u/JohnMarshallTanner

This takes up from Part 1, which you can see at this link: WHAT CAUSED THE PLANE WRECK IN THE PASSENGER? : r/cormacmccarthy

The reason McCarthy did that, other than to present a McGuffin hook to make readers scratch their heads about, was to point to what he and many others at the Santa Fe Institute believed in during his time there: Complexity Theory.

As I said in that earlier post, the invention of the plane caused the plane to exist, but it also caused the plane crash. And that if we trace the chain of cause on back, we have to come to the invention of that tool used by the Mother's suicide in The Road, that piece of flint used to make fire (and also used to make the first popular killing machines, the stone axe and the arrowhead).

One of the things McCarthy repeats in his works, is Complexity Theory, which grew out of Chaos Theory. It occurs paraphrased or in metaphor several times, most plainly in Cities of the Plain. The idea is that everything which happens is caused by something that happened before, such as with the chain reaction going back to the gift/discovery of fire.

This prompts the Sphinx answer to the Sphinx question of, what caused the wreck of the plain plane. As laid out in part 1, acts of creation have nested in them corresponding acts of destruction.

This is the prophecy of the ancient Greeks, Pythagorean and Presocratic sources, via Eudemus of Rhodes and Porphyry, via the later Heraclitus-influenced Stoicism, the periodic bloom and fade. Birth, death, rebirth. Ekpyrosis in a word.

Better known as the Eternal Return, or eternal reoccurence. In thermodynamics, it is the eventual heat death of the universe, entropy wound down. Which is why McCarthy went to so much trouble to put it into Blood Meridian.

The word ekpyrosis is Greek, meaning "out of the fire." The fire which creates is also the fire which later destroys. Essential to thermodynamics and the changing weather. We all carry the fire, as both Blood Meridian and The Road pointedly emphasized, for better and for worse.

Prometheus gave fire to humans to help them, but with it came the curse of it. Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher of science and poet, wrote a book entitled The Psychoanalysis of Fire, back in 1938, both entertaining and thoughtful, as he came up with some popular syndromes which still ring true, such as the Prometheus Syndrome, the addiction to constant reading and learning.

From Blood Meridian: "The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles."

That divine spark within us, McCarthy infers, is the spark of the divine, the source of the better angels of our nature, as Lincoln put it. But it is in there with the reptilian Id, the serpent of Eden, the dragon, and men must choose which side they are on.

Last month, someone was asking about Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy And The Physics Of The Damned by Patrick O’Connor.

I thought it a marvelous work. I would add that he does indeed see the synthesis of nature, naturalism, and human schools of abstract thought. O'Connor gives it as "a unique literary fusion of materialism and metaphysics," and it is that, including Platonic and Aristotelian thought, Biblical scripture, Zen, Gnostic ideas, comparative myth and metaphysics and science all wrapped up together. McCarthy also incorporates history and personal details with humor and eye-winks and designed Easter Eggs.

Plato and Christianity are synthesized in McCarthy's fiction. Plato's metaphoric theory of the self was the "I" of the chariot pulled by two horses, one wild. impulsive and flighty, the other self-contained and self-disciplined. The mind's eye having free will, choses which to follow. The self-disciplined horse has free will. The flighty horse is prey to all of the vices and lusts of his wild nature and is a slave to them.

The Christian version has the same triangle, much the same, but it is humans with the free choice between the lusts and appetites of the world personified by the reptilian brained beasts, the egocentric Id, the demons on one side, and the self-controlled empathetic angels on the other. There is no freedom without self-control.

McCarthy employed Plato in The Road, showing, in Plato's metaphor, all those addicted zombies in the caves who were addicted to living in chains, rather than taking up the free but temporary life that is always within their grasp.

Earlier last week, I reviewed Yann Martel's novel Son of Nobody as an adjunct McCarthy read. Martel posits the opposing western values that the Greek thought contributed to modern times - Judeo-Christian empathy on the one side, War on the other. It isn't generally thought that the Greeks had much to do with Christianity, but Martel's argument is right in many ways, as in Cormac McCarthy's synthesis.

The hook is this: A Canadian history professor and linguist comes upon fragments of a little-known Greek epic, a retelling of the Trojan War, written by a common soldier.

Like Blood Meridian, it is a war novel that is an anti-war novel, and unlike the Iliad, it is not written by the victors--or at least, it is not written by the ruling class, the Establishment. There have been a slew of other excellent books I also like, whose authors have written somewhat similar narratives--like Zachery Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, to name one--or John Scalzi's Red Shirts, to name another. But this is the one that with The Thin Red Line by James Jones and Tree Of Smoke by Denis Johnson, I would most highly recommend to McCarthy scholars.

Son of Nobody is built in two interleaved textual planes — The recovered Greek epic on the top half of the page, with the scholar's epic footnotes on the bottom half. This duel narrative will remind some of the extreme post-modern text of the novel S: Ship of Theseus by Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams, but to me it is more kin to Faulkner/McCarthy in its relation to Time and Story.

Interpretation of the past is a creative act, not a retrieval. Martel literalizes this by having Harlow “discover” meanings in The Psoad that actually become messages to himself, written across millennia. He discovers the story in the gaps between the documents.

We meet Psoas of Midea, a common soldier in the Trojan War. Unlike Homeric heroes, Psoas is not a king, not a demigod, not a chosen one. He is a nobody, a foot soldier whose life is defined by mud, hunger, fear, and longing for home. Like the kid in Blood Meridian or like I was during the Viet Nam War, Psoas is essentially a conscript.

Harlow Donne, a Canadian classicist, has discovered papyrus fragments at Oxford. He begins translating them while dealing with his obsession with his work, which causes him to lose his relationships with his family.

Psoas becomes enmeshed in the Trojan War’s machinery, which he begins to see more clearly. His voice becomes more introspective, more philosophical, more modern. Meanwhile, the scholar studying him becomes more isolated, the importance of his work more loudly dismissed by his academic colleagues.

Psoas's war with the Greek war machine becomes a parallel to the scholar's war with the academic establishment. Both are consciousness trying to preserve meaning in a collapsing system. The scholar's footnotes are his attempt to reverse entropy by creating meaning.

The novel reaches a glum crisis point at which it seems as if entropy is victorious. But then the scholar makes yet another discovery in the ancient text. A hidden message. An Easter Egg like that which some scholars see in Cormac McCarthy's work.

A message about fatherhood, regret, and the possibility of redemption. A message about free will and choice, that most reviewers of this book never see and thus never mention.

If you’re a McCarthy reader like me, this book will feel like a cousin in the dark. Not because Martel imitates McCarthy—he doesn’t—but because he’s living with the same deep Machinery against higher consciousness.

--------

Addendum: I have again been attacked here by a woman who has stalked me for a long time--decades, she says. She doesn't know me and I do not know her, except from her stalking rants. She complains, under different monikers, that I post nonsense that should be banned. She says, "No one can read thirty books in a day." I have never claimed such a ridiculous thing or anything near it. It is she who is being ridiculous, one lyric in her chorus of hysteria.

So, to be clear: I am an independent scholar and a lifetime reader. I have no grudges against anyone, not even her. My view is an individual view, my very own, and is sober and consistent. I often take speculative minority report positions, like to source my references, and in general my style conforms to the Chicago Manual of Style I owned in 1963 or so, which is now foreign in these internet environs.

But that's because I am very old and because I learned a scholarly format now out-of-date. The naysayers lie, slandering me when they say I rely on AI, and they lie again when they say that I have not read all the books I claim to have read. And whereas I have no beef against them, they always have an angry aggrieved complaint against me. They seem maladjusted. I will pray for them.

Addendum 2: Because many of the reviews of Son of Nobody across the web are negative, I will offer this in the novel's defense. After you finish the book, you should return to the "Author's Note" at the beginning of the book. This is not Yann Martel the author but rather his protagonist scholar who is doing the talking. He paraphrases the William Faulkner quote in Light in August, from which the title is taken:

“. . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.”
― Light in August

Martel has the scholar recount his time in Greece:

"I made my way to the sanctuary. . .I stayed there a number of hours, into the dusk, entirely alone, and that spell of peace cast by the remains of Ancient Greece took hold of me, the work of a softly radiant sun, the gentle wind, the occasional bleating of sheep, and the whispering spirits hiding in the temple ruins. Time slipped by without notice and my mind emptied of worries and troubles, all knots untied, all riddles resolved, replaced by quiet rapture."

"Everything became clear to me at that moment, but without the desolation of purely cerebral understanding: life is a matter of radiance and simplicity, and the challenge of life is to remain within that radiance and simplicity." ― Son of Nobody

That pastoral grace was lost when the scholar was tempted to leave his family and join that cause, that academic war that like all wars made passionate true believers of otherwise sane children of God. When the scholar finds the right interpretation for the hell of true believer soldiering, he has an epiphany, recognizes Christ as the opposite and turns away from his personal war.

To me, Martel says that the scholar, released from his war obsession, keeps his beloved daughter alive in his memories, where she remains fresh and dear in his imagination, again and again. As so it is with all we love.

As McCarthy told Oprah, we should be grateful.

William Faulkner put his daughter, Alabama, into Light In August, just as Cormac McCarthy put his son, Culla/Cullan, into Outer Dark. We thought, back in the day, that this was done to exorcise personal demons somehow.

Note the light and dark of those titles. And the first title that Faulkner chose for Light in August had been The Dark House. Unlike McCarthy, Faulkner gave lectures at colleges and gave interviews in which he discussed his work. His often quoted paraphrase, "the past is not even past," is from Nobel Prize-winning writer and philosopher Henri Bergson, whose extended version of thermodynamics was very popular in the 1920s and 1930s.

Bergson's model of existence was that there was a death force that predominated in the material world, what is now routinely called entropy, the material universe winding down toward a heat death.

Opposing that, randomly on the scale of infinity, Bergson posited a life force. Randomly--which is why Lena wanders aimlessly in Light In August, seeking her chap. And also why Rinthy wanders aimlessly in McCarthy's Outer Dark. Also seeking her chap. Mother Earth figures seeking to connect with the Father in the Sky. They are both life forces--non-conformist Brownian motion, candles against the vast entropic darkness.

The death force in Light In August is Joe Christmas, like Culla/Cullan's italic dark triune, and like Lester Ballard in Child of God, the dark Id, the skeletal reptilian brain, the animal guided only by killer instinct. Despite his pleasant name, the unevolved Joe Christmas, while also a child of God, is a rapist and a killer. He can't abide it if Lena offers to give herself, for he must violently take and control.

Lena is pregnant, carrying the past with her into the present, for the past is never past--just as the birch tree also carries the seed which preceded it. And the father of Lena's child is named Joe Brown/Burch. That seed contains the average Joe of Joe Christmas as well, but the life force is Brownian motion, there also in that seed.

Henri Bergson, once very fashionable, is nearly forgotten today, but his ideas about the thermodynamics of life and death in the universe are gaining ground again. I have posted on this about a dozen times here in this subreddit, about McCarthy's metaphorical deployment of thermodynamics, listing a number of valuable sources.

A new and excellent book for me is Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos by Charles Seife, author also of Zero and Alpha & Omega.

See also the numerous sources I have listed in previous posts. And don't miss John P. Anderson's book-length study, The Poltergeist in William Faulkner's Light In August. I believe that it is still available on-line as a free PDF, and it contains a wealth of good ideas.