Andy's Brain Blog

In the past two weeks since I have returned from San Diego, I still find myself struck with lucid recollections during my hypopompic states, the memories of my travels twinned with hallucinations no less beautiful and no less real, were I to try distinguish the two.

When I close my eyes I can still feel the pitch-perfect weather against my skin; I can hear the purl of fountainwater underneath the lush gardens and exquisite statuary of Balboa Park; I can see those silvery, sunwarmed beaches, speckled with families and surfers and oceangoers of all stripes and ages, the terns overhead lazily riding the wind thermals and the surf below gently lapping at the shores. The man is not to be envied who does not find his spirit refreshed and invigorated by the scintillating waves of the ocean, his eros not aroused by the sight of brown-skinned beauties emerging from the sea with beads of saltwater clinging to their skin and their delicate pink toes sinking into the argentate sand; no, he is not to be envied who does not find some spark of religious awe kindled by the sight of the sun bleeding slowly into the horizon and replaced by the pale disc of the moon, pasted in that inky firmament like some ghostly wafer, overlooking the dark abyss of water out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

It is well to be surrounded by such sights and sounds, as, set against the backdrop of a conference devoted to science, the conscious mind is all the more appreciative of the particulars and the practicalities of what he believes, secretly or openly, to be the healthiest, the most rigorous, the most downright of human endeavors - that of scientific inquiry. Aristotle once claimed that the twin peaks of human pleasure consist of one, sexual intercourse, and two, thinking; and once one has felt the slow-burning satisfaction of scientific experimentation, of hypotheses proposed and tested, of results surprising one in the most unexpected of ways, what right man would believe otherwise? And after a day of lively discussion and heated debate, after filling one's cup with as many poster sessions and workshops and talks as one can handle and drinking it to the lees, then one encounters the night; and, the mind still reeling from the heady fumes of science, the senses attuned to all the nuances that weren't there before, walking past the garish lighting of the restaurants and pubs of the Gaslamp district, brazen hussies with their sultry strolls and minimalist vesture calling out to each other in the darkness, steroid-inflated bouncers guarding the doors of nightclubs exuding faint rumbles of bass punctuated by shrieks and laughter - and it is here that one becomes aware of certain beauties and lusts and terrors and menace that until now were only thinly hidden. The juxtaposition of such different modes of experience makes each of them in turn that much more powerful, more savory, more piquant.

During my days at the conference inside the convention center, therefore, I expected all of the hobgoblins and ecstasies of the nights before to melt away like snow in sunshine; but even here there is an element of the surreal. Within the bowels of the convention center, several football fields long, were rows upon rows of posters, almost beyond reckoning; here is one person surrounded by intrigued colleagues, gesturing expressively with his hands, his face beaming; there is another over there who could not be more different, all alone, head down and sullenly gazing at the floor, one hand holding the opposite forearm, a perfect picture of dejection. Wind your way through the exhibition section where companies are hawking their wares, photos showing how results look before and after the application of their device, mechanical contraptions demonstrating how the latest stereotaxic equipment drills into any location without any error, no fuss, no muss. You would expect the vendors to be much more animated, to act like some sort of scientific carnival barker; but unfortunately, they sit around, this one checking her phone, that one with a saturnine expression pasted on his face and a toothpick affixed to the side of his mouth.

Upstairs through the pavilio, and enter the ballroom, where chairs are stacked in rows as neatly and ceremoniously as gravestones in a cemetery. Far away at the front of the ballroom a speaker is at the podium, a miniscule dot at this distance, but whose person is projected on several large screens hanging from the ceiling, the amount of exposure beyond the most egomaniacal totalitarian's wet dream. After a couple of hours of talks and results and diagrams of models, out the door again into the hallway, past several smaller conference rooms packed with listeners. Along my way I reach down to pick up a discarded pamphlet off the floor from the American Association for the Advancement of Science; inside, it laments that more than half of the United States population still believes in psychic phenomena such as ESP and seances. "Fifty-seven percent of American adults believe in phenomena unsupported by any evidence whatsoever," it says. "It would be better to get that number closer to zero." It then lists several resources and initiatives to educate the population to think scientifically. The younger the age at which they can stage an intervention, it seems, the better.

While I can appreciate the sentiment, part of me thinks that this feeling is misguided. I have several close colleagues who would be horrified to wake up to a world denuded of superstitions and myths; so satisfying is the sense of superiority they feel in mocking those who still hold groundless beliefs, and the repercussions so minimal, that to take that away from them would be to take away their chief joy. Conversations would dry up, bereft of the usual potent feelings of solidarity and indignation, and the only ties that used to bind them to other like-minded individuals would dissolve. No, clearly a world free of people believing crazy shit would be a catastrophe. I think that a more reasonable goal would be to get the number of persons down to about five or ten percent; that way, the Association can still claim no small measure of success in their crusade, and there will still be plenty of eccentrics left over to insult, belittle, and marginalize.

After making the rounds at all of the talks, I go back to the poster session, where new posters have been pinned up on the boards, some of them still reeking the stench of hot ink fresh off the printer. Wander around, and you begin to notice how some individuals tend to dominate the conversation surrounding a poster and poins out all the experimental flaws with a minimum of decency. To counteract this, I usually leave in one or two glaringly obvious errors in any poster I present or any paper I submit; that way, one can more easily comment on it and feel as though they have done something useful, usually leaving all of the other material alone.

That being said, however, still be aware that there is much research out there which is smoke and mirrors; having been in the game for quite some time, I can provide a short list of words and phrases that should immediately set off alarm bells in your head: neuroscience; significant; brain; rat; human; monkey; hypothesis; anterior cingulate; activation; voxels; cake; "game-changer"; default poop network. Beware the siren song of these words that charm the ear and bewitch the mind; they are beautiful but treacherous ondines who, given the chance, will wrap their briny arms around you, dragging you down to your death in the bottomless sea.

When I was a child, I remember reading a story about a single soldier who executed several thousand of prisoners of war using only a service-issued pistol. Every night for a month he would don his military cap and leather gloves and a leather butcher's apron and lead the prisoners one after another into an antechamber draped in the crimson of the Rodina and tell them why they were to be killed and then shoot them in the head. At night he would share vodka with his men and the next day it would begin again. Over ten hours a day he worked over a period of four weeks, at the incredible rate of one execution every three minutes. At the end of his own personal holocaust he would have some seven thousand souls to his credit.

I am told that he died years later, insane and in utter wretchedness. What right man would have it any other way?

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Cormac McCarthy is a difficult writer to pin down. His works deal with the grisly and the grotesque, and although it is unfair to label McCarthy as a pessimist or a misanthrope, his books can hardly be considered an argument for optimism. The characters haunting his books are the violent, the dispossessed, and the desperate - men thrown into situations of extreme violence and deprivation faced with horrifying scenes of murder, infanticide, necrophilia, psychopaths, irate wildlife, and a God that can only be understood after journeying through universes of pain and suffering. On the whole, not the most comfortable material to read.

One small part of it, however, is an unadulterated masterpiece. When Blood Meridian was first published in 1985, it was not unnoticed, it is true, but it was not necessarily understood; some thought it an interesting, but minor, failure. Fifteen years later, McCarthy's stock had risen considerably. Nearly another fifteen years later, the change in the book's reputation is greater still; it is now hailed as one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century, and as one of the finest pieces of fiction written by a currently living author. After having read my way through his entire oeuvre, I cannot help but see the books from the beginning of his career as forming a sort of prelude, in which he tested and experimented and honed his craft; and in everything he wrote after its publication, he never quite sounded that magical, eerie note again. It is the apex of his career; Blood Meridian is his reception piece.

Before starting the book, however, there are a few points to keep in mind. First, it is not merely a brutal geek show where McCarthy is daring the reader to look away. (Although, if it were, it would surely outrank all others.) Second, it is not simply a book about the West, a piece of interesting historical fiction based on the scalphunting operation of the real-life Glanton gang; it is, rather, an investigation into McCarthy's central obsession - the nature of violence and death - and he is exploiting material he has studied intimately. Just as Conrad's works are not, expect superficially, mere sea-stories, so this is not just a Western, but an uncompromising exploration into the darker regions of the soul.

Third, there is a very real possibility, even for the most jaded, that you will not finish the book on the first try; and afterward, you may decide not to return to it. With Blood Meridian, even some of our finest critics have had false starts.

Even knowing all of this, Blood Meridian is tough going. McCarthy's style is paradoxically both sparse and dense; and his odd punctuation, lack of quotation marks, technically detailed language, and pockets of untranslated Spanish can be difficult to adjust oneself to. Finally, there is the issue of the violence itself, which is extremely - some would say virtuosically - graphic. Random killings, decapitations, dismemberments, scalpings, bizarre tortures, spectacular scenes of mass infanticide, crucifixions, immolations, flamboyant acts of sadism, and wholesale slaughters of humans and animals alike are only the beginning of what the book has to offer on its grisly bill of fare, building in a vicious crescendo to the final, unnameable atrocity. It is well for the reader to know this. To read Blood Meridian is to descend into an inferno.

A passage from the scalphunters' slaughter of the Gileños both highlights the cold precision of McCarthy's prose and the horror suffused throughout the whole novel:

Within that first minute the slaughter had become general. Women were screaming and naked children and one old man tottered forth waving a pair of white pantaloons. The horsemen moved among then and slew them with clubs or knives. A hundred tethered dogs were howling and others were racing crazed among the huts ripping at one another and at the tied dogs nor would this bedlam and clamor cease or diminish from the first moment the riders entered the village. Already a number of the huts were afire and a whole enfilade of refugees had begun streaming north along the shore wailing crazily with the riders among them like herdsmen clubbing down the laggards first.

When Glanton and his chiefs swung back through the village people were running out under the horses' hooves and the horses were plunging and some of the men were moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy. There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton's warhorse.

McCarthy allows us to witness this nightmarish world through a character known only as the kid. We never know his name, we know virtually nothing about him, and we know little about what he thinks. Furthermore, there are long stretches of the book where he disappears completely from view; all we know is that he is young, desperate, and that within him "...broods a taste for mindless violence." He is less an actual person than an avatar for the reader - a representation of our race's dark, powerful, deep-seated fascination with violence that, for better or for worse, can be managed and suppressed but never entirely rooted out of our souls; that troubled, darkened corner of our psyche which always finds some part of itself both appalled and enticed by the carnage of the battlefield, both horrified and inflamed by the screams of the tortured victim.

This same mindless incitement to violence is embodied in the Glanton gang as a whole, a grim reflection of the more sordid aspects of the human condition. Nearly always caked with the dried gore of their enemies and adorned with grisly trophies hacked or cut away from the corpses of their victims, the scalphunters are described in words mythological; they are "ogres," a "heliotropic plague spreading westward," and more than once they are referred to as "argonauts." They carry shotguns and revolvers with bores big enough to stick ones thumbs in, and wield Bowie knives as big as claymores; one of their Indian enemies, flamboyantly attired, is described as a "wild thaumaturge out of an atavistic drama." Thus the feeling that they are not really representing themselves - actual individuals from an actual scalphunting operation that massacred their way across the plains and deserts of western Mexico - but rather timeless embodiments of the violence and warfare weaved throughout the history of our species.

The Gang's gradual descent into madness leads to murdering out of sheer compulsion, as illustrated in one self-contained paragraph which, bookended by larger, more complex scenes, appears to be a throwaway - but upon closer inspection becomes one of the most chilling:

The next town they entered was two days deeper into the sierras. They never knew what it was called. A collection of mud huts pitched on the naked plateau. As they rode in the people ran before them like harried game. Their cries to one another or perhaps the visible frailty of them seemed to incite something in Glanton...He nudged forth his horse and drew his pistol and this somnolent pueblo was forthwith dragooned into a weltering shambles. Many of the people had been running toward the church where they knelt clutching the altar and from this refuge they were dragged howling one by one and one by one they were slain and scalped in the chancel floor. When the riders passed through this same village four days later the dead were still in the streets and buzzards and pigs were feeding on them. The scavengers watched in silence while the company picked their way past like supernumeraries in a dream. When the last of them was gone they commenced to feed again.

Blood Meridian echoes several other works, including Paradise Lost (compare the Judge's creation of gunpowder to that of Satan's), Moby-Dick (Toadvine contemplating whether to kill the Judge, as compared to Starbuck contemplating whether to kill Ahab), and the Bible (those acquainted with the bloodier bits of the Book of Judges and the Book of Samuel will find much here that is familiar). The allusions are calculated and deliberate; McCarthy draws upon references to books and rituals that, even if one has never directly read them or heard of them, are so thoroughly ingrained in our heritage that we cannot help but resonate to them. There is the scene of the fortune-telling around the campfire (which, if paid attention to, reveals much more about the architecture of the book than at first glance); the story within the story about the son whose father is murdered and who himself becomes a killer of men; the burning tree in the middle of the desert, struck by lightning; and, in the shortest chapter of the novel, the baptism of the lunatic, a rare but bizarre moment of tenderness whose meaning is completely lost upon the insane.

In addition to his literary references, McCarthy devotes considerable time to describing the land itself; that indifferent, often terrifying aspect of nature from which we, if we are sensitive enough, always feel ourselves somehow estranged. In a way, the landscape becomes one of the book's primary characters. Everywhere and at all times are felt the dangers of unpredictable weather, of exposure, of infection or blood poisoning from an unfortunate encounter with any of the innumerable beasts hiding within the forests or crawling upon the sands of the deserts. A wrong step, a delayed reaction, can mean the difference between life and death; and given the utter isolation and desolation of the landscape, one's death is greeted not with grief or mourning, but with terrible silence:

The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that ever was.

Counterbalancing the stark reality of the book is the Judge, an enormous, completely hairless man resembling a gigantic infant. In a novel surfeited with atrocities and depravity, the Judge stands apart. Explorer, orator, gunslinger, murderer, pedophile, childkiller, Judge Holden is a quasi-supernatural being, the horrifying spiritual emblem of the Glanton gang. Seemingly all-knowing, all-present, and nearly invincible, the Judge assumes the role of a demigod, appearing to know all tongues, all arts, all sciences, all histories, and desiring to record every thing upon the earth, living or inanimate, into his depthless logs - and then obliterate it.

More compelling than his fantastical appearance and ghoulish predilections is his oratory; as with Satan in Paradise Lost, even though we know his rhetoric is riddled with nihilism and casuistry, we want to hear the Judge speak. Our first experience of the Judge is his inciting a mob to murder a preacher, based on false accusations of sodomy and bestiality; immediately we are aware of his demonic charisma, his methods, and his association with violence. His utterances are those of a supremely intelligent maniac, in full control of his rhetorical powers but seemingly not in control of his mind, pontificating in Biblical periods and declaiming in the epic mode. His speeches throughout the novel - which, read together, form a sort of loose progression charting the spiritual decay of the Gang - seem to be only so much eloquent gibberish, but contain a seed of truth that we somehow cannot simply wave away.

One example will suffice. As one night the men discuss whether there is any life elsewhere in the universe, the Judge says that there is not. The rest of his answer verges on insanity; and through him we possibly are allowed a glimpse into the author's own mind:

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

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Blood Meridian is that rarest and most precious of works, a book which speaks directly to the human condition. McCarthy deals with the most profound, the most horrifying, the most powerful drives and instincts embedded within the human spirit, and uses depictions of extreme violence to enumerate its contents. It is a refreshing contrast to the relentless flood of books concerned with the glands, but not the heart; it is a much-needed tonic of the epic and the grandiose, in an age that jeers at grandeur. Most importantly, it is the work of an uncompromising artist and a ferocious intelligence, terrifically enjoyable to read even when dealing with subjects at their most wretched. With McCarthy, every sentence, every word, is weighted for effect; when he chooses to, he strikes like a thunderbolt. Once you reach the end of a sentence, a phrase, a paragraph, the images he conjures up will bloom in your mind like blood in water.

Above all is his supreme achievement, the creation of Judge Holden. Enormous, terrible, bewitching, irresistible, he is less a man, a character, a fictional being, than a force of nature. He is the animating spirit, the driving force, the engine of absolute war and violence for its own sake; he is reality itself in its most depraved and sanguinary aspect. His dance is the Totentanz, never-ending, all-consuming, dancing to the strains of the fiddles sawing up a hellish roundelay and the sound of jackboots slamming on the floorboards, keeping time to the tattoo of the wardrums and the beating of the human heart. He says he never sleeps, we are told. He says he will never die.

In any case, a book to haunt one's dreams.