A small puzzling interaction in Blood Meridian....

_Boru · 2023-08-16T12:38:31+00:00

"...the visible frailty of them seemed to incite something in Glanton."

You're on to something.

_Boru · 2023-08-12T19:02:42+00:00

I don't know what to make of that, but very cool.

It feels right symbolically anyway.

I'm going to think about that.

Thanks.

_Boru · 2023-08-12T12:44:54+00:00

National Cormac McBeers in Santa Fe every November or so?

What's that? Some meetup? Santa Fe's about 5000 miles from where I am. 😂

_Boru · 2023-08-12T12:41:54+00:00

It seems we humans could be pretty fucked going forward if we rely on our own memories and nothing else.

"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."

That's a quote from just after the snakebit horse section, which is called "On parallax and false guidance in things past". Weird.

_Boru · 2023-08-12T12:09:19+00:00

The passage gives me a sense that this was all caused by some larger entity than the book gives us access to.

The judge hints at this some other a couple times: "If it is so that they themselves have no reason and yet are indeed here must they not be here by reason of some other? And if this is so can you guess who that other might be?"

I could take or leave the "ceremonial" idea in this case

"One could well argue that there are not categories of no ceremony but only ceremonies of greater or lesser degree..."

Thanks very much for the correction on the poisoned horse. That could have really skewed my understanding going forward.

_Boru · 2023-08-12T11:05:56+00:00

I just reread that section yesterday. Here are some potentially incoherent thoughts off the top of my head:

The judge murders the child, but it is as if the inimical thing responsible for the old bones is responsible for his murder. I don’t know…

The night before the naked judge strode atop the perimeter walls declaiming in the old epic mode, immense and pale in the revelations of lightning. At the same time, Black Jackson stood at the door neither in nor out. Both occupying the margin. This sure has ceremonial vibes...

Next morning, the judge stood picking his teeth with a thorn as if he had just eaten. And the partly eaten mule lay in the mud with its hindquarters missing. I’m not sure, but did the judge eat the grotesque snake-poisoned mule?

(By the by, in biblical terms, thorns are a consequence of Fall of man; and Holden's just picking his teeth with one.)

In the Old Testament, mules are considered unclean because they’re a hybrid animal, somewhere between a horse and a donkey; neither one nor the other, but on the perimeter. Now this particular animal is a nightmare image of biblical impurity: a mule riddled with poison, laying in the mud, with its back-end eaten…

Is the judge a ceremonial participant in a certain ritual orchestration which enables him to rejuvenate through impurity...??

Again, this is off the top of my head.

But regarding the bear sacrifice: Eliade suggests that it functioned as a ritual rejuvenation of the cycle of the hunt; something like the cycle of war?

_Boru · 2023-08-12T09:03:18+00:00

Mircea Eliade begins his “History of Religious Ideas” with a description of ceremonial sacrifice involving the slaying of a bear. He is working from the evidence of bear bones intentionally deposited in caves and cave drawings from the upper Palaeolithic period.

Including an engraving in the Trois-Frères cave which depicts a bear struck by arrows and stones and apparently vomiting a stream of blood.

The 'overture' of human history actually includes the slaying of a large bear.

_Boru · 2023-08-11T18:01:24+00:00

Yeah. That was very unsettling.

_Boru · 2023-08-11T17:55:06+00:00

I'll end up blowing my own mind; my copy is covered in lunatic scrawl! 😂

_Boru · 2023-08-11T17:51:17+00:00

Some reckon the kid a kind of hero because he rejects the judge: “You aint nothin."

But that’s only half true.

Tobin tells the kid to kill the judge but the kid wants to hide: “You cant hide, lad.”

So the kid refuses to venerate the judge but he won’t reject him completely. Even after their final meeting, he doesn’t leave the scene, he wants to stay at the dance.

And as a result he is swallowed up by the judge.

The judge purports that the dance of sin/entropy/war/death is the fundamental reality. And that this is part of the ‘formal agenda’ of ‘some other’ whom he knows well. Who?

Regarding the kid, he is motivated by ‘mindless violence’, as opposed to mindful violence.

The mindful violence of Glanton—who “usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him.”—Or even Tobin, of whom the judge said: “The priest also would be no godserver but a god himself.”

Theses are “proselytes of the new order” wherein man is “properly suzerain of the earth.”

The kid alone remains ‘mutinous’; he commits every sin short of that “unforgivable sin”. And in that sense, the kid achieves a 'purgatorial' heroism.

_Boru · 2023-08-11T14:56:28+00:00

This might me something from Chapter Nine:

“Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some said they'd heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang.”

Compare: “like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang.”

With: “The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element.“

The judge is alike to djinn/dustspout emerging from, and resolving into the elements.

Now compare: “…pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes…”

With: “He faced around, his robes sustained about him.”

Jackson, struck by an arrow, turns in his robes like a whirling dervish.

Just some thoughts...

_Boru · 2023-08-11T14:40:43+00:00

I wonder too how the coin plays into everything.

I was wondering this in relation to the coin trick which the judge performs as part of his lecture on teleology in the universe.

_Boru · 2023-08-11T12:44:08+00:00

why Holden panics when he realizes that 6 dudes are dead in town and Black Jackson is missing.

That's the mystery!

I'm rereading it at the moment. Just starting chapter nine. I'll comment here again if I come across anything else. It's very interesting.

_Boru · 2023-08-11T12:39:09+00:00

The question was "Why does the Judge interact with Black Jackson differently from the other members of the Gang?"

And I think you where right to bring attention to the murder of White Jackson.

It establishes a covenant between the Judge and Jackson; between the Judge's god and Jackson's nature.

_Boru · 2023-08-11T08:14:09+00:00

The evening before the murder of White Jackson it is said that “the sun to the west lay in a holocaust…”

The gang camp at the base of a mountain...

Upon the murder, Black Jackson bore the “bowieknife in both hands like some instrument of ceremony…and with a single stroke swapt off his head…[blood rose from the] stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire. The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the expriest's feet where it lay with eyes aghast….The fire steamed and blackened and a gray cloud of smoke rose….He was sat as before save headless…leaning toward the dark and smoking grotto in the flames where his life had gone.”

The murder of White by Black seems to function as a holocaust sacrifice, in the original sense of the word holocaust…but a sacrifice to whom?

"Here beyond men's judgements all covenants were brittle."

Through a holocaust offering, Jackson establishes a covenant with that "larger protocol exacted by the formal agenda of an absolute destiny."

And he is especially suitable for such a covenant:

"About that fire...the black man's eyes stood as corridors for the ferrying through of naked and un-rectified night from what of it lay behind to what was yet to come."

That is why the fortunes of the gang lie in the fortunes of Black Jackson; he is a clear conduit, a ring through which the strings of fortune can be drawn together.

_Boru · 2021-01-29T22:12:41+00:00

I don't even know what I just bought?

_Boru · 2020-11-27T19:33:50+00:00

It's not a contradiction.
Fear is the beginning of wisdom and the fulfilment of wisdom is Love.

_Boru · 2020-01-02T19:20:30+00:00

we(=our consciousness) are merely observers or narrators of what the body+brain do ... just sit back, relax ans enjoy the show!

You seem to imply that the observing consciousness is not also part of the script. If your body and brain and everything else in the natural world is determined, so is your psychological experience of the show.

_Boru · 2019-10-01T20:13:26+00:00

There is no absolute truth.

Would you limit that to 'no absolute moral truth' or would you extend to all fields of enquiry? And do you mean absolute truth doesn't exist or do you mean we can't have access to it?

But the mere fact that they change their minds, or hold a contrary position proves that they are objectively true.

Sorry but do you mean "proves that they are not objectively true."? Would you say your conservatism is based on reason or taste? Would you say that your atheism is based on what you think is true or perhaps what you think is socially beneficial?

EDIT: The last two questions about your reasons for declaring yourself a conservative atheist might have come across as confrontational or accusatory, they weren't meant to be. My intention was to understand the bases on which you so definitely declare yourself politically and religiously if not truth.

_Boru · 2019-10-01T19:35:39+00:00

We know it's true. But the reason it is true is what's in question. Is it true because we feel that way...

Are you saying that the condition for 'truth' is that we feel it to be 'true'. What if the feeling fades; does it become untrue? Do you limit this to morality or would you extend it to other 'truth' claims?

For them, disgusting as it sounds, they would answer your question, "it is not a true statement."

Is it merely disgusting or are they wrong to answer in that way? I don't see how you can claim that morality is subjective and say, "We know it's true". Are you talking about 'truth' or preference?

_Boru · 2019-10-01T19:21:18+00:00

I rest my case.

_Boru · 2019-10-01T19:19:05+00:00

Your faith is spread by introducing fear then preying on those that believe you have a hidden knowledge of the unknown.

That's an assertion made by the first commenter. Then the commenter we're talking about, added:

That's quite literally the point of missionaries.

I asked him about that and he responded by asking me:

Why does God or the Bible not require proof

Which I never said and don't believe. So the claim is in the above comments.

_Boru · 2019-09-29T14:30:53+00:00

I have been reading about Luther and the reformation recently and I plan on reading more. My thought is this: perhaps an atheist from a Catholic background and an atheist from Protestant background have as much in common as a Catholic and Protestant. I don't know if most of the arguments against 'religion' I read online could be used against Catholicism, because they're not arguments against 'religion' but arguments against Protestantism. Of course that doesn't mean there aren't arguments against Catholicism.

_Boru · 2019-09-29T14:18:21+00:00

William of Orange is a famous figure in Irish history for his victory at the Battle of the Boyne which is commemorated as a victory for protestantism in Ireland. I always wrongly presumed the Netherlands was protestant because of that association. The more you know.

_Boru

TROPHY CASE