What follows is a list of stray words and quotes that I highlighted for my own reasons while reading Blood Meridian a couple years ago. I’m sharing them because their aesthetic value is inherently high but also because, in aggregate their strangeness and desolate aesthetics are enhanced. They also act like luminol on my brain to highlight where the blood is in that particular crime scene. Highlighted text is a psychic roadmap to the soul.
Mindless violence…His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay…there’s no god in Mexico…The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it. Hell ain’t half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Ye’ll wake more than the dogs…
Enshadowed…out of the shallow sandy for into a howling wilderness…prairie wolves…where they’ve gone to hide from God…The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come…ghost army…
The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night…there were no wolves now…They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and- leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing…
They rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses’ trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land on some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear…
The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream…prayed for rain…the thunder and the wind…
Death seemed the most prevalent feature of the landscape…dark little archipelagos of cloud…the uttermost rebate of space…traprock…old storm…Starlight and waning moon made a faint shadow of his wanderings on the dark of the desert and all along the ridges the wolves were howling…deathcamas…terra damnata…prairie vipers…basalt prophets…
When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf…the greater void beyond seemed to swallow up his soul-warrior…twisting in a wind sprung from nowhere…in that emptiness…strange silence…itinerant degenerates…the felon wind…midnight meridian…the fire fled down the wind…invertido…
The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element…As if beyond will or fate he and his beasts and his trappings moved both in card and in substance under consignment to some third and other destiny…The advent of the riders bruited by scurvid curs that howled woundedly and slank among the crumbling walls…Another anchorite, another dawn…
…entered a place where all was darkness without definition…where all the land lay under darkness…blue and faultless void…high pine forest…trembling perimeter of the world…lay in sharp shadowfold…shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor…
…the problematical destruction of darkness…
…by the cries of wolves and providence of night…
…I’ll kill you graveyard dead…
…in the flames where his life had gone…
…like a murdered anchorite discalced in ashes and sark…
…lost in the sun…
…augmented by planes in lurid avatars…down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below…They diminished upon the plain to the west first the sound then the shape of them dissolving in the heat rising off the sand until they were no more than a mote struggling in that hallucinatory void and then nothing at all…
…in sun and in shadow…a bleak and barren caldera…in a condition of half gray dawn…the dark iron shapes of abandoned machinery…
