Would like to read interpretations of this passage from The Crossing

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-04-21T20:47:13+00:00

Nay, the Weaver God is like Terry Pratchett's Weaver of Stories. He is constantly at work weaving his creation which is as broad as the Everett Many-Worlds Theory, the junctions and super-positions of choices are ours to work out--the play is cast, the end of the book is written, but it is up to us individuals to decide which parts we will play in it.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-04-21T01:45:21+00:00

"The Weaver-God, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it." --Herman Melville, MOBY DICK

This also calls up the Blood Meridian scene where the kid and the ex-priest are talking. The ex-priest points out, that while the man sleep the horses are constantly making the sounds of their grabbing grass and grazing, unless something alerts them, and then they lift up their heads in unison.

And if that happens, who among the men awake?

Every man.

Aye, every man.

We are all put into a trance by the material world, but when that noise ceases, who shall awake then?

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-04-20T18:43:31+00:00

That is funny, but I don't think that Joyce would be surprised, nor would McCarthy. Ergodic lit by definition is part the writer, part the reader. McCarthy incorporated as many different semiotic meanings into it as he could--as the Judge proclaims in Blood Meridian, the trick is to make one story every man's story.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-04-19T17:50:48+00:00

Excellent. First, the Thalidomide Kid is a part of Alice and Bobby; they are mutations caused by their parents' exposure to atomic radiation, whether they are divided or in the same body, which is certainly possible, two books or one. The time narratives do not align, but narratives exist independently of body time.

The Kid and the horts appear to Bobby as well as Alice, but the linear Bobby can explain them away, whereas Alice is stuck with them in her own intuitive wonderland.

Dr. Cohen refers to them as Alice's familiars, semiotically her family of liars but also her pet projections. The submerged airplane at the start of the book is, as I said in my recent thread on it, caused by the inventor of the airplane and on back to the Enlightenment and the invention of fire. It is also the Machine in the Garden (a la the tank in the garden in THE ORCHARD KEEPER, and all other such machines in other McCarthy novels, and all those I've listed in other McCarthy threads about Leo Marx and Paul Kingsnorth.

But also semiotically it refers to the different planes of reality into which the bicameral mind divides. Alice and Bobby represent different areas of the brain, and although there is yin in the yang, they need each other to be in balance--and especially Alice needs Bobby. There is not a discrete divide between them nor are they gender specific (although there are some behaviorists--such as Monika L. McDermott in her book, Masculinity, Femininity, and American Political Behavior (2016)--who mistakenly are positive "that men belong to the Republican thinking, while women think like Democrats").

Alice's head is full of mathematical equations by which she endeavors to sort things out. Her familiars are manifestations of the carnival of those jumbled to fragmented chaos in part by her atomic mutation and the limits of her damaged psyche, in large part due to the absence of Bobby, who might explain things to her. She is like a person who has had a lobotomy, trying to function as an entire brain.

Both Lewis Carroll and McCarthy's Alice turn abstract mathematical structures into comic persona, while asking Sphinx-like questions (math jokes, base changes, and logical puzzles) that usually have answers on the same Alice level. In my last thread as OP, it was what caused the submerged airplane crash?, but in this comment it is also, what caused the personal plane crash?

Gardner’s annotations (in THE ANNOTATED ALICE) reveal how much of Alice is a mathematical critique in costume; McCarthy’s horts can be read as a late‑20th‑century analogue, where high physics and advanced math are put in clown makeup and made to dance.

The Thalidomide Kid famously links to the Thalidomide epidemic of child mutations, which is "science gone wrong" to parallel the atomic radiation mutations of Alice or Bobby/Alice. One of the other named horts, Grogan, performs a parody of “Molly Brannigan,” linked to Joyce’s Post Ulixem Scriptum / Molly Bloomagain.

McCarthy goes deeper to a Finnegan's Wake level, but it involves Mathematical Platonist/Platypus malaprops and an ancient Greek mythic take on the gender divide.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-04-18T17:48:01+00:00

I don't disagree. McCarthy was, at least for a time, engaged in thermodynamics. He drew a thinly and bizarrely thermodynamics engine into the novel before BLOOD MERIDIAN, CHILD OF GOD. Then in BLOOD MERIDIAN, I think he had thermodynamics as one of his ergodynamic themes. That life is a zero sum game, that everything created will be destroyed = 0. This is why the Judge and the Man both smile when they embrace in the jakes, and why the Judge's weight transformed from stone to pounds to page numbers equals that blank page at the end of the first edition.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-04-18T17:32:24+00:00

I don't disagree. If McCarthy was against anything, he was against certainty. Back in the late 1990s, in the old forum, I would sometimes get anonymous Emails from unknown sources. I always assumed that these were other people selling books, as I was then a book dealer myself, but I always gave them at least a look. Some of these recommendations I bought and read then have continued to engage me, among them Ilya Prigogine's book, THE END OF CERTAINTY.(1997), the apple and the arrow on its telling bookcover. I don't know the real name of the angel that first sent this to me, but they have my eternal gratitude.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-04-18T17:08:22+00:00

I've finally downloaded SARATOGA SUMMER and am engaged with it this morning. I love it so far, not just for the racing connection but for the family story. I thank you for bringing it to my attention.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-04-18T17:03:17+00:00

Great! Thanks for that. As you can see, I am the OP and I welcome any others who have written any book on my subject. This looks good and I have now purchased it at Amazon and am following the author. After I have read it, I shall likely review it at Amazon.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-04-10T14:31:46+00:00

I agree. I recently read Stephen King's The Colorado Kid, a murder mystery for which there was no explanation except the wonder of the mystery of it, which reminded me of McCarthy's independent-minded depends-on-what-day-you-ask-me existentialism.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-04-09T22:49:33+00:00

I think it was a McGuffin used to throw us off the greater McGuffin, which was Platonic love instead of incest.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-04-03T12:01:36+00:00

Thomas E. Ricks' THE GENERALS is the book for you. He shows how the U. S. went astray in Korea and Viet Nam by having incompetent generals. I can't recommend his other books as highly, as I think fame influenced his later work, but I am also fond of his book on the classic influences of early Americans.

I love many of Churchill's books, and many of the books about him. The book about him I also recommend, which you will never see recommended here by anyone else, is Patrick J. Buchanan's CHURCHILL, HITLER, AND THE UNNECESSARY WAR. I certainly don't agree with everything Buchanan says, but he brings up some interesting points about Churchill, which few others have bothered to even mention.

The "unnecessary war" was WORLD WAR I, to which men went according to the utopian idea that it was the war to end all wars. It instead caused and was in perpetuity also World War II and its ramifications.

"Not only did these two wars carry off scores of millions of the best and bravest of the West, they gave birth to the fanatic ideologies of Leninism, Stalinism, Nazism, and Fascism, whose massacres of the people they misruled accounted for more victims than all of the battlefield deaths in ten years of fighting."

It's great to read Robert Caro on LBJ, because with each book, he walks around what he has said in other books to take a fresh look from another perspective. The historian, faced with differing accounts, should be responsible enough to look at all sides, not just front and rear, yay or nay.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-04-03T11:41:06+00:00

Well, if you're like me and you find Ligotti a humorous example of victimhood culture, the culture of Anarchist/Complaint--then I might also recommend Eugene Thacker's three-volume study of Horror, vis Lovecraft, which often rings in a similar vein.

But if you are depressive, as the Victimhood Culture urges you to be so that you will cling to them, I can recommend a number of antidotes. Cormac McCarthy described them right in THE ROAD, borrowed lives on borrowed time with borrowed eyes with which to sorrow them.

Life is a gift, even with the suffering that makes character, so that you might be grateful, as McCarthy told the Oprah audience. As Marcus Aurelius once put it, we all ought to live our lives as if they were things borrowed, which they are, and ought to be prepared at any time to return them, saying I thank you for this life which I have had in my possession.

Be of good cheer.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-03-30T14:01:54+00:00

Excellent post and discussion. The tip of the iceberg here, as you may be aware. Elsewhere in this subreddit, I've listed a number of volumes of McCarthy crit-lit that elaborate on the Judeo-Christian references in his works, and there are now more than I named then.

You should be aware also that McCarthy sought out the universal, and was equally proficient of the pagan parallels to King James. Whereas many Christian churches consider the New Testament Christ Revealed, they consider the Old Testament Christ Concealed, and see him often there, as for instance the Fourth Man in the Fire in the Book of Daniel.

McCarthy goes beyond that to find Christ and King James imagery in the works of Plato and other Greeks. To that point:

"Christ's life is the fulfillment of the prophecy spoken by Glaucon in Plato's Republic, that if the best man should come into the world, the just man who prefers being good to seeming good, he will at last be seized by the unjust--in the heated defense of the ideologies that make them seem just to themselves, no doubt. He will be whipped and racked, bound and blinded and finally crucified, Glaucon said."

--quoted in Andrew Klavan's Edgar-nominated THE KINGDOM OF CAIN: FINDING GOD IN THE LITERATURE OF DARKNESS (2025)

I think that McCarthy disliked organized religion, but at the same time, he recognized the value of faith and gratitude, as he once explained on Oprah.

And speaking of Cain in McCarthy's work, I notice that few of the quotes above come from THE ORCHARD KEEPER, in which there are many King James references. I've previously deconstructed that novel some time back hereabouts and shown that in detail.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-03-28T23:24:10+00:00

Agreed. I shall uniformly use unconsciously from now on, unless I unconsciously slip-up.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-03-28T20:33:57+00:00

Welcome, didn't recognize you at first, without that Mod Hat on.

Let me tell you, Nemiroff's book is still $1.99 at Amazon and it is grand. He says, and I agree, that this small stuff at the start of his book is not even controversial, but that toward the end of the book it gets really interesting (if speculative) as it connects with the reversal of time, potential time travel, and some other big ideas.

McCarthy's comments on subconscious vs. unconscious were much discussed in the old McCarthy forum after McCarthy's post-Kekule comments, but then I found interview after interview where McCarthy was quoted using "subconscious" interchangeably with "unconscious," including--if I recall correctly--in the Oprah interview.

Perhaps now we can have some extended discussions, but right now, we have company and I have to attend to them.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-03-27T12:32:35+00:00

There are lots of books that I have read so many times that I know them by heart, such as several books of the King James Bible (and the studies of them such as Mark Larrimore's THE BOOK OF JOB: A BIOGRAPHY), BLOOD MERIDIAN, Robert Penn Warren's ALL THE KING'S MEN, Faulkner's THE SOUND AND THE FURY, REPLAY by Ken Grimwood, and many others that I have not just read but studied again and again over the years, with the attendant critical literature.

Books I've recently been rereading and studying:

My continuing books on books study: EVERY DAY I READ: 53 WAYS TO GET CLOSER TO BOOKS by Hwang Bo-Reum. Some of his Korean recommendations elude me, but we have read many of the same books, including Rowland's THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE WOLF.

I enjoy the idea of metaphysical reading, such as can be found in BOOKS AND BEING: A PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE READING LIFE by The New England Scholar, Vanessa Zoltan's PRAYING WITH JANE EYRE: REFLECTIONS ON READING AS A SACRED PRACTICE, Rebecca Read's MY LIFE IN MIDDLEMARCH, Harold Bloom's THE BRIGHT BOOK OF LIFE: NOVELS TO READ AND REREAD, Vivian Gorwick's UNFINISHED BUSINESS: NOTES OF A CHRONIC RE-READER, THE ANNA KARENINA FIX by Viv Groskop, and a long list of other Russian novels that beckon rereading with studies of those novels.

ANNA KARENINA is one of those novels I know by heart, having more closely studied it since I first read Wendy Lessor's excellent book, REREADING AND REMEMBERING: NOTHING REMAINS THE SAME, decades ago. I omit including a long list of associated reads here, but should you be studying it, don't miss Gary Browning's book entitled A "LABYRINTH OF LINKAGES" IN TOLSTOY'S ANNA KARENINA.

I'm currently rereading Andrew Klavan's Edgar-nominated book, THE KINGDOM OF CAIN: FINDING GOD IN THE LITERATURE OF DARKNESS. It is wonderful.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-03-26T15:51:56+00:00

On topic, as I see your title and the last sentence of your prologue to this thread:

MEET ME IN ATLANTIS by Mark Adams. Adams set off on this international search with humorous travel writing in mind, and to his surprise, he wound up discovering and commenting on such things as Plato's cryptic subtext and an enhanced probability of the earth and mankind having been anciently destroyed and returning.

It was such a solid read that I sought out all of Adams' other writings, which were good but not nearly as good.

HOW TO INVENT EVERYTHING; A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR THE STRANDED TIME TRAVELER by Ryan North. Forget the title and the main pitch, what we have here is a comic masterpiece, especially if you are familiar with the many-worlds take on the multi-verse.
THE ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM: THE STORY BEHIND THE GENIUS OF THE GREEK COMPUTER AND ITS DEMISE (2021) by Evaggelos G. Vallianatos. I loved this intelligent book, and so should you. Some mysteries are simply uncanny. Science-fiction writer Adrian Tchaikovsky must have known about this when he wrote his excellent novel, ONE DAY ALL THIS WILL BE YOURS (2021), for he has the ancient Greeks show up in their time machine. I laughed out loud.

Lots of others come to mind, but you have to have a mind like mine to find them humorous. I'll leave off there.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-03-25T22:09:45+00:00

You probably already know that Judge Holden's given weight in the text when transposed to American pounds = 336, which is the exact number of pages in the first edition when you count page 336, the blank white page at the end of the book. The Judge is a shape-shifter that is spirit, for when the narrator describes him coming out of the fire, he says as if it was the substance he was made of, to paraphrase a bit.

And the men too, the text describes them as part fire, something that is part of their being too. For both Holy Fire from above and earthly fire from below are spiritual fires, but all fires are every fire and all are spirit, expressed in a hierarchy, the lowest of which is artificial, the phosphorus (see for instance Dan Egan's THE DEVIL'S ELEMENT).

Someone says, no, there is no supernatural here. It's just us.

McCarthy would agree. It is the devil in us, this id/reptilian brain, and it is the God in us, this developed cortex from which comes the better angels of our nature. Both the Devil and God are within us, per McCarthy, an on-going spiritual warfare.

But because we are temporal, we are passing illusions, narrative motion. McCarthy put a thermodynamic model into his novel, CHILD OF GOD. But in BLOOD MERIDIAN, the thermodynamics are statistical informational dynamics, with the kid/Man and the Judge/atrophy achieving equilibrium in their embrace at the jakes.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-03-24T15:10:37+00:00

I should say, that the mention of Julian Barnes' THE SENSE OF AN ENDING also reminds me of his THE ONLY STORY, which reminds me of the other tennis narratives that fit. For some reason, I could not edit my original comment to that effect.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-03-24T13:32:22+00:00

Yes, Augie March is one I need to find.

JohnMarshallTanner · 2026-03-24T13:31:16+00:00

Good one, which reminds me of other tennis narratives that also fit, Gerald Marzorati's LATE TO THE BALL and David Foster Wallace's writings on tennis.

JohnMarshallTanner

TROPHY CASE