Blood Meridian Now

GRAVEYARD DEAD: Chapter 8 Blood Meridian

Welcome to our discussion of Chapter 8...thank you for listening!!! This is a bit of a long episode and we appreciate you for even beginning to listen to it. We found some concerns including sacrifice, ceremony, identity, capitalism, redistribution festivals, gambling, and even a brief hint at Moby Dick...we may or may not have got to them, ha!

"Hark ye yet again,—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?

To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines." Ahab

 

Excerpt from TRICYCLE magazine, 2007,  

From interview with poet M.S. Merwyn...

 

"The paintings in the Paleolithic caves? Those aren't art; they weren't there for an audience. Except the great halls, which were initiation places. But the tiny figures that were 25 feet up inside a cleft where nobody could ever see them, an animal that someone built in there? Those animals are part of the person who put them there, and that person came down knowing something, and this is the ultimate vision quest. And it didnt even begin with Cro-magnon man. We found five years ago in Southwest France a place quite near Lascaux with a history of it's own that has never been published because the scientist who discovered them- the government of France would not let him go on with his excavations. So he said "ok well I won' t publish my findings, then." And he hasn't. He's kept them going for years, and I talk to him on the telephone. What he found sixty feet down was a burial. It was not Cro-magnon. It was Neanderthal. It was probably, he thinks, 19,000 years older than Lascaux. (It) was a Neanderthal skeleton and beside it the skeleton of a bear. And the bear's legs and the mans legs were exchanged so that the man had bears legs and the bear had mans legs. And they were surrounded by fossil pollen. It was a ritual burial. That's a great scoop, and it hasn't even been published yet. But the reason i'm telling you this, is that this is already saying that the link between the imagination-which to me is the great pinnacle of humanity, the imagination that makes the arts and makes compassion- is in our species and goes way back. And it's never been separate. And when you get any aspect of the culture that tries to separate it, it's destructive and suicidal. 

 

Take them away, names like Buddhism. I'm impatient with them. There's something beyond all that, beneath all that, they all share, they all come from. They are branches from a single root. And that's what one has to pay attention to. And of course the words in The Diamond Sutra that grabbed me were, when Tathagata (the Buddha) says, "boddi, does the Tathagata have a teaching to teach?" And Bodhisattva says," no, lord, Tathagata has no teaching to teach." At that point I got chills right down my spine.

 

And Tathagata says, " because there is no teaching to teach, it is the teaching." I thought this is it, you know. Here we go. I think that goes as far back as shamanism. I mean, what did those guys find up in those clefts? In the caves? There was no teaching to teach. They knew something, but they knew it from then on. And it was something distinct, and it was something to do with connection, with following, with what came before and after, and they couldn't express it in any other terms. But they were obviously guides to their people after that. Because you know, the animals that they were depicting were not the animals. I mean, they may have eaten a few of them. But that was not what it was about. It was about following, it was about the fact that these were the elders. They knew where they were going. The humans did not know where they were going."

 

HICCIUS DOCCIUS: Chapter 7

Chapter 7 has so much for us to talk about!!! Like every chapter the synoptic headers can keep a feller up all night researching. We find many things here. Another chapter on blackness. Deaths of magic and the history of science. Legal motifs like crazy...some we didn't even get to. After all Cormac McCarthy had a few people close to him in law...so it shouldn't be a surprise he has words like "some vortex in that waste apposite to which mans transit and his reckonings alike lay abrogate."

We read a couple of listeners comments too. Thank you for listening! Please write a review on  Spoitify or iTunes we would love that. And check out our supplementary content on our Substack page.

Did you know a regular decks of cards relates to the tarot deck in some ways? Did you know, that a deck of cards is calendrical? Yep both decks have temporal allusions like this wonderful novel.

 

All art has elements of time-related allusions. A still life is one tiny moment frozen in an image. So is a photograph. A film is 24 frames per second. 

A regular deck of cards has 52 cards, like 52 weeks in a. year. The cards are black or red, like day and night. 4 suits like 4 seasons. Spades, summer. Hearts, Fall. Diamonds, Winter. Clubs, fall. And each suit has 13 cards to represent the lunar cycles. Jokers can help with tracking a year...with adding the numbers of all the suits you get 364...use 2 Jokers for leap year!

 

Tarot cards also have calendrical qualities. Of interest for Blood Meridian there are 78 tarot cards in a deck. Minus 22 Major Arcana and you have 56 cards. 78 cards might relate to the several 7's and 8's in the novel 7x8 is 56.

 

But meanwhile...

 

Monday-The High Priestess

Tuesday- The Tower

Wednesday-The Magician

Thursday-Wheel of Fortune

Friday-The Emperess

Saturday-The World

Sunday-The Sun

 

Aries-The Emperor

Taurus-The Hierophant

Gemini-The Lovers

Cancer-The Chariot

Leo-Strength

Virgo-The Hermit

Libra-Justice

Scorpio-Death

Sagitarius-Temperance

Aquarius-The Star

Pisces-The Moon

IN COUNTRY: Chapter 6

"for years now there had been no country here but the war."

“How many times did someone have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice?”

Dispatches, Herr

 

Thank you for listening. Chapter 6 might not have many pages but we found a few things to think about JVH finds some source material. Candy changes lead into gold.

The phrase "in country" can be found in Michael Herr's brilliant book DISPATCHES. It's also in Dennis Lehane's novel SMALL MERCIES....

“Right now the sun shines during the day, but it’s pretty gray seven months out of the year. Or maybe, I dunno, it was just gray in my house growing up. I think of my house after my mother died—maybe even when she was still alive—and it just feels like everything was the color of the sidewalk, even the air. But in-country? Vietnam?” He looks around the circle. “You’ve never seen the color green until you’ve seen Vietnam.”

A CROSSROADS IN THE WASTE: Chapter 5, Blood Meridian

"Allegories are in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things." Walter Benjamin

“Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.” Georges Bataille

In this episode we talk about a few ideas and influences including T.S. Eliot, a little about allegory, the Baroque of Walter Benjamin, the Mexican basin, bats, climate, geography (hell) the strained relationship of Sproule and the kid, a little of the humour.

 

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Some cultural references in this episode:

El Topo by Jadorovsky, The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot.Versalles, Vatican City art work, Baroque. The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, The Mushroom At The End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jim Morrison, Lovecraft, vampires, elitist portrayal of food and street markets, and the potential intelligence of the kid.

THE GEOLOGY OF FEAR: Chapter 4, Blood Meridian

The novel becomes quite exciting and seems to enter a different form of descriptives...why do we feel what we feel reading this chapter?

Ready. Set. Action.

Simile, allegory, pagination, tools and hints of a secret architecture. 

We forgot to mention how funny the line from Hayward praying for rain was..."Lord, we are dried to jerky down here." And goddammit it rained!

Thank you for listening!!!!!

THE PARATEXTS; The Epigraphs , A Special Bonus Episode

Very little has been written about the epigraphs in Blood Meridian, especially looking at all three of them together. We fix that.

Are the epigraphs misleading? Are the epigraphs another example of the art of misdirection?

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Bohme April 24, 1575-November 17, 1624 (another 117 or 1117?)

Shakespeare April 23, 1564-April 23, 1616 (like the kid born and died on same date?)

THE WRATH OF GOD LIES WAITING: Chapter 3

Welcome to Chapter 3 and we are so glad you made it this far! Thank you!

This chapter offers a few moments of foreshadowing including the quote for this episode by the Mennonite...who hints at something we will hear from the judge and has become an iconic quote from this novel, "War was always here, before man was, war waited for him." Is that the wrath God has lying waiting?

We think about the humour, and developing prose, and historical aspects to this chapter. 

Let us know what you think of the podcast by leaving a review. We will randomly send out a gift, Blood Meridian related, to a reviewer. 

 

Again thanks for listening.

 

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A RUINOUS CHURCH: Chapter Two

We are so glad you found us. Candy's husband said there are lots of podcasts on Blood Meridian and she replied yeah but any with JVH and a woman's perspective? He said you two are like Deadpool and Wolverine. Who is who?

Welcome to our discussion of Chapter Two in Blood Meridian. We would love to hear from you! Find us on social media or email us:

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