The Blood Meridian

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.

Blood Meridian is a love letter to the South American desert. This classic anti-western story seems to posit that the primary reason for the romanticisation of cowboys is not the cowboys themselves, but instead the great untamed land that surrounded them. In a greater sense, the story is an examination of the twin threads of environment-shaper and environment-inhabitant.

Already within the first few pages of the story, McCarthy juxtaposes the potential of a person tempered by their environment:

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt... 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 from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him... He watches, pale and unwashed. 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.

In a sense, he sets up a backstory for most men in the story with this opening. An environment of neglect and of dirt. The men who make it past this stage are already pre-selected for the undertakings necessary to cobble together a nomadic existence trawling from place to place, doing odd jobs with no chance of social mobility.

After getting involved with endless fights he is shot. And upon recuperating, makes his way to Texas, that final act of violence making him into a man.

The boat is going to Texas.

Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. 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.

His capacity for violence, perhaps the only thing he is good at, culminates in a fight with an innkeeper. A fight he handily wins. The first touch that the environment is no longer just shaping him, but he is starting to truly affect his environment. Bringing his past wherever he goes.

He joins a company of men who promise him wealth and land in exchange for murder. It is then that he is put to his first real taste of the desert. A cowboy story would have them set out, and then cut to a scene in the desert where the men are starting to die from dehydration. An argument, some pragmatic decision making, and maybe our protagonist would faint, and wake up upon arrival in a new town. The group much beleaguered would seek to rest up for a few days. Somehow, at the saloon, or because of a gang of outlaws, the story would center at this no-name town for awhile or perhaps for the rest of the story. This story instead just drones on and endlessly on. The harsh environment endless in its capacity to grind the men and the wagons and the animals into the very dust that makes it up. And yet, the environment is, at this moment, one of the harshest descriptions the book will have. The kid is unused to it. His virgin voyage. As such, it still has touches of civilisation:

On this day two men fell sick... they cried out to be left and then they died... They covered them with stones and rode on again.

And the description of the harshness:

The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board... They moved on and the iron of the wagon-tires grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice.

A desert that grinds even iron wheels to chrome beset upon them.

All of this harsh deprivation withstood, the kid is due a reward. A flash of power to reclaim a feeling of control over his destiny and destination. And the story is, initially, forthcoming. On the horizon, they see a small band droving cattle and horses. They ready themselves to kill them, only for this to happen:

We may see a little sport here before the day is out...

The lattermost of the drovers were now coming through the dust and the captain was gesturing and shouting. The ponies had begun to veer off from the herd and the drovers were beating their way toward this armed company met with on the plain. Already you could see through the dust on the ponies' hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the pipe of the quena, flutes made from human bones... when up from the offside of those ponies there rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eye of their enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat wore backwards and otherwise naked... and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering...

dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs...

A band of marauding, miragic Comanche come upon them. The violence is not poetic. The kid and his band imagine themselves as powerful, "We may see a little sport here before the day is out.", only for them to be set upon, and the kid introduced to the true nature of the desert: ultra-violence.

A normal cowboy story may have a tense exchange, or a well-timed, well executed ambush on behalf of the cowboys. Or a quick-draw shooting. In this case, surprisingly, the cowboys got got. The long run on sentences and the sheer enormity of the violence creates a sense of disbelief, an almost dream-like quality. The ethereality of it is increased at the kid escaping completely unharmed, minus his horse. It starts to emphasise the kid's lack of importance. He could have been any one of the survivors, he is merely a vehicle to explore the effects of that violence and this environment.

There is a question, to me, at this point, of what made the Comanche like this. What drove them to the point that they became such lawless, grotesque savages. The fun thing about the book is that at this point you are still of the belief generally that you are following the story of someone who is more like you than say, these Comanche weirdos. But as the book goes on, and the violence becomes more and more normalised, eventually the kid will become part of a group indistinguishable from these Comanche raiders. This just simply being the first step of many down a long winding staircase to hell.

It is important at this point to bring up the character of Judge Holden. When I read this book, I missed that Judge was introduced very early in the story, where he convinces a crowd to lynch a sermon-giving priest. To me, Judge was introduced by the men of Glanton's gang as having sprang, seemingly fully formed from the desert:

And there he set. Just him and his legs crossed, smilin as we rode up. Like he'd been expectin us. He'd an old canvas kitbag and an old woolen benjamin over the one shoulder.... He didnt even have a canteen. It was like... you couldnt tell where he'd come from.

Judge Holden was, to me, the embodiment of the desert. He is singularly interesting within the story. He is a completed character arc, he does not change. He knows multiple languages, can make philosophic arguments far beyond the heads of the men around him. He is not just capable of violence, he is particularly inclined to acts of violence even the other men, as steeped as they are, find distasteful. He is the perfect renaissance man, a gentleman, and a violent psychopath.

He's been all over the world. Him and the governor they sat up till breakfast and it was Paris this and London that in five languages, you'd have given something to of heard them. The governor's a learned man himself he is, but the judge...

The judge sat with the Apache boy before the fire and it watched everything with dark berry eyes and some of the men played with it and made it laugh and they gave it jerky and it sat chewing and watching gravely the figures that passed above it. They covered it with a blanket and in the morning the judge was dandling it on one knee while the men saddled their horses. Toadvine saw him with the child as he passed with his saddle but when he came back ten minutes later leading his horse the child was dead and the judge had scalped it. Toadvine put the muzzle of his pistol against the great dome of the judge's head.

So, with someone so inherently monstrous on your team, how do they move the Overton Window? Well, as the book itself seems to imply, they don't need to do so explicitly:

Each man scanned the terrain and the movements of the least of creatures were logged into their collective cognizance until they were federated with invisible wires of vigilance and advanced upon that landscape with a single resonance.

Simply by being in the presence of others in pursuit of the same goal are we impressed upon by them. A constant shared consciousness and time will surely shape us to the people around us.

Eventually, the men themselves turn into the thing that they set out to destroy. Outlaws, with a bounty upon their heads and no home to turn to. As their situation becomes more and more desperate, they finally turn inwards, and start to cannibalise each other. Leading in culmination to the final showdown between the kid and the judge.

A duel.

A duel, as in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, is an affair that is ultimately, about equals. Pistols at noon. The sun at its highest point so it is not in either man's eyes, a countdown, and then each man is to his own devices, having signed a contract with his assent. In this book however, the duel is at poor odds for the kid. He is injured with an arrow in his leg, he bears only a pistol versus the judge's rifle, and is inferior in every way to the judge even at full strength. The judge is essentially hunting him down for his summary execution. The kid escapes only due to luck. And in these two ways is the inherent aromantic portrayal of the cowboy continued. Violence, which is the fundamental underpinning of the cowboy, is not glorious. It is fundamentally a bad decision to put yourself in harms way against an equal opponent. And the book fully reifies the reality of the world view it espouses through this duel: fundamentally, man is at odds with nature. For all of the judges eloquence, learnings and gentlemanly capability, underpinning it all is the ability to more competently visit violence upon the world than any other man in the story.

A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test.

Decisions of life and death, or 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.

In essence a hero, or a villain, is merely whoever we want to win, but their ultimate means of victory look the same in terms of described action. Because to me the judge represents the very land in which the story takes place, his violence against the kid is biblical and alien. It is the same violence that is wrought upon the men when their wagon wheels are slowly ground to dust and their dehydration is pushed to its limit. And the men return that violence against each other. Their environment, ultimately something they cannot hope to conquer, slowly and insidiously infecting them with itself. Your only real option, in the moral of the story, is to leave.