We Americans are a people without a history. We came here to escape history. We moved West and then South to escape what little history we made here. We reinvented ourselves and became who we wanted to become. We manufactured our histories to mesh our desired future. To pull all of that off you have to forget who you were. Which means of course that we Americans do not know ourselves.
There is a lot of moving on in Blood Meridian and there is a lot of forgetting the past and two or three times now through 152 pages Cormac McCarthy presents the theme of self-knowledge.
We were aliens in an alien land "yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them."
The kid took one night's shelter in the hovel of a hermit, an ex-slave trader who preached some to the kid, "The way of the transgressor is hard.," "I take it ye lost your way." "Yes," the kid said. "We got off the road someways or another." "A man "can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. 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."; who, as they were sitting around the fire, "handed through the flames a small dark thing...Some man's heart, dried and blackened.", removed from a slave's body; who may have sodomized the kid as he slept.
Roads: "We got off the road someways..." The Road is the title of another of McCarthy's books. "I believe this here is the most traveled," the kid suggests as their route to another kid, Sproule, before Sproule dies. The kid continued on.
The history problem: "What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it's writ," the judge says to one of the riders who begs the judge not to draw his likeness in the judge's ubiquitous book.
We can never really forget all of our history, which is cyclical anyway and thus from which there is no escape. The kid's mother died in his childbirth. She "did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off."
The riders and another party part each "pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men's journeys."
The kid makes the acquaintance of a man named Toadvine. He makes the acquaintance under the circumstances of Toadvine trying to kill him. He and Toadvine become friends.
The forgetting antidote to the history problem: When the kid's mother dies his father never speaks her name again and the kid never learns her name.
When the kid and Toadvine commit a murder together and have to flee, Toadvine stops off at home to gather some things and abandons his wife who briefly chases after him. "He didn't look back."
When two riders die on the trek "The men turned out in the early morning darkness to dig their graves...covered them with stones and rode on again. They rode on." Another one died and they "buried him also and rode on." They encounter skeletons of other men, a wagon full of dead bodies, including a boy, another boy dies while they are encamped in a a ruined church. "They rode one." "They moved on." After the Comanche attack the eight survivors "had gone on."
Churches: Every one of them so far a church in ruins or, as McCarthy phrases it once, "a ruinous church." Churches are the scenes of slaughter and death, every one. "They went on." They went on, moved on, rode on, past and through all death and "didn't look back."
There is an "expriest" among the riders who does some sermonizing from the Good Book to the kid but the expriest is also the Dennis Hopper character in Apocalypse Now and in chapter ten sermonizes to the kid about the demigod judge who also delivers a sermon to the riders. The Judge/Kurtz keeps a book too.
There is a lot of moving on in Blood Meridian and there is a lot of forgetting the past and two or three times now through 152 pages Cormac McCarthy presents the theme of self-knowledge.
We were aliens in an alien land "yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them."
The kid took one night's shelter in the hovel of a hermit, an ex-slave trader who preached some to the kid, "The way of the transgressor is hard.," "I take it ye lost your way." "Yes," the kid said. "We got off the road someways or another." "A man "can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. 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."; who, as they were sitting around the fire, "handed through the flames a small dark thing...Some man's heart, dried and blackened.", removed from a slave's body; who may have sodomized the kid as he slept.
Roads: "We got off the road someways..." The Road is the title of another of McCarthy's books. "I believe this here is the most traveled," the kid suggests as their route to another kid, Sproule, before Sproule dies. The kid continued on.
The history problem: "What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it's writ," the judge says to one of the riders who begs the judge not to draw his likeness in the judge's ubiquitous book.
We can never really forget all of our history, which is cyclical anyway and thus from which there is no escape. The kid's mother died in his childbirth. She "did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off."
The riders and another party part each "pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men's journeys."
The kid makes the acquaintance of a man named Toadvine. He makes the acquaintance under the circumstances of Toadvine trying to kill him. He and Toadvine become friends.
The forgetting antidote to the history problem: When the kid's mother dies his father never speaks her name again and the kid never learns her name.
When the kid and Toadvine commit a murder together and have to flee, Toadvine stops off at home to gather some things and abandons his wife who briefly chases after him. "He didn't look back."
When two riders die on the trek "The men turned out in the early morning darkness to dig their graves...covered them with stones and rode on again. They rode on." Another one died and they "buried him also and rode on." They encounter skeletons of other men, a wagon full of dead bodies, including a boy, another boy dies while they are encamped in a a ruined church. "They rode one." "They moved on." After the Comanche attack the eight survivors "had gone on."
Churches: Every one of them so far a church in ruins or, as McCarthy phrases it once, "a ruinous church." Churches are the scenes of slaughter and death, every one. "They went on." They went on, moved on, rode on, past and through all death and "didn't look back."
There is an "expriest" among the riders who does some sermonizing from the Good Book to the kid but the expriest is also the Dennis Hopper character in Apocalypse Now and in chapter ten sermonizes to the kid about the demigod judge who also delivers a sermon to the riders. The Judge/Kurtz keeps a book too.
