Okay, so who here knows what’s going on? Really? Don’t lie or try to slip one by me in a rowboat while I’m trying not to tip my own canoe. Because I’ll know, you see, I’ll know. I’ll see through the fancy twirling ribbon sentences and hear the unvoiced struggling stammers since most likely you, like me, don’t have an ort of understanding nor the map.
I wonder if Suttree, and McCarthy himself are just like one of us, the words not borne of deep-kilned knowledge but instead, of wondering wandering paths of silvered snail trails and the anguish of the needed turning back. Eloquence not only sticking in the picking up of clues, but in the useless striving for the words. Words that can be tossed and tumbled in the mind until they come out fresh and clean like laundry from a dryer. Still hot. Cooling slowly. Wearable.
But words are only words and not enough.
—
I went to sleep last night exhausted from my reading. There is sense among the nonsense but you need to dig and bring it up to light and study it.
If Suttree was a color it would be muddy greys and garish black and whites of town. Suttree in a faded blue denim shirt and jeans, his eyes the surface color of the river. I’ve walked and I’ve walked (another McCarthy technique in language) within this world, and come to feel as if I’m seeking something that lies within myself–as sought in Bud Suttree. He touches lives along the way, the worse-off than him, the characters he’s chosen over those he left behind. He cares, but in a way that’s almost planned yet seems a part of his salvation.
And this is where I wonder if the words are pulled from anguish and frustration at trying to explain the unexplainable. The randomness of what sets off his thinking onto paths that cannot lead anywhere but back to himself.
The feeling is familiar to me, only not as bizarrely eloquent as is McCarthy’s way.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
this was brilliant … so much to absorb in so little space, and I only wish my brain was capable of responding with equal depth.
Two parts I was especially drawn to:
“Words that can be tossed and tumbled in the mind until they come out fresh and clean like laundry from a dryer.” — this was just beautiful, and so perfectly describes the process
and:
“The randomness of what sets off his thinking onto paths that cannot lead anywhere but back to himself.” — yes, yes, and yes is about all I can say to this one. You captured the thrust of it exactly.
this was really, really good, and thanks for sharing
I look at my comment, and it just doesn’t do justice to what I intended to say … somehow I wish I were conveying that I not only admire the skill you exhibited with your choice of words and phrasing, but I equally admire the messages contained therein. In fact, one enhances the other, and together they weave something very beautiful to witness
(or something like that?)
that’s the best I can do this early in the morning, but I don’t dare drop by and not share at least some shadow of my reaction to reading your carefully chosen words
really beautiful
Brilliance or babbling, I’m not sure which, but thank you for selecting the former. I only hope the difference is not easily discernible. But when you awake with hair appearing lighning-struck, and cannot unglue your eyelids though you’ve had an uninterrupted long slept night, you know something’s up. And then you have to write about it.