Chuck Crabbe's Blog: The Harlequin
May 10, 2014
A Tragic Fire: Cormac McCarthy and Gnosticism in Blood Meridian, No Country For Old Men, and The Counselor
When I finished reading Blood Meridian for the first time it didn’t sit right with me. There was something silent, but fundamental, hidden between the words, and I had missed it. I opened it again and read the epilogue, cryptic and enraging as it was, three or four more times.
"In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search… "(351)
Right. That’s just the beginning of the epilogue, and the rabbit hole only gets deeper. Finally, I put the book down, turned on my computer, and went looking for help. My vanity as a reader wouldn’t let me walk away.
I do not intend to argue here that Cormac McCarthy takes the myth of the Gnostics to be true in a literal sense. They didn’t take it literally themselves. Like all deeper understanding of myth the Gnostic story should be taken as a metaphor, a key to a mystery that is beyond the categories of human thought.
Gnosticism holds that the material world, including the bodies that hold us, is more or less a mistake, an aberration created by a tyrannical, ignorant God. For Gnostics all matter is corrupt and doomed, that’s its nature, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Our flesh is a tomb and Jehovah’s world is a serpent swallowing its own tail, monster feeding on monster, and in the material realm, power is the only rule (The earth and humanity as they exist in McCarthy’s novel The Road could be seen as the world of matter approaching its natural, and only possible, end). Pretty bleak, and Gnosticism, like Buddhism, has been accused of nihilism, and were it not for the fire, the "spark of the alien divine" it might be a just accusation.
The myth plays out differently in different texts, but essentially: Things once existed in a state of perfection called the Pleroma. God existed in a fullness that can't be comprehended and the Gnostic Gospels describe him mostly in terms of negatives, or what he is not, much as the state of Zen or Satori is described. This is intentional. The Gnostic authors didn't want to give readers anything to hold on to and wanted, as much as was possible, to avoid reducing God to a concept, a mental idol.
continued at: http://www.chuckcrabbe.com/1/post/201...
"In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search… "(351)
Right. That’s just the beginning of the epilogue, and the rabbit hole only gets deeper. Finally, I put the book down, turned on my computer, and went looking for help. My vanity as a reader wouldn’t let me walk away.
I do not intend to argue here that Cormac McCarthy takes the myth of the Gnostics to be true in a literal sense. They didn’t take it literally themselves. Like all deeper understanding of myth the Gnostic story should be taken as a metaphor, a key to a mystery that is beyond the categories of human thought.
Gnosticism holds that the material world, including the bodies that hold us, is more or less a mistake, an aberration created by a tyrannical, ignorant God. For Gnostics all matter is corrupt and doomed, that’s its nature, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Our flesh is a tomb and Jehovah’s world is a serpent swallowing its own tail, monster feeding on monster, and in the material realm, power is the only rule (The earth and humanity as they exist in McCarthy’s novel The Road could be seen as the world of matter approaching its natural, and only possible, end). Pretty bleak, and Gnosticism, like Buddhism, has been accused of nihilism, and were it not for the fire, the "spark of the alien divine" it might be a just accusation.
The myth plays out differently in different texts, but essentially: Things once existed in a state of perfection called the Pleroma. God existed in a fullness that can't be comprehended and the Gnostic Gospels describe him mostly in terms of negatives, or what he is not, much as the state of Zen or Satori is described. This is intentional. The Gnostic authors didn't want to give readers anything to hold on to and wanted, as much as was possible, to avoid reducing God to a concept, a mental idol.
continued at: http://www.chuckcrabbe.com/1/post/201...
March 12, 2014
How I Discovered Fire and Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthyYou can’t. You have to carry the fire.
I don’t know how to.
Yes you do.
Is it real? The fire?
-The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
Over the last few years I’ve become deeply interested in the work of Cormac McCarthy. Like many readers the first book of McCarthy’s I read was The Road. Paradoxically, my walk through the book’s apocalyptic, ash-strewn landscape brought me solace at a time when I couldn’t seem to find it anywhere else.
I was thirty-two and hanging on by a very thin thread. The mother of my two adopted boys and I were breaking up and, as usual, I was doing a pretty terrible job of ending it. My health was terrible, the novel I was working on felt like it was dead in the water, and of course I was broke. It was November. I spent my weekends looking for an apartment.
The break-up was hard on everybody. The older of my two boys was seven and going through a phase where he was afraid of the dark. At night he would ask me to come into his room and hang out with him until he fell asleep. Grateful for the silence and escape I obliged him over the next few weeks. His room was invariably messy, and I would lie there in the midst of the disaster of clothes and toys, turn the nightlight on low, and pull out the copy of The Road I was reading. It became the best time of the day for me. As I read and my son tried to fall asleep I would imagine that him and I were relying on each other in the waste land of everything going wrong around us, just as the boy and his father did in McCarthy’s book, him counting on me against the darkness, and me relying on him for that precious time each day, and for the promise of a future I couldn’t believe in on my own. I let the rest of the world collapse around us. There was a sense of security on those evenings, a feeling I can still bring back into focus and hold. Where your heart is, there too shall be your treasure. By the end of December I had moved out and had the boys on weekends.
In the novel the boy and his father are always talking about carrying the fire. Not having been exposed to any of McCarthy’s other work I thought he was maybe using fire as a metaphor for the will to survive, or the last bit of goodness on the broken earth they were walking. It wasn’t until I started exploring the rest of McCarthy’s books that I began to see that the fire runs through everything he does like Ariadne’s thread, and it wasn’t until I read his masterpiece, Blood Meridian, that I came to understand what the fire was and what it could mean for me.
(To be continued in the next blog entry.)
