#between parentheses

[thirdity]

If you have patience enough to search, maybe you’ll catch a glimpse of what you’re looking for. And when you find it, you’ll probably be disappointed. It isn’t the devil. It isn’t the State. It isn’t a magical child. It’s the void.

Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses

[monologuerhead]

BLOOD MERIDIAN

Blood Meridian is a Western, a cowboy novel by a writer who seems to specialize in the genre. Many enterprising types thought that Cormac McCarthy would never be translated into Spanish and they ransacked him shamelessly, abetted by ignorance and a rather curious understanding of intertextuality. And yet Blood Meridian, set in the mid-nineteenth century, isn’t just a Western but also a fevered, ultra-violent novel about life and death, with all kinds of underlying themes (nature as man’s great enemy, the absolute impossibility of redemption, life as inertia); a novel that, in part, tells the story of a group of Americans who launch a murderous raid into the state of Chihuahua and then, after crossing the Sierra Madres, into the neighboring state of Sonora, and whose mission, for which they’re well compensated by the governments of both states, is to hunt down and scalp Indians, which isn’t just difficult but also costly in time and lives, and so they end up massacring whole Mexican towns, where the scalps are ultimately similar enough that it makes no difference.

Blood Meridian is also a novel about place, about the landscape of Texas and Chihuahua and Sonora; a kind of anti-pastoral novel in which the landscape looms in its leading role, imposingly — truly the new world, silent and paradigmatic and hideous, with room for everything except human beings. It could be said that the landscape of Blood Meridian is a landscape out of de Sade, a thirsty and indifferent landscape ruled by strange laws involving pain and anesthesia, the laws by which time often manifests itself.

The other two characters in the novel, Judge Holden and a boy known only as the kid, are antagonists, though they belong to the same gang: the judge is a learned man and a child killer, a musician and a pederast, a naturalist and a gunslinger, a man who yearns to know everything and destroy everything. The kid, by contrast, is a survivor; he’s wild but he’s a human being or, in other words, a victim. According to the distinguished Harold Bloom, Blood Meridian is one of the best American novels of the twentieth century.

Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses, 2004

[thirdity]

The literary kitchen, I tell myself sometimes, is ruled by taste, by which I mean that it’s a domain in which memory and ethics (or moral values, if I can call them that) play a game whose rules I don’t know. Talent and excellence watch the game, mesmerized, but they don’t take part. Daring and bravery do take part, but only at certain moments, which is to say not often. Suffering takes part, pain takes part, death takes part, but on the condition that they don’t take the game seriously. They’re just playing to be polite.

Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses

[thirdity]

Some of the writers here are people I call friends. From them I expect nothing but perfect consideration. The rest of you I don’t know, but I’ve read some of you and heard excellent things about others. [...] It’s a promising scene, especially if viewed from a bridge. The river is wide and mighty and its surface is broken by the heads of at least twenty-five writers under fifty, under forty, under thirty. How many will drown? I’d say all of them.

Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses

[thirdity]

Maybe what he expected from books, as I’d like to believe now that he’s dead, was messages in a bottle or hard drugs or windows through which, on rare occasions, one sees Alice’s white rabbit skim past like a lightning bolt.

Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses

[thirdity]

The young man’s face is beautiful and deeply thoughtful. He’s looking toward the window, if he’s looking anywhere, though probably all he sees is what’s happening inside his head. But he’s not contemplating escape. [...] One might say that all the time in the world stretches out before him. By this I don’t mean that the young man thinks he’s immortal. On the contrary. The young man knows that life renews itself and that the art of renewal is often death. Intelligence is visible in his face and his eyes, and his lips are turned down in an expression of sadness, or maybe it’s something else, maybe apathy, none of which excludes the possibility that at some point he might feel himself to be master of all the time in the world, because true as it is that man is a creature of time, theoretically (or artistically, if I can put it that way) time is also a creature of man.

Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses

[monologuerhead]

BURROUGHS

For some of those of my generation, William Burroughs was the affectless man, the shard of ice that never melts, the eye that never closes. They say he possessed every vice there was, but I think he was a saint who attracted all the sinners in the world because he was gracious and unwise enough never to shut his door. Literature, his livelihood for the last thirty years, interested him, but not too much, and in that regard he was like other classic American figures who focused their efforts on observing life or on experience. When he talked about what he read one got the impression that he was remembering vague stretches of time in prison.

He was certainly familiar with prison, and his writing on the prison system in the United States might be some of the sharpest ever penned. He traveled all over the world: his vision of the planet is perhaps one of this century’s bleakest. And he experimented with all kinds of drugs and escaped unscathed from fifteen years of heroin addiction.

His observations on certain hard drugs give him a kinship to the great chroniclers of hell, except that in Burroughs there’s no moral or ethical motive, only the description of a frozen abyss, the description of an endless process of corruption. Language, he said, is a virus from outer space, in other words, a disease, and he spent his whole life trying to fight that disease.

He loved guns. He killed his wife while they were practicing their William Tell act in Mexico. He was a follower of Wilhelm Reich and he built orgone boxes in the shabby backyards of lost cities, to which (the cities and the boxes) he retreated like an Andromedan Dracula.

He had no liking at all for life on earth, or human life, and he would rather have been born on any other planet. A planet of spiders or giant insects. In the cover photograph of My Education (Península), he appears with a shotgun, and from the way he looks at us it’s clear he’s not afraid to use it. In his later years he played small roles in a number of films: Drugstore Cowboy was perhaps the most memorable.

Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses, 2004

[theblackestofsuns]

Between Parentheses (2004)

Roberto Bolaño

New Directions