artist is to provide a mirror containing within the larger truths of this world, why should the reflections of said mirror limit themselves simply to what appeals to our own sense of value and aesthetic? How can our own moral high grounds and aesthetic sensibilities coexist with the very real violence and depravity of this world if we never stop to consider it? That violence and depravity exists whether we acknowledge it or not, even if it doesn’t fit neatly into whatever higher meanings we project upon this world. It must not be adorned or romanticized or rendered symbolic in the name of convenience. And to not confront it at all? Denying the existence of the darker things this world contains does nothing to address the very fact that those things exist. Those things exist with or without our acknowledgement and consideration. But it is our duty to wrestle with the existence of those things, with darkness, with evil eternal, even if our own lives don’t directly confront us with those depths. Indeed, most lives don’t force one into confrontation with such trials, but in McCarthy’s work we are so forced, and while most might not find it to be a pleasant experience wrestling with this world's evils, denying ourselves the experience does nothing to solve the problems and challenges that the very existence of said evils presents. Truth needs no acknowledgement to be. "His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will 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." -Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Chapter I, page 5 Someone recently asked me what Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian was about. I told them scalpin' injins, which is certainly part of it. But how can a brilliance so broad be summed up with brevity? The person's question prompted me to attempt to sum up what has for a long time been an obsession of mine. I don't think I covered the half of it, but here goes. And note, some of the tone throughout is a bit of an homage to Cormac's prose in the book, which is an homage to previous Melvillean classics, amongst others, and so goes the baton of language and literature. So, what's Blood Meridian about? Well, it is about scalpin’ injins. But also... It’s about the expansion of the old West, using the mid 19th century frontier as a landscape within which we examine the nature of man, mostly as it pertains to our ancient and eternal disposition towards violence and conquest and destruction, wrestling with our brief moment in eternity and the mark upon it we are to leave in our wake. It’s about a kid from Tennessee. It’s about innocence and innocence lost, and another sort of quality not unlike innocence, and whether that intangible can be sheltered from corruption in an all too corrupt time and place. Trace flames in the dead hearts of men nearly so themselves. It’s about the Devil himself, silver tongued fiddler that he is, taking delight in talking men out of their convictions, their religions, walking the world seeking out all manner of relic and artifice, fossils of old world genius and ancient man, only to strike them from time and trace in baptisms by fire, for “things that exist without [his] knowing exist without [his] consent”. It’s about mobs and groups and collectives, and the capacity for the individual to be lost therein. It’s about man’s capacity for ultimate evils, and how certain endeavors inclined towards the darker shades of spirit and soul invite such evils upon ourselves, to use us first as agents, consuming what we will with what we can, and then as fuel, to be consumed upon mortal altars of man and the mud of which we are made and to which we are destined to return and become again. It is an homage at times, but all at once something wholly new, something that has never been, an achievement in language, an achievement in novel. It's my favorite book, written by a master. "A man seeks his destiny and no other... Will or bill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefor some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone." -Cormac McCarthy via the Judge, Blood Meridian, Chapter XXIII, page 344 Sie müssen shlafen aber Ich muss tanzen : They must sleep but I must dance. A Brief and Recent History of Ciudad Juarez: It is the year 1992 and a horizon red with desert clays has begun to exhale. The first coughs of industry can be seen inking into a still-blue spread of o-zone and dust. The sunsets burn brown, yielding more smoke than smolder. It is the year 1993. Human remains are found in a field down slope from a highway. They are not the first, and they will not be the last. Identification is made impossible by the effects of the sands and the winds. Bones and cotton are all that is left. It is the year 1994 and Mexican and American politicians have finally found something to agree upon. The verdict is unanimous. NAFTA is universally praised. An economic boom is declared in Ciudad Juarez. The trumpets sound, drowning out the screams, howls and histories both lost amidst the revelry. It is the year 1995. The media is beginning to catch wind of what mothers in Juarez have known for years. Girls are disappearing. Dying. Devoured by the devil himself, swallowed in shadow, lost in a fog of rumors and hearsay. Theories arise. They are mostly ridiculous, discussions of cults and sacrifice and the world’s most prolific serial killer. At the University a young student of Jounalism drafts a compelling theory rooted in solid research and implicating everyone: Cartels. Cops. Prestegious families and political powerhouses. He is found shot dead on his porch in the early hours of a late Summer Sunday, and the death is declared a suicide. It is the year 1996. A woman departs a public bus in one of the city’s newborn neighborhoods. She keeps her head to the ground, and walks at a joggers pace as she passes houses pieced together with old cardboard sheets and salvaged zinc. A pale crescent moon is the street’s only light. The sidewalk beneath her rolls, an unpaved slick of loose gravel and powdered dirt. All around her whispers linger, hidden, tucked away in the space between sounds. Just after 3 a.m. she passes a stirring barracho as he fiddles with the newspaper blanket keeping him warm. She never makes it home, and is never heard from again. The drunk is the last person to remember seeing her. He tells the cops she had red hair and a green jacket. Her hair was black, same as her clothes. It is the year 1997 and the killing of poor brown girls in Juarez has become cattlehouse common. Swine for the slaughter. Souls turned slabs for sale and consumption. There are patterns to the crimes but they are often broken. Most of the girls are between the ages of 13 and 25. Most of them are dark, with long black hair. Most of them have some connection to the maquiladoras that crowd together for claim in the free trade frontera. All of the girls are victims of a culture drunk on dark dreams of ancient gods, haunted by memories of violence, the smell of blood still thick under cuticles, firebrands burning behind each lidded gaze. All of the girls are victims of a city sick with men whose moustaches grow thick enough to mask the manhood they’re missing, whose cocks swell with delusions of power and pride. All of the girls are innocent, in ways only the dead can be. It is the year 1998. A young girl is screaming on a street corner. Her clothes are torn and stained and she is palming handfuls of stuffing torn free from a rotting sofa. She is using them to keep herself covered and decent. She shouts at the sky, the city, the world. Her cries are swallowed up like sounds in the cosmos. A cop car slows as it passes. The woman stops screaming. In the morning she is gone, a memory misplaced. It is the year 1999 and an Egyptian man living in Juarez is arrested after an altercation with a prostitute in the Colonia Hermosa district. He is charged with seventy eight counts of murder. Press conferences are called. Cases are closed. The femicidios are declared over. The devil has been caught with his cock out. It is the year 2000. The killings have continued without pause, although media coverage has become inconsistent. Talk of copy cat killers is common. Suggestions of street gangs operating on the orders of the imprisoned Egyptian are put forth. The police investigation slows to stagnation. Meanwhile, the sands outside the city dine weekly on sacrifice, a spirit world in full bloom. It is the year 2001, and it has become clear there is a black hole at the heart of Juarez. We know it is there because of its gravity. We can see it in everything the city contains, in the direction of each life lived, and the shadow of each life lost. It moves time and space by implication alone. (...) Epilogue (?) It is the year 2012 and the desert surrounding Juarez has become Mexico’s biggest cemetery. The winds are heavy here, a blanket of mirage and phantasm, ghosts wandering worlds between blood and bone shed, spread thin upon altars with no ears for final words. The winds, the sands, even the sunsets are overbearing, the sole recipients of desperate prayers, stillborn wishes, deathbed confessionals both tearstained and cut short. Cries for help devoured in an expanse of scrub brush and dune. The elements each a sponge soaked heavy, bloated with bloodclot and dreams in a land that dreams of rain. (...) It is the year 2666. In a desert that has forgotten its name there is a plot of Earth, what had once been a cemetery, all of the bodies returned to the essence, all of their names forgotten. Memories linger, tracing rocks and ravines, whispering flower pedals back to dust, looking for release, longing to be forgotten. It is a time beyond time and a desert of shade and shale has achieved a new dead. The lights above have flickered out. The sands beneath have frosted over. And still the winds remember. And still the winds blow free. It’s the best kind of anything. Think about it. A smile that can’t help itself. Laughter that’s anything but polite. A speech that can’t help but express, some monologue walled behind rib cage, chest, and cartilage that can no longer contain its confession. An attraction that can’t help but dictate one’s actions, be they involving good choices or otherwise. Passion is anything but moderate, far from self contained, near impossible to control, unrestrainable. Anything done in moderation or with self control is either (on the rare occasion) a reflection of an individuals own hard earned discipline and will power or else (more likely and far more often) evidence that the whatever you’re doing is kind of fucking boring. Almost real. Has you almost engaged. It’s almost whatever it is that you’re looking for, but, muthafuck an almost, y’know? When I was 19 years old My father died And I’ve since rewritten him More times than I can remember I’ve colored him heroic Closed shut every whiskey bottled he opened And rewrote my mother’s bruised skin Back to brown I’ve been kind I’ve dressed his story in poetics such That muses would blush At the beauty and truths His life contained I’ve been cruel To us both Dug through dirt in dark to find him Lifeless limp equal as all post transition are Drug him out Taped back eyelids Tried to revive him Shoved hollow words Into hollow lungs And helped him recite them With chest compressions Trying to settle petty old scores That were better off left in the ground Somehow I keep coming back to him Bringing him back to have something to come back to When the truth Is none of my revisions Have ever rewritten my father back to form Fiction is all I have left to wrestle with |
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March 2015
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