Very slowly, the temperatures have been dropping, though they’re still unseasonably high. We have had almost two weeks of beautiful weather, something very noteworthy in the Netherlands. It has been the perfect opportunity for me to start exercising again, and yet I haven’t. I have shown great resourcefulness in avoiding the necessary. I have discovered and invented any number of excuses to put off my responsibility to be healthy. Fortunately, I have a better angel in Menna, who has been stubborn about insisting that I start running again. Yesterday, finally, I started. In the same way that I needed excuses to avoid exercise, I also needed one to start running. It seems there is little I can do in life simply because I should. My excuse was, as it was for Ted Cruz, my kids. Baby Jos needs more practice on her bicycle, so I suited up for running, and I took her out on the bike paths. That was a workout! What I hadn’t thought out was that, once she was pedalling, there was very little I could do to control the pace. Neither could I indulge in my suffering. I had to smile and encourage. There was no room for huffing and puffing, swearing or weeping, like I might reasonably have been expected to do. And that was my first run in months. The good news is, Baby Jos is becoming quite proficient on her little two-wheeler. Even better, she was having a good time. She was absolutely delighted to be out on her bike again, and so excited to be testing herself on the bike paths. She wore a huge grin the entire time, easy and genuine, as a stark contrast to her father’s expression of real distress, masquerading as supportive-daddy face. I’m forced to assert, though, that there is nothing like sharing your child’s joy, no matter the personal duress. The part of me that hovered high above the sweating and suffering physical self was sincerely happy.
Sunday, February 21, 2021
Baby asks me wonderful questions. Riding home on the train, as we watched the fields spin by, as we watched sunlight glint off the canals, Baby asked, “Why does the sun like us?” One week after our snowy trip to Baby’s violin lesson, we’re making the same trip in temperatures nearing 60˚F. It’s uncanny.
“Why does the sun like us?” It’s such a lovely question, and I was delighted. It doesn’t matter what I answered, because fanciful and beautiful questions deserve fanciful and beautiful answers. Any response beginning with, “Actually,” would never have made it past my lips. I think I said something about the sun loving all it surveys, or something about how the sun gives life to everything. Baby’s mom is a Christian, so I figure I have some room for playful paganism.
I was reminded of the god Helios, whom I’ve always revered in my agnostical, not-quite-serious, pantheistic manner. Helios is also a character in the novel I’m reading now, “Circe” by Madeline Miller. The book is a fanciful book about the Greek goddess and sorceress, Circe. The goddess tells her own story, and it’s a fun read. Okay, it’s not historical fiction, but it does feel like a fit with my theme of historical fiction in recent months, just because it complements so neatly my unceasing fascination with ancient Greek and Roman history.
If I were to analyse the voice given to this ahistorical figure, Circe, I would say it has authority and it’s seductive. The narrative demonstrates dramatic arc, discovery and personal development, opportunities for assertion and for redemption. I have few objections to the language attributed to someone speaking to me across several thousand years, other than my usual regret combined with gratitude for the overlay of modern psychological concept. The regret is that’s it’s anachronistic; the gratitude is that it makes characters relatable.
If anything, I wish for tougher choices. Of course we want the hero to be the sorceress. Of course, we want her to redeem the path of witchcraft with her humanity and her self-possession. I could have wished for a story, say, from inside Athena’s light and wisdom and dull righteousness. The choices all seem too easy. But I certainly can’t complain about the adept story-telling and refined language.
I’ve been thinking about these deities and the complex mythologies they populate. Helios is the sun, but he has a form and a life beyond being the fiery disc in the sky. In that sense, he is not the disc itself, but somehow the personality of the sun in the sky and, in some senses, the supervisor of the operational side of being sun. It’s a sort of feudalism. Helios is Duke of Sunshine.
Philosophers of the classical ages felt compelled to explain and interpret their inherited mythology. It strikes me as the obvious first step that Plato would have offered the idea of forms defining and animating the things of this world, kind of like the way gods and goddesses did, but without the personality, pranks and sexual escapades. Real philosophers will wince at this reductionist thought, but it does follow, doesn’t it? My child sees Helios in the sky. She’ll later abstract it into an idea, a placeholder in the mind, before science ‘solves’ her problem: why does the sun like us?
Sunday, February 14, 2021
It’s been a festive week. Last weekend it snowed, and temperatures dipped below freezing. They fell, and they stayed below freezing all week. The canals froze. The sun came out. And slowly we saw people venturing out onto the ice. By yesterday, skaters were out everywhere, turning elegant circles on the ice. Baby and I had a chance to watch them in a number of locations. We travelled to a nearby village for Baby’s violin lesson. Since the lockdown has closed the school, we receive video lessons and, once in a while, we travel to the teacher’s house. All along the way, from the tram and from the train, we saw cheerful people on the canals. In the small town of Pijnacker, we walked by families enjoying the day together outside. Many of them had gathered on the ice. Dads were pulling sleds with toddlers. Moms on ice skates were holding young ones with skates. Older kids were pushing each other on the ice. Baby and I went out on the canal together. It was her first time on the ice, and she couldn’t have been more excited. We slid around on the ice, and Baby demanded I teach her how to ice skate immediately. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. We have no skates!” This snowfall caught us woefully unprepared. We had no shovel to clear the walkway. We had no sled. We had no ice skates. The media is telling us we haven’t seen these conditions in ten years. Certainly not since we’ve been here. There have been a few snowstorms, one or two that were big ones, but no snow that stuck. The girls have enjoyed themselves, despite our lack of preparation, making snowballs until their hands hurt so much they cried. They gathered ice and called it treasure. They made snow angels. They even got to see an igloo. Mysteriously, they had clamoured to build one. I don’t know where that idea came from. And then, amazingly, we discovered that a downstairs neighbour had made one, packing snow into a shallow recycling bin to make bricks! Today is Valentine’s Day, and, in a kind of bow to the divine Eros, the freeze has broken. There was no evident change in the skies. The wind was constant. The sun shone in the same way it had the day before. And yet, by noon, the temperatures had broken through freezing. We took a walk by our canal, and there were already long cracks in the ice. We were sad to see our winter-in-winter already passing.
Saturday, February 06, 2021
If we consider “Blood Meridian” as historical fiction, even tentatively, then maybe we have a basis for analysing the voice, the way we did for Vidal’s “Julian”. “Blood Meridian” is not a first-person narrative, of course, and so the strategies of the two books must diverge. Vidal had to make a decision about what Julian himself should sound like, and he opted for accessibility. It’s fair to say that McCarthy had something very different in mind. We are just about as far from McCarthy’s characters’ states of mind as we could imagine. The third person narrative distances us. The lack of a single clear protagonist distances us. The stratospheric perspective taken by the narrator distances us. And what is the voice of that narration? When I ‘listen’, I hear a few different strains interwoven.
Much has been said about McCarthy’s ‘Faulknerian’ style. I’m not convinced. His style reminds me more of the beat writers than of Faulkner. There is that (dark) lyricism stretched to breaking point. There is that sense of something big forever imminent, a sense never quite fulfilled except by the thrill of imminence. There is that playful, if sometimes strained, use of vocabulary. My experience of Faulkner has been one of sinking deeply into convoluted sentences and tidal emotion. Faulkner was sleeping pills and whiskey, whereas the beats were amphetamines. McCarthy might fall in the middle, nearer to tequila on a hangover. There just isn’t the emotional depth or radical constructions of the language. Long sentences don’t make Faulkner.
McCarthy reaches occasionally for nineteenth-century cadences, sometimes with a Coen-Brothers-like exaggeration, employing the wooden and stodgy formality that cinema has taught us is Civil-War-era language. It’s a concession of sorts to the exigencies of historical fiction. But the beat liberties clearly take precedence, making for only a fleeting period feel. Take as example these excerpts from the beginning to Chapter XI: “The shoeless mules slaloming through the dry grass and pine needles.” “… and they crossed a high saddle at sunset where wild doves were rocketing down the wind …” It’s expressive language, but language that can’t decide when or where it was written.
All in all, I’d say “Blood Meridian” is about “Blood Meridian”. It has a terrible beauty of its own, but I’m not sure it aspires to speaking either for or about its chosen time period. A few singularly savage images are offered as symbols of the pillaging of the continent. In that sense, it’s a didactic piece. Beyond that, it’s simply fanciful language for a cold-blooded story.
Wednesday, February 03, 2021
Taking Scalps
Who are, after all, the characters of this novel? I would say the primary one is Nature. Dizzying amounts of language are devoted to the deserts and the treacherous skies. That does not mean that Nature can be allowed to be a sympathetic character. No character can be in a book like this. The book is set in wartime, and so each force and every character is painted in adversarial light, pitted not only against each other, but against the reader. The war is not one given a name in history books. It’s the continual assault on humanity and Nature that is the mundane history of North America after the Europeans invade.
There is ‘the kid’, whose unreliable presence provides the main thread through the book. The kid doesn’t speak much. He’s destitute without knowing it. He moves from one degrading experience to the next. He proves himself capable of unthinking acts of violence. He proves himself capable of survival. He survives without a conscious reason to, as far as the reader knows, and a cynic would firmly state that that sets him apart among humans in no way at all. I might answer, no, this is not a metaphysics. It’s fiction, and still a portrait rather than a medical treatise. Few people accept so blandly that they have no reason to live. But all right: point of view is a choice.
The kid runs into some bad company. There doesn’t seem to be many other options in the world he inhabits. He falls in with a troop of bounty hunters, led by the foul Glanton and the supernatural Judge Holden. This troop rides around northern Mexico taking scalps and causing mayhem in any town that allows them in. There’s little to like about them, but there’s no one else to root for in this landscape. The Apaches are bizarrely vicious. The Mexicans are passive and venal. One might root for the landscape itself, which is always lovingly described, but it, too, seems guided by malevolence.
It should be stated that Glanton and Holden are based on historical figures. This novel, as creepy as it is, as set as it is on portraying reality as unreal, or at least unnatural, qualifies as historical fiction. The historical figures are only points of departure in characterization, but the outline of the narrative cleaves more or less faithfully to what remains of a historical record. Maybe it qualifies as historical fiction mostly as a kind of meta-narrative about the rape of the Americas.