Looking into Cormac McCarthy

Oh I remember now—what kicked off my interest in McCarthy was that YouTube randomly recommended this video:

​

Then it showed me the infamous Oprah interview. Then I started seeking out better ones (better than the Oprah interview) and ran across these:

• The Mysterious Mind Of Cormac McCarthy (America's Last Great Writer)
• Writing with Meaning - What Writers Can Learn from Cormac McCarthy
• Cormac McCarthy's Writing Tips | Writing Advice from Famous Authors
• The Violent Faith of Cormac McCarthy @ Acton Institute
• Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian @ YaleCourses
• Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (cont.) @ YaleCourses

Here's the essay associated with the Acton Institute video plus one more web page of interest:

• Blood of a Thousand Christs: The Violent Faith of Cormac McCarthy
• Blood Meridian @ The Mookse and the Gripes

YouTube just randomly showed me this video:

​

I think it actually helps quite a bit toward understanding the dark philosophy of McCarthy. Logic and reason and Liberal ethics are a flimsy veneer compared to the depths of cruelty and violence he shows running throughout history. This was made clear to me in high school (back in the late 70's) when the only thing that would modify the behavior of the worst bullies was a sound paddling. It isn't compassion and understanding they need—they're cruel and malevolent to the core. They laugh at such weakness and attempts to 'help' them by showing them kindness and love. The violent only understand and respond to strength backed by the threat of violence.

It does make sense—I've seen Nietzsche listed as one of the big influences on McCarthy.

This is a thread that connects up a lot of the most powerful artists and writers of history, as well as some of the most powerful themes in movies and music etc—an unflinching look at evil and violence. You encounter it in a lot of rap music, heavy metal and rock. The attitude of I take what I want, and you just try to stop me. No empathy, no ethics, only brute force and violence. Lawlessness. Total disregard for the rights or feelings (or lives) of others. Only selfish desires satisfied at any cost. And the kind of uncompromising stance it takes to face this attitude.

It can be severely damaging for a person with empathy and sensitivity to have to square off against people like this.

​

​

Here's a nice treat—Not only did McCarthy hang out with physicists and scientists and was smart enough to talk shop with them at pretty near their level, but he was deeply interested in language and the unconscious mind as well, and wrote this essay about the origins of language and its relation to the unconscious. Needless to say, this stuff is right in my wheelhouse. The link will download a PDF file, just so you know, unless you click to Open Link in New Tab or whatever—

• The Kekulé Problem—Where did language come from?

Man, I love the way this guy thinks. He seems to share most of my own interests. It looks like some of the other articles could be pretty good too.

​

I'm probably more than halfway through The Road now. Not sure what to think about it. It's become incredibly boring. There's no plot progression, because there's no plot. It follows the "this hapopened, and then this happened, and then this happened" approach, rather than "This happened, and as a result he did this, but it caused that. He tried to do whatever, but was prevented by... " That's a progression of events linked by causality and leading toward a conclusion. I know literary fiction doesn't need to follow these rules, and often doesn't, but it does make it feel pointless and dull. I get it—I think what he's doing is trying to make us feel how desperately dull the end of the world (or the desolation of a man's soul) would really be, and that most of the challenges are mundane and monotonous. And then there are these episodes of intense violence. Yes, I undersatand—this is probably what it's like when the fabric of society we've grown so comfortable in breaks down and you can't just go to the store to buy groceries anymore, or live in a functioning house on a functioning street with functioning neighbors. This is what it was like for the pioneers most likely, at times anyway. But they also pulled together and helped each other build log cabins or bring in the harvest etc. I'm wondering why it seems like nobody has banded together to build little societies and fend off the bad guys in groups? It seems like people would do that. But I guess the whole point is they're totally alone against nature and all the people they run into. I'm sure there's a deeper symbolic meaning in that, but so far it's eluding me. It seems like the only people that have banded together (so far anyway) are what he calls the bad guys.

Also, the conversations between the man and his son are ridiculously sparse. The man doesn't say more than two or three words at a time, and never explains anything in more than the barest, most basic way. Again I'm sure there's a reason. I hope it isn't buried so deep I can't find a clue to it.

I just had a thought—all the devastated and ruined houses. A house makes you think of a family. But these houses are empty broken shells, most with nobody living in them. Maybe they're all reflections of his own ruined family?

In fact maybe the whole devastated world is an outer reflection of his own devastated inner world? "As within so without." It means we project the contents of our inner life out onto the world around us. As a cliched example, somone who's deeply sad might refuse to cry, but it begins to rain, as if their tears are displaced into the outer world. As in a dream, the surroundings begin to mirror your emotional state or important ideas or memories. Especially since we have no access to the man's interior thoughts or feelings, they may well be expressed through the exterior world, as if they're bleeding through—especially the most powerful ones. It often feels like those must be visible or audible to everybody else, since they're resounding so strongly inside of us. Hence the expressionistic device of reflecting feelings or thoughts externally.

When I'm trying to find symbolism in a movie or a story, in the early stages you just cast about almost randomly and make suggestions like this. After a while some of them might start to become more clear, or you might realize you were off on some. Generally though I wouldn't even try to find symbolism the first time through. Not until I've become pretty familiar with the whole story or movie. You get a better understanding of themes and motifs etc when you've seen the whole thing at least once through. With movies I generally watch them several times before I start to see symbols. The first few times you're discovering the plot and the story and the subtleties you missed the first time. You can start to connect up ideas and parts of the movie on a third or fourth viewing, because now you've got the whole story figured out (hopefully, if it's clear enough, which they aren't always) and maybe you've begun to see some deeper stuff about characters or locations or sets or music or sound effects or all kinds of other things. Often you also start to notice symbols along the way, especially if they're pretty obvious. But often you need to become very familiar with everything else first.

​

This puts a lot of things into perspective. So now I understand he was in a deeply minimalist style late in his career, when he wrote The Road for instance, and in the grip of nihilistic Materialism when he wrote Child of God. That helps me understand a few things about those books. Maybe it means not all of his work is so bleak and feels so empty. I'm hoping Blood Meridian is different (but I'm afraid not by much). I've ordered a paperback edition of it, and am looking forward to the King James and Moby Dick influences.

I'm 22 pages in to Blood Meridian. So far I'm liking it a lot more than The Road. Things are happening—there are settings and character interactions (besides just 2 characters grunting at each other occasionally). I mean, the characters are just as nasty and despicable as in Child of God, or the secondary characters in The Road. Not sure I'm gonna like it for that reason, but at least it feels like a live story taking place, in actual settings (not just ash everywhere and the desolate memories of a once-alive world). And the prose is far superior to The Road. I can definitely feel the King James influence, and at times the Melville. Not familiar enough with Faulkner to detect that, and I forget the other influences.

I just realized I also like it better than Child of God, because that was mostly just the main character alone doing stuff. Occasionally there would be another character, and sometimes they were even alive (usually not). But the conversation wasn't exactly sparkling witty banter. More like glum grunting and threats. So yeah, Blood Meridian is definitley my favorite so far of his books that I've read (partially read anyway, haven't finished one yet).

​

I was about to make a new entry with this, but I realized it actually fits in here because really it's about facing adversity and learning to deal with loss or suffering. Such as for instance the losses or suffering that come with war or violence, or with knowing someone who's violent. People who choose to avoid all violence and conflict are simply making the decision to be the first victims when the shit hits the fan, which inevitably happens now and then. Civilization, as has been pointed out in so many important books and works of art, is a thin veneer—an illusion of safety that peels away instantly when the going gets tough.

I just re-watched the video in the first post (at the top of every page of this entry). I put that particular video front and center for a reason—it gives a listing of some of the influences on McCarthy, and it also details certain things that can help a reader understand and deal with the intense violence and desloation (of people, place, and of the inner nature of the characters). As a civilization we've become over-civilized—in other words domesticated or pampered. We don't often need to deal with the difficulties our ancestors did (even our grandparents, just a few decades ago). Instead we live in a protected bubble most of the time where we hardly need to do any manual labor (like they had to all the time), and where there are insitutions and bureaucracies to deal with the things we don't want to face (like the death of loved ones, now done in sanitized and distant hospitals rather than a deathbed in the house).

He mentions in the video that dealing with violence and the harsh spirit of the kinds of people McCarthy writes about is in some ways analogous to doing Shadow work (something I've written about extensively, here and elsewhere, and spent three years doing myself). Well, learning to deal with difficult situations and people is the external version of that. Stepping outside of the comfort zone we grew up in (most of us) and toughening up a little. We've become so domesticated that there are people who refuse to even think about conflict of any kind, including playing games like baseball or tennis, because they involve physical competition and there are winners and losers. People like that won't do well with McCarthy, unelss they read it as something detached from actual life, like glorified movie or video game violence.

​

Followup to the above video.

​

And with those videos in mind let's take another look at Nietzsche's ideas about what he called Master and Slave morality. This is one of the best videos I've seen on the subject. He points out that Master morality isn't just Finders keepers, losers weepers—in fact at its best it promotes strength of character and decency toward your fellows. Just like masculinity, it can tilt toward excellence or toward toxicity and tyranny. The same of course can be said about femininity as well.

It's at least important to understand these two different systems of morality. Generally most politicians and powerful leaders promote master morality for themselves and those close to them, often of a very toxic and criminal type, but push slave morality (aka altruism, selflessness etc) on those beneath them, because that makes people much easier to govern and control. In fact strong men in general, and quite a few strong women too, definitely run on master morality, either of the noble or toxic type, or maybe veering back and forth between the two. And what's really nasty—many who profess to altruism and gentleness are actually deeply resentful and malevolent and are using it only as a cover for their spiteful master morality or immorality. Criminals and liars often present themselves as kind gentle people—what could be a better cover? And they project and accuse the innocent, in particular those who have seen through their disguise, of being what they themselves actually are. For all of these reasons it's vitally important to understand these two very different approaches to morality, and how they can be used as disguises or corrupted. It explains so much of human behavior. Especially for those who exhibit Dark Triad traits. I believe McCarthy's work is filled with people of this type.