The Passenger & Stella Maris: The Prophecies of the Bleakest Seer
The late art critic Peter Schejdahl once wrote a piece about an art show that starts with his observation of autumn in New York:
“I was riveted especially by a heartbreaking little trick nature plays with trees whose leaves turn pale yellow. Seen from afar when an exact mix of yellow and late-summer sullen green is reached, the trees are ringers for trees in springtime, alight with the tender green of May. So in the moment before its extinction the landscape flashes this illusion of new life, which you could say either mocks hope or holds out consoling promise.”
He wrote about the illusion of life before the extinction, the speck of rot behind all living things. Lately this is what I have been thinking about when reading The Passenger and Stella Maris, the new released books by Cormac McCarthy after sixteen years.
Except that it is the opposite.
McCarthy’s subjects are familiar in the dark and discomforting realms of the human nature: its atrocity and deformity, the alienation, the true horror of death, the sure corruption of all things in a world in which everything appears broken. They have diffused all of his body of works, not excluding these ones.
But The Passenger and Stella Maris flashes the illusion of despair and death, when in fact it is also about hope and light. This interpretation might be a product of a naïve faith, but I am for grasping metaphors whenever possible, even just scraps of them.
I found myself actually riveted by the tricks that he plays in these two books. After all, seeing this as a book about hope and light might be something that might come as a confrontation, when the story deals with an impossible love interrupted by suicide, and with the fact that humans knowledge and intelligence was used to create weapons that could destroy all life on earth, in the background of the awfulness of World War II.
I had to pause when coming across a line that evokes the landscape of the nuclear bombing: “Two. One. Zero. Then the sudden whited meridian.”
Only McCarthy can deliver something so horrific and terrifying in just one line, it is as if he demands a precision of language for horror beyond comprehension.
James Wood called this literary style in two terms: afflatus and deflatus modes. We see this contrast through the way he wrote most of the scenes in deflatus mode — short, exhausted, denuded, desert-like.
And then in contrast, we came to a whole page description of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing in afflatus mode, with the string of words that build up like a crescendo towards a sublime yet terrifying landscape, as if you are in the presence of a divine wrath: “In that mycodial phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do stood a truth that would silence poetry for a thousand years.”
I kept thinking about what exactly drew me to his works, especially this pair. The first time I was introduced to McCarthy’s scriptural, post apocalyptic masterpiece, The Road, I felt almost discouraged. Somehow it felt too exahausting to take in so much darkness. Suddenly it felt too dangerous to play the game that he played — delving into a world of anesthetic, featureless black.
But I think part of what draws me to him would be because of the idea that the darkness itself is not the point, but rather a byproduct of confronting the human condition in an uncompromising way.
It is his effort to ponder and to try to penetrate the deepest metaphysical questions, probably for the last time: here he is staring straight into the abyss that he sees with undulated clarity, refusing to step back.
Reading these books was a peculiar experience, it simultaneously felt completely profound and also impenetrable. I came out of it with my perception thoroughly on the fritz, tending towards some kind of mourning that could not be explained.
The book focuses on a pair of siblings Bobby and Alicia Western, the children of a physicist who worked for the Manhattan project under the leadership of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
The legacies of their father’s works hung over them like a vaporous mushroom cloud: the grisly war that forever alters the humans’ course and what it says about the corrupting power of knowledge, and violence inherent in mankind.
Bobby, who dropped out of his doctorate physics study, got into a coma after a racing accident. Upon knowing this, Alicia committed herself to a psychiatric house called Stella Maris before finally committing suicide.
The Passenger told a story in the aftermath of Alicia’s suicide when Bobby woke up from his coma several years later. We also got glimpses of Alicia’s life through pages of her encounters with her hallucinations as the result of her schizophrenic episodes.
We follow Bobby as he navigates the world through his grief. We met characters whose scrutinized perceptions of the world is bleak and hideous from the start, except for John Sheddan whose vigor in friendship and literature as a antidote to despair, carried him to the end.
Mathematics, Language, and Meaning
Across all of McCarthy’s works, different characters took on different approaches to arrive at something, to create meaning and coherence amidst the doom-laden, nihilistic vision of their lives.
‘Is God a mathematician?’ was Alicia’s question. An attempt for meaning, for making sense of the world, I think, stems from this very question.
What can mathematics tell us about the ‘absolute truth’, about the existence of some kind of grand design — a meaning? This is why I think we were introduced to Bobby and Alicia Western, not as anything else, but as a physicist and mathematician with immeasurable intelligence.
The central idea behind this question has been explored among physicists and mathematicians, quoting James Jeans: “The universe appears to have been designed by a pure mathematician.”
This recalls to one of the best conversations I’ve had in a theistic discussion about exact and universal pattern of the universe, its deep and elegant mathematical structure that appears across space and time. If the atheistic question was to be imposed, why then mathematics appear to have an almost omnipresent power to explain precisely not only the at cosmic level, but also the smallest or the most chaotic of human enterprises?
Why then it points to the existence of a divine designer?
An example phenomenon shows that “the state of agitated motion exhibited by tiny particles such as pollen suspended in water or smoke particles in the air, the same equation also applies to the motion of hundreds of thousand of star clusters”.
In the end, however, this is also the very reason why Bobby abandoned this field and chose to become a race car driver. He was asked whether he really believed in physics, he only remarked that “physics tries to draw a numerical picture of the world. I don’t know that it actually explains anything.”
If everything was designed so precisely, surely there must be something that could explain the meaning behind all of this — our own very existence? But why, despite their intelligence, they fail to understand whether it means anything at all?
What then does it say, about the seeming randomness of the horrors that humans face, the senseless suffering? And when they can’t find any answer, they fall into an “awareness indistinguishable from despair”.
The Kid, a persistent figure that appeared in Alicia’s hallucination put this perfectly:
“You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world. As you close upon the mathematical description of reality, you cannot help but lose what is being described. In spite of everything that you’ve read, some things really don’t have a number. But it’s worse that that. Some things don’t have a designation at all.”
It seems that absolute truth is not words, it is number through and through. McCarthy is saying that intelligence is numbers, that language and words are “latecomer to truth”.
He explains this in length through his non-fiction essay called The Kelule Problem: The reason why the unconscious so loathe to speak to us is because the unconscious is not a linguistic phenomenon. “It is mostly silent even resistant to language, imperceptible and non-verbal, impervious to the babble of interior life.”
Language itself is secondhandedness at its core. Our own attempt to use it as a tool to make sense of the world is inaccessible, because it mutilates reality, that our deepest metaphysical experiences and thought cannot be reduced to linguistic utterances.
The idea that there is a gap that cannot be crossed between reality and language is one that, I think, still haunts McCarthy. Alicia once said that “God is not interested in out theology, only in our silence.”
However, I found myself believing it. What I mean is that I felt like language wasn’t enough to describe some of the most significant experiences that I had. Earlier this year, as I was looking at the seascape before me with its deepest shade of blue, the light spills through the waters with a flock of birds in flight above the clouds.
I began to realize that there is no language large enough to describe such experience that I could only come up with silence — not the kind that’s empty or devoid of meaning, but silence that feels right because it tells me that: this is it, whatever it is. And this is only one of the many examples of how much of our experiences as humans are not penetrable by linguistic capacities.
In Hermeneutics, what humans come up with language is not the reality itself, but interpretation of realities, to which McCarthy famously said: a mystery, opaque to total blackness.
Somehow it reminds me of what poet Ocean Vuong once said about having the ability to ‘articulate the world that we want to live in first.’ And that is why I think despite everything, I do believe that language and words really do have a redemptive power.
As Vuong walked around the New York City in the aftermath of his uncle’s death, he contemplated on what is the linguistic existence of a ‘fire escape’, something that allows us access to get out of despair. He concluded that every book and every poem was an attempt to articulating a fire escape — an architecture of resistance, but above all, hope.
Light
It is easy to see this pair of books as McCarthy’s extension of his bleak worldview that nothing matters will survive under the pitiless sun — that in the end, ‘truths’ (be it mathematics or language) will be obliterated into a godless void that awaits us.
I really didn’t know what to expect, I think I just wanted him to tell me the truth about the world, after sixteen years or even decades of his life-long work: Here, here is the truth about the world. But the truth is this impenetrable abyss.
But I found myself kept going back to this little light that he let us in and reveal, even though only in small doses.
McCarthy’s characters, despite being bashed against these extrinsic forces, crawling their way to find a center that could hold them — I would argue that they are not without hope.
In Stella Maris, we came to an understanding that Alicia has extreme suicidal tendencies, she went on describing a lengthy explanation to his psychiatrist that drowning as a suicide mode was the least preferred one.
She wanted the quickest way to go and nobody would ever find her, it would be as if she never existed in the first place.
However, McCarthy decides to open the very first page of The Passenger with Alicia’s death as she dressed in white with a bright red sash tied around her against the white of the snow — “a bit of color in the scruplous desolation.” And then the man who found her kneeled and said a prayer.
What does it tell us that despite what she believed in, it is as if she actually wanted to be found.
In my mind, it meant something when McCarthy starts the story with someone actually finding her and then kneel to pray for her — almost indicating his intention that creeps towards theological faith in the world to come.
As I’m writing this, I have been listening religiously to Del Rey’s new released album, particularly this song called “Let the Light In”. Somehow, as I listen to it, I kept going back to what Alicia said when she spent time with Bobby on the beach.
Earlier in the book, Bobby went to their grandmother’s house as the memories of the better years hit him with extreme nostalgia and sadness for his dead sister, he said “I’m sorry baby it’s all just darkness. I’m sorry.”
However, McCarthy wrote this poignant scene at the beach when they were both talking about the mock moon and paraselene, and I think, despite of their or even our beliefs that half of the universe is composed of darkness, I kept what Alicia said close to my heart:
“to speak of such things which are composed solely of light as problematic, or perhaps as wrongly seen, or even wrongly known, or of questionable reality, had always seemed to me something of a betrayal. Things composed of light. In need of our protection.”
Then in the morning I sat in the sand and watch the sun come up.
