Xavier Ray > Recent Status Updates

Glanton’s reverie feels like the soul of Blood Meridian distilled, a man so emptied by violence that he mistakes his will for the motion of the cosmos His “charter written in the urstone” is the final illusion: that human agency is carved into the bedrock of creation. He turns the Western into a study of modernity itself, of how the will to conquer becomes indistinguishable from the forces of entropy it serves.

Great amazing stunning book

Just wow! I sometimes don’t know what to say next. Certainly unlike anything I’ve ever read. I’m bewildered in the best way

• Cosmologically, the “Gondwanaland” reference situates this in geological time — a reminder that human cruelty is just one flicker in the earth’s endless self-reorganization.

It’s not just that these men are “like ancient monsters.” It’s that in McCarthy’s vision, they are precisely what the universe has always been doing — consuming, dissolving, reforming, without end or purpose.

This paragraph telescopes the entire novel’s philosophical project into one image:
• Historically, we are watching a band of scalp hunters move through the desert.
• Mythically, we are watching the reanimation of primordial forces, violence and hunger, that predate humanity.
• Ontologically, we are witnessing the erasure of individuation: human beings reverting to mineral process, motion without meaning.

McCarthy is showing us what happens when the categories that define the human — self, purpose, language, moral difference — are obliterated. What remains is an entropic field where being simply circulates through endless permutations of dust, flesh, and rock.

“And each was all.” — total erasure of distinction. Each rider is all riders, each atom is all matter. This is ontological monism — the idea that all multiplicity is illusion, that everything is one substance — but rendered not as mystic unity, rather as terrifying sameness.

“…in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.”

Here he reaches the sentence’s philosophical apex.

“Before nomenclature was” — before naming, before the word “was made flesh.” The line evokes Genesis reversed: the undoing of language, the collapse of differentiation.

“Gondwanaland” — a brilliant geological insertion. Gondwanaland was the southern supercontinent from hundreds of millions of years ago. By naming it, McCarthy drags the scene beyond history into deep time — pre-human, pre-language, pre-consciousness.

This is his geological sublime: history folds back into prehistory; human cruelty becomes a faint repetition of ancient, mineral violence.

“Ravenous and doomed and mute” — appetite, fate, and silence — the three properties of all living things in McCarthy’s cosmology. They hunger, they perish, they do not speak.

“As gorgons” — monstrous figures whose gaze turns others to stone — here inverted: these are men turned out of stone. The myth reverses itself.

“…to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland…”

The verbs and nouns here are evolutionary — “wander,” “shambling” — locomotion without direction, an ancient groping through the void.

McCarthy collapses human ontology into flat geology: form without consciousness, motion without volition.

“At no remove from their own loomings” — “loomings” suggests both their shadows and their emergent shapes in the heat shimmer. To be at “no remove” is to be inseparable from one’s projection — to have no inner life, no distance between being and appearance. They are surface only — beings without interiority, pure phenomenon.

“Set nameless” — they exist before the invention of language. To be nameless here isn’t about anonymity; it’s about ontological absence — existence without differentiation, pure being without the taxonomies that language brings.

“Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and…”

“Provoked out of the absolute rock” — “provoked” suggests both conjured and angered. These are not travelers in the desert but generated by it. The rock “provokes” them as if violence itself were a geological secretion. “Absolute rock” — the base material of creation, the unyielding substance of the planet before life.

“Primal, provisional, devoid of order” —“Primal” returns them to a prehuman impulse. “Provisional” implies impermanence, as though even their existence is temporary, subject to recall by the earth. “Devoid of order” finally cancels all hierarchy, reason, or teleology.

This is McCarthy showing us a post-human anthropology: the men as matter moving under the laws of entropy, not morality.

“Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order.”

“At venture” means at hazard — driven by chance, ungoverned by purpose.
They are not explorers or soldiers; they are pure vector, stripped of intent.

“Anonymous in the crenellated heat” — the air itself wavers into architecture, building and dissolving illusions in the same motion. The men vanish into that shimmer — identity liquefying into light.

(Goodreads note: A vision of men so absorbed by the desert that they cease to be subjects at all — reduced to pure phenomenon, to matter trembling in heat.)

“Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat.”

McCarthy fuses perception and mirage in one line. “Spectre horsemen” — already ghosts of themselves, erased as they are described. “Pale with dust” — drained of blood, indistinct from the terrain, dust as the visible residue of the earth’s own decay.

“Ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world” – They are ordained (almost consecrated) to embody reality’s own violent process of separation: dividing life from death, light from dark, creation from destruction. They’re like instruments of entropy, the world’s own agents of division.

It’s one of those moments where the book briefly stops being a Western and becomes something metaphysical — describing not men riding, but the movement of annihilation itself through time and space.

McCarthy’s saying that Glanton’s company isn’t just wandering through the desert — they’re erasing it. Wherever they go, nothing remains: no trace of what was, and no potential for what could be. They are, in a cosmic sense, the agents of pure negation.

The Glanton gang’s journey is entropy — order, meaning, and moral structure collapse as they traverse the desert. What remains is pure, indifferent matter — sand, bone, dust, and heat.

In the novel’s world, there’s no firm boundary between life and death, matter and spirit. Nature itself is animate, but indifferent — it produces and destroys with the same gesture. One of McCarthy’s most haunting truths: existence isn’t moral, it’s mechanical. The lightning that births the horses from darkness is the same that will erase them. Creation and annihilation share a single pulse.

“It was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man.”
McCarthy’s most terrifying moment of creation through destruction. The Judge isn’t content to kill—he erases. To him, what’s not recorded doesn’t exist. History itself becomes a battlefield, and memory is his final conquest.

Judge calls the volcano “our mother the earth,” but it’s not reverence—it’s desecration. The ex-priest sees devils in the lava, the Judge sees scripture written in fire. Both are trying to humanize a world that couldn’t care less. narrator stays outside it all, describing a cosmos that burns and cools and burns again. It’s not a story of men anymore—it’s the planet writing its own gospel in stone.

“Pursuing, as all travelers must, inversions without end upon other men’s journeys.”
McCarthy turns a simple parting on the plains into a cosmic truth — that every path we take is just the echo of another’s. No one forges new ground; we walk the mirrored routes of those before us, convinced our footsteps mean something new. History, like the desert, only folds back on itself.

“For this will to deceive that is in things luminous…”
McCarthy’s fire isn’t just light—it’s illusion. The world itself lies, not out of malice, but by nature. Even memory conspires in that deceit, reshaping our past until we believe our myths. Reading it, I felt exposed—how much of my family’s righteousness, my own sense of deserving, is just a trick of light on the road behind me.

McCarthy once said he wanted to write about the “truth of the world” without sentiment. In Blood Meridian, he builds a narrator that behaves like a natural law: it describes, measures, and records, but never consoles. That’s why the prose can move from a man’s bootprint to the birth of a star without changing tone. The voice is impersonally cosmic.

The narrator sees as if the earth itself were doing the observing. There’s no moral commentary, no psychology, no mercy—only the indifferent grammar of matter and history.