Looking into Cormac McCarthy

Those times when it happened as I was walking across the parking lot were when I noticed great beauty all around me. Probably first one thing, or one area—quite possibly shimmering sunlight dancing, but I'm not sure. But I can say for sure that my attention stopped being directed at individual things or small areas and expanded out to cover the enitre area. So it's basically seeing the forest rather than individual trees, or peering up close at the bark texture on a square inch of one tree. Taking in the enitrety all at once. Or expanding outward to encompass it all.

Oh shit, and it just hit me—the many from the one. That's one of those ancient wisdom sayings that are profound mysteries people have pondered for ages. Paradoxes. First you're seeing one thing (meaning you're in the conscious mind) and suddenly you're seeing everything all around you, as one unified field, all a-shimmer and a-twitch with constant random motion. But it's fine, smooth motion—a pleasing tranquil kind of motion, like the motion of the sea or of the leaves in the breeze. Like staring into water or fire, both of which can hypnotize you. Yep, I think I'm on to something here.

Just before all these ideas cascaded into my head, I had a quick succession of epiphanies about my drawing that I won't share here. They're going in my journal. I just wanted to get the information recorded. I suspect the one led directly to the other.

And now I'm thinking about ways to use focused and peripheral attention in writing (without simply saying "I switched from focused to peripheral attention... ")

I'll say this much about the drawing—what I've been doing in recent years has been all constructive drawing, using boxes and cylinders etc to construct the figure, to help keep everything in proper perspecrtive and proportioning etc. Plus studying anatomy. That's the equivalent of using a pretty rigid structure for plotting a story. Many years ago, when I really enjoyed drawing and was much better at it (in some ways) I hardly did any of that at all, only if I needed to figure out something difficult, Otherwise it was all drawn directly by outline, and I had a pretty good knack for that. I could almost visualize the figure in my head (not completely, but vaguely), and as I drew it I figured it out rapidly. It's the equivalent of discovery writing—discovery drawing.

Which means a shift from tightly conscious plotting to loose ideas, relying on intuition (AKA the unconscious).

This morning right after waking up I had an eiphany about myself, relating to the ones I had last night about the nature of the nature trance and about my drawing. What led to the lastest epiphany is that I was wondering why I had the two last night, and I realized some things about myself. This has been really wild. So many revelations all packed so close together. It does tend to happen that way though, and later you often realize that they've been a-brewin' for a long time, they just needed to process in the unconscious for a while before the results could emerge.

Oh, and I ran a test last night right here in the studio. I can definitely see colors in peripheral vision, as long as the colors are bright enough and the objects are big enough and there's enough light. No matter how far off center I move something I can still see what color it is. So much for "Peripheral vision is black and white."

This is a followup to my previous post about Hemingway being Anima-possessed. I'm listening to part one of The Art of Darkness podcast on Hemingway:

• AoD044 (Pt.I) - Ernest Hemingway: Out Too Far w/ Aaron Gwyn

I had already listened to part two, but skipped part one. They did make a cryptic reference or two in part 2 to what I'm about to say, but not enough for me to understand it. Just enough to leave me scratching my head.

Apparently Hemingway and his older sister were both raised as girls by their mother. I've been sort of half-listening while I do other things, and I missed some details, but for whatever reason she dressed them both in frilly dresses and treated little Ernest as a girl. And to compound matters, his older sister was bigger and stronger than him until he went through puberty.

Well shit! That seems to explain a lot about his exaggerated masculinity of later years. I guess he had a lot to compensate for, and a lot of reclaiming of stolen masculinity to do. No wonder he lost touch with his Anima—He undoubtely rejected everything even remotely feminine or vulnerable in his character once he realized what was going on.

They told a number of stories about his early years (childhood and adolescence), and it seems like he really wanted to create a big impression of being strong and manly (boy-ly?). This may well be the genesis of his performative masculinity and the famed bouts of childish impotent rage or very feminine behavior when he was hurt or angry.

You know, I'm not sure there actually are stories about this. I don't remember where I got that impression. It might be mostly from a man I knew for a decade or so who was very Hemingway-esque and would have such bouts frequently, and/or from the portrayal of Sterling Hayden in The Long Goodbye playing a very Hemingway-esque writer character. But I did always have the impression he was like that—that his over-wrought masculinity would break down at times of stress to reveal a very immature and rather feminine nature underneath it. That isn't necessarily his real nature, but rather because he was repressing any sign of femininity in himself all the time, and what we repress grows in the unconscious, often into something dark and monstrous and much bigger than it originally was, and will burst out at times of stress and lash out at people around you. It's no more a reflection of who he really was than his overblown masculinity itself, which was a show he put on (to some degree anyway). If you forcefully tilt your personality toward one false pole, then when it rebounds it will snap way past the mid-point to the opposite extreme as a means of sort of balancing out the act you've been putting on. This is what Jung referred to as an enantiodromea, which means a rebounding of the opposite or a movement to the opposite.

So yeah, knowing this about him (which I don't think is very common knowledge) lends a lot of power to the Anima Possession theory.

I've been working on the Superhero Mega-Thread and made the connection this morning with the Melville and Odysseus lectures, and that prompted me to read some of my notes from those. First of all—holy crap! What an amazing time that was, of delving deep into the meanings of some of the most profound writings in the Western canon! And the insights it gives, into the workings of the conscious and unconscious minds (which is the basis of all this religious and spiritual thought).

I ran across Melville's fascianting idea that Moby Dick, and all whales, and in fact all people too, have something he calls heiroglpyphics inscribed on their bodies, that tell their fate, but that there's no way for them to read. He was referring to things like the patterns of wrinkles and scars and natural lines on the body of a whale, and the way it literally records some of the more powerful events of its history—encounters with whaling ships, with giant squids and other monstrous denizens of the deeps, and with aging for instance. Queequeg the cannibal harpooneer had his entire body engraved with patterns of little scars put there by a witch doctor of his tribe, recording the entire story of the world according to their cosmology. Ahab had a gigantic scar running from the crown of his head down his entire body to where one leg was bitten off by Moby Dick in their first encounter. This is his fate encoded there in heiroglyphic form. We all have the same thing, not as obviously of course, and perhaps it's largely invisble—our fates are written not only in our memories but in our bodies. And we're not capable of reading them.

And suddenly it hit me—this is what McCarthy was doing with the main character of Blood Meridian, the kid, who carries a Bible with him throughout the story, but can't read. He was connecting it with that idea in Moby Dick. The Bible of course is the story of the universe and everything in it, including our fates, for ther Western world. It's our cosmology. And we don't read it or underestand how to interpret it.

Of course we don't need to. Our fate is what it is, whether we make a conscious effort to understand it or not. But those who do, without trying to alter or control it, get some profound inisghts the rest don't. Spiritual knowledge and visions. Not sure where this is going.

Youtube just dropped this on me:

​

​

This actually explains a lot about the book. I was despairing of ever understanding it (if that's even a sentence, and even if it's not). I'm about three quarters of the way through, and once I finish these analyses I might pick it up again, now that I have half a clue what's going on.

I bought the book Cormac McCarthy: An American Apocalypse. It looks to be a great book explaining his whole mythology and philosophy, using a methodology called

Mimesis:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Referring to it as imitation, the concept of mimesis was crucial for Samuel Taylor Coleridge's theory of the imagination. Coleridge begins his thoughts on imitation and poetry from Plato, Aristotle, and Philip Sidney, adopting their concept of imitation of nature instead of other writers.* His departure from the earlier thinkers lies in his arguing that art does not reveal a unity of essence through its ability to achieve sameness with nature. Coleridge claims:

[T]he composition of a poem is among the imitative arts; and that imitation, as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the SAME throughout the radically DIFFERENT, or the different throughout a base radically the same.

Here, Coleridge opposes imitation to copying, the latter referring to William Wordsworth's notion that poetry should duplicate nature by capturing actual speech. Coleridge instead argues that the unity of essence is revealed precisely through different materialities and media. Imitation, therefore, reveals the sameness of processes in nature.

René Girard
In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), René Girard posits that human behavior is based upon mimesis, and that imitation can engender pointless conflict. Girard notes the productive potential of competition: "It is because of this unprecedented capacity to promote competition within limits that always remain socially, if not individually, acceptable that we have all the amazing achievements of the modern world," but states that competition stifles progress once it becomes an end in itself: "rivals are more apt to forget about whatever objects are the cause of the rivalry and instead become more fascinated with one another."

Source
​

Girard created a Mimetic theory of literary criticism, which is the system used in the book by its author, though he claims to have used many other techniquws as well, which seems necessary for a writer as eclectic as McCarthy.

* McCarthy famously said that books are made of other books, and has definitely incorporated elements of many of his predecessors into his own work, though doubtless in transmogrified form (through his integrative imagination).Which I just realized, seems to run counter to a Mimetic reading of his work (that it's based on artistic imitation of nature rather than of other books).I've read part of the Sample though, and it seems like an excellent book.

Oh damn, I forgot I had a thread on McCarthy. I just posted that I bought the Kindle version of The Passenger over on my Poetry thread of all places. Shoulda done it here. Well, I guess I did now, huh?

Here's a really good article I just found on him as a largely misunderstood writer:

• Cormac McCarthy: Conservative Novelist

The gist of it is that, at least in his Westerns, he isn't really nihilistic, and evil doesn't win out in the end. I mean, it does, but the point isn't that evil wins, it's that the main characters were good men, even Christian in a sense, in spirit anyway if not by denomination, and that they all were good compassionate souls standing for what they believe in, in a world that was trying actively to destroy them. And he points out and corrects some misunderstandings propagated by people like Harold Bloom and many other prominent critics. Glad I stumbled across this one. It really does put things into persective.

Oh double damn! I just looked at what was formerly the last post on the page—right above the previous one, and this is not good.

The guy (author of the book I bought on McCarthy) apparently misunderstood Coleridge's theories about the Imagination, in the way a lot of people do. Apparently he thought the Primary Imagination was the good one, the Poetic one, and then he based his whole literary theory on that misunderstanding and wrote his book based on it. ​

Mimesis, the imitation of nature. That's what the primary imagination does alright, and it fails to merge ideas together and morph them into new forms. Only the Secondary Imagination does that. And now I have this massive book of his sitting here. Wow, that's a mess. Fortunately (in a way), since writing that, I've gone through a massive deep dive into Coleridge and his ideas about the imagination, and I can now see how wrong he was (the other author, not Coleridge).

Here's a line pulled directly from that older post of mine, and I even bolded it there, as if this is great or important stuff:

"Coleridge begins his thoughts on imitation and poetry from Plato, Aristotle, and Philip Sidney, adopting their concept of imitation of nature instead of other writers."
​

That is so messed up! So wrong. McCarthy famously said that books are based on the books of earlier authors. And this guy believes the opposite. Looking back at this now I feel like I landed in Bizzaro world. And I was pretty excited about that book too. It's so strange to see that author constantly opposing Mimesis and Imitation, when they're synonyms. Well, at least I'm glad I realized this before I went wading into that book all excited.

McCarthy was a Modern Romantic?
Depairing over that American Apocalypse book being messed up, I went in search of another good book on McCarthy. I already have one, but I want something else too. Competing theories or alternatives or something. I ran across this article:

• Cormac McCarthy’s Catholic visions of sin

Which then led me to this book:

• Professing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy's Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment

Pretty intriguing stuff. The book seems pretty heavy on the academic-speak, loaded with all kinds of massive indecipherable words and phrases, but I don't think I'll be buying it. Just reading the sample seems like enough, just so I get the gist of the idea.