u/Difficult_Crow_2382

One of the headings for the very last chapter of Blood Meridian is The Beehive. This was an actual saloon that existed and operated in Fort Griffin, Texas. Even Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Pat Garrett spent time there during the frontier days. There was a steakhouse built on the same site, or in the same vicinity, in the 1980’s that was in business until 2023. But, anyway, I find the name ‘Beehive’ eerie for several reasons. Namely, the fact that Judge Holden is represented as the embodiment of war and evil in the book, regardless of it being in a physical or metaphorical sense. He is the queen of the hive. Not in the sense that he’s a female but in a symbolic sense that he is the god of war, or evil, or violence. However, if he’s not even a human being then one can easily consider him androgynous. He’s numero uno, though. ‘Hear me, man. There’s room on the stage for one beast and one alone.’ The people there for the dance are the worker bees who feed him, sustaining him and keeping him alive. Their evil thoughts and deeds are the symbolic nectar keeping evil alive. He never sleeps, he says he will never die. Looking at it this way the judge can rather be looked at as a metaphor for the violence and evil of mankind, rather than a physical entity, which will never end because it’s in our nature.

Thoughts?

I know, I know. What a heading. When the judge first learns that Cloyce Bell is the idiots brother, he goes directly to the man and starts examining him. Like an anthropologist would a specimen. The judge is dumbfounded. He stares in disbelief at Glanton. God forbid this ‘deficiency’ could procreate and, therefore, replicate. Perhaps the judge was gauging the possibility of this with the idiot and the young girl at the Yuma camp. This is the biggest threat to the judges existence, because the idiot completely contradicts his philosophy of inherent violence. He renders the judges beliefs false. The idiot represents the most primitive form of humanity, whereas one can argue the judge represents the complete opposite. The idiot is a gentle creature. He is not violent by any means. I know the kid might seem like the antithesis to the judge but he’s somewhere in-between these two, being not entirely innocent, and not entirely evil (depending on your interpretation of his character). Anyway, that’s my take on the idiot.

It might seem obvious, or not at all, but I noticed something in Blood Meridian after the incident with the Reverend Green.

‘The baldheaded man was already at the bar when they entered.’

‘On the polished wood before him were two hats and a double handful of coins. He raised his glass but not to them. They stood up to the bar and ordered whiskeys and the kid laid his money down but the barman pushed it back with his thumb and nodded. These here is on the judge, he said.’

Now, correct me if I’m wrong about this, but I think one of those hats in front of Holden might be the Reverend Green’s? He used his hat for donations, or as a collection plate, at his revival? Holden caused all that chaos, grabbed the hat, went to the bar, and bought everyone a drink?

‘You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.’

My interpretation is that the ‘machine’ the hermit is referring to is man himself. Man makes another man, and so on and so forth. Continuous evil across millennia.

What are your thoughts?

The only place I have ever encountered the words ‘blood’ and ‘meridian’ together was in Stanzas to the Po (1821), by the English Romantic poet Lord Byron:

A stranger loves the Lady of the land;
Born far beyond the mountains,
But his blood is all meridian,
As if never fanned
By the black wind that chills the polar flood.

My blood is all meridian; were it not
I had not left my clime, nor should I be,
In spite of tortures, ne’er to be forgot
A slave again of love, at least of thee.

As for ‘The Evening Redness in the West’, I believe it is an inverted form of Jakob Böhme’s Morgenröte im Aufgang (Dawn of the Day in the East), which isn’t surprising since McCarthy quotes him.

Discuss.