What I'm Reading: McCarthy, Snyder

Charlie recommended Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian to me months and months ago. He's read it three or four times, and I can see why. It's an amazing book.

It's taken me quite awhile to get through it, though. The language is a little difficult (McCarthy is famous for avoiding punctuation), but the book's most challenging aspect is its violence. Set in 1849, the novel is dark and troubling and casually gory; scalps and blood fly constantly as a troupe of hired killers hunt Indians tribes along the Mexican-American border. McCarthy is preoccupied with war not as an incident but as a natural state of man. His characters roam deserts and scrub lands killing and being killed, caring little for why they do so.

But beyond the gore, McCarthy's imagery is startlingly beautiful, and his characters grow increasingly symbolic as the book progresses. In its final pages, the book transforms from murderous picaresque into something more allegorical, more profound. Even though I cringed my way through all 300 pages of its relentlessly senseless violence, McCarthy's novel provides more than enough intellectual heft to make me love it, in spite of its dark view of human nature.

I've also been reading Gary Snyder's Axe Handles. I've never read Snyder before, and, to be honest, I'm not sure that I will again. The book as a whole was disappointing. There were too many flat spots throughout, and too many poems that felt lazy or sentimental. I don't know if this is just one of Snyder's weaker collections, or whether it is characteristic of his usual work.

But there were a few moments in the book that I loved. Snyder is at his best when describing nature's fine, peculiar details. In his nature poems, the writing is precise, moving, and surprising, and without the sentimentality of his poems about family or the painful baldness of his political poems. I was especially fond of Snyder's long, sectional poem "Little Songs for Gaia" and the charming "A Maul for Bill and Cindy's Wedding."

I also loved "Old Rotting Tree Trunk Down," which I've posted below. It seems to have something in common with Blood Meridian: both works confront death and death's purposes, and revel in the chaos of decay.

---------------

Old Rotting Tree Trunk Down

By Gary Snyder

From Axe Handles

Winding grain

Of twisting outer spiral shell

Stubby broken limbs at angles

Peeled off outer layers askew;

A big rock

Locked in taproot clasp

Now lifted to the air;

Amber beads of ancient sap

In powdery cracks of red dry-rot

               fallen away

From the pitchy heartwood core.

Beautiful body we walk on:

Up and across to miss

               the wiry manzanita mat.

On a slope of rock and air,

Of breeze without cease--

     If "meditation on decay and rot cures lust"

     I'm hopeless:

     I delight in thought of fungus,

     beetle larvae, stains

               that suck the life still

               from your old insides,

Under crystal sky.

And the woodpecker flash

     from tree to tree

     in a grove of your heirs

On the green-watered bench right there!

     Looking out at blue lakes,

     dropping snowpatch

               soaking glacial rubble,

     crumbling rocky cliffs and scree,

Corruption, decay, the sticky turnover--

Death into more of the

Life-death same,

     A quick life:

     and the long slow

     feeding that follows--

     the woodpecker's cry.

                                    VII, '78, English Mountain