engine of ruin

“Engine of Ruin” by Mark Gleason

I first read Cormac McCarthy’s monumental Blood Meridian five years ago and it left an immense impression on me. Over the last year, or more likely because of the last year, the novel kept haunting the edges of my consciousness until I could no longer ignore it. Rereading it proved to be an utterly overpowering experience, and I wanted to do something with what I was left feeling. However, what I felt, and still feel, about McCarthy’s novel is buried under layers of doubt, apprehension, ambiguity… and hope. Whenever I try to talk about or think through Blood Meridian, my words never seem right. (Perhaps unsurprisingly. This is a myth about the end of a certain kind of myth, a history in which one character claims to deny the reality of history, a depiction of an apparently godless world created using biblical language.) In this sense, trying to write a soundtrack for the book felt natural — I could create moods and atmospheres and soundscapes as a way of becoming attuned to the text, as a way of allowing the novel to resonate… all without using those words that never seemed right.

Or so I thought. After spending several months moving to and fro across the sanguinary borders of Blood Meridian, I felt overwhelmed. Nothing I wrote felt sufficiently dark, sufficiently harsh, sufficiently violent. Everything I tried to compose felt thin next to the seemingly relentless brutality of McCarthy’s novel.

Paper thin.

Paper.

Like the pale figures moving “across a paper skyline” beside “crumpled butcherpaper mountains.” Like those mounts rotating “like paper horses in a windtrap” beneath hawks circling “slowly and perfectly opposed like paper birds upon a pole.” Like that landscape strewn with “the tiny limbs and toothless paper skulls of infants” set against “the gap of the black paper mountains to the east.”

(This fascination with paper may be an anticipation of two lines from McCarthy’s 1992 interview with the New York Times: “The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” The world of Blood Meridian is, literally, made of paper.)

A breakthrough came when I started to see behind the blood, to listen beyond the thunder, through to those quieter moments of hope or beauty or reflection. Instrumental in this were several of the seemingly minor characters who provide, without motive or reward, tender care — nursing the injured kid, feeding prisoners with meat from their own tables, tending the grave of the murdered traveller, bathing the imbecile in the river. A little later, I started to appreciate McCarthy’s descriptions of the natural world — the sublimity of landscapes, often presented minus humanity. Later still, psychological and philosophical theories started to emerge and connect themselves — ideas about history, causation, will, determinism, and knowledge. Hell, there’s even a joke:

He speaks dutch, said the expriest.
Dutch?
Aye… Asked where he’d learned it you know what he said?
What did he say.
Said off a dutchman.
The expriest spat. I couldn’t of learned it off ten dutchmen.

Well, I think it’s a joke.

Although I’m still exploring the vast cosmos that is Blood Meridian, I felt that it would be dishonest not to confront its grotesque acts of violence (“a blood-stained wedding veil,” “rawskulled,” “among the fallen”). Other tracks, however, try to acknowledge other moods — atmospheric pressure (“it’s fixin to storm”), the seemingly supernatural (“cuatro de copas”), anxiety (“et in arcadia ego”), fleeting moments of tenderness (“a birth scene or a baptism”), landscape (“a thousand acres wide”), and the pangs of self-knowledge (“there’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart”).

Hopefully, this at least hints at the diversity of content contained in Blood Meridian. But what of its form, its structural-numerical configurations? On my third or fourth journey through the text, I noticed that the number eight (sometimes, mysteriously, ‘seven or eight’) kept occurring, again and again. This was confirmed by William Wickey’s brilliant post, which prompted me to look deeper.

The first thing that gripped me was the fact that the kid sees the four of cups tarot card twice (4 x 2 = 8). First, in Chapter V, the kid is scouting abandoned houses when he finds

Illustrations cut from an old journal and pasted to the wall, a small picture of a queen, a gypsy card that was the four of cups.

Then, in Chapter VII:

The kid looked at the man and he looked at the company about.
Sí, sí, said the juggler, offering the cards.
He took one. He’d not seen such cards before, yet the one he held seemed familiar to him. He turned it upside down and regarded it and he turned it back.
The juggler took the boy’s hand in his own and turned the card so he could see. Then he took the card and held it up.
Cuatro de copas, he called out.

In the following chapter, the kid, Bathcat, and Toadvine head into a cantina for a drink. Curiously, almost unnervingly, there is a reference to three cups and a possible confusion over whether more are needed:

The barman poured the measures from a clay jar into three dented tin cups and pushed them forward with care like counters on a board.
Cuánto, said Toadvine.
The barman looked fearful. Seis? he said.
Seis what?
The man held up six fingers.
Centavos, said Bathcat.

The parallels with the four of cups tarot card is uncanny.

But even this didn’t prepare me for Chapter XVI. Glanton’s gang confront between twenty to twenty-five Chiricahuas. Their leader had no sooner spoken when

Glanton’s horse leaned its jaw forward and seized the man’s horse by the ear. Blood flew. The horse screamed and reared and the Apache struggled to keep his seat and drew his sword and found himself staring into the black lemniscate that was the paired bores of Glanton’s double rifle.

The lemniscate. A fallen eight.

I felt compelled to incorporate the number eight into my project.

Finding it helpful to work within confines, even if they are arbitrarily concocted and imposed, I first decided to use the number eight to fix the total length of my soundtrack. Sixty-four minutes (8 x 8 = 64) felt about right. It was then that I read A Brief Statistical Analysis of Blood Meridian by Christopher Forbis, and started thinking about ratios. Using Christopher Forbis’ word count for each chapter, I calculated how long each corresponding track should be, such that the word ratio of chapter to novel was mirrored in the time ratio of track to soundtrack. For example: Chapter I is 4158 words long, which is 3.57% of Blood Meridian; therefore, the corresponding track “god how the stars did fall” is 2m17s long, which is 3.57% of the sixty-four minute soundtrack. And so on, for every chapter-track pair. (The epilogue, which comes in at a mere 208 words or 0.18% of the novel, was surprisingly difficult to get just right, leaving me just seven seconds to work with.)

A little later, under the influence of Glanton’s lemniscate and an allusion to Wordsworth (“all history present in that visage, the child the father of the man“), I started learning about various kinds of circularity in Blood Meridian. There are:

Words looping within sentences. For example, “they rode for days through the rain and they rode through rain and hail and rain again”.
Phrases repeating across paragraphs. For example, “blacks in the fields, lank and stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton,” followed by the kid “on the move again, a few dollars in his purse that he’s earned, walking the sand roads of the southern night alone, his hands balled in the cotton pockets of his cheap coat” (brilliantly caught by Professor Hungerford.)
Ideas echoing between chapters. For example, in Chapter I: (a) stars fall before the birth of the kid; (b) we are asked to “see the child”; (c) in response to Toadvine saying “I meant to kill ye,” the kid says “They aint nobody done it yet”; (d) the kid is shot by a man; (e) the kid accepts a drink from the judge. In Chapter XXIII, with the kid now called “the man”: (a’) stars fall before the death of the man; (b’) two men see the man in the jakes; (c’) in response to a kid saying “I ain’t never been shot,” the man says “You aint sixteen yet neither”; (d’) the man shoots a kid; (e’) the man accepts a drink from the judge. (For more ideas on the palindrome in Blood Meridian, see Christopher Forbes’ article.)

In order to outline such loops, repetitions, returns, I decided to use sampling. I began by identifying the eight most resonant uses (or in the case of the four of cups, possible suggestions) of “eight” in Blood Meridian:

CHAPTER III: How many were there? The kid stared at him. Robbers. How many robbers. Seven or eight, I reckon.
CHAPTER V: The way narrowed through rocks and by and by they came to a bush that was hung with dead babies. They stopped side by side, reeling in the heat. These small victims, seven, eight of them, had holes punched in their under-jaws and were hung so by their throats from the broken stobs of a mesquite to stare eyeless at the naked sky.
CHAPTER VII: The juggler took the boy’s hand in his own and turned the card so he could see. Then he took the card and held it up. Cuatro de copas, he called out.
CHAPTER X: He got up when he seen us and went to the willows and come back with a pair of wallets and in one was about eight pounds of pure crystal saltpetre and in the other about three pounds of fine alder charcoal.
CHAPTER XIII: There were one hundred and twenty-eight scalps and eight heads and the governor’s lieutenant and his retinue came down into the courtyard to welcome them and admire their work.
CHAPTER XV: Midmorning of the day following they crossed an alkali pan whereon were convoked an assembly of men’s heads. The company halted and Glanton and the judge rode forward. The heads were eight in number and each wore a hat and they formed a ring all facing outward.
CHAPTER XIX: The other bodies eight in number were heaped onto the fire where they sizzled and stank and the thick smoke rolled out over the river.
CHAPTER XXIII: Two year ago we pulled out from Griffin for a last hunt. We ransacked the country. Six weeks. Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed them and come in. They’re gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if they’d never been at all.

Then, I formed a circular bond across the eight corresponding tracks, such that:

track 3 is sampled in track 5,
track 5 is sampled in track 7,
track 7 is sampled in track 10,
track 10 is sampled in track 13,
track 13 is sampled in track 15,
track 15 is sampled in track 19,
track 19 is sampled in track 23,
and track 23 is sampled in (anticipated by) track 3.

These eight samples form a barely audible network of quotes, a twisting loop that snakes across the soundtrack, a sonic play on Glanton’s lemniscate.

Finally, I realised that the twenty-four parts of Blood Meridian (twenty-three chapters plus the closing epilogue) are a multiple of eight. So I tried to use eight different compositional or recording techniques across the soundtrack, realised in three tracks each: