Blood Meridian
Published:
- “The passengers are a diffident lot. They cage their eyes and no man asks another what it is that brings him here.”
- “Distant thunderheads reared quivering against the electric sky and were sucked away in the blackness again.”
- “Through the noon heat and into the dusk where lizards lay with their leather chins flat to the cooling rocks and fended off the world with thin smiles and eyes like cracked stone plates.”
- “…looked out from the great caves in his skull where his eyes lay.”
- “Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague.”
- “One of the ponies was lying in the sand breathing steadily and others stood that bore arrows with a curious patience.”
- “For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.”
- He’d just written about a group’s fire left behind them as they rode ahead, seeming to move around behind them in their wake. Captures his bizarre but seemingly profound style.
- Deceptive light of past…stasis entrenched in history but we feel it still burns and moves…our anxiety of it affects our future, we conjure up “fraudulent destinies” due to this fraudulent fire at our tails
- The judge is sketching miscellaneous artifacts with effortless expertise and throwing those artifacts into the fire after he’s finished. A simple man asks him what he’s doing with those notes. The judge smiles and tells him “it was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man.”
- My mind goes to our obsession with photos. Judge as a partial metaphor for impressive technology, the throwing into the fire that of how when we obsess of re-presentations, that original presentation is destroyed. (Banal example is tourists obsessed with the images their travel creates, and laying waste to the destination in the process)
- The simple man points out that not everything in the world can be put in a book.
- “To the west the cloud banks stood above the mountains like the dark warp of the very firmament and the starsprent reaches of the galaxies hung in a vast aura above the riders’ heads.”
- “In those small pools there sat each a small and perfect sun.”
- In an exchange between Toadvine and the judge, we finally get a glimpse of the judge’s motivations to documenting everything. “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent,” he says. Placing his hands on the ground he says “this is my claim, and yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.”
- The yearning for power, chief pride, revealed.
- Toadvine replies that “no man can acquaint himself with everything on this earth.” The judge responds “the man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. … But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”
- A deep irony here. He claims those who embrace mystery are fearful, and yet it is he who is steeped in fear of the unknown, clamouring to capture everything.
- His cruelty is starting to make sense. This “taking charge of the world by singling out the thread of order” reminds of scientific ignorance, particularly the kind that leads to senseless killing (nuclear, weapons, externalities). It is this deep insecurity, this unwillingness to accept one’s fate, that generates atrocity.
- “The stars burned with a lidless fixity…”
- “In the distance before him a fire burned on the prairie, a solitary flame frayed by the wind that freshened and faded and shed scattered sparks down the storm like hot scurf [dandruff, flakey residue] blown from some unreckonable forge howling in the waste.”
- “A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before the torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.”
- The judge addressing the kid: “There’s [something flawed in] the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.”
- Many showdowns, some attempts for the kid to kill the judge but he doesn’t. The humanity of the kid bothering the inhuman judge
- “…led by the tethered fool until the two were shimmering and insubstantial in the waves of heat and then they were gone altogether.”
- The judge being led by a fool: in this unraveling he degenerates into his true form.
- The kid, now a man, encounters the judge in a saloon surrounded by all types of people and “in all that motley assemblage [the judge] sat by them and yet alone as if he were some other sort of man entire and he seemed little changed or none in all these years.”
- Something about the judge as a symbol being prevalent among the masses. The devil? Luciferian intellect? Pride? Cruelty?
- The judge expounds on determinism and the misery of man in yearning for the world to conform to his will, but the impossibility for the world to do so. He talks of the desire for power culminating in a game, a conflict, that yield but one victor. (He earlier says that God is War, something like the Ultimate Victor). Speaks of a lack of bloodshed leading to a sort of false game, a false ritual. Rituals in his mind require bloodshed.
- Finite mentality. Playing to win. Can’t understand that by playing to keep playing we can participate with eternity, but to do that we need to relinquish our desire to win, to end the game. The judge is too prideful to see this, too caught up in winning. Here at the end we find that the judge has won nothing. He is the same as he was before, an unchanging engine.
- “And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?” asks the judge. “You aint nothin,” replies the man. “You speak truer than you know…” replies the judge.
- The absent nature of evil. The void. Nothing but the lack of good.
- The story ends with the judge killing the man gruesomely in an outhouse, and dancing as this large presence, almost like a black hole, at the center of the dancefloor. “His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”
- Hauntingly beautiful.