McCarthy-ing

To start off, I think this is a sad post. Sad, in terms that I could not fully comprehend and grasp. Sad that I should be working with something right now but I am not, but not entirely that I would have a breakdown and curl up in a fetal position on our office's waxed faux wood floor.


So, here it goes. I've been reading Cormac McCarthy lately, watched his works on screen too, and I can't help but admire his level of thinking and writing voice in his books. Yeah, them books again creeping up my consciousness like a damn cold gust creating tremors of giggles or just plain short creepiness. Anyhow, his words and politics are one and the same. You could clearly see what his writing about, whether the fall of man and the salvation he seeks in futility or the hard realities that shape life itself, or rather let itself be withered by life on the reflection.



In his novel, The Road, there is a scene in which the father comforting his son after a bad dream. The father recalls telling his son that bad dreams are a sign of life, it goes to show that you haven't given up fighting for them things that you believe in. It means that you live to go on about with what you do : surviving. And that when you dream of the good things, that's them times you've got to worries about what's been happenin round 'ya. Fuck, that's good writing. Sorry for that, it just is good writing.


So, what happens when you don't dream? Will that mean that neither good nor bad is happening? Is it a state of limbo in perfect balance or is it a state of limbo in plunging equal weights waiting for a breeze to tip it to either side? Maybe, it is a state in which there is no is sin but at the same time, none of it. And that your existence is based on the fact that one false or right move will lead to a string of misfortunes or good repercussions.


This is to ponder what happens in dreamless nights. Am I naive for believing the word of an old man about a post-nuclear world that is the reality of father and son? Maybe, but also, maybe he is right and what he meant was that there is actually no certainty to what we do and will face later on. 


When we dream of boulders chasing us in an endless looping corridor, we are ever thankful for waking up not getting crushed by a real and manifesting hulk of stone. But when we dream of the scent of our first love, or the sight of that first fat and glorious, divine paycheck and wake up with a purse full of coins and no paper in it, we are sad a bit in the reality that there is no paycheck. But, we revel in the fact, still, that the hulking boulder hasn't crushed us into bits of bone, yet. 


We tip the scales to which weight we want to, well, but that's just me. Don't trust me, I ain't no McCarthy.