I’m keen on ponderings … to ponder is to raise a question without necessarily looking for an answer - the question may never be answered - and it may have a number of answers, each with a different purpose. At the heart of the process is a sense of ‘I wonder …’
It’s with this spirit I approached the three epigraphs which form part of the opening of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.
PAUL VALERY
It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.
JACOB BOEHME
Clark, who led last year's expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.
THE YUMA DAILY SUN
June 13,1982
In pondering the first quote by Valery, I noted that it focuses on ideas. Ideas are all very well, but where do words feature? If the ideas are found terrifying, surely they would have been communicated in words - and if so, how? Who is it that finds them terrifying? The thinker or thinkers? Or the person or people they’ve shared their thoughts with? Is this an act of self-reflection? Or is it an act of outward communication?
What’s the back story? Where’s the quote from?
As it happens, it’s from an imaginary dialogue between an Eastern sage and a Western intellectual - written by the French writer, poet, and polymath, Paul Valery, whose life roughly spans the first half of the 20th Century. The Eastern sage is quite scathing of how the Western intellectual privileges Reason, viewing the result as a monstrous beast.
The Boehme quote harks back to an earlier time, a totally different intellectual and spiritual vision, and one is challenged to recognise the common ground between them - Boehme’s is visionary and spiritually based; Valery notably also dedicated himself to exploring the ‘life of the spirit’ in his output.
Where this leaves us with the quote from the newspaper clipping is unclear. The quote is from a genuine source. It references a finding cited to corroborate the discovery of an early humanoid fossil dating back 4 million years - the skull is comparatively much more recent, dating back 300,000 years - the additional comment is that it was ‘impossible to say whether this constitute[d] cannibalism or ritualistic scalping’.
With this quote, we’re left wondering - why did McCarthy group these epigraphs together? What did he think they shared in common, or if there was a deliberate choice to include the third as an ‘odd man out’, what was his purpose in doing so.
There’s so much richness - and so much paradox here that the epigraphs are arguably ineffective as an opening. They may serve to illuminate the content on reflection once one has finished reading the work, and if so, they pose a riddle for the reader. That, at least, will colour my experience.
I pondered epigraphs for a bit - and wondered whether anyone had done a specific study on these - and how they relate to openings and closings in oral traditions. I found a couple of compilations with reflections - one by Rosemary Ahern; the other by Graham Greene, but no one seems to have looked at their counterparts in oral traditions, or remarked on the similarities and dissimilarities in functionality between literary epigraphs and the series of letters which open Surahs of the Quran. Do these marks operate as re-entry points, taking the reader into the work and keeping them coming back for more? I sense that the openings and closings of stories in oral traditions do the opposite: they bring listeners into stories so they can engage outwardly in a different way - which is an interesting thought to be left with to ponder on.
If you enjoy story, find out more about The Unknown Storyteller project. It maps 18 distinct story structures (excluding comedy and tragedy) identified so far using only 6 simple basic visually intuitive symbols that will enable you to find out more about how story ‘stories’ on my website at leonconrad.com — not to mention some very cool writing exercises that will help you tell the stories you want to tell more effectively.