Ep. 305: Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” (Part Two)

0:07 Dylan: you're listening to the Partially Examined Life. This is part two of episode 305 on Blood Meridian. We were talking about the relative aptness of the term gratuitous to describe the violence in Blood Meridian and wanted to make sure that we got to talking about Judge Holden's characterizing of the Meaning of life.

0:28 Wes: Okay, shall I set us up for a little bit of that?

0:32 Mark: Before you do, let me just throw in that thing. So there's a notion out there on the Internet anyway that this book is unfilmable. It can't be made into a movie. And I think it's exactly those two topics, namely the violence in combination with kind of the philosophic positions and representations by Judge Holden that are commonly used as justifications for why it might not be possible to turn this into a movie.

0:57 Wes: If it was done right, it would make an incredible movie. Did you guys see the new All Quiet on the Western Front, by the way?

The German?

1:03 Mark: No.

1:04 Wes: It's incredible and explicitly violent, but it's a masterpiece.

1:09 Mark: I have to watch that.

1:10 Wes: And that book was a famous anti war book I think when we were in high school. I think we all had to read it early. Academy award winning film was based on it. So it's an anti war movie, but anti war book and anti war movie that it can only communicate that through the explicit violence.

1:28 Dylan: I didn't read a ton about the movie question. I read a little bit. But Ridley Scott was an example of a director that apparently worked on it for a long time trying to make it into a movie. And he is not a director who has shied away from having violence in his movies.

1:45 Wes: The violence is so over the top that if you're true to the book, you're going to be creating something a lot of people are going to have a are not going to be able

to watch, I think.

But then if you don't include it but there's so much. The visual magic in this book is just waiting for cinematic treatment. The blue lightning storms and the desert and all that. And I actually didn't do a lot of this, but I was hoping that someone had done a video journal tour of the route so I could see everything that's talked about.

Right.

Maybe that's been done. Maybe that will be done. That would be in and of itself amazing. And I saw the map. Yeah.

2:27 Mark: Yeah, you can find maps online. That would be really interesting. A video journal.

2:32 Dylan: I didn't find a good map. The maps I found showed paths, but it didn't show the path. Right. Which I found pretty frustrating. Like it's the obvious thing you would do. Right. Is what did they actually do? Maybe you have a separate one for. Was it Toadvine and Brown that go to San Diego as a little bit side excursion.

2:50 Wes: Right.

2:50 Dylan: But for crying out loud, just draw the line.

2:54 Wes: I know, I had the same thing. I don't like the map that. Yeah, there's that map out there, but I can't read it either.

3:00 Dylan: I think, Wes, you're wanting to have us get to the.

3:05 Wes: Yeah.

3:05 Dylan: Let's do some Judge for the philosophy of Judge Holden.

3:09 Wes: Let's do some Judge Holden.

3:10 Dylan: Philosophy of Judge Holden.

3:11 Wes: Yeah.

It's very convenient that we have such a vocal character in the book to tell us what it's about and to offer, I was going to say a philosophically sound thesis. But not to say that it's right, it's not wrong. But it's an option that's not often talked about even though it's enacted. Right.

So war.

Why do people do war so much? It's impractical. Personally, I reject the so called realists who think wars, these big strategic objectives, it's always a disaster for everyone. So it's a meaning making activity. Chris Hedges wrote a famous book called War as a Force that Gives Us Meaning or something like that. And I think we got into this a little bit with our Simone Weil episode Iliad. Poem of Force, I think was the

essay we read on this.

I think maybe the best place to start with Judge holden is chapter 17, the war is God part. There are some antecedents to this that we could go back to. Like there's a bit of the Judge stuff in chapters 11 and 13, but

4:13 Dylan: I think 17, I mean it is distilled there. Right?

4:16 Wes: Yeah.

So he'll start out earlier on. He'll give a bit of a Schopenhauerian idea of the world as this fever dream with a Calamitous destination. That's basically the summary of what he says about that.

4:30 Mark: I'm sorry, I'm laughing because I just opened 17 Eternity. Across from him sat the vast abhorrence of the judge, half naked, scribbling in his ledger. He's constantly naked too. But that just like the abhorrence of the judge.

4:44 Wes: We haven't even mentioned that he's a murderous pedophile.

4:46 Dylan: But I was gonna point to exactly that part because it's the setup for the section that Wes is pointing us to. You know, they're sitting around the fire and. Yeah, it begins with the vast abhorrence of the judge. To me, that's the beginning of the section.

5:00 Wes: Yeah. Cause there's kind of two campfire scenes in this chapter. And the one that I just talked about with the, you know, the world is a fever dream is the first one. And the second one is the war is God part. So I forget where the abhorrence thing

5:13 Dylan: is, but it's on page 243 in this version of the book.

5:17 Wes: So let's give a little bit of this argument. Basically, Jackson has said something about living by the sword, dying by the sword. The rare moment where someone in the book is moralistic about violence. And the judge is basically going to say something like, war is actually the telos of men. It's kind of his built in end. So he'll say, it makes no difference what men think of war. Said the judge. War endures as well. Ask men what they think of stone. War was always there before man was. War waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

That is the way it was and will be that way and not some other way. And then he kind of teases Brown, it's your trade we honor here. Mine too. And Brown's like, what's with all the notebooks? Then why are you sketching and being a botanist and being a geologist and all that? He'll say all other trades are contained in that of war. And then he'll say, war endures because young men love it and old men love it in them.

6:16 Mark: I think that's a great, great line.

6:18 Wes: Yeah. And then the idea is that. So why is it the telos of man? Because man is a creature of play. This is the weird inversion of Nietzsche on the aesthetic and on sublimation. Right. The idea is that, yes, men are creatures of play and play is nobler than work. But the ultimate manifestation is in the game. In games, the higher the stakes, the more worth they confer on the participants. And the more agency the game they confer on participants. So he'll say, all games aspire to

the condition of war.

For here that which is wagered swallows up game player all.

6:55 Dylan: We should read that paragraph.

6:57 Wes: Yeah. Why don't you do that? And then, yeah.

6:59 Dylan: Men are born for games, nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows, too, that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself, but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents. And the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance, or trial of worth. All games aspire to the condition of war.

For here that which is wagered swallows up game player all. Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard of such a tale? A turn of the card, the whole universe. For such a player has labored, clanking to this moment. Which will tell if he is to die at the man's hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man's worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state Admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable.

And it is a dull man indeed. Who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance, either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated, the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification seen so. War is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will, which, because it binds them, is therefore forced to select.

War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is God.

8:49 Wes: The interesting idea here is that we think of the unifying force in the world as love, or natural equivalent of that right. Natural forces that bind bring things together. Yeah, bring things together, unify and synthesize. But here the idea is that war does that. It's not mere annihilation because it involves this contest of wills that binds two wills to a larger will. This also sounds kind of Schopenhauerian in a way. You know, it's almost like an anti Hegel type of thesis. You know, he's anti Nietzsche and he's anti Hegel in that the master slave dynamic.

It's not that mutual reciprocity, right, in which there's some level of equality reached between the two participants in their mutual recognition, kind of parallel to a planetary orbit that doesn't swallow up the planet. Rather, this is sort of the theory of the master, which is that you simply overpower the slave, and that's the unity, right? You get a unification of the self through that overpowering. But the one other thing I want to say about this is that the idea of the game here is that when you're playing a game, if you think of the world in a deterministic way, everything that's happened is the result of the causal matrix in which you exist.

All the things that have happened in the world come to that point and it's predetermined in some sense. And the game player embraces that moment. They say, okay, I'm going to play a game of luck in no country for Old men. Right? It's just the flipping of the coin. It's kind of a pure version of that. I'm going to play a game of luck in which the stakes are ultimate, and I'm going to kind of retrieve agency out of determinism by making the decision to go along with the determinism, you know, whatever deterministic or chance result comes. And not only that, I'm going to stake my life on that.

I'm going to make this appeal to what the judge calls the historical absolute. This is why violence is taken to be the road to agency, is because in being violent and getting into a contest of wills, which is violent, and playing a game for the ultimate stakes, I am willfully subjecting myself to the outcome of that battle, even though in some sense it's predetermined, probably by just who's bigger, who has more force, right? But also by a lot of other preceding causal forces.

11:14 Mark: So I'm sure that as Dylan was reading it, all the folks listening jumped out of their chairs to make the connection to no country for Old Men with Anton Chigurh and the flipping of the coin, right? Because he essentially is the embodiment of this thesis in that context. A couple things I want to say about this. So first off, I caution the listener against the concept here of he's talking about war, because he's not talking about war in the sense of nation against nation or army against army. That's not the Way he's characterizing it, he's talking about it's the state of nature, right?

The war of all against all. It's got more of that kind of a flavor. And, you know, he talks about the war consuming the players and the game. And the reason why it's important to talk about the two individuals testing their wills against each other as part of the larger will is that when one is destroyed, there's no more game. Like if we play chess, and Dylan, beats me, the game still exists. I still exist, and we can play another game or somebody else can play chess. It's that war constitutes an irreducible and

12:25 Wes: unique particular event, like the normal stakes of a game. What's at stake? He says the humiliation of defeat and the pride in victory, right? And you can get that out of a game of, like, hearts or pinochle or whatever. Silliest game, Monopoly, you know, we can feel we get some of that. And so something's at stake. And the question is, you know, the game becomes better and better the more you raise the stakes. So if you raise it to the level of life and death, then you've enhanced the game, and so you validate. This is all about the validation of the worth of the participant, right? The pride and victory. This is how you endow yourself with worth and agency. And the only way to maximize that is to take the ultimate risk of death and engage in this violent struggle. Annihilation must be at the stake.

13:11 Mark: Yeah, annihilation is the stake, but the vindication, or what you get is not just survival, but it's the extinction of somebody else's existence, right? So it's a combination of wagering, but also winning that wager in the form of, like, if I was going to tie this back to, for example, Heidegger, Gratuitous name drop. I apologize for violating the rule. But the notion that death is the end of possibility, right? Death represents Dasein's not having any future projection anymore possibility. It's the snuffing out, essentially, of a world, right?

There's an old Jewish thing. Basically, the idea is that if you take a life, it's as if you had taken an entire world because that person could have children, those children have children, and you could be cutting off an entire future of people and possibilities and worlds. And I think that's part of this as well. So the judge doesn't characterize it this way, because if you think about it in the descriptions of the violence that they perpetrate, which, by the way, I'm trying To recall if we ever have any explicit descriptions of the kid actually perpetrating any of the atrocities the way some of the others do.

But it's oftentimes it seems as though they're not actually risking. In some cases they are. But when they slaughter the peaceful Indians in their village, there's no real risk to them. And so there's kind of a betrayal of this notion. The judge is speaking out of two sides of his mouth. Now, you could say that that's not the judge, that's Glanton that's doing that and what have you. But there's something specious about this characterization that doesn't sit with me.

14:53 Wes: I mean, they do get messed up pretty badly by Apaches and by General Elias's men.

14:58 Mark: They can. There are situations where they're testing their will against the others in the ultimate game, and there are others where they're not. That's not war. What I'm saying is they're not at war all the time in this book. They're perpetrating massacres.

15:12 Wes: Yeah, I think you're right. That Holden is. What he means by war is rather expansive and war of all against all. And it can be a massacre. It could just be completely overpowering your quote unquote enemy or. Which could be a child. Right. He's killing children as well.

And.

Oh yeah, being a pedophile and you

15:28 Dylan: know, I mean, even though there's a condition of one against the other, it seems to me that it's in his characterization. It's all about the hazard of you yourself. And I think it's right. This isn't geopolitical confrontation kind of war. This is any one individual against other individuals or circumstances in which you put your own existence. The stakes of moment after moment are your own existence itself. And the part that would link up with other people is your annihilation of another is only more validation of your winning. It's not glory exactly. That's not what's won. Right. But it is.

16:15 Wes: It's agency and autonomy.

16:17 Dylan: I think it's agency and autonomy. And you're killing of other people is a activity of your agency and autonomy.

16:26 Mark: It's important to mention that because there are ways that you could risk your life without confronting somebody else where they would be risking theirs in the same endeavor. You can do extreme stunts or climb mountains. And that's not what he's talking about.

16:41 Dylan: I wondered about that a little bit with asking the question about nature. So you raised the question of like free solo, you're going to go and you're going to climb El Capitan, in one shot without any safety equipment. Right. This is what Alex Honnold did, and extraordinarily risky for most people, arguably very risky even for someone like him. And part of that free soloing, part of the deal is the stakes. It's clearly part of the deal for free climbers is the stakes. And in here we talked a lot about nature and the kind of suffering and gauntlet and experience that nature presents.

And I think Holden could imagine it that way, that their surviving through the desert was part of that. I don't know that he does. I am trying to think of his interaction with nature in this respect is in terms of consuming it, sort of as a scientist, as a paleontologist and writing it down and stuff like that. And I see that as, again, a kind of consumption of it. I don't see anything in here that I remember of Holden. Maybe he does.

17:51 Wes: So I want to. I think I can help us with this because it maybe, maybe, but it kind of ties together what we were just talking about as well, with agency and autonomy. Because remember that philosophically we should keep in mind what the rival explanation of autonomy is, which is precisely the opposite. We are autonomous when we're behaving ethically, behaving morally. And according to Kant, that's because we are in a way following laws issued from within.

And.

But even in, you know, Leibniz and previous philosophers, the idea is that there's autonomy in reasoning. We can be responsive to reasons, we can be responsive to insight into what is good for us, and there's freedom to be had in that. And then the rest is heteronomy, you know, including violence or greed or whatever. That's when we are living at the behest of objects of desire or hate or whatever. We are strung along by them. And the judge will explicitly reject this in another passage just after the one we read. I'm going to go ahead and read this as well because I think it's important. Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. So sounds very Nietzschean. I think it's a red herring because I think the judges, the anti.

Nietzsche.

But. But going further, historical law subverts it at every turn. Historical law, which I read as determinism, destiny in the sense of causal determinism. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong, by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is, and to petition directly to the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof.

For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity, but his knowledge remains imperfect. And however much he comes to value his judgments, ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant. And here are the views of litigants, despised decisions of life and death, and of what shall be and what shall not. Beggars all question of right in elections of these magnitude are all lesser ones subsumed moral, spiritual, natural.

So what is the argument he's making? You know, there's a little bit of a skepticism. He's saying our knowledge is too imperfect to prove anything about our values. We can't prove right and wrong. So it's futile to argue about that and to do the very thing that I was just talking about is the key to autonomy, which is reasoning.

Right.

Moral reasoning would be the key to autonomy. He says that's futile. That is not the path to autonomy. It's never going to give you a final proof of anything. The only final proof is the historical verdict, is the verdict of history and the historical absolute, which is to say our destiny as determined by all the causal forces that lead us to that destiny. So fate, or fate might be the wrong word, but destiny becomes the norm. That's the only norm. Not is it right to kill this person? Is it not right to kill this person? It's just is it destined to happen?

Is it written that becomes the norm? And then you gain agency by saying, I am going to gamify. I'm going to embrace this high stakes game and not run from it. I'm going to submit myself to destiny by putting myself in the position to kill and be killed. And at all moments to get that verdict rendered up right. The verdict that moral argument can provide, I can have it rendered up by war or violence. But also, Dylan, just to speak to your case, by the environment, by man against the whole man against nature thing, all of that, I subject myself to risk.

And it's not about adrenaline as we might think with like a mountain climbing thing. It's about agency.

22:01 Mark: Yeah, it's about agency. It's also there's something here about the finality of violence, this notion where he says, we don't think that if somebody wins a duel that they're morally vindicated. There's a romantic view that God would support the one who was in the right and that you would have a duel and whoever won the duel was ultimately in the right. As far as this. But.

22:23 Wes: Well, psychologically, we do tend to think that, like Nietzsche formulated this in a phrase, political superiority always resolves itself into psychologically superiority. Or victims blame themselves. We always moralize struggles of power. But the judge is right. I mean, we shouldn't, but we do.

22:39 Mark: We do. But ultimately it doesn't matter who's right if they're dead. It doesn't matter who is holy if they're dead. Violence unto death renders a judgment which nullifies all other judgments. This is his point. And then after this, he turns to the priest, right? And the priest has no response. Now it is the priest, or it's not the priest, it's Jackson who says the Good Book says that he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword. Which we referred to in part one, I think it was. He's explicitly saying. And he could make reference to the Bible. We've talked about violence from the perspective that the individual is about agency and destiny.

But violence from the perspective of a force of nature or of some kind of social structuring, he's saying, hierarchically sits above any other kind of consideration. Because who gives a shit if you have the best argument in favor of such and such a view, if somebody can just take out a gun and kill you.

23:40 Wes: But also the argument can never be resolved because our imperfect knowledge. But violence is perfect, right? As you put it, Seth, violence can be absolute and perfect in a way that moral reasoning never can be. When you die, the argument has reached its conclusion decisively and no one can argue against it. But again, I just want to emphasize the fact that the agency is not an. It's not destiny busting all of that imagery with them. They're being driven by the sun across the desert and it's like they're dolls and. And raggedy men, and they don't.

The special irony of the book or the judge's thesis is that submission to destiny in the sense of the most high stakes conflicts, the results of high stakes conflicts, submission to that destiny is ironically, weirdly, the only form of agency. So you try to retrieve freedom out of determinism by endorsing determinism, by making determinism your norm.

24:36 Dylan: Let's talk A little bit about the unity that Holden is pointing to, because I think that's part of what would turn on. I mean, he. In that section, the great unity is in acts of violence and in the submission of yourself to that game and that test and then the ferreting out of the Survivor, I guess I would say the winner, as you pointed out, your destiny goes through that cauldron of violence. The moral unity that you were referring to, Wes. I think that's the right one. That in fact the judge responds to is one that says that the unity that we would aspire to involves other people in a fundamental way.

And I think that in the way Holden is talking about it, other people are just incidental. The fact that they are other human beings doesn't matter at all because it has to do with your destiny. The difference here seems to me is his formulation is one that is completely solitary. You are a lone entity in the world, and the world is sort of incidental, in fact, in the particulars of it are sort of incidental to your existence. You are just in a ongoing endeavor to fulfill your destiny, to get as far along in it as possible. But there's no notion that there is something greater than outside of you or the notion that other human beings in particular have any factor in your realization of yourself.

26:11 Wes: Yeah, nothing greater than history. I mean, the way he puts it is that nothing greater than unity is the unity of wills testing one's will and the will of another within that larger will. The larger will is the unifying thing.

Right.

For Schopenhauer, that was essentially God and the thing in itself. So it's a high stakes game. Seems like it's a struggle of will against will. One will is going to destroy and overpower the other will. The wrong master slave dynamic, because then the will that destroys the other will doesn't get what it needs to continue its existence, which is recognition from the other. But in this case, the judge's theory is that in fact it is uniting and binding. And he'll allude to this again at the end of the book, by the way. In Griffin, he'll say blood is the only thing that can actually bind us together.

So what is the uniting thing? Well, the larger will is destiny. Those deterministic forces that will cause our paths to intersect, that cause the fates of two nations to intersect in such a horrible way. So the binding thing is history and deterministic forces. That's how we can be united in a violent interaction. So it's sick, obviously, but that's the Theory, I agree.

27:23 Dylan: I'm just trying to understand itself, consistency. In the case of the universe being a contest of wills, it's important, I think, to remember that those wills aren't necessarily embodied by individuals. I mean, that's just a distinction almost without a difference, I think for Holden.

27:41 Wes: Well, the larger will is certainly not.

27:43 Dylan: Yeah.

27:43 Wes: And then I think you're putting the question again of whether it can be man against nature, a struggle against a war in the sense of a struggle against natural forces of the desert or something like that.

27:53 Dylan: Yes. And this is. Where is it going too far to say it's a destiny as history and it's sort of your mere existence. When having continually put your own existence to hazard, that is the pinnacle of agency and all those other forces that you put yourself to a hazard and that the will would be the thing that you are hazarding against the will of the universe in a myriad possible manifestations. But that's what it means to be you in your own will have put yourself to a hazard. And that act of risk is manifest in being against another will in the wind of some other will.

28:37 Wes: In chapter 12, when the judge. What's the beef between the judge and the kid? The judge suspects that the kid is appealing to the moral law instead of the law of history.

Right.

So he was chapter 12. Or there's chapter 12 when the judge visits him in jail. And this is after. In jail is the first time the kid gets a bit vocal and starts talking about in a remorseful way to the jailers, I think about what he's been involved in. And then the judge will say things like, you know, you alone shaped events on their calamitous course. You sat in judgment of your own deeds. You put your own allowances before the judgments of history.

Right.

Which is moral reasoning type allowances. And therefore you poison the enterprise. You dishonored war. War is actually holy. War should have been the God that you were worshiping and instead you went with morality. That's ultimately why it seems it's a little unclear in the end if he kills a kid, but it seems that he does. That's his beef with the kid. He'll say at the end in Griffin as well, war is dishonored when its nobility is called into question. You become a false dancer and this and that. So the important, I think, point to take out of all of that, there's an implication, all this, that goal directed behavior is always heteronomy.

So for instance, if you are a traditional moralist, you might say, well, being subject to My desires and to objects, and that's an unfreedom. But if I can reason and be responsive to other goals, higher goals, then there's freedom in that. And the Judge's point is that any goal directed behavior is subjection, unless the goal is submission to the judgments of history, submission to destiny. That's sort of the significance of the epilogue at the very end of the book, where the drilling of these holes, I think, seems less like the pursuit of some continuance and the verification of a principle, a validation of a sequence and causality, as if each round and perfect whole owed its existence to the one before it.

So Kantian idea is autonomy through an internally issued law. Here it's autonomy through behavior that is not goal directed at all, except insofar as its obedience to causal principles of

history, let's put it that way.

30:54 Dylan: I wanted to evaluate Judge Holden a little bit on this.

30:57 Wes: Is he a good philosopher?

31:00 Dylan: There's two things that come to mind. One is to continue to pursue this question of the role of the other in our becoming full realizations of ourselves. Okay. Which to me, that's absent for him. But the other one is just evaluating his own actions in the context of this war. Let's just take the example where he picks up the child, travels around with the child on his horse for a while, until later he kills the child and scalps it. Right.

31:29 Wes: And this is like the lone survivor of a village that they've massacred.

31:32 Dylan: This child, yes. The lone survivor of a village that he's massacred. He basically picks up this kid as a kind of trophy along the way. There's a sense in which there's a kind of sick notion that he's preserved this child from the massacre, but only to kill the child later on purpose. How is that a contest of wills? That is an example, and seems to me Holden has numerous examples. It isn't putting himself to a hazard. It is just gratuitous domination and wanton, violent domination. Which isn't the same thing as putting yourself to risk and surviving the risk, surviving the hazard.

32:16 Wes: Well, he's. He's suzeraining. He's suzeraining the earth, you know?

Right.

Stuffing birds. Killing birds, Stuffing them. That which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. Sketching things and then destroying them or scratching them out.

32:28 Dylan: That's the tension that I'm wondering about. Is that the piece we've focused on for about the past 45 minutes? That seems to be one pole of his philosophy regarding the state of war. But the notion that nothing exists in the world unless I understand it and I comprehend it and I destroy it. I mean, he has this scene where he goes and he gathers all these things. He draws them out in his book, and then he goes and he burns all the artifacts themselves. That's his act of consuming the world into his own, his suzeraining it. To me, those two things are like separate philosophies. And there's a tension between them. It feels like. Not that Judge Holden has any. You know, he has to be consistent. I mean, he seems. Seems to me that he's kind of fooling himself about the way in which he presents his romantization of the world as war.

33:18 Mark: Well, that was kind of what I was driving at earlier when I was saying that he's speaking out of two sides of his mouth. But I don't think the two things are inconsistent. As long as you continue to do that, it doesn't obviate that you can do despicable. And especially if you think that there's no morality, then it's, you know, it's irrelevant.

33:36 Dylan: Well, we can go back to that. But I do think that they are inconsistent with one another.

33:40 Mark: What I wanted to say was, because I think we gotta kind of get towards the end anyway, is that the suggestion is. It's not just the suggestion. It becomes clearer, but in retrospect. All these conversations, all these discourses that the judge is doing are for the sake of the kid. Because he doesn't care about the other people. They're either fully in or. They're like the ex priests. They're irredeemable. From his perspective, the kid is the one he's trying to figure out. You know, the kid is like job or something, right? Where he's like. He's trying to convert him.

And I think that the judge keeps goading him and saying that he'd never fully committed. He doesn't understand the philosophy of violence and war. That what the judge wants is for the kid to kill him or try to kill him anyway. And there is that moment. I think it's in the penultimate chapter or the chapter before that, where the kid and the priest are in the desert and the judge walks by and the priest keeps telling him, this is your. You've got to do this. This is your chance. You know, this is. And the judge says, I've walked by you twice, and I'm gonna walk by you again a third time.

You do not have it in you. You cannot do this. But it's as if he's Setting the stage. So ultimately, the judge is wagering in a very real way, his existence. And because he's winning by not annihilating, in some sense, his opponent, although we know he eventually does. But it's like he's giving the kid multiple, multiple chances to validate his thesis and to fully become an autonomous individual. And then after, you know, what is it? The kid's 16 when the whole thing ends and he's 28, I think, when they meet in Griffin. So it's been 12 years. And mind you, right before he goes to Griffin, the kid kills a child, a 15 year old, at the campfire.

I don't know if you remember that. By the way, the child, this is one of the two brothers whose grandfather was the guy they tell the story about.

35:35 Wes: Well, the child, in all fairness.

Yeah, it doesn't matter.

35:40 Mark: It's a test of wills. He went to war and he tested his will. And of course he did it by hiding out because he knew the kid was going to come back and try to kill him.

35:48 Wes: He tries to hide from the kid, the kid comes.

35:50 Mark: Yeah, well, and by the way, to talk about those two kids being the grandchildren of a guy, a traveler, who was murdered and buried in the road. And do you remember them telling the story of the old man who's the blacksmith or whatever?

36:06 Wes: The judge tells the story the judge tells the harnesser.

36:09 Mark: Harness maker. Harness maker, yeah. So the implication is that these two kids are the grandchildren of that guy who got murdered, the one who gets killed by the harness maker to wrap

36:18 Dylan: us up for today.

36:19 Wes: Okay, so maybe we could talk about that in the third part, because the theme is the frozen. What does the judge call it? The point of that harness maker story is to say that there's a concept and the book begins with this. A violent regression based on an idealized father figure that has simply disappeared from one's life. The frozen God of the father or something like that.

36:42 Dylan: And Holden at the end tells the kid, you could have been my son.

36:48 Mark: Yeah, we should probably talk about the.

36:51 Wes: The Jakes, the dancing bear, which is bizarre.

36:53 Mark: Bizarre and incomprehensible.

36:55 Dylan: Oh, and the dancing of Judge Holden, the dancing bear.

36:58 Wes: And then Judge Holden takes over the pigs.

37:02 Mark: Oh, the pigs, yeah. So it all comes full circle, right? So you have the dancing bear in the saloon who gets shot by the someone by somebody after the bear's owner tries to ask him for money. We have the previous bear that has pig eyes and the judge having pig eyes. And then the judge has the conversation with the kid who's now the man, although not capitalized the way the kid is K and kid is. The kid goes to go to the bathroom in the outhouse and the Judge is inside. When he opens the door, naked Bear hugs him and locks the door behind him. And all you get after that it's just two men, I think, who look in and are dumbfounded to the point where they can't even describe or what is what the scene is in there. It ends with the Judge on the dance floor, dancing, naked, like the bear twirling around. It is bizarre.

37:54 Wes: He never sleeps, he says. He says he'll never die. He never sleeps. The Judge, he's dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die. The weirdest paragraph is the last one.

38:06 Dylan: It's sing songy, like into. Like into a fade into a fever dream.

38:10 Wes: Yes, different than everything that comes before. It's in present tense. There's a few places where the book does go in the present tense in an odd way from past tense, but this is the most prominent one. As if now we are talking about a force of nature and a principle and something that does exist forever and is not to be referred to as something that has passed. This is something he's doing forever. He bows to the fiddlers and he does this, he does that. This is eternal, this dance, this unity

38:39 Dylan: aspect that we were talking about does get articulated again as a ritual of letting of blood, which is also related to this gaming. So an orchestration of events. So he's talking with the kid. This is where not having quotation marks sometimes get in the way.

38:59 Wes: A man seeks his own destiny.

39:01 Dylan: Yeah. Let me put it this way, said the Judge. If it is so that they themselves have no reason and yet are indeed here, must they not be here by reason of some other? And if this is so, can you guess what that other might be?

39:14 Wes: No.

39:14 Dylan: Can you? I know him well. He poured the tumbler full once more and he took a drink himself from the bottle. He wiped his mouth and turned to regard the room. This is an orchestration for an event, for a dance, in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned. It contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale. There is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well.

In any event, the history of all is not the history of each, nor indeed the sum of those histories. And none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence or for he has no way of knowing, even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know, he might well absent himself. And you can see that cannot be any part of the plan. If the plan there be an event, a ceremony, the orchestration thereof, the overture carries certain marks of decisiveness, includes the slaying of a large bear. Now I'm confused, right? It seems like the narrator's saying that part.

40:16 Wes: Yeah, it does. And initially, when I read this book, I thought, first of all, Judge Holden is all over the place. This is like someone's trying to graft something philosophical onto this. I have much more appreciation. I think there is a more consistency, and it's a very philosophically interesting idea that the judge actually has. And then at this point, you know, this is often the mark of a bad piece of writing when the author inserts their own commentary on their work into the mouth of a character. In my opinion, in this case, I don't think so. I mean, I think it's fine, but because it's part of the point that the judge is trying to make. I mean, everything is a narrative for him, right? And it's orchestrated. It's a historical. It's predestined. It's a product of historical forces. And so it's not surprising that he sees it through that lens and sounds like the narrator.

41:06 Mark: At that point, you were bringing up the ritual and the bloodletting for a reason, I thought, yeah.

41:11 Dylan: So this is pulled and continuing a ceremony, then. One could well argue that there are not categories of no ceremony, but only ceremonies of greater or lesser degree. And deferring to the this argument, we will say that this is a ceremony of a certain magnitude, perhaps more commonly called a ritual. A ritual includes the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are but mock rituals. Here every man knows the false at once. Never doubt it. That feeling in the breast that evokes a child's memory of loneliness, such as when the others have gone.

And only the game is left with the solitary participant. A solitary game without opponent, where only the rules are at hazard. Don't look away. We are not speaking in mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to that feeling. The emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds? The judge leaned closer. What do you think death is? Man, of whom do we speak? When we speak of a man who was and is not, are these blind riddles or are they not some part of every man's jurisdiction?

What is death if not an agency? And whom does he intend toward?

42:23 Wes: Look at me.

Look at me.

I don't like craziness, says the kid. Nor I. Nor I.

42:31 Mark: Bear with me.

42:32 Wes: The next.

Yeah. Does he say that?

42:35 Mark: Yeah.

42:35 Wes: Oh, it's hilarious. The next part, which I won't try to read because I know we're running out of time, but it's basically Will say men's complaints about life actually conceal the fact that they just want to overpower other people. That it's all about power.

42:51 Dylan: Yeah. So that consistency is there.

42:53 Wes: Yeah, it's about power.

42:54 Dylan: Yep. Yeah, it's thrasymachus.

42:56 Wes: And then ultimately he comes to this idea. You know, a man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge, will or nil. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course would only come at last the self. Same reckoning at the same appointed time. For each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. And again, the concept of agency he's trying to retrieve out of that is the endorsement of destiny and subjection of oneself to the highest stakes in relation to destiny, which is death, the possibility of death. I haven't myself given thought to the dancing bear and.

43:32 Dylan: And the dancing of judge and the

43:34 Wes: dancing of the judge. I mean, the dance is.

43:36 Mark: There was a bloodletting and a ritual letting of blood and something terrible happens to the kid.

43:42 Wes: We assume the dance is understandable in the sense.

Right.

The dance is orchestrated. It's when you dance in the way, if you are dancing an orchestrated dance, you're doing moves that other people have defined for you. There's a great moment in the movie Ex Machina where the creator of the intelligent robots, they're able to dance, but they're all dancing in concert with him according to his will. So it's a sign of autonomy in a sense. Right. And a sign of artificial intelligence. But as creator, he can't but help choreograph their dance to be exactly what he's doing. But anyway, so the dance is something in which you can express yourself.

And it feels like autonomy and feels like agency in that expressive moment. But if it's choreographed, you are simply going through moves defined by others. And I think that perfectly represents this theory of agency and the embrace of determinism. I mean, so that part seems somewhat clear. I just don't. Yeah, I haven't figured out the poor bear. And then what do we think of the ending?

44:46 Dylan: I think he's Mutilated into a horrible mess in the. Jake.

44:51 Mark: I agree. I read one commentary, Internet commentary, and they were like, some people think it was sodomy, but the judge showed no predilection for sexual deviation before. I was like, okay, you didn't read the book, but I wouldn't be surprised if he sodomized him before he killed him. But I have this image of the kid upside down, dead, with his legs sticking out of the toilet, you know, and out of the.

45:18 Wes: What is it?

45:18 Mark: The abattoir or whatever they call that, the hole.

45:21 Wes: And at this point, he's in his 40s. Right.

45:23 Dylan: So he's not an abattoir, is a slaughterhouse.

45:25 Mark: Sorry, that's not what I meant to say. I meant to say.

45:27 Dylan: So. I mean, it would be an interesting confluence of terms.

45:31 Mark: In this case. No, the kid's 26, 28, something like that.

45:35 Dylan: 28? Yeah.

45:36 Wes: No, in the end, he's in his 40s, actually.

What?

Yeah.

45:39 Dylan: Really?

45:40 Wes: Yeah.

Because there's a montage and then it gives you a date.

45:43 Dylan: No, I thought the montage was that he was 28. I would have sworn that he is

45:47 Wes: 28 at a certain point. And then. Then you get another fast forward.

45:51 Mark: So he meets the judge again after 25 years.

45:54 Wes: Yes. There are decades of him having different trades.

45:58 Mark: I didn't realize that was that. I really thought it was just 12 years, but. Okay, I'm not gonna.

46:03 Wes: You know, maybe I'm wrong.

You guys can cr.

I don't think we need to.

46:05 Dylan: Well, we can sort that out for the third. Yeah, yeah. There's plenty more for us to talk

46:09 Wes: about in a third, including this concept of the frozen God of the father, the abandoning father of the father who's died too early. Yes, things like that. Because the judge tries to make it speak to what's happening to the Indians. And also it speaks to what's happened to the kid and the idea of a regression to violence that is based on this condition. The concept of regression actually turns out

to be important as well.

46:34 Dylan: Okay, so if you're a citizen, you can look forward to listening to part three of the discussion on Blood Meridian. For our next episode, we're going to return to some law and political philosophy. While we talk about unenumerated rights, you can participate in the conversation in general by commenting on the blog post for the episode@ partialexaminedlife.com or emailing us or on Facebook or Twitter. Thanks for listening. Good night.

46:59 Mark: Good night.

47:00 Wes: Good night.