Sleepless Night and Weird Dreams ... reading Cormac McCarthy!

Written by Zeferino Siani. Posted in Favole e Racconti

Salerno - Thursday 13 July 2023.

Preface

I dreamed of going around the city, in the middle of July, wearing only white underpants and a sleeveless cotton tank top, also white. So I went everywhere, and I spoke normally to anyone, wearing only a white underpants and a sleeveless white cotton tank top, and everyone spoke to me normally, and I answered normally, and nobody paid any attention to my way of dressing. When I woke up I remembered exactly like that, and I tried to figure out what that fucking dream meant, but I couldn't. Later, after a shower and a shave, I thought about it, and I was still fucking thinking about breakfast. But nothing. Nihil, nain, nothing, nichoho!

Cormac McCarthi, as a young man (photo).

Only at breakfast, after coffee, did I clearly grasp the meaning of the dream; a meaning I had simple simple: I didn't attach importance to appearances, and so did everyone I spoke to; that is, everyone who saw or spoke to me gave a shit about my white cotton underpants and white cotton sleeveless tank top; I myself spoke and listened with only a white underpants and a white sleeveless undershirt. Then there was a moment when I suddenly realized that I couldn't go around in public in my underwear and a tank top… but at that point I woke up! The question I ask myself is this: "Is there perhaps another meaning, beyond the immediate one that I have given myself? A deeper meaning? More true? I could also turn to a psychologist, asking him: "Does this fucking dream perhaps have a different meaning, sir psychologist?". But the psychologist would respond with those question-and-answer protracted for weeks, months and even years...until the total savings in your account dried up! It is therefore advisable to find a personal explanation, slowly, by analyzing the things that have been done in the previous days, or even further back in time, even months or years. I think I have found the explanation, at least partially: my strange dreams are the consequence of recent reading of the novels "The Road" and "The Passenger" by Cormac McCarthy, and also - perhaps - of personal experience. So let's see what these two novels are about?

The Street

"The man screwed on the plastic cap, dried the bottle with a rag and weighed it with his hand. Oil to use for that accursed lamp, which would brighten the long bruised twilights, the long gray dawns. So you can read me a story," he said the boy. Isn't it, papa? Sure, he said. Sure, I'll read it to you."

At the center of the novel there are only a man and a child, father and son, fighting for survival in a world now at the mercy of cannibals. They happen to see a group of cannibals go by carrying slaves, following them, of women and children who will soon be their meal; are described "the small daily gestures, thoughts and nightmares, even physical sensations, the difficulty of finding food in a lifeless world, where everything is covered in ashes and the few things to eat are in tins and cans or completely withered". "All interspersed with the wonderful and tragic memories of the father, who describes to his son a living and luminous land that he has not been able to see"

The child's mother long ago chose death, she decided not to hope and abandoned them. The man and his son, on the other hand, somehow see a distant light, despite all the gray that surrounds them, despite the complete absence of trees and animals, the cold, a sun that was brilliant and is now a glimmer in the gray sky. They are looking for a warmth that they may not find, an ocean that will disappoint them, but they continue to search, drawn by a force that goes beyond the survival instinct.

"The man took his hand, panting. You have to go on, he said. I can't bear to go with you. But you have to go on. Who knows what you'll meet along the way. We've always been lucky. You'll see that you still will be. Now go, don't worry.
...

I cannot.
...

You said you'd never leave me.
...

I know. I am sorry. You have all my love.
...

That night the boy slept beside his father, and held him in his arms, but when his father awoke in the morning he was cold and stiff. He sat there for a long time crying, then got up and walked through the woods towards the road.

The Passenger

Bobby Western, the protagonist of the novel, is a diver by profession.
During a recovery mission off the coast of Mississippi, Bobby Western sees what he shouldn't have seen: a seemingly intact JetStar lying on the seabed and, in the cabin, nine lifeless bodies, with billowing hair, open mouths and empty eyes. . After seeing this, Bobby wonders - naturally - where did that plane come from, what happened to the black box, and what happened to the tenth person on the passenger manifest. These are the questions that Bobby, persecuted by two government emissaries "with an air of Mormon missionaries", cannot answer. He then realizes he has to disappear.

After all, he has been used to running away for a long time: he is pursued by feelings of guilt towards the world and towards her, towards Alicia Western, her sister, the love of her heart who died prematurely, and the ruin of the soul of she. Alicia Western was an excellent mathematical mind and was also a world expert on Cremona violins. In summary, she was a beautiful woman, difficult to forget, "because her beauty has the power to arouse a pain inaccessible to other tragedies"
Alicia, like Bobby, also looked where she didn't have to look, in the heart of darkness. Even as a child she was afflicted by the "cohorts", a jumble of hallucinations led by the Kid, a phocomelic dwarf and an incestuous love for Bobby.
Alicia tried to oppose the order of the number to the chaos of life, but she couldn't do it, because "some things don't have a number".

No Country for Old Men

"No country for old men" describes the fates of three men, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, Llewelyn Moss, a Texan welder who returned from the Vietnam War, and Anton Chigurh, a murderous psychopath, in a world where only the ruthless survive and where one can only choose "in which order to abandon one's life". In Texas in the 1980s, along the border with Mexico, the destinies of these three intersect: Llewelyn Moss, a Texan welder who returned from the Vietnam War, found himself on the site crowded with corpses of a battle between drug traffickers for a disproportionate match of heroin and has jumped at an opportunity too big for him: he takes possession of a bag containing bills for many millions of dollars. On his trail move Chigurh, the psychopathic killer with a dangerous philosophy of justice, and Sheriff Bell, a man of the past who can't get over the ferocity of the present. Moss' fate depends on which of the two pursuers will find him first. A raw and relentless novel like a premonition of tragedy, which takes the reader back to those landscapes of the Southeastern United States where old values have given way to blind and uncontrolled violence. Where men live who, "if one were to kill them all, would have to build an outbuilding of hell". The other characters in the novel, secondary characters, are Moss's wife, Carla Jean Moss, Carson Wells and Loretta Bell. A peculiarity of the narrative style: quotes are not used in the sentences that the protagonists exchange. Here are some excerpts from the beginning of the novel: Beginning of the novel. We are in Sheriff Tom Bell's office. The deputy is informing the sheriff that he has captured Chigurg: ... I'm back right now. Sheriff, he had on a thing like an oxygen tank for emphysema patients or something. And then he had a tube that went up his sleeve and into one of those air guns they use in the slaughterhouse. He will see it when he arrives. Yes sir. I'll handle that. Yes sir. While he leaned forward, Chigurg crouched and slid his bound hands behind his knees. ... They fell to the ground ... Chigurg strained at the handcuffs ... he just pulled harder. The nickel-plated handcuffs cut to the bone… The deputy's legs slowed and then stopped. He lay on the ground in spasms. Then he stopped moving altogether. ... Standing by the dead man's knee was a heavy leather satchel: Moss knew full well what was inside and felt a fear he could not understand ... It was filled to the brim with hundred-dollar bills. They were divided into bunches, secured with bank ties on which the value was printed. 10 000 & (later in the novel, we learn that the purse total is ..... $!) Moss's wife, Carla Jean, at one point in the novel, says: "I had an epiphany: if I went to work in that place, he would find me. At Wal-Mart. I didn't know who he was or how his name was. I only knew that when I saw him, I would recognize him. And on the ninetieth day…” She was sprawled out on the sofa watching TV and drinking a coke. She didn't even lift her eyes. It's three o'clock, she said. If you want, I'll leave and come back later. She glanced over the seat at him and went back to watching television. What do you have in that bag? It's full of money. Yes, tomorrow. The lantern reappeared at the edge of the caldera and moved along the rocky ridge. Moss lay on his stomach and watched. The light appeared again. If you knew someone was walking around here with your two million dollars, at what point would you stop looking for them? That's right. That point does not exist.

More annotations on Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy also wrote Frontier Trilogy: Wild Horses, Beyond the Border and Towns of the Plains, a collection centered on the adventures of two cowboys John Grady Cole and Billy Parham. A 2000 film directed by Billy Bob Thornton and titled in Italy Passione rebel (with Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz) was freely based on the first title.
In 2005 the thriller No Country for Old Men was released, which, thanks to the film adaptation by the Coen brothers, and which sees Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem in the main cast, made McCarthy known to a wider audience, especially outside the United States. In 2007 he published La strada, which continues in the style of the nineties novels, but with a sci-fi-catastrophic setting, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 2009, the adaptation for the big screen was also made from this novel. The film, titled The Road, is directed by John Hillcoat, from a screenplay by Joe Penhall, with Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee in the lead roles. Film adaptations have also been announced from Blood Meridian and Cities of the Plain (respectively directed by Todd Field and Andrew Dominik).
Keep in mind, in addition to McCarthy, the other four great novelists of the recent literary history of the United States of America whose first two best novels I mention only: Don DeLillo (with "Mao II" and "The Silence"), Thomas Pincherton ( with The Pinkerton Agency and Nat Pinkerton detective) and finally Philip Roth (with American Pastoral and Portnoy's Complaint).

Epilogue

The appeals of Pope Francis and figures from the world of culture for the advent of a better world are not enough, also because these appeals are dampened by the prevailing civilization of consumption and the god of money. We need the masses, the large numbers of people, and those are us, only us. Each of us must ask ourselves the problem of how to create this new world. But where to start? How to leave? That is the question. We must then keep in mind that each of us is partly a Socratic self and partly an Aristotelian self, and to solve the problem we need to be guided by both, and rebuild a new world together, which could also be a revisitation of this old but restructured one. and modernized to our measure, to a human scale. We will then retrace paths similar to those traveled in our previous childhood, youth and maturity. And again we will meet our other half, we will retrace the same places, new, splendid places, which remind us of those of a past time. And one day we will meet a she, who "seems to be something miraculously brought from heaven to earth", and who will take us by the hand, and with her we will go everywhere, wearing only white underwear and a sleeveless cotton undershirt, also white!

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