Service in the armed forces of the United States has not been a universal male obligation of citizenship since 1973. Our military today is a professional corps of men and women who join up for their own reasons, commonly to advance themselves in the face of one or another cul de sac of American society. They normally do not expect to be shot at, but they do expect all the benefits of state employment – steady pay, good housing, free medical benefits, relief from racial discrimination, world travel, and gratitude from the rest of society for their military “service.” They are well aware that the alternatives civilian life in America offers today include difficult job searches, no job security, regular pilfering of retirement funds by company executives and their accountants, “privatized” medical care, bad public elementary education systems, and insanely expensive higher education. They are ripe, it seems to me, not for the political rhetoric of patrician politicians who have followed the Andover, Yale, Harvard Business School route to riches and power but for a Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, or Juan Perón – a revolutionary, military populist with no interest in republican niceties so long as he is made emperor.

Given the course of the postwar situations in Afghanistan and Iraq, it may not be too hard to defeat George Bush in the election of 2004. But whoever replaces him will have to deal with the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, our empire of bases, and a fifty-year-old tradition of not telling the public what our military establishment costs and the devastation it can inflict. History teaches us that the capacity for things to get worse is limitless. Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American republic is in serious trouble – and that conversion to a military empire is, to say the least, not the best answer.

Chalmers Johnson, “The Scourge of Militarism - Rome and America”

Tuesday, September 9, 2003 TomDispatch.com

 

Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time. –Paul Valéry

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 the darkness. –Jacob Böhme

Epigraphs to BLOOD MERIDIAN

dozen years ago, the American West was on my mind. I had finished writing a book about Alaska, where I had gone to live when younger, and now wanted a wider, literary perspective on our westward expansion. The novelist Thomas Pynchon suggested I ought to read a remarkable work of fiction, BLOOD MERIDIAN OR THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST, by Cormac McCarthy. His advice was sound. The prose enthralled, even as the archaic subject of the novel infused the reader I was then with awe-filled terror.

On the North American continent, so long inhabited by immigrants and their descendents, I thought that our (children of immigrants’) literature seldom had attained the imaginative truth of myth. By myth I meant a kind of story rooted in belief so profound it animates the very way one sees the world and which in the fineness and accuracy of its detail, explains that world by its description. It need not (surely, cannot) explain causality; it is not science; it does not support rational knowledge. It is another way of knowing seldom available to us modern, educated people. In the Alaskan Interior, occasionally, I was permitted a glimpse of such knowledge.

Occasionally, true artists are so permitted; one cannot envy them. Melville was permitted; Faulkner, too, likely; and in this book at least, Cormac McCarthy stood with them. His was a chthonic vision. Some vermillion impulse had risen from the very ground of the West and touched his imagination, and he gave it form. The book he made was not for the squeamish. I began it three times before succeeding and thought my hair would turn white as I read. To regain a necessary distance I wrote a series of notes, then put them away. This war-filled summer I opened BLOOD MERIDIAN again, and re-read the notes. I believe they stand.

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. . . . He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.

The kid, Cormac McCarthy’s protagonist, was the child who would lead me further West in literature, into the mythical American wilderness. He was a child of “history present,” the eternal return, impersonal and without a self. He has no name and no stake in property: “His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.” The kid is a character of no ambiguity. He never learns to read or write. The land teaches him some things: how to eat, how to take his bearings. The unalterably violent, erotically described gangs of men he drifts into teach him something else. He looks for this thing, and expects it; he rides to it as a pilgrim. Is he a creature of belief, of free will and consent? He has had no formation but that his father “lies in drink,” and has no moral center but his taste for violence.

In Faulkner’s great novella “The Bear” a reader finds what could have been one line of the kid’s patrimony, born in an instant of possibility. Here is Isaac McCaslin, arguing with his cousin McCaslin Edmonds. He is twenty-one, trying to come to terms with the land he has inherited and how he cannot “relinquish” because his forebears have not truly “owned” it; because it was established by God that man should oversee and “hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood.” He cries out about the nature of his God:

‘He didn’t have His book written to be read by what must elect and choose, but by the heart, not by the wise of the earth because maybe they dont need it or maybe the wise no longer have any heart, but by the doomed and lowly of the earth who have nothing else to read with but the heart.’

I imagined the kid born in the shadow of that cry; I saw him as the negative possibility of Ike McCaslin’s desire for “the communal anonymity of brotherhood.” The kid was as doomed and lowly as a child of God could be.

What is the nature of his heart?

Now the kid is fourteen; the year is 1847. (It interested me to trace the years in McCarthy’s fiction, to see if, as decades passed, there had been moral development in the citizenry; another way of measuring Progress, I thought, as an ethic of the American civil religion¹.) He has run away from home, gone to New Orleans, fought and been shot, recovered; he has traveled in mud and rain and seen brutal death; he asks no man for anything, and can defend himself. He has turned west, toward Texas; or toward the land McCarthy calls Texas, where “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.”

This “Texas” is not only an historical evocation. The word also calls up a sacred land; but no gentle meaning for sacred there. In archaic and biblical cadences delineating the moral landscape through which the kid journeys, a theogony is traced. The kid rides west on a pilgrimage to mindless violence. The word McCarthy assigns again and again for this place is darkness. It is a metaphysical darkness.

On the dark trail the kid meets a hermit.

Lost ye way in the dark, said the old man. He stirred the fire, standing slender tusks of bone up out of the ashes.

The kid didnt answer.

The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didnt make it to suit everbody, did he?

I dont believe he much had me in mind.

Aye, said the old man. But where does a man come by his notions. What world’s he seen that he liked better?

I can think of better places and better ways.

Can ye make it be?

No.

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 dont want to. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it.

“Best not look in there”: there the kid looks. What he sees is darkness. He has no mind to comprehend it; he has no family or community, no law or religion; he is without distinguishing qualities and exists for himself alone. He is an individual. (He is the negative type of Ike McCaslin’s romantic yearning that the meek shall inherit the earth.) Therefore, he sees war, fought across the demonic land into which he rides. BLOOD MERIDIAN is a book about war, and about a human possibility no one in his right mind would choose; yet, without cease, humans choose it. They choose war, or so I have believed. Therefore, if we were men, that is, humans, endowed by our Creator with free will and conscience, if we followed His way, would we not therefore renounce the choice of war?

If that was my naive question, McCarthy’s answer was as hard as Calvin’s, and as Hegel’s: in his theogony, history is indeed a slaughter bench; his theology is implacable, more determinist than Calvin’s. With gaze held steady he envisions no redemption outside slaughter. In such a world, what choice does one such as the kid have? “In him broods already a taste for mindless violence.” Thus predestined the kid will enter the field of war; and, empty-minded, he will be crazed and destroyed by it.

Dry, stony, Spanish landscapes, snake-eyed stubble-beard grotesques killing everything that moves. . . Spaghetti westerns are fantasías on the American western, a genre that is itself a voluptuously violent visual fantasy about our history. The movies flicker through the pages of BLOOD MERIDIAN. A brassy undertone of Morricone-music mocks its pure vernacular. This book is grandiose, it’s an epic, it’s movie melodrama. The kid’s trail compañeros are killers, truly, but stylized, in their ghastly antics almost comical. The story advances cinematically, one scene succeeding another, the transitions purely formal. A passage, one among the many, evokes the scene. It is the appearance of a band of scalphunters riding into the capital of the state of Chihuahua. They are led by a veteran soldier named Glanton, an American hard man. The kid and a man called Toadvine, and another Kentuckian, “a veteran of the war,” are incarcerated in the filthy calabozo. They are about to be delivered.

They saw patched argonauts from the states driving mules through the streets on their way through the mountains to the coast. Goldseekers. Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague. They nodded or spoke to the prisoners and dropped tobacco and coins in the street beside them.

They saw blackeyed young girls with painted faces smoking little cigars, going arm in arm and eyeing them brazenly. They saw the governor himself erect and formal within his silkmullioned sulky clatter forth from the double doors of the palace courtyard and they saw one day a pack of visciouslooking humans mounted on unshod indian ponies riding half drunk through the streets, bearded, barbarous, clad in the skins of animals stitched up with thews and armed with weapons of every description, revolvers of enormous weight and bowieknives the size of claymores and short twobarreled rifles with bores you could stick your thumbs in and the trappings of their horses fashioned out of human skin and their bridles woven up from human hair and decorated with human teeth and the riders wearing scapulars or necklaces of dried and blackened human ears and the horses rawlooking and wild in the eye and their teeth bared like feral dogs and riding also in the company a number of halfnaked savages reeling in the saddle, dangerous, filthy, brutal, the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh.

. . . . . .

That night Toadvine called them together and they crouched by the wall and spoke in whispers.

His name is Glanton, said Toadvine. He’s got a contract with Trias. They’re to pay him a hundred dollars a head for scalps and a thousand for Gomez’s head. I told him there was three of us. Gentlemens, we’re gettin out of this shithole.

The scalphunters, filthy and decrepit as spaghetti banditos or Alaskan end-of-the-roaders, are, equally, pre-Homeric (“patched argonauts”). Their purpose (“Goldseekers”), too, is eternal. McCarthy’s theogony allows no history, and there is no progress; its very movement is repetition, it is eternal return². BLOOD MERIDIAN is not an historical fiction; it does not purport to retell what happened to these people in this place as family or nation. Though his faceless individuals are the characters of chronicles, legends, movies, they also are only types, and they enact something larger than themselves, of which they are wholly ignorant, as they are wholly ignorant of themselves. They are mythical. But this is an American myth and it subsumes all forms into itself; and it is McCarthy’s telling of a cosmic principle clothed in a configuration his reader can recognize. The scalphunters are a bloody eternal band. They also, recognizably, are part of us, the U.S.

Riding with the scalphunters is a character called the judge, who is, ought to be, an alarming presence in American literature. He is a comic-grotesque, an incarnation of an eternal force, the trickster whose milieu is blood-letting, whose society is men whose anti-community is the roving gang, whose hearth the night’s campfire. After the convention of frontier penny-dreadfuls, or the legend of Faust, amid those many who can neither read nor write he is a man of learning and books. He is the one who will, as Faulkner’s Ike McCaslin despaired, “elect and choose.”

The kid is sixteen, the year 1849, when he washes up in the mud and rain and the jakes of Nacogdoches. The judge appears first as a monstrous imp at a sodden tent revival. He invokes panic and incites the crowd to become a mob, then to kill a preacher, and fades from the kid’s view into the darkness. He will reappear in new guises. He has set the pattern. Some time later, the kid sees him amid that “pack of visciouslooking humans,” the scalphunters, riding into the capital of Chihuahua.

Foremost among them, outsized and childlike with his naked face, rode the judge. His cheeks were ruddy and he was smiling and bowing to the ladies and doffing his filthy hat. The enormous dome of his head when he bared it was blinding white and perfectly circumscribed about so that it looked to have been painted. He and the reeking horde of babble with him passed on through the stunned streets and hove up before the governor’s palace where their leader, a small blackhaired man, clapped for entrance by kicking at the oaken doors with his boot. The doors were opened forthwith and they rode in, rode in all, and the doors were closed again.

. . . . . .

The following day the judge in the company of others stood in the street smoking a cigar and rocking back on his heels. He wore a pair of good kidskin boots and he was studying the prisoners where they knelt in the gutter clutching up the filth with their bare hands. The kid was watching the judge. When the judge’s eyes fell upon him he took the cigar from between his teeth and smiled. Or he seemed to smile. Then he put the cigar between his teeth again.

The judge is Glanton’s – the scalphunters’ leader’s – advisor, and he is the story’s evil daemon. He has long since chosen the kid. In an inverted way he will act as his father, willing to teach him how to live in the enormous darkness that “is like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.”

The kid, always watchful, comes to ride with the filthy band. His heart is empty and is never faint, and he has no ideas at all. He has no fear. The scalphunters are witless men. At the evening campfire, their imitation hearth, they call upon the judge to instruct them, and the judge, with delicate contempt, does so.

One such night his subject is war. Deftly he instructs them that they are men at war; and that war endures and is no human invention. Here opens a fantastical scene, no aspect of it without metaphysical weight. Near the campfire the judge “stood half naked and sweating.” “All listened as he spoke, those who had turned to watch him and those who would not.”

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. 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 waiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

He turned to Brown, from whom he’d heard some whispered slur or demurrer. Ah Davy, he said. It’s your own trade we honor here. Why not rather take a small bow. Let each acknowledge each.

My trade?

Certainly.

What is my trade?

War. War is your trade. Is it not?

And it aint yours?

Mine too. Very much so.

What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff?

All other trades are contained in that of war.

Is that why war endures?

No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.

How then, in McCarthy’s theogony, are men creatures of God, who are endowed with free will? If war endures, what choice is theirs; and what God has made them? If the judge is the fearsome one who reads, what book is his text; and what is its nature?

His book is men and the cosmos; their nature is chance and possibility, and their will exists to be tested. No moral law mitigates this, and thus is all men’s choice and election subsumed to a larger will: the world is a dice game, a gamble, and men are players. His logic is as rigorous as the Grand Inquisitor’s, or the Jesuit, Naphta’s; it is the dark side of Manichaeism; it is exuberantly nihilist. I could not dismiss it: the judge carries an inviolable authority. He had to be studied and his terms considered. It was folly to shy away from him because he is horrible, because he also is fascinating, and because he, his like, endures.

The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the worth of that which is put at hazard. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up the game, player and all.

Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

“War is god.” The judge shocks even the scalphunters. These are creatures who have abandoned home, family, land, so that all they came from was behind them and dead to them, and who prey on all that lives; and yet, who carry in themselves some rudiment of biblical teachings left over from their childhoods. In some dim way they know they are among the doomed and lowly. For a moment they retrieve a shred of moral principle:

Might does not make right, said Irving. The man that wins in some combat is not vindicated morally.

But Irving’s protest, and Brown’s more reflexive reaction (“You’re crazy Holden. Crazy at last.”) carry no weight and are lost in the judge’s smile. He tells them:

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 any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forego further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest.

His logic is unmovable, his argument pitiless. He is shameless and arrogant; he is merely observant. He foresees all opposition.

Man’s vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgements ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. 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.

Gaily he invites scholastic disputation; but not even the ex-priest in the company will dare answer him. The judge is satisfied.

Ah Priest, said the judge. What could I ask of you that you’ve not already given?

No disputation possible: the logic of war is not open to rebuttal; how could it be? War endures. A gun silences a protester.

However, I was a reader; no gun was turned on me. As my dismay rose it was met by McCarthy’s refusal to turn aside. I could not turn aside, but read to the end; only then did I begin to recover myself, as is necessary. BLOOD MERIDIAN is a book containing such violence and the poetic description of violence that this word, violence, pales as I write it to mere reference. Wishing to disarm it, I traced its linguistic origins. The dictionary (Amer. Her.) noted its Indo-European root, wei-, meaning vital force. Related words are vim, violate, violent, from the Latin vis, force. Related meanings are, “to treat with violence,” and “vehemence.”

About “vital force” the dictionary told me that Indo-European metaphysics appears in its root word aiw-: “‘vital force,’ whence ‘long life, the eternal recreation of life, eternity’”; also, “‘endowed with the acme of vital force, young’.” Its derivatives are ever, every, never, medieval, age, eternal, and eon.

This was some awful, cosmic kind of pun. The vital force of life and the vital force of war conflated, long life and youth conflated, and one becomes the other!

That etymology hardly laid the ground for disputation. The judge found an answer for it in his book of the world.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimaeras 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.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

Still I looked for my own ground to stand. I turned back to the dictionary, to war, and, chillingly, it offered a “word history” that was like a funhouse-mirror image of the judge’s order of creation:

A piece of liverwurst may perhaps help us gain some insight into the nature of war, at least into the semantic history of the word war. War and the -wurst part of liverwurst can be traced back to the same Indo-European root, wers-, “to confuse, mix up.” In the Germanic family of the Indo-European languages, this root gave rise to several words having to do with confusion or mixture of various kinds. In the case of the ancestry of war, the hypothetical Germanic stem werza-, “confusion,’ became werra-, which passed into Old French.... Both forms meant “war,” a very confused condition indeed. Meanwhile another Indo-European form derived from the same Indo-European root had developed into Old High German wurst, meaning “sausage,” from an underlying sense of “mixture,” which is, of course, related to the sense of the root “to confuse, mix up.” .… (American Heritage Dictionary)

In the Interior of Alaska I saw a man shot, lying in a field of snow, the snow around him red, the blue sky as hard as enamel. The man swore at the nurse and cursed her as she inserted an IV-needle in his arm. Four paramedics had to hold him down. He was a drug-taker and one of those men they call an end-of-the-roader. I saw a woman come out of her cabin at sunset, the right side of her face bruised where her husband’s aimed rifle butt had hit her. The bruise was the color of the sunset, which was beautiful; but her face was not beautiful.

Two of the woundings I saw, among many hundreds I did not see. Two intense moments as life went on. Moral law had not intervened. Something remained to trip off small explosions in my memory. Reading the fictional, or mythical, violence of BLOOD MERIDIAN was another kind of experience than watching it happen. The violence of the book was an astringent. Once I could stomach the reading, I felt cleansed by it. The prose was immaculate. A friend of mine, a translator of languages and woman of moral acuity, lifted an eyebrow at my surprise, and suggested: “Of course: there is no ambiguity. That may be why violence – at least, reading about it – can almost invigorate us.”

It invigorated me, because its art had not “bled it of its strangeness.” The frisson was erotic, but not merely sexual, if it was at all sexual. Yet, when I saw what I saw, it too was strange; I had not grown up with it and it was new to me. What images of violence I carried in imagination came from movies and television, counterfeit images as I knew; and came from news videos of the Vietnam War, and all the wars since that have appeared on television. Of those I was a disembodied spectator, watching but in fact removed in time and space.

In Alaska I was present, and felt direct emotion: surprise, compassion, a deep calm, awareness of beauty. Recalling the moment, however, I was aghast; only after repetition, when I began to imagine possibilities, did fear touch me. This is to say that the experience was made of more than one quality; and – this is equally important – it took place in three physical dimensions. At the same time, before my eyes it occurred as though for the first time. The act seemed unreal (“Is this a movie?”), but its effect, the wound in the living flesh, was palpable. Those women and men were people I knew, and they tried to keep going; as for me, in the end I got away. Since then, that part of the world has seen an increase in the violence; even worse, in its randomness.

Cormac McCarthy’s uncompromising fiction, or, his telling of the myth, placed the violence in long perspective. The formality of the narrative; the almost comic, because nearly unbelievable, quality of its imagery (finally, though, not unbelievable, because I have seen and heard enough of it, and know it will not end); its distancing in time and distortion of space; its incantatory prose, biblical cadences, metaphysical arguments, archetypal characters – none of this is banal; but none is at odds, either, with the chronicles and tales of the mountain men, pioneers, warring tribes, the hermits, crazies, desperadoes, socio- and psychopaths who exist in the history of the West and the North. In the kid and the scalphunters is displayed a quality whose like I first saw in the eyes of certain men in the remoter parts of the North. It was a fury, a vital force, violence in their spirit, that they tamped down and held under iron control. There were men of this kind, though, for whom self-control was not tight enough and could never be so; who were bound to go on until something, a mere nudge, provoked them and the force broke through. Then it worked its own course. Your only protection then, the people advised, was to stay out of its way. Nothing human but equal or greater force could stop it.

“All listened as he spoke, even those who had turned to watch him and those who would not.”

The kid is an American type. He has no knowledge, particularly not of himself. (He is innocent!) He seeks no attention and has no inclination to speak. He is wary and defensive; when he must act, he acts instantly, his nerves all reflex. He is an individual because, willfully, he belongs to no one or thing. But he belongs to the judge; for only in relation to the judge can he begin to know himself.

After a terrible journey the kid makes it to California, where he knows no one and has no standing or name; he is wounded, and has stopped drifting. “He seemed to be waiting for someone to come for him and after a while four soldiers entered and arrested him.”

In his cell he began to speak with a strange urgency of things few men have seen in a lifetime and his jailers said that his mind had come uncottered by the acts of blood in which he had participated.

His mind unhinged, he has, just barely, begun to understand what the wei- darkness means. He has learned fear.

One morning he wakes and sees a terrifying visitor: the judge, who like himself has survived the frightful ordeal in the wilderness. With feral intuition he knows the judge is crazy. The judge, irresistible, is about to test him again. It will be the penultimate test. He begins with a monumental, sophist’s joke: he suggests the kid is a creature of free will and choice, and the agent of his own fate.

I believe it is their intention to hang you.

What did you tell them?

Told them the truth. That you were the person responsible. Not that we have all the details. But they understand that it was you and none other who shaped events along such a calamitous course. Eventuating in the massacre at the ford by the savages with whom you conspired. Means and ends are of little moment here. Idle speculations. But even though you carry the draft of your murderous plan with you to the grave it will nonetheless be known in all its infamy to your Maker and as that is so shall it be made known to the least of men. All in the fullness of time.

You’re the one that’s crazy, said the kid.

The judge smiled. No, he said. It was never me. But why lurk there in the shadows? Come here where we can talk, you and me.

The kid stood against the far wall. Hardly more than a shadow himself.

Come up, said the judge. Come up, for I’ve yet more to tell you.

He looked down the hallway. Dont be afraid, he said. I’ll speak softly. It’s not for the world’s ears but for yours only. Let me see you. Dont you know that I’d have loved you like a son?

The judge smiled. He spoke softly into the dim mud cubicle. You came forward, he said, to take part in a work. But you were a witness against yourself. You sat in judgement on your own deeds. You put your own allowances before the judgements of history and you broke with the body of which you were pledge apart 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.... Only each was called upon to empty out his heart into the common and one did not. Can you tell me which one that was?

It was you, whispered the kid. You were the one.

It is an uncanny, blasphemous moment. The judge is the Tempter of the desert, he is the Antichrist: he is a casuist, and master of the dialectic: he is a moral shape-changer and wears every face that evil has worn in literature. The kid is nothing, not St. John, but lost and doomed, and there is no society and no redemption for him. But, inexplicably, the kid is released; the Spanish doctor decides to think he is a young Easterner from a good family; his wound is operated on. He falls into delirium.

At last he sees the judge in his own mind, truly, fantastically. The judge appears in all his incarnations. He has no origins. He is the principle of the world of false coinage, and of the Hephaestean weapons-fire that smelts metals ripped from the earth.

A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through whatever unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing. In the white and empty room he stood in his bespoken suit with his hat in his hand and he peered down with his small and lashless pig’s eyes wherein this child just sixteen years on earth could read whole bodies of decisions not accountable to the courts of men and he saw his own name which nowhere else could he have ciphered out at all logged into the records as a thing already accomplished. . . .

In his delirium he ransacked the linens of his pallet for arms but there were none. The judge smiled. The fool was no longer there, but another man and this other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men’s fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end.

The kid’s attachment to the judge was his only purpose: for, the judge incarnated his bent to mindless violence and revealed to him its dimensions; but he would not recognize this. But now he saw that the violence has a mind: it is the willful order of disorder and counterfeit, the logic of war. But the story had not ended. The logic of the myth would not permit the judge to be a figment of delirium, he is not eradicated by knowledge; he and the kid would meet only one time more.

The myth spares the kid nothing as he nears his end. The year is 1878; he is forty-five years old, no longer the kid but the man. Inevitably, he is riding toward Texas. He passes through the West as the frontier is closing; he sees the new faces of violence. He meets an old buffalo hunter who tells him about the last great slaughters, the trains of emigrants going west, the ravages of the mines.

He meets four bonepickers, kids from Kentucky and kills one, a violent and mouthy boy, a version of himself at fifteen. “This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war.” He crosses the Brazos into Texas and, closing his great circle in a raw and garish saloon, comes to his final meeting with the judge.

Do you believe it’s all over, son?

He turned. The judge was standing at the bar looking down at him. He smiled, he removed his hat. The great pale dome of his skull shone like an enormous phosphorescent egg in the lamplight. . . .

Was it always your idea, he said, that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?

No matter how he dodges, he is caught up in the judge’s final casuistry; the more indifferent, the more taciturn, the more evasive he is, the less it matters. The judge will not be stopped. The writing spares no one. The man ends in somber, stereotypical sordidness in this garish, noisy saloon filled with whores, whisky, cheap music, lost children, slaves and indians, the carcass of a wantonly-slain bear; out back in the mud is the jakes. He has come back to where he started, and, in the jakes, he is annihilated by the judge.

“But I will tell you,” says the judge, last words before consigning him to Sheol:

Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.

Even a dumb animal can dance.

The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one beast alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that don’t.

On the Texan ground, in American history, simultaneously, more than one kind of story unfolds itself. Story depends on belief; and there we are tested. What line of story do we know how, do we dare, to refuse? But how can we live in the uncertainty it brings? We live with it because these stories we read are art. They are human makings.

In this American myth there is no redemption. Most horribly – because it is left to the reader’s imagination – no image is given of the man’s death, only the grubby circumstances of the doomed and lowly; his end is, classically, off stage. But it is no tragedy, because he was nothing. But his end is unspeakable.

The judge remains, fantastic creature, comic, fool, dialectician, slaughterer, preternatural spirit, the messenger of the god War. His last scene is cheap and cinematic and it is occult and somber; it is a Germanic music-drama and a mining-camp ghost tale; it is unstoppable and stately and very frightening. The judge is the Totentanz. “He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”

¹ Bernard DeVoto wrote ACROSS THE WIDE MISSOURI about the Rocky Mountain fur trade (the early decades of the kid’s life):

          By the time we deal with in this book, several hundred men were crossing the Great American Desert every year and its commerce had been incorporated in world trade. No matter: it was still uninhabitable, the soul would no grow crops, there was no grass domestic cattle could eat…. [I]n 1844 the editor of the Christian Advocate, whose church had had a mission in Oregon for ten years, thought that Botany Bay would be more favorable for emigration. In that same year Daniel Webster most certainly did not make a speech that has been attributed to him ever since: ‘What do we want with the vast, worthless area, this region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, of shifting sands, and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts or these endless mountain ranges, impenetrable and covered to their base with eternal snow?…I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific coast one inch nearer to Boston than it now is.’ Mr. Webster has been libeled, he never made that speech – but the point is that the speech was so common in and out of Congress that any expansionist could believe he had. And John Charles Frémont, who crossed the wasteland in 1842, came back to say that maybe a grazing society could inhabit parts of it, but not many nor large parts, and the rest was steppes. Next year he changed his mind and began to render his principal service to American history by shrinking the great desert toward its center. (p. 3)

² McCarthy’s third epigraph, one leg of his thesis tripod, is this:

Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.

—The Yuma Daily Sun, June 13, 1982

Readings:

Bernard DeVoto, ACROSS THE WIDE MISSOURI. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947/1975)

William Faulkner, “The Bear,” GO DOWN, MOSES. (New York: Vintage International, 1942/1970)

Cormac McCarthy, BLOOD MERIDIAN OR THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST. (New York: Vintage International, 1992)

Katherine McNamara, NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH, A Journey into the Interior of Alaska. (San Francisco: Mercury House, 2001)

Mary-Sherman Willis, “The Fight for Kansas: The Letters of Cecelia and John Sherman,” in “Living with Guns,” Archipelago Vol. 6, No. 3.

Previous Endnotes:

Where Are the Weapons?, Vol. 7, No. 2.

Patriotism and the Right of Free Speech in Wartime, Vol. 7, No. 1.

A Year in Washington, Vol. 6, Nos. 3/4

Lies, Damn Lies, Vol. 6, No. 2

The Colossus,  Vol. 6, No. 1

The Bear, Vol. 5 No. 4

Sasha Choi Goes Home, Vol. 5, No. 3

Sasha Choi in America,Vol. 5, No. 1

A Local Habitation and A Name, Vol. 5, No. 1

The Blank Page, Vol. 4, No. 4

The Poem of the Grand Inquisitor, Vol. 4, No. 3

On the Marionette Theater, Vol. 4, Nos. 1/2

The Double, Vol. 3, No. 4

Folly, Love, St. Augustine, Vol. 3, No. 3

On Memory, Vol. 3, No. 2

Passion, Vol. 3, No. 1

A Flea, Vol. 2, No. 4

On Love, Vol. 2, No. 3

Fantastic Design, with Nooses, Vol. 2, No. 1

Kundera’s Music Teacher, Vol. 1, No. 4

The Devil’s Dictionary; Economics for Poets, Vol. 1, No. 3

Hecuba in New York; Déformation Professionnelle, Vol. 1, No. 2

Art, Capitalist Relations, and Publishing on the Web, Vol. 1, No. 1

contributors