Introduction to Blood Meridian (as Philosophy)

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what the fuck, i just subscribed to you two days ago and was wishing you were still making videos, then you release this video on one of my favorite books of all time??? the simulation is breaking. in all seriousness i hope you continue making videos theyre incredible!

[@lurkingvariable9913]

I always took the two handled implement that is drawing fire out of the rocks to be a posthole digger. The metal sparking against the rock. These are often used to put up fencing. I took this to mean that the wild was being subdued and destroyed and only existed in books like the Judge's or Cormac's.

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Glad to see you back brother! I'm French and I love your videos. I bought many of your book recommandations, excited to discover this one!

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[@shaunkerr8721]

I recently attempted a reread of this as a tragedy in the Greeco-Shakespearian sense and found an interesting perspective in viewing the Kid as a tragic hero and the Judge his foil as Tiresias is a to Oedipus. Neither are evil per see, they simply are and, like Mephisto and Faust, both can be looked at as one in the same or different parts of the same psyche, the Judge being a universal part of every man, the desire for epistemic certainty. The Judge has confidence which allows his to believe he knows everything; he has an epistemology of the world and is active while the Kid is rather passive (by the end) and is Becoming ( in the beginning/middle) instead of the Judge's Being. The Judge loves and loathes Becoming and either nurtures or destroys it, judging each instance based on whatever his desires and will is in that moment (true Being). The tragedy is that we all will succumb to desire to stop Becoming at some point and look for a rest from the Faustian striving and seek something more stable, more permanent, Being more Judge like (if only in having a solid epistemology). This is the White Wale we are all longing for, chasing for, desiring. When we "give up the chase" for something less than what we actually want, we become desiccated, deformed, and destroyed versions of ourselves; found twisted and lifeless on a bathroom floor. The issue is, regardless of if we achieve our ambitions or not, we all tire eventually... This is the tragedy: success or failure gives us the same end. So long as we are striving to find and actualize our dreams or goals or ambitions even if we don't really know what they are, simply being abstract happiness or stability, etc., in this life and honestly are efforting with our whole self (like a child, striving for maturity) we are alive and being vital in THIS life, but, we all come to the place where we cease this vitality and lean on a metaphysical, supernatural, and/or nonsensical reality which either will never be or resides elsewhere, on some other plane of (non) existence. At this point, we are "dead" and might as well be found twisted on the bathroom floor; we are revolting to the sight of others who can see us for what we truly are; our doppelganger the White Wale we wanted to get, "gets" us. This is where I believe either McCarthy nails his audience like a great writer of tragedy must. A Greek tragedy should affirm life and the striver despite their flaws as understood in the prePlatonic society and their Homeric morals. By the time we get to Goethe, Nietzsche chides him for making Faust not an authentic tragedy since there is an ultimate dissolving of the tragic with Faust striving being the redeeming quality which "saves" him in the end, but, I argue that the tragic form is not a universal Greek one and must change or morph to fit its audiences perspective and Faust does this perfectly as does Hamlet. Goethe does this with Faust and, I believe, understands his modern man, modern society, his audience, as McCarthy does too. Modern men had an idea of ultimate redemption, purpose of their life extending beyond it, and a notion of sin. These ideas are not to be taken as literal truths, objective, universal, and absolute, by use post modern (ew) men but, they are realities thanks to Christianity/Secular Humanism we have baked or hard wired into our psyches and cannot simply handwave them away. Sophocles wrote Oedipus' tragedies prior to the Socratic reevaluation of values in Greek society. The Greeks did not have to be concerned with sin on a universal scale or redemption in an absolute sense. Despite his flaws, Oedipus was cheered in the theatre, he affirmed life for the Greek who sought to live on those scales; Hamlet does the same ('we eat in life and are eaten in death'); The Kid does NOT and this is the genius of McCarthy, he nails the post modern (for lack of a better term) human condition of nihilism we all live in. For this reason, I see Blood Meridian as a tragedy, the most updated form of the tragedy, one which does NOT affirm life in the least as compared to the original Greek which affiremed in its totality, the Shakespearean which affirmed it abstractly, and the Goethean which affirmed it passively, after the fact). I believe the epilogue attempts to show some affirmation of life, that at least life continues (with the post-digger and the those followers) but this, in my perspective, fails to affirm life in the least from our perspective. We do not simply value life continuing we have a whole host of metaphysical baggage we are concerned with, too. As such, we are a collection of skeptics, unable to accept a lie as a truth and unable to accept the truth as the truth. We've seen behind the curtain and the Wizard is not even there! So we continue to erect prosthetics for God in society which aim to fill the gap while acting as though we never needed him/them in the first place. So long as we are striving to find some new mooring, some new purpose, some new aim, goal, straight line, we are as the Kid was, free from the grasp of the White Wale. Once we grasp at some dogwhistle, some mooring which gave past humans purpose and meaning due to fatigue of the pursuit, we then have lost vitality, we are no longer "alive" and the White Wale destroys us. To turn back to past examples which gave meaning and purpsoe to our ancestors, as the Kid did as an adult, is to be illiterate in their ability to ground life as the kid was. We've heard the stories and know the tales but cannot read the actual text which would give us what we so desire: meaning and purpose; stability and justification; cause and being. This is to say, the Greeks had their culture, and the Romans theirs, and so on and so forth, and they obtained meaning by living their lives in their culture, worshiping their gods and participating. The reason heresy was met with death was (at least subconsciously) because the person who went against the grain to that extent was already dead so it was justified to kill them; they were no longer citizen and the law did not apply to them. To challenge the social convention was to seem like an alien, a monster, an other, different and in need of destroying. Our culture is nihilism; nothingness; unmoored existence; and when we grow too weak to handle this and look for safe refuge, we become an atheistic skeptic in ancient Athens (even Socrates and Diogenes believed gods existed) To be an atheist then would be somewhat like it is to be a Christian, etc. today in Western society, but, at least then, it was new to be an atheist could carve out their own path and still be vital despite the fear of those around them. To attempt to go back to former forms of meaning today is la petite mort in the most negative sense, and this is what I believe McCarthy was aiming for; it's philosophical suicide; it's what you envisioned your potential, the freedom you thought you would have with maturity; the ability to actualize your ends; vitality; an aim; a goal; a straight line; this is all gone. This is our tragic condition to search for what we do not know; to aim for what we cannot see; to be truly free from all except ourselves; to realize that the freedom is to much to bear; to be swallowed by the failed or actualized ambitions of our vital days; to die and have life continue on as though we never existed.