A Legion of Horribles
Blood Meridian’s infamous scene
Commissioned nonfiction originally published in Entropy Magazine, 2018, part of a series on “fear responses” to books.
First came the sound of their trampling feet, a distant thunder that caused the earth to quiver, and the birds to leap from their perches and squawk irritably, sensing something was amiss. The sky was clear, they must have noticed, as did I, the source of the thunder still not evident, and my ears perked up with those of unseen beasts hidden in the folds of the desolate earth stretching before and around me — how did I arrive here? I wonder. Here, in this half-formed world whose limits and details remain unfinished, waiting for those last brushstrokes from a hidden creator to fully form and finish it all — the rocky outcrops are too smooth to be made of rock, the angles at which they rise unnatural; they are but mythical impressions of distant lands told in ancient, authorless texts, etched across crumbling vellum; the trees and shrubs and cacti are but ideas or suggestions of their actual shapes, vague outlines or simplified blots of canopies and thorns and bristles; my own movement is too slow, too unsure to be truly my movement. And the sky is also incomplete, a primer of grey ending before — rather than meeting — the undulating, fluid horizon, and lined with cracks of black nothingness, calling for binding and buffering and color.
The quivering of the earth is swiftly becoming a shaking, a clattering, a great din accompanied by a whistling wind — no, this sound is woven of whooping cries, I quickly realize, belonging to creatures who speak a language or languages not my own. Who use gestures whose meanings formed in isolation have long since been forgotten, who belong to this realm, not to the one I know or knew, and seek now to purge it of an unfamiliar presence. They sense me and have been roused by me, who threatens them and what they know, roused to an innate capacity for violence, for revenge for a sin I committed in a distant memory that may not be my own, and yet I can’t flee. I’m but a pair of eyes, an observer of my own impending doom, as unfinished as everything else, except for them: they emerge on the shifting horizon on horseback, perfectly intact, this legion of horribles, hundreds in number…
Literature, like all art, is infectious. It calls for your trust and then abuses it — it invades, trespasses, uproots, and tangles. But it also respects you — it comforts and nourishes and untangles and clarifies; everything you’ve ever read remains within you in some way, emerging at will when conjured by thoughts or inadvertently when sparked by senses, or simply dwelling in the subconscious deep, dictating actions and ideas without us knowing. But never had a single moment in a piece of literature consumed me so utterly until reading of these gaudy and grotesque riders of Christian reckoning in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Never before had a scene burst before me so completely and distinct in that place where all and everything should be a blurring, a merging, a mixing — in a dream dreamed the very night I finished that passage and set down the book until morning. Or call it a nightmare, as they charged my way, this horde from hell, these men or vaporous beings half-naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed with the skins of animals or pieces of uniform or fragments of Conquistador armor…
Blood Meridian can be difficult to accept. It can halt by exuding supposed pretentiousness for those now expectant of the self-confessional, the colloquial, the excessively contemporary and trending, the translatable, the easily-digestible phrases and references and names and places that don’t test what we are increasingly failing to test — our imaginations — and do little to reveal those hidden links that connect us all with the extended memories of entire cultures and times. And what lurks beneath everything: our emotions. In fear, most choose to skirt above it all, comfortably floating at the surface of existence, distracting themselves rather than descending into their very depths, and accepting, “a feeling for the irregular” (Paul Valéry). Let instead the irregular and the fear it brings seize you in your most vulnerable moments, as only then can you — we — truly understand the power of art.
