As most of the band’s followers are undoubtedly aware, one of the themes that runs through Ænima is the concept of a man’s anima.  “Anima” is the term the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung used for the feminine side of the masculine psyche, the female within the male.  A male’s anima is characterized by his emotional life, expressiveness, creativity, and his connection to the rest of nature.  For both cultural and psychological reasons the anima is often repressed, either because it is not viewed as socially acceptable or because it is experienced as threatening.  One of the other causes of this repression are traumatic experiences where we either come to believe that our emotions are shameful and unsafe, or are faced with situations where emotions have to be ignored for survival reasons.  But repression of something fundamental to our nature always has a cost, and an unacknowledged anima can wreak havoc in a man’s life and lead him to ruin.  Jimmy deals with a spiritual return to the point in the artist’s life when his anima was disowned and cast aside, a return to reclaim and integrate the emotional life and wholeness that was lost at the age of eleven, under a dead Ohio sky. 

What was it like to see
The face of your own stability
Suddenly look away
Leaving you with the dead and hopeless?
Eleven and she was gone
Eleven is when we waved goodbye
Eleven is standing still
Waiting for me to free him
By coming home

The point has been reached where the repressed anima and the emotions it contains are doing real damage and “The face ” of the poet’s “stability…Suddenly looks away.”  While this probably happened over a long period of time it is common to experience the cumulative effect of ignoring one’s emotions as an acute and “sudden” crisis. The repressed emotions have manifested themselves as illness and existence has become “dead and hopeless.”  One of the fundamental things that needs to be understood about the song is that the “she” that is referred to is not a person, “she” is the splintered feminine aspect of the singer’s own psyche.  Personifying a part of the psyche (like the shadow) in order to better deal, or even converse, with it is common practice in Jungian Psychology.  Spiritual and Psychological development are arrested when we disown vital parts of ourselves.  This is why “eleven” (the artist at age eleven) is “standing still” “waiting” to be freed by the grown man “returning home” and reclaiming his wholeness.  The entire song can actually be viewed as the lyrical and musical representation of an inner-child exercise that is often worked through in psychotherapy (a quick internet search will bring up several, or see John Bradshaw’s book  “Homecoming” ).

Moving me with a sound
Opening me within a gesture
Drawing me down and in
Showing me where it all began
Eleven


The wounded eleven-year-old child and the emotions he has disowned are both the cause of the crisis and the key to healing. He shows himself and his need for integration through symptoms and disruptions.  The child and his wound make “sounds,” “gestures,” and continually draw the adult poet “down and in” to reveal the causes of his instability and illness.  The boy wants to “show him where it all began.”

It took so long to realize that
You hold the light that’s been leading me back home
Under a dead Ohio sky
Eleven has been and will be waiting
Defending his light
And wondering
Where the hell have I been?
Sleeping, lost and numb
So glad I have found you
I am wide awake and heading home
Hold your light
Eleven


The eleven year old holds the “light” of wholeness and the child is waiting for the artist to come back (psychologically speaking) and reclaim it.  The boy inside has given painful clues as to the solution to the problem and wonders “where the hell” the artist has been.  But, until this point, much of the problem has remained unconscious and the poet has been “sleeping, lost, and numb” or not following the map of his feelings. Now that the pieces of the puzzle have been made conscious he is “wide awake” and “heading home.”

Lead me through each gentle step by step
By inch by loaded memory
I’ll move to heal
As soon as pain allows so we can
Reunite and both move on together
Hold your light
Eleven.
Lead me through each gentle step by step
By inch by loaded memory
‘Til one and one are one, eleven
So glow, child, glow
I’m heading home

the child to lead him through each “loaded memory.” “One and one” refers to the two sides (masculine/feminine) of a whole person.  These sides will be “reunited” so that “both” can “move on together.”  Jung often used the alchemical hermaphrodite and the commonly referenced “androgyny of Christ” to represent this idea.  Jimmy closes with an invocation to the child within to continue serving as a beacon, to “glow, child, glow” until the artist is healed. 

Dæmon: (in ancent Greek belief) an inner attendant spirit or inspiring force; the guardian      of an individual’s destiny and character; a divinity or supernatural being of a nature between gods and humans

       The moment when the dæmon that is his destiny takes possession of a young man is an event that forever remains a mystery to all who surround him, and even more so, to himself.  What calls forth this haunted blossoming from the organism of time, this strange geometry from the manifold, layered design of chance and change?  For some, it gathers and arrives in the chemistry of their thoughts and actions with the light, angelic touch of joy.  Their task is clear, they perform marvels without effort.  So it was with Mozart.  For others it comes woven into the dark breath of necessity.  In opposition to any will of which they are aware, a hidden hand casts a shroud over them, carrying with it a dark flowing weight that binds them to courses of action they would not have chosen, to thoughts no man would wish on his worst enemy, and to a desperate groping for understanding, light, and fate, that their now quickened pulse pushes them towards.  To say it can be demonic is not an exaggeration, though we are, of course, speaking of a sort of psychic possession, possession by the power of an idea, an obscure but directed urge that overcomes and replaces much of what the young man, and those who possibly surround him, hoped would become of his life and character.  So it was with Beethoven.

         However, to say that this force enters at one time is not accurate, and we should correct ourselves on this point.  Often, when a young man destined to take on such a burden looks back to even his earliest memories he recognizes the shadow of this presence.  But it is not until the mysteries of time and direction have made it manifest, have given the dæmon birth, following the scattered tempests of its gestation, in all their horror and light, that he recognizes the memories, coupled with the thoughts and feelings that accompany them, as a prophecy of what will one day overcome him. Now he hears the voice, the voice that here dripped a tainted word in his unprepared ear, there hummed a forbidden melody while he slept; he hears the thousand broken poems of his childhood reach out for one another and form one unerring song of danger and longing, one tightrope of terror and beauty that extends beyond his furthest horizon -a tightrope he must walk alone. He recognizes this presence primarily in premonitions half unconsciously visited upon him during times of isolated play and wandering, for these children are often solitary according to their own choice and nature.  The dæmon is a serpent that has always been there, coiled, calling, wrapped around the base of the spine, poison in the mouth of the shepherd; a cold omniscient ubiquitous eye in the back of a dream, a thin outline of bleeding black loss traced slowly around his fantasies of adventure and victory.  He recognizes it pushing its protean forms through inner gardens he has tried in vain to keep holy through love and prayer.  It is a spectre wrapped around the neck of stories his grandfather told him, the voice of an ineffable destiny moving through the trembling altar of his imagination.

         Do you see these lonely children playing?  Where are they?  They are burrowing hiding places, creating new prisons of fantasy, dancing, as unwatched children do, in the dusts and dim light of our attics.  They wear the clothes of the dead, costumes to their years, and the song life yearns to sing is unshackled.  Come forth once more.  Abandoned cars and rotting houses, useless in the utility weighed vision of adult fatigue, shelter their biology as the change takes hold.  A sunken roof becomes the vaulted ceiling of the cathedral.  Paint is mixed in the mind.  Dusted records spin black, and the music we lost is heard again.  Father!  Father that the war took hold of and then took!  Read the lost books of Thomas to me again! Cast thy voice out of the dark!  It is here.  At window sills they stand, watching night begin to clutch at day, and know they too change at night.  They climb trees and in silence watch those who pass underneath, delighting in the leafy folds of the secret.  Will I always be a stranger?  Hidden under your city's bridges they trace the graffiti, shivering in backyard snow caves they speak, they reveal themselves, but only to themselves.  The steps disappear beneath the street.  It is lost, but I will follow; you my beacon.  They are adorers of cupboards they can squeeze into, boxes with locks on them, hidden pockets in their clothing, things that appear to be one thing and are really another.

On April 12th 2014 the book launch party for the novel As a Thief in the Night was held in downtown Toronto. The event featured a wine tasting with Pelee Island Winery, No Quarter, playing the music of Led Zeppellin, art work inspired by the novel, and a charity raffle benefiting One Voice One Team.

       Right. That’s just the beginning of the epilogue, and the rabbit hole only gets deeper. Finally, I put the book down, turned on my computer, and went looking for help.  My vanity as a reader wouldn’t let me walk away.

       I do not intend to argue here that Cormac McCarthy takes the myth of the Gnostics to be true in a literal sense. They didn’t take it literally themselves. Like all deeper understanding of myth the Gnostic story should be taken as a metaphor, a key to a mystery that is beyond the categories of human thought.

       Gnosticism holds that the material world, including the bodies that hold us, is more or less a mistake, an aberration created by a tyrannical, ignorant God.  For Gnostics all matter is corrupt and doomed, that’s its nature, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Our flesh is a tomb and Jehovah’s world is a serpent swallowing its own tail, monster feeding on monster, and in the material realm, power is the only rule (The earth and humanity as they exist in McCarthy’s novel The Road could be seen as the world of matter approaching its natural, and only possible, end). Pretty bleak, and Gnosticism, like Buddhism, has been accused of nihilism, and were it not for the fire, the "spark of the alien divine" it might be a just accusation.

       The myth plays out differently in different texts, but essentially: Things once existed in a state of perfection called the Pleroma. God existed in a fullness that can't be comprehended and the Gnostic Gospels describe him mostly in terms of negatives, or what he is not, much as the state of Zen or Satori is described. This is intentional. The Gnostic authors didn't want to give readers anything to hold on to and wanted, as much as was possible, to avoid reducing God to a concept, a mental idol. 

        This God created Sophia, his divine consort, and endowed her with all manner of creative powers.  Sophia soon wished to use these to bring forth a likeness of herself without God's consent or agreement:

       This is Jehovah, the God of Orthodox Christianity and Judaism, the god of our world of matter. He is a sort of aborted fetus, an infant thrown off of a cliff because he is an abomination.  An archon is a name Gnostics give to those who hold power in Yaltabaoth/Jehovah's world of matter, and he is himself the chief archon. From here on out this false god goes about creating in the realm (our world of matter) he has been exiled to. To Gnostics the true God, the “Alien Divine” has nothing to do with this world. And Jehovah in his ignorance said:

In McCarthy’s screenplay for The Counselor the diamond dealer, who, like Jehovah, deals in false currency, repeats this idea for us.

This "god of the blind" creates man, a creature made only of matter, in all its destructive and corrupt nature. 

McCarthy tells us the same thing about the Glanton Gang in Blood Meridian:

       The material body and world exist under this “ancient curse” we are “condemned to ride out.” This state of affairs doesn’t leave us much to live for or look forward to. As Leo Daugherty points out in his wonderful essay on Blood Meridian:

       In order that at some point things can be made right again, so that we can come back around to truth and spirit, the “Alien God” who cannot be named blessed us with a small grace, or, in McCarthy's language, the fire. It is the divine essence, the spark of the true God buried within the corrupt and opposed matter of the human body.  In the Hypostasis of the Archons this comes from God through Sophia.

The arrival of the Christ on the physical plane was intended to help us awaken to the Gnostic spark or flame within us. See the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas:

       Waking up from the slumber of matter and the body into knowledge, gnosis, or the divine fire, is our journey, and people exist in different places in that journey. Some people are still completely asleep and ignorant of the "spark of the alien divine" and they live only by the destructive laws and power driven dynamics of the material world (which is doomed no matter how far we come in our individual realization). Because they operate according to the laws of the material world they are often seen as the greatest survivors, the most powerful and successful within it.

       Back to McCarthy. Many of McCarthy's central characters are what could be called tragic Gnostic heroes. "Hero" might not sound like the most accurate word to describe the kid in Blood Meridian, Llewellyn Moss in No Country For Old Men, or the counsellor in the screenplay from the Ridley Scott movie of the same name, and they are not heroes in the traditional sense, but only become so once one understands their characters within a Gnostic framework. But before we understand McCarthy's heroes we need to understand his villains.

       The Judge in Blood Meridian is one of Jehovah's archons (lords) and is McCarthy's most terrifying creation.  He rapes and murders children, kills without pause, lusts after power, speaks all languages, dances, and plays the fiddle prodigiously. He takes spiritual possession of things by drawing them in his notebook. Anton Chigurth from No Country for Old Men and Malkina from The Counselor are lesser archons. Chigurth, like the judge, cannot be killed and Malkina knows things she cannot possibly know. All three, the judge, Anton Chigurth, and Malkina lust after power, control, and violence. Each comes right out of parts of Nietszche, who McCarthy clearly considers the greatest philosopher of the material world. See the judge in Blood Meridian:

Or Malkina in The Counselor:    

       The archons destroy anything that doesn't fall under their dominion, kill without pause or remorse, and toy with human prey for entertainment. The most disturbing thing about them is that they always come out on top. They never lose, never die, never learn their lesson or meet their end at the hands of more righteous powers. But that's the point. Each of McCarthy's bad guys is in sync with the corrupt nature of matter, and since, to Gnostics, matter is in itself evil, evil must win out on the physical plane. It's only natural.

       In McCarthy's works the Gnostic spark is revealed through empathy, a sense that the hero identifies with another as himself.  It is a recognition in the very questionable hero that beneath the surface of the material world each of us has a spark buried within that is a part of the unity that is the divine fire, the “Alien God.” This comes out in a very muddled way, as it initially must through the filter of a physical body. All three of the central characters mentioned above perform these acts of empathy amidst other much more selfish acts, even violent and damaging ones. Each hero is at a stage in the journey, as much of the world is, where he has only begun the process of unclothing the divine spark within him.  It is easier to use moral language to describe this idea, but I don't believe McCarthy is presenting us with a moral lesson at all. For him the Gnostic spark is more like a scientific fact, and our individual recognition of it is a phase in our evolution. It only appears as empathy to a world used to interpreting things in moral language.

       Like all tragic heroes the kid, Llewelyn Moss, and the counselor have a tragic flaw, but the “flaw” in the case of McCarthy's heroes is the Gnostic fire.  It is what makes them vulnerable, incapable of victory and survival, in a world of matter where power is the ruling principle. They have to die, or in the counsellor's case be destroyed, because they're no longer playing by the rules of the game (the world of matter) they are a part of. The death or downfall of each can be traced to a moment of empathy, a moment when they recognized that the divine fire in them was the same as the divine fire in someone else. In Blood Meridian the kid's moments of empathy and identity take place alongside murder, indifference, and cruelty, but they still separate him from the other members of the Glanton Gang who are still completely in the grips of the material world and the body’s slumber.  As the Glanton Gang engages in the slaughter of a group of natives and scalps them one of their members, a man named McGill, is skewered through with a lance, while the rest of the gang waits for him to die the kid has a brief moment of empathy. The kid moves to help the injured man, but McGill has become a liability, and Glanton shoots him in the head.

Later, being stalked in the desert by the judge, the kid and the badly injured ex-priest Tobin stop to rest. Tobin feels he can no longer continue.

   These are a long way from shining moral victories, and in my view this makes them all the more interesting. At best we could call the kid morally ambiguous, he “has a taste for mindless violence,” but alongside this the Judge recognizes there is something different about him. McCarthy’s breadcrumbs about what separates the kid are subtle, but towards the end of the novel the judge finally tells us outright:

       The “flawed place in the fabric” of the kid’s heart is the Gnostic fire.  The judge calls it flawed because by the standards of the material world, the world that belongs to the judge, it is flawed.  One of the reasons McCarthy makes the kid (like the counselor) nameless is so that the judge can’t control or comprehend him (following the ancient idea that naming something gives one power over the thing named). The kid meets his end at the archon’s hands, the tragedy on the material plane comes to an end, and the Gnostic spark returns to the divine fire. The ruling dynamic of tragedy has always been participation, and as the kid is released from the bonds of the body the reader is too.

       Early on in The Counselor a conversation between Reiner (played by Javier Bardem) and the Counselor (played by Michael Fassbender), hints at the same idea –empathy makes him ill-fitted for the world he is about to enter.  Just before the counselor commits to take part in a drug deal to get himself out of financial trouble:

       It is this moral dilemma, the empathy that divides his actions, that ultimately destroys the counselor.  A client in a women’s jail asks for help with her son who has just been arrested.  The counselor agrees to help and puts up the money to bail her son out, even though he is in financial trouble himself.  This moment of empathy with the woman in jail causes the drug deal to fall apart and makes things look to the Mexican drug cartel as if the counselor was involved in stealing from them.  His fiancé is kidnapped and used in a snuff film to make up for the money the cartel believes the counselor has cost them.  He is Oedipus, wandering the rest of his days as an exile who has gouged his own eyes out.  Again, things have played out as they must on the physical plane. Everyone in touch with the divine spark has been destroyed –at least on a material level.

       In No Country For Old Men Llweleyn Moss stumbles into a world he too cannot survive in.  McCarthy uses narcotics again, because for him the world of drugs is one of the clearest examples of the material world’s drive to destroy itself.  Moss tries to stay alive, but like the Kid and the Counselor “the flawed place in the fabric” of his heart ends up being the death of him.  Llewelyn has a briefcase full of money and no one knows where he is. All he has to do is get on a plane and leave. But he can’t leave his wife behind, his love and identity with her brings him to the motel where he’s supposed to meet up with her and where the Cartel kills him. Had he been not had this empathy he would not have met the tragic end he does. Just before he dies an attractive young woman that he picks up hitchhiking asks him if his wife knows what he does for a living.

       Here we have one of McCarthy’s few clues.  Llewelyn Moss is a “welder,” someone who creates bonds with fire.  The young woman tries to use sex to tempt him away from his empathy, from the identity he shares with his wife. The last thing Moss says before he’s murdered is an affirmation that he is in touch with the Gnostic Spark, that in his own humble way he won’t be swayed by the destructive gravity of the body. It is again easy to take this in a common, moral sense, and see it as Moss being faithful to his spouse.  But that’s not the mark McCarthy is trying to hit, it’s too simple, and too obvious.  Moss turns down the woman’s advances and she says:

       Gnosticism holds that the nature of matter is destructive, and that ultimately all matter will be destroyed.  The very stuff that our bodies are made up of will take us to our death. This destruction is a process that we are creeping closer and closer to.  There is no longer any “country for old men” because we are into a period of decline, a period that those “old men” who were still able to identify with the Gnostic spark in one another can no longer fit into.  Gnosticism’s saving grace is that this world wasn’t the important thing to begin with. Nietzsche might say that this too is nihilism, the denial of this world in favour of another one. But part of the Gnostic claim, like the Buddhists, is that the spark can be realized in this world, that individuals can evolve into an expression of the divine essence on this plane. The Gospel of Thomas tells us:

This is why McCarthy’s man of the epilogue in Blood Meridian goes about the earth “striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there.”  The man of the epilogue is the artist, and his job is to reveal the divine spark buried within the nightmare that is our history.  McCarthy’s task is to awaken, and the tool he uses to strike the fire from us is darkness.

NOTES

1. The entry above is a continuation of a much shorter, earlier piece on Cormac McCarthy and his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road. The first entry, How I Discovered Fire and Cormac McCarthy, can be found here.

2. I would like to acknowledge the heavy debt my understanding of McCarthy and Gnosticism owes to Leo Daugherty and his paper Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy.  You can find Daugherty’s paper here.

4. I have avoided the temptation here, for the sake of brevity, of a much more detailed Gnostic analysis of Blood Meridian, The Counselor, and No Country For Old Men.  A more in-depth look at each piece individually is needed to do McCarthy’s work  justice.

5.  Other excellent tools for further insight into Blood Meridian include Bookdrum’s guide to Blood Meridian, which can be found here, and Professor Hungerford’s two part lecture at Yale University, available below.    

                            You can’t. You have to carry the fire.
                            I don’t know how to.
                            Yes you do.
                            Is it real? The fire?      
                                                         -The Road
                                                           by Cormac McCarthy  

        Over the last few years I’ve become deeply interested in the work of Cormac McCarthy.  Like many readers the first book of McCarthy’s I read was The Road. Paradoxically, my walk through the book’s apocalyptic, ash-strewn landscape brought me solace at a time when I couldn’t seem to find it anywhere else.

        I was thirty-two and hanging on by a very thin thread.  The mother of my two adopted boys and I were breaking up and, as usual, I was doing a pretty terrible job of ending it.  My health was terrible, the novel I was working on felt like it was dead in the water, and of course I was broke.  It was November. I spent my weekends looking for an apartment.

       The break-up was hard on everybody. The older of my two boys was seven and going through a phase where he was afraid of the dark.  At night he would ask me to come into his room and hang out with him until he fell asleep.  Grateful for the silence and escape I obliged him over the next few weeks.  His room was invariably messy, and I would lie there in the midst of the disaster of clothes and toys, turn the nightlight on low, and pull out the copy of The Road I was reading. It became the best time of the day for me.  As I read and my son tried to fall asleep I would imagine that him and I were relying on each other in the waste land of everything going wrong around us, just as the boy and his father did in McCarthy’s book, him counting on me against the darkness, and me relying on him for that precious time each day, and for the promise of a future I couldn’t believe in on my own.  I let the rest of the world collapse around us.  There was a sense of security on those evenings, a feeling I can  still bring back into focus and hold.  Where your heart is, there too shall be your treasure. By the end of December I had moved out and had the boys on weekends.

       In the novel the boy and his father are always talking about carrying the fire. Not having been exposed to any of McCarthy’s other work I thought he was maybe using fire as a metaphor for the will to survive, or the last bit of goodness on the broken earth they were walking.  It wasn’t until I started exploring the rest of McCarthy’s books that I began to see that the fire runs through everything he does like Ariadne’s thread, and it wasn’t until I read his masterpiece, Blood Meridian, that I came to understand what the fire was and what it could mean for me.

(To be continued in the next blog entry.)

My Reading from Road - The Day to Shape the Days Upon