Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
The high-priest of bloodshed and violence has died. While that sounds like a blood-curdling read, it comes in one of the most beautiful languages that literature has to offer. “He slept and when he woke he’d dreamt of the dead standing about in their bones and the dark sockets of their eyes that were indeed without speculation bottomed in the void wherein lay a terrible intelligence common to all but of which none would speak.” That is from his novel All The Pretty Horses (1992), and to me, it’s impossible not to be attracted and repulsed by that image at the same time.
I am taking Blood Meridian along as my beach read, and I feel a poorly hidden glee that they haven’t filmed it yet. To me, it’s unfilmable. Not even Kubrick could have come close. There is an unapologetic realism to that text that makes me shiver. “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.”
I can very well re-watch John Hillcoat’s movie The Road (2009) because it’s a very good, if bleak movie, almost without hope, but it is the hardest thing to translate McCarthy’s language into images. All the Pretty Horses ails very much in that whatever you see in the novel, the movie makes it unforgivably graphic and set. My mind goes on rampages while reading McCarthy, and that, no movie has ever dared do.
While his plots are violent and unforgiving, there is a deep human understanding that you want to resist, but can’t. I get sucked into his poetic maelstrom almost against my will, but the outlook from inside his world is spectacular, sometimes even funny. And the old blind man in The Road is one of the most brilliant literary cameos I know. Go read that one.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 
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