Enough death to bind a nation

Witnesses to the dawn of modernity in Blood Meridian and River of Shadows

Bandelier National Monument; photo by author

Photography and cinema contributed in large part to the secularization of history, to fixing it in its visible, “objective” form at the expense of the myths that once traversed it. Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.

Forgetting extermination is part of extermination, because it is also the extermination of memory, of history, of the social, etc. This forgetting is as essential as the event, in any case unlocatable by us, inaccessible to us in its truth. —both from Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard

There’s a scene in Blood Meridian. It’s not the best scene or my favorite, but it’s the scene where Cormac McCarthy hands the reader a cheatsheet for his allegorical epic. That’s not to say he makes it easy. The dialogue is in Spanish and you need to know your tarot. A family of circus performers has briefly joined Glanton’s party of demented scalphunters and the patriarch is inviting the men to pick a single card from the tarot deck for a fortune. Jackson, the sole black member of the party, draws The Fool, who symbolizes the everyman proceeding through life’s journey—the protagonist of the tarot reading. Judge Holden explains to Jackson that “in your fortune lie our fortunes all.” This tracks insofar as Jackson’s actions presage and reflect the growing depravity of the party and when they are ultimately themselves killed he’s the first to die.

The judge prompts the juggler to read fortunes for Glanton and the kid. Glanton draws The Chariot, inverted: riot, quarrel, dispute, litigation, defeat, according to A.E. Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot. The kid draws the Four of Cups, which speaks to distraction, obliviousness, and misaligned contemplation. The judge does not draw a card. The judge does not need to know his destiny. The judge is destiny.

As Rebecca Solnit recounts in River of Shadows, Eadward Muybridge undertook four great photographic projects in his life: to document the majesty of Yosemite, the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the U.S. Army’s war against the Modoc Indians of northern California, and, what he’s best known for, the high-speed sequential photos of a horse, other animals, and humans in motion which, when played back, flicker to life in a kind of proto-cinema. In Muybridge, Solnit finds a locus point for the epochal changes that the technological advances of the 19th century inaugurated.

Together, the two books record, in myth and in fact, what was gained and what was lost, and at what cost, as the old world retreated before the advance of modernity.

THE CHARIOT

It seems axiomatic that to build first you must destroy. The ground must be cleared of debris and smoothed out if your structure is to be sturdy. Descartes resorts to the image of a ramshackle city being razed and rebuilt uniform and orderly early in the Discourse on Method as a model for his project of tearing down all his preconceptions and building a new philosophy from the ground up. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein relates the story of Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist at McGill University and proponent of “psychic driving,” who believed that for a patient to make progress first their troubled mind had to be erased back to a blank slate that could then be rewritten with a healthy script; he never succeeded in the rebuilding but the techniques he developed to break patients’ existing minds became the basis for the CIA handbook on torture.

Of our three principals in Blood Meridian—Glanton, the kid, and the judge—Glanton is the least significant and the least interesting. He is essentially a tool wielded by the force of history. Modernity is sweeping westward across the plains on newly laid railroad tracks. Everywhere this march of progress pushes up against intransigent wilderness and human beings who have no intention of stepping out of the way of these thunderous machines bellowing their doom. A man like Glanton is required to exterminate those human beings, to prepare the earth to be flattened and smoothed for the rails.

Glanton leads a party of scalphunters. Ostensibly contracted to kill Apache warriors, they soon lapse into indiscriminate slaughter—old denizens of villages they pass through, women and children, their own injured comrades. Against McCarthy’s exquisite prose describing landscapes overburdened with meaning and spirit, the scenes of carnage are unbearably horrific:

There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives…

McCarthy won’t let us look away. Whatever euphemistic sheen you want to put on it, call it “settling the west,” or “bringing light to a dark continent,” “the march of progress,” “history,” this is what it looked like. A genocide on a scale too large to process, babies pulled from their baskets to die. Entire cultures wiped out, cosmologies obliterated, an infinity of thoughts and emotions and existence prevented from ever coming to being. Utterly erased.

In the days to come the frail black rebuses of blood in those sands would crack and break and drift away so that in the circuit of few suns all trace of the destruction of these people would be erased. The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell to any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died.

And it is people who do this to other people. At times they verge on the demonic, as when McCarthy describes Glanton’s eyes as “glowing centroids of murder.” More than that, though, they seem beings displaced from their proper time. They appear so primitive, they seem less men than primeval golems, stone-age homunculi, antediluvian Nephilim:

They wandered the borderland for weeks seeking some sign of the Apache. Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground them. Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.

Their unstuck-in-timeness matches their function. They are part of the conquest of the west but their work is not dividing the land, it is dividing time. In “leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished,” they are eliminating the past that was and eliminating countless possible futures. With each village burned, with each horrific slaughter, Glanton and his men divide the past and the future and foreclose all possible future worlds where their victims were alive and perhaps historical agents themselves. In leaving only empty lands and bare earth behind them, they erase its history and its identity and write a new future for it, an anonymous future where place is transformed first into land and ultimately into real estate. Glanton and his men seek nothing less than the annihilation of time and space.

No technology ever before had annihilated time and space like that chariot of the nineteenth century, the railway. It had once taken months, and tremendous good fortune, to reach the Pacific Ocean; in the years before the completion of the transcontinental railroad that had been whittled down to six or seven still-grueling weeks. Suddenly, once Leland Stanford hammered in the golden spike to mark its completion, the journey could be made in under a week, in comfort and safety. “No space so vast had ever been shrunk so dramatically,” Solnit writes. “The transcontinental railroad changed the scale of the earth itself, diminishing the time it took to circumnavigate the globe.”

Like Glanton—a creature of pure savagery being conscripted into the cause of order and civilization—the railroad cuts a paradoxical figure. Even as it reshaped the landscape and imposed itself on it, an incarnation of a new technological order, it was an instrument of abstraction. In shrinking the world it served above all the forces of capital. As Marx put it, “Capital must on the one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e., to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market. It strives on the other hand to annihilate this space with time, i.e., to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another.” Solnit continues:

This led to the formation of ever-vaster fortunes and the first modern corporations, even the stock markets whose first major stocks were railroad shares. Capitalism, stocks, corporations, transformed the labor of workers and the materials of the world into that abstraction: profit. Labor and materials were themselves abstracted as the one went into the factory to become a series of simple repetitive gestures rather than an authorship of objects, and the objects themselves came to be bought and used by people more and more remote from the process of their making.

One great tangibility the railroads took from us was time itself, or time-keeping, rather. Before the advent of the railway, every city kept its own time. That is, every city set noon as the moment the sun was at its zenith. Each degree of longitude accounts for about four minutes difference—two cities three degrees apart would be in the same time zone by our standards but would keep their clocks twelve minutes apart. With the transcontinental railroad this became extremely problematic vis-à-vis making sure trains didn’t crash into each other. This problem of time made it apparent the railroad was a single continent-spanning entity that would require continent-wide regulation and homogeneity to manage. “In other words, the railroads comprised a single machine that wrapped the continent in its iron ribbons and wreaths of steam,” Solnit writes. “Regulating that machine to prevent collision meant regulating the nation with the precision of a single clock… In the course of the nineteenth century, time ceased to be a phenomenon that linked humans to the cosmos and became one administered by technicians to link industrial activities to each other.”

Solnit goes so far as to credit the railroad with preparing people for the experience of cinema. She writes:

The railroad had in so many ways changed the real landscape and the human experience of it, had changed the perception of time and space and the nature of vision and embodiment. The sight out the railroad window had prepared viewers for the kinds of vision that cinema would make ordinary; it had adjusted people to a pure visual experience stripped of smell, sound, threat, tactility, and adjusted them to a new speed of encounter, the world rushing by the windows; had taken them farther into that world than they would have ever gone before, broadening many horizons at the same time it made the world a theater of sorts, a spectacle.

But as McCarthy’s terrible descriptions of bloodshed make clear, there is a difference between taking in a spectacle and truly bearing witness.

FOUR OF CUPS

For a book as overtly allegorical as Blood Meridian, I’ve long puzzled over who or what the kid represents. A violent runaway of no particular distinction, he disappears for long stretches of the narrative, absorbed anonymously into the mass of the Glanton’s gang. He is nonetheless always the character we are following. When the party draws straws to decide who stays behind a bit to kill their injured comrades rather than leave them to the pursuing Apaches and the kid is chosen, we stay with him until he manages to rejoin them. There is only one section of the book where we explicitly part ways with the kid, when we follow Glanton’s lieutenant Brown on an excursion while the rest of the party occupies the ferry crossing late in the story. When Brown returns it is clear things have gone very wrong, have taken a turn toward limits of depravity even these men cannot tolerate. As readers we are never given to know what happened in Brown’s absence, but the kid knows.

He doesn’t look like much, but the judge recognizes him immediately. The judge recognizes him as his witness.

Throughout the book the judge returns to two obsessions: tertium quid—a third thing, a third aspect of man—and witnesses. The judge believes that for anything to attain solid factual reality a witness is required. In a crucial moment, the hunting party comes upon the ruins of a wagon train that was set upon by raiders and everyone killed. They happen upon this scene spontaneously, following neither the track of the killers or the victims, a third path. Tobin, the expriest, asks

if some might not see the hand of a cynical god conducting with what austerity and what mock surprise so lethal a congruence. The posting of witnesses by a third and other path altogether might also be called in evidence as appearing to beggar chance, yet the judge, who had put his horse forward until he was abreast of the speculants, said that in this was expressed the very nature of the witness and that his proximity was no third thing but rather the prime, for what could be said to occur unobserved?

This is a fascinating admission from the judge because it makes the kid more essential to his project than he is himself. The judge’s project is the remaking of the world. But this remaking is worth nothing at all without a vessel in which each moment of the process can be recorded. The kid is a flawed vessel—he never seems to understand that he is witnessing more than slaughter, that he is witnessing the passing of an age.

When he and Tobin escape the judge and make it back to civilization he is immediately arrested, upon which “he began to speak with a strange urgency of things few men have seen in a lifetime and his jailers said that his mind had come uncottered by the acts of blood in which he had participated.” In the morning the judge is outside his cell. The kid asks what he told his jailers. The judge replies:

Told them the truth. That you were the person responsible. Not that we have all the details. But they understand that it was you and none other who shaped events along such a calamitous course. Eventuating in the massacre at the ford by the savages with whom you conspired. Means and ends are of little moment here. Idle speculations. But even though you carry the draft of your murderous plan with you to the grave it will nonetheless be known in all its infamy to your Maker and as that is so so shall it be made known to the least of men. All in the fullness of time.

The judge lies every moment but he also speaks the truth every moment. As the witness burdened to carry the knowledge the judge holds the kid as the person responsible. That is the truth as he sees it, where the witness is not the third thing but the prime. Means and ends are genuinely mixed up here—the kid, and the rest of the scalphunters, were clearly the means to the end of genocide. But the role of witness turns all this on its head—now the judge has become the means, the means to the end of that hideous knowledge attaining concrete existence in the kid. The world is being remade, the Indians are really being killed, but it’s a truth of such a nature that it must be held in the mind to be real.

The Four of Cups speaks to misplaced attention. The kid cannot see past the bodies on the sand to see that he travels in the hideous presence of an avatar of modernity that is ushering in a new age of abstraction, falsity, and impersonality, an age where the presence of the divine that screams from the landscape will be muted beneath the roar of machines and people in constant motion. At the very end of the book, after years and years have passed, the kid and judge encounter each other again. The judge calls them the last of the true. The judge says, “I recognized you when I first saw you and yet you were a disappointment to me. Then and now. Even so at the last I find you here with me.” As way of saying the judge can’t intimidate him anymore, the kid tells him he’s “been everwhere. This is just one more place.” The judge asks in return,

Did you post witnesses? To report to you on the continuing existence of those places once you’d quit them? Where is yesterday? Where is Glanton and Brown and where is the priest? Where is Shelby, whom you left to the mercies of Elias in the desert, and where is Tate whom you abandoned in the mountains? Where are the ladies, ah the fair and tender ladies with whom you danced at the governor’s ball when you were a hero anointed with the blood of the enemies of the republic you’d elected to defend? And where is the fiddler and where is the dance?

Where indeed is yesterday? The past is a place we are constantly vacating. Only our memory stands as witness that it was ever real. My son is three years old. He is a tiny individual, with a full personality and a sense of humor and specific interests. He will never remember being who he is right now. All these days of playing and reading and crying will be utterly lost to him. It will be me and Liz who will be able to remember these days, who will be able to testify to the ways, as McCarthy puts it on the first page of the novel, the child was the father of the man.

The kid never understands he is a witness posted, a witness posted to report on the continuing existence of the slaughter of the Gilenos, on the continuing existence of the division of past and future they committed.

But that is no matter. The cup need not understand what fills it. Earlier, much earlier, the judge speaks with a Mexican military officer in spanish about Jackson and delivers a long disquisition about on the nature of race, with reference to the children of Ham and the lost tribes of the Israelites and other classical sources. Jackson gets angry when the judge won’t translate it all back to him. The judge:

It is not necessary that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts—to the extent that they can be made to do so—should find a repository in the witness of some third party… Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.

The kid, Jackson, the sergeant, all are doomed to act in a way that will accommodate history with or without their understanding. They are only witnesses, onlookers to the great movement of history, but they are somehow implicated. A friend recently shared with me a line of Sartre’s that goes, “We do not do what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are—that is the fact.” This is exactly the hell the judge damns us to. We have no power to choose anything but the guilt for all the evils of the world falls at our feet.

Like the kid, Muybridge is often ancillary to Solnit’s interests in River of Shadows. The book’s best chapter, Lost River, documents the U.S. Army’s campaign against the Modoc Indians of northern California, of which Muybridge was the official photographer. Early on, Solnit writes:

There are things that are hard to photograph: guerrilla warfare, the end of an era, the meaning of a place. And there are things it is nearly impossible to photograph: the subtle workings of the human heart, the wandering paths desire and fury take, the bonds of love and blood that tie people together, the decisions that tear them apart, the way that the most unprepossessing landscape can become home and thus speak of stories, traditions, gods that strangers cannot decipher from the rocks and streams.

By and large what we have of Muybridge are his photographs. The man himself is harder to parse, except through the photographs. From what we can gather there, he was ideologically uncommitted. As an English immigrant, he seems not to have gone in for the same American triumphalism as many of his peers. Where they photographed Yosemite still, stately, and well lit, Muybridge photographed chaotically, the work showing “a strange attraction to debris, to piles of rocks, tangles of dead branches, fallen trees, to a foreground of chaos.”

The inexorable march of progress in the wilderness didn’t seem to engage Muybridge. His figures are not new to the landscape, not conquering it, not standing in for the public, for America, for the rational mind. They are obscure, not connected to each other, not connected to any practical purpose. And in this obscurity lies the great rift between Muybridge, the emigrant who was never naturalized, and his American peers.

In Yosemite Muybridge did something else the other photographers swarming the valley weren’t: he photographed the daily life of the Miwok-Paiute people who lived there. He insisted on using the Miwok place names in the titles of his photographs, “Thus Bridalveil Falls is, in his version, Pohono (Spirit of the Wind) and the triple peaks of the Three Brothers are instead The Pompons (Jumping Frogs).” So Muybridge documented the Modoc War without excitement, without bloodlust, without providing justification.

The Modoc people believed they lived at the center of the world, at the foot of the seat of their creator. That seat was “the peninsular bluff on the southeast shore of Tule Lake,” Solnit writes. “Around its base are more than five thousand petroglyphs of human and animal figures, of celestial bodies, circles, lines, and zigzags incised in the pale stone, an alphabet of images hard to read now.” When soldiers arrived to force them away from that place it was in a very real way the end of the world for them. Modernity had insinuated itself gradually into the lives of Europeans and white Americans; it fell upon Indigenous populations in one great crash that felt like the apocalypse.

Apocalyptic feelings were common among Native Americans at that point in the 1870s. In 1869 or 1870 a Paiute prophet named Wodzibob began to preach the Ghost Dance, claiming that the Native dead were returning and white people would be obliterated. The Ghost Dance would roll back the clock years, decades, centuries, to restore the lost world before colonization. Solnit calls the Ghost Dance a technology:

Literally, a technology is a systematic practice or knowledge of an art, and though we almost always apply the term to the scientific and mechanical, there is no reason not to apply it to other human-made techniques for producing desired results. Maybe the best definition would be: A technology is a practice, a technique, or a device for altering the world or the experience of the world. To propose annihilating the inexorable march of history and the irreversibility of death was to propose a technology as ambitious as a moon walk or a gene splice.

Solnit awards photography two epithets: on page 14 she calls it a technology of interpretation; on page 116 she calls it a technology of grief. Perhaps all religious doctrines are technologies of both interpretation and grief. Of the way photography fused the two, she writes:

Before, every face, every place, every event, had been unique, seen only once and then lost forever among the changes of age, light, time. The past existed only in memory and interpretation, and the world beyond one’s own experience was mostly stories… Every photograph was a moment snatched from the river of time. Every photograph was a piece of evidence from the event itself, a material witness… Soon countless thousands were lining up to possess images of themselves, their families, their dead children, to own the past.

Time itself was becoming the enemy, to whites and Native people alike. It was moving too quickly, no one could get their hands on it. Time was outpacing everyone and no one could catch their breath. Solnit relates a story of a battle Sitting Bull fought in 1872 against soldiers protecting the construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In the middle of the battle he put down his weapons and sat down to smoke his pipe. Two Oglalas and two Cheyennes joined him. Solnit sees in this gesture a powerful desire for reprieve, for it all just to stop for a moment. “Perhaps in that interval they had time to see the grass clearly, to look at the sky, to think about where they stood, in landscape as well as in history, to remember their lifetimes of roaming across such grasslands, fording rivers, following buffalo, of living in what then seemed to be the cyclical time of the seasons before the linear time of history caught up with them.” Describing Jane Stanford’s fascination with spiritualism following her son’s death at fifteen, Solnit groups it in with photography and the Ghost Dance, all three technologies meant “for defeating the trauma of time itself.”

And so, Muybridge photographed the Modoc War.

His Modoc pictures are not great expressive works of art; what is important in them is his act of witness and how it connects this history to the other histories he was tied to: the transformation of a world of presences into a world of images… There are at most two or three speakers of the Modoc language left in the world, and a language is itself a world, creating distinctions and connections, describing time, kinship, place in a unique way. Does something have to come to an end for something else to be born? Did the Modocs make way not only for settlers and miners, but for a new idea of California? Was there room for both a world with a center and California as the center of technological and cultural innovation, or did the latter require a kind of decenteredness and the annihilation of what had come before? To ask this is to ask if there could have been another history, a parallel universe—but the history we have is the history in which the center was uprooted and the machines evolved.

THE LEVIATHAN

Judge Holden is called the devil early and often. During his first appearance on page 7 of Blood Meridian, the reverend he slanders as a sexual deviant sobs, “This is him. The devil. Here he stands.” Tobin, the expriest, describes him as a “sootysouled rascal” in the course of the story he tells about the hunting party finding the judge in the desert and him leading them up a volcano to make gunpowder out of saltpetre and sulphur. There is something infernal to the judge—he is a trickster and a tempter and a riddler—but he is not the devil. As I’ve already said at this point, he is modernity itself—legalized, abstracted, more interested in appearances than realities. If there is something infernal about the judge it’s because there is something infernal about the modern world.

I imagine it’s not uncommon to read the judge as an incarnation of civilization. What my analysis argues is that he represents civilization in its modern, capitalist flowering, in which things in themselves are melting away into amorphous categories. Solnit quotes the visual theorist Jonathan Crary, who writes, “Modernization is the process by which capitalism uproots and makes mobile that which is grounded, clears away or obliterates that which impedes circulation, and makes exchangeable that which is singular.” Glanton is hunting Indian scalps, the judge is hunting a pure commodity.

For as much as the judge might resemble Satan he is also Adam gone mad with power. The judge claims dominion not only over the existence of the earth and its creatures but every action and every occurrence thereof. “This is my claim,” he says after placing his hands on the ground. “And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.”

“Whatever exists,” he says just before, “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” In this scene he is sketching birds, not birds on a branch but birds he has shot and stuffed. The judge preserves everything he encounters as knowledge, but the thing itself must be destroyed.

Earlier, they make camp in a canyon lined with Anasazi cliff dwellings. This is one of several critical moments when McCarthy switches from typical past-tense narration to the present to describe an aspect of the judge, as if to suggest his timelessness. The judge wasn’t a good draftsman in 1849, he is a good draftsman, now and forever.

The judge all day had made small forays among the rocks of the gorge through which they'd passed and now at the fire he spread part of a wagonsheet on the ground and was sorting out his finds and arranging them before him. In his lap he held the leather ledgerbook and he took up each piece, flint or potsherd or tool of bone, and deftly sketched it into the book. He sketched with a practiced ease and there was no wrinkling of that bald brow or pursing of those oddly childish lips. His fingers traced the impression of old willow wicker on a piece of pottery clay and he put this into his book with nice shadings, an, economy of pencil strokes. He is a draftsman as he is other things, well sufficient to the task. He looks up from time to time at the fire or at his companions in arms or at the night beyond. Lastly he set before him the footpiece from a suit of armor hammered out in a shop in Toledo three centuries before, a small steel tapadero frail and shelled with rot. This the judge sketched in profile and in perspective, citing the dimensions in his neat script, making marginal notes.

Glanton watched him. When he had done he took up the little footguard and turned it in his hand and studied it again and then he crushed it into a ball of foil and pitched it into the fire. He gathered up the other artifacts and cast them also into the fire and he shook out the wagonsheet and folded it away among his possibles together with the notebook. Then he sat with his hands cupped in his lap and he seemed much satisfied with the world, as if his counsel had been sought at its creation.

A Tennessean named Webster had been watching him and he asked the judge what he aimed to do with those notes and sketches and the judge smiled and said that it was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man.

It is important to have a record of the past, but it is essential the real thing be lost from living memory, with only the record to take its place. Modernization is the process of exchanging the real for the abstract. This was a process that most welcomed. Describing audiences in 1822 flocking to Daguerre’s dioramas of a church they could have visited in actuality, Solnit writes, “This is one of the great enigmas of modern life: why the representation of a thing can fascinate those who would ignore the original.”

The judge is a mountain of a man. He is pale, completely hairless, “close on to seven feet tall.” Tobin puts his weight at 24 stone, which is 336 pounds. He resembles, from a certain angle, that great leviathan of the sea, Moby Dick. But he is not a dumb beast. He is the leviathan of Hobbes, the modern state. The judge binds men together. His presence establishes an unspoken social contract that Glanton’s never could. And he marshals all his legal knowledge in service of their awful project. In one scene he cites Anaximander and Thales to keep Glanton from being arrested and to maintain their ability to kill indiscriminately. The state is that which holds a monopoly on violence.

The state is horrible but it gathers men to it because the state of nature is worse. The state absorbs people and holds them tight. In the final pages of the book, when the judge finally kills the kid, the judge waits for the kid in the outhouse. “He was naked and he rose smiling and gathered him in his against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him.” Of all the ways for the judge to go about it, he chooses to pull the kid in close, to squeeze him to death against himself. Like Hobbes’ leviathan, the judge is made of all the men he pulled into his orbit and never let go.

Putting forward this reading to the friend who gave me the Sartre quote, he asked me, “Why, then, is the judge a pedophile?” Easy. Even as modernity wipes away the past for tidy recording in a notebook it also preys on the future. Modernity cannot resist the new and the young and it cannot resist killing what it craves so badly. The modern world was built by mortgaging the future to pay for the present. The great orgy of expansion and industry ate up the world and swallowed the bones. Of this phenomenon, Solnit writes

The late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries were… an era of rapacious exploitation, though to recite its particulars is to invoke an almost alchemical transformation from wildness to citified commodities. The beaver of the North American West went first, those dammers of rivers turned into felt top hats for city gentlemen. The gold of the California motherlode went afterward, the secret contents of streams and fossil rivers turned into money in the days when money was still a material medium rather than only numbers in an account or guarantees on paper. The whaling industry turned those titans of the seas into lamp oil for parlors and whalebone for corsets and brought them close to extinction, at least until 1870, when Rockefeller founded Standard Oil and began to pump out the black residue of the Jurassic past in unprecedented quantities. The forests of the nation were being pitched into the boilers of locomotives and smelters of ore, were becoming churches and rocking chairs and crates… Organic material is usually harvested so that it renews itself year after year, but in the nineteenth century the industrialized world began mining this material—passenger pigeons, bison, beaver, whales, forests, into extinction or near-extinction.

Nothing illustrates this like the slaughter of the buffalo. The buffalo were integral to the lives of the Plains Indian tribes who were resisting westward expansion most strongly and whom the government wanted crushed and reservationized. It was decided that annihilating the buffalo would be a helpful assist in doing so. And so, the slaughter began. From an unfathomable number—a train once ran for 120 miles through a single herd—about a million buffalo a year were killed.

Buffalo skeletons piled up into mountains, and these bones were later converted into fertilizer and other industrial products, though most parts of the dead animals were left to rot on the prairie… They had been killed for sport, for food for the railroad builders, and for hides to ship east. The unromantic destiny of most of those hides was factories. Before rubberized drive belts, the belts that drove the Industrial Revolution’s factories were made of leather, and buffalo hide was thick and durable. The roaming bison herds were being transformed into the relentless churning of machines serving the cash economy.

At the top of Blood Meridian’s final chapter, the kid meets an old buffalo hunter.

The hunter shared tobacco with him and told him of the buffalo and the stands he'd made against them, laid up in a sag on some rise with the dead animals scattered over the grounds and the herd beginning to mill and the riflebarrel so hot the wiping patches sizzled in the bore and the animals by the thousands and tens of thousands and the hides pegged out over actual square miles of ground and the teams of skinners spelling one another around the clock and the shooting and shooting weeks and months till the bore shot slick and the stock shot loose at the tang and their shoulders were yellow and blue to the elbow and the tandem wagons groaned away over the prairie twenty and twenty-two ox teams and the flint hides by the ton and hundred ton and the meat rotting on the ground and the air whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror of snarling and feeding with the wolves half crazed and wallowing in the carrion.

I seen Studebaker wagons with six and eight ox teams headed out for the grounds not haulin a thing but lead. Just pure galena. Tons of it. On this ground alone between the Arkansas River and the Concho there was eight million carcasses for that's how many hides reached the railhead. 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.

The ragged sparks blew down the wind. The prairie about them lay silent. Beyond the fire it was cold and the night was clear and the stars were falling. The old hunter pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there's other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one.

A couple weeks ago we drove up from our home in Santa Fe for a family trip to Bandelier National Monument. At Bandelier are the Anasazi cliff dwellings, by all accounts the exact place where the scalphunters camped and the judge sketched and expunged those artifacts from the memory of man. It is monumental country, a psychotic mix of great mesa plateaus fissured by canyons that drop hundreds of feet sheer. It is all so massive and it goes on and on and you can see for miles, can see more landscape than seems should be possible. The eye rebels at the scale of it. Just to approach the site is overwhelming.

The roads diverge eventually but at first driving to Bandelier is the same as driving toward Los Alamos and its National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb and still one of the region’s major employers. As we climbed through scrubby pine toward the Monument, we passed the huge dish of an astronomical observatory, New Mexico’s night skies offering some of the darkest, best stargazing in the country. We passed two Los Alamos installations, LANL Tech Stations 39 and 33. I thought about the Trinity test and I thought about Robert Oppenheimer and how deeply haunted he appeared in later years. I thought about how profoundly he carried the weight of the responsibility for that great advancement in annihilation.

The Anasazi were an ancient people. The caves were long-empty before any Navajo or Apache happened upon them. The judge calls them the old ones.

They quit these parts, routed by drought or disease or by wandering bands of marauders, quit these parts ages since and of them there is no memory. They are rumors and ghosts in this land and they are much revered. The tools, the art, the building—these things stand in judgement on the latter races. Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with. The old ones are gone like phantoms and the savages wander these canyons to the sound of an ancient laughter. In their crude huts they crouch in darkness and listen to the fear seeping out of the rock. All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone.

Bandelier is an asymmetric canyon, with one side edged by sheer cliff of a curious pocked stone. The cliff dwellings were started by nature, the Anasazi only elaborated a plan innate to the rock. This side of the canyon is open, with little tree cover. On the other side, heading toward a gentler rise, rich evergreen forest flourishes. The canyon is an ecotone, a zone where several ecosystems meet and mingle, which would have made it a fruitful place to live.

The cement path at Bandelier is poorly maintained. It frequently lapses into sand through which I would have to push my son in his stroller. We passed the kiva, once a structure of civic and perhaps religious significance, now a great, perfectly round pit descending ten or twelve feet. It was very hot that day and we were well sunscreened.

We arrived at the cliff dwellings. Inside and on the cliff wall surrounding the doorways are carved petroglyphs: faces, zigzags, one that’s purported to be a parrot but looks very much like a dinosaur. It is a self-evidently sacred place. I felt the spirit entombed in the stone. There are several dwellings with ladders that the public is allowed to go inside. That day there was a line for each of these fifteen or twenty people long, each of whom was taking their turn sitting in the entrance and getting their picture taken; none seemed to look inside.

As we passed by them and descended into the pines for the loop back I drank from my water bottle freely, wastefully. I thought about the scene in Blood Meridian where the kid, nearly dead of thirst, is given a canteen by a stranger and drinks past when he’s told to stop, gulps until the canteen is kicked from his hands. I thought about what that would be like. I thought about how I have never worried I would not be able to refill my water bottle.

We completed our loop and went to the restaurant for lunch. From where we sat outside we could look up at the cliff-face and the myriad pockmarks forever waiting to be expanded and lived in by a people never to return. I felt the immensity of time and was crushed by it. I looked at my beautiful, perfect son and I thought about the Delaware bashing those babies’ brains out. I thought about how fragile everything we hold dear is and how determined we are not to believe it.

I thought about the buffalo. I thought about all the animals that have gone extinct in the time since. I thought about the old buffalo hunter and his last question. I wonder if there’s other worlds like this. Or if this is the only one. That futile hope, realized too late, that there might be somewhere else out there in the universe where he and those like him made other choices, had written a different history, and the buffalo been allowed to live.

I thought about all the worlds that we have destroyed. All the cultures and languages and traditions that were wiped out just because. Just because people are afraid of difference, are incurious, stand to profit by it. I thought about the world we have made, this nightmarish hell of the judge’s devising—maximally pedantic, minimally compassionate, where laws have the incantatory power to nullify the most self-evident claims of morality. A world made of money for those lucky few and made of struggle for the rest of us.

I thought about all the people destroyed and the suffering inflicted to bring this fallen world so low. I thought about the estimated 100,000-150,000 human beings subjected to imprisonment and torture in Chile and Argentina in order to impose neoliberalism on the world. I thought about Gaza. I thought about unknowable number of children killed and maimed by the state of Israel in the last two years. I thought about all the rest of us, lucky enough to still be alive, forced to bear witness endlessly, apparently somehow responsible despite our powerlessness. I wondered where the grief goes, when there aren’t enough people to hold it all.

And then I came back to myself, there at that table with my wife and son. We gathered our trash and walked back to our car and drove home. We made great time.