The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

    Another heavy book by Corman McCarthy. When I set out to read more literature this year, I specifically wanted to avoid heavy books like this, but he is so damn good at writing. I definitely didn't think I would want to read Westerns, but my friend Frank kept mentioning how good Cormac McCarthy is, so I gave All the Pretty Horses a try and now I'm hooked. The Crossing is the sequel to that book, and the second book of The Border Trilogy, but follows a completely different character. But like the protagonist in All the Pretty Horses, Billy Parham makes multiple trips down to Mexico, fails to achieve his goals there, and finds death instead, but also the wisdom and kindness of strangers. Now that I've read two McCarthy books, I notice some trends. The obvious one is not much punctuation. Another one is that the characters in these books inhabit our world, but it's not our world. People in these books are wiser, and kinder, but they're also capable of more cruelty. Most characters that we meet are strangers on the road or in small towns or haciendas, who usually show kindness either by sharing food or a story or wisdom. Some others we meet are pure evil, who commit cruelty for cruelty's sake. And a very small number are benign, usually working for some cruel overlord, but willing to be merciful; or they are a person with no reason to harm out characters, but admit to their indifference to human suffering. Spoilers ahead. McCarthy also uses his books to draw big contrasts between the United States and Mexico, and to use Mexico as almost a time warp, where we hear stories going back to the Mexican Revolution and see poverty that would suggest the Stone Age. And then the characters return north of the border and confront modernity in the form of cars, war, and diners.

    The book, I would say, is dominated by three big stories in each part. The first is Billy Parham's search for the she-wolf terrorizing the cattle of the land, finding her, and trying to bring her back to Mexico. The second is Billy and his brother Boyd as they try to find the men who killed their parents and stole their horses. And the third is Billy returning to Mexico to find his brother Boyd. All of the stories deal with cruelty, and all these missions end in failure. When Billy tries to join the Army for World War Two its a failure. Failure is just an all-pervading theme of this book. Another one is truth. Throughout the book, we hear people saying things that are false, and we hear stories emerge out of nothing, or take a kernel of truth and turn it into something else entirely.

    McCarthy loves a sensitive cowboy. He loves how they love their horses, and he loves to think about the thoughts they think while they sit alone on the range at night, or atop a horse in the morning. He loves to write about them crying over horses they've lost, and in this book, he writes about an inverted scene, a pregnant wolf that Billy Parham loses. One other thing he likes to write about is a wound that lasts. In this book, the dog's throat gets cut, rendering it mute, the boys cause the death of a one-armed man, and Billy meets a blind man who tells him his story. I think surviving with wounds or with disabilities is important to McCarthy.

    I love McCarthy's writing and I've really never read anything else like it, so I wanted to just throw a few examples in here that stood out to me while I was reading. This first one is long, but I really didn't expect him to jump into the mind and the whole backstory of a wolf:

THE WOLF had crossed the international boundary line at about the point where it intersected the thirtieth minute of the one hundred and eighth meridian and she had crossed the old Nations road a mile north of the boundary and followed Whitewater Creek west up into the San Luis Mountains and crossed through the gap north to the Animas range and then crossed the Animas Valley and on into the Peloncillos as told. She carried a scabbedover wound on her hip where her mate had bitten her two weeks before somewhere in the mountains of Sonora. He’d bitten her because she would not leave him. Standing with one forefoot in the jaws of a steeltrap and snarling at her to drive her off where she lay just beyond the reach of the chain. She’d flattened her ears and whined and she would not leave. In the morning they came on horses. She watched from a slope a hundred yards away as he stood up to meet them.

She wandered the eastern slopes of the Sierra de la Madera for a week. Her ancestors had hunted camels and primitive toy horses on these grounds. She found little to eat. Most of the game was slaughtered out of the country. Most of the forest cut to feed the boilers of the stampmills at the mines. The wolves in that country had been killing cattle for a long time but the ignorance of the animals was a puzzle to them. The cows bellowing and bleeding and stumbling through the mountain meadows with their shovel feet and their confusion, bawling and floundering through the fences and dragging posts and wires behind. The ranchers said they brutalized the cattle in a way they did not the wild game. As if the cows evoked in them some anger. As if they were offended by some violation of an old order. Old ceremonies. Old protocols.

She crossed the Bavispe River and moved north. She was carrying her first litter and she had no way to know the trouble she was in. She was moving out of the country not because the game was gone but because the wolves were and she needed them. When she pulled down the veal calf in the snow at the head of Foster Draw in the Peloncillo Mountains of New Mexico she had eaten little but carrion for two weeks and she wore a haunted look and she’d found no trace of wolves at all. She ate and rested and ate again. She ate till her belly dragged and she did not go back. She would not return to a kill. She would not cross a road or a rail line in daylight. She would not cross under a wire fence twice in the same place. These were the new protocols. Strictures that had not existed before. Now they did.

She ranged west into Cochise County in the state of Arizona, across the south fork of Skeleton Creek and west to the head of Starvation Canyon and south to Hog Canyon Springs. Then east again to the high country between Clanton and Foster draws. At night she would go down onto the Animas Plains and drive the wild antelope, watching them flow and turn in the dust of their own passage where it rose like smoke off the basin floor, watching the precisely indexed articulation of their limbs and the rocking movements of their heads and the slow bunching and the slow extension of their running, looking for anything at all among them that would name to her her quarry.

At this season the does were already carrying calves and as they commonly aborted long before term the one least favored so twice she found these pale unborn still warm and gawking on the ground, milkblue and near translucent in the dawn like beings miscarried from another world entire. She ate even their bones where they lay blind and dying in the snow. Before sunrise she was off the plain and she would raise her muzzle where she stood on some low promontory or rock overlooking the valley and howl and howl again into that terrible silence. She might have left the country altogether if she had not come upon the scent of a wolf just below the high pass west of Black Point. She stopped as if she’d walked into a wall.

She circled the set for the better part of an hour sorting and indexing the varied scents and ordering their sequences in an effort to reconstruct the events that had taken place here. When she left she went down through the pass south following the tracks of the horses now thirty-six hours old.

By evening she’d found all eight of the sets and she was back at the gap of the mountain again where she circled the trap whining. Then she began to dig. She dug a hole alongside the trap until the caving dirt fell away to reveal the trap’s jaw. She stood looking at it. She dug again. When she left the set the trap was sitting naked on the ground with only a handful of dirt over the waxed paper covering the pan and when the boy and his father rode through the gap the following morning that was what they found.

Just a good quote that illustrates the type of words McCarthy puts into unnamed strangers' mouths:

    The boy didnt know if he understood or not. The old man went on to say that the hunter was a different thing than men supposed. He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there. Finally he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do. He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them.

More wisdom from strangers, who predict the future or understand what has happened far away, which is that Billy's parents have been murdered.

He told the boy that although he was huérfano still he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself. He said that the world could only be known as it existed in men’s hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them and therefore to know it one must look there and come to know those hearts and to do this one must live with men and not simply pass among them. He said that while the huérfano might feel that he no longer belonged among men he must set this feeling aside for he contained within him a largeness of spirit which men could see and that men would wish to know him and that the world would need him even as he needed the world for they were one. Lastly he said that while this itself was a good thing like all good things it was also a danger. Then he removed his hands from the boy’s saddle and stepped away and stood. The boy thanked him for his words but he said that he was in fact not an orphan and then he thanked the women standing there and turned the horse and rode out. They stood watching him go. As he passed the last of the brush wickiups he turned and looked back and as he did so the old man called out to him. Eres, he said. Eres huérfano. But the boy only raised one hand and touched his hat and rode on.

Sometimes, you can't be sure who exactly is talking, thanks to the lack of punctuation. The result is to be unsure if we are hearing narration or Billy Parham's thoughts. This is one such example of that, which also serves as an example of the theme of simple kindness of strangers:

He went back to the kitchen and looked for something with which to write. In the end he dusted flour from the bowl on the sideboard over the wooden table and wrote his thanks in that and went out and got his horse and led it afoot down the zaguán and out through the portal. Behind in the patio the little mule turned the pugmill tirelessly. He mounted up and rode out down the little dusty street nodding to those he passed on his way. Riding like a young squire for all his rags. Carrying in his belly the gift of the meal he’d received which both sustained him and laid claim upon him. For the sharing of bread is not such a simple thing nor is its acknowledgement. Whatever thanks be given, however spoke or written down.

And this is just a bizarre example of the needless cruelty that is so common in McCarthy's writing. It makes you wonder what happened to him. And by the way, I looked it up, and this is not humanly possible:

The German then did something very strange. He smiled and licked the man’s spittle from about his mouth. He was a very large man with enormous hands and he reached and seized the young captive’s head in both these hands and bent as if to kiss him. But it was no kiss. He seized him by the face and it may well have looked to others that he bent to kiss him on each cheek perhaps in the military manner of the French but what he did instead with a great caving of his cheeks was to suck each in turn the man’s eyes from his head and spit them out again and leave them dangling by their cords wet and strange and wobbling on his cheeks.

And here is another example of the types of conversations people have in these books. Just one of many:

The man sat his horse and weighed this soberly. As if there might be some deeper substrate to this reflection with which he must reckon. He said that men believe death’s elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny. He said that moreover it could not be otherwise that men’s ends are dictated at their birth and that they will seek their deaths in the face of every obstacle. He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof.

Qué piensa usted? he said. Billy said that he had no opinion beyond the one he’d given. He said that whether a man’s life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it. He said that while it was true that men shape their own lives it was also true that they could have no shape other for what then would that shape be?

Bien dicho, the man said. He looked across the country. He said that he could read men’s thoughts. Billy didnt point out to him that he’d already asked him twice for his. He asked the man could he tell what he was thinking now but the man only said that their thoughts were one and the same. Then he said he harbored no grudge toward any man over a woman for they were only property afoot to be confiscated and that it was no more than a game and not to be taken seriously by real men. He said that he had no very high opinion of men who killed over whores. In any case, he said, the bitch was dead, the world rolled on.

He smiled again. He had something in his mouth and he rolled it to one side and sucked at his teeth and rolled it back. He touched his hat.

Bueno, he said. El camino espera.

The Life of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust: A Memoir by Ben-Zion Gold

    I was looking for a book that might give me some idea of my grandfather's experience in the Holocaust, and I found this beautiful memoir of a man born the same year as my grandpa, also in Poland, 100 miles away. However, Ben-Zion Gold was much more religious than my grandfather's family, and a lot of his reminisces are about religious life at cheder and yeshiva. I know that like Gold, my grandpa had to worry about being attacked on the street for being Jewish, even before the war. Gold writes that of the three and a half million Jews living in Poland in the 20s and 30s, less than a third were religious. The majority were attracted to different Jewish ideas, like Zionism or the Jewish Socialist Bund, or to Communism.

    This book is especially good because Gold writes with immense wisdom as an octogenarian. He can look back on his childhood and understand better not just his own feelings, but the feelings and thoughts of the other children around him. With age, he is more accepting and forgiving of everyone, and I think he also feels nostalgic for everything, even what was bad, because it came from a world and a people destroyed by the Holocaust.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

    This was a very challenging book that I did not fully understand, but the parts I did understand were pretty interesting. In brief, Kuhn argues that the history of science is not continuous and is not always the history of pure progress. Rather, it is a history of revolutions and paradigm shifts. Apparently this book popularized the word "paradigm." Science depends on paradigms to set out the goals of research, the questions worth asking, many of the rules of a field, and the general conception of what is true. With a paradigm in place, scientists can conduct normal research (synonymous, I think, with basic research), which is a type of science designed to confirm the paradigm, using experiments to confirm the theory. However, sometimes, in the course of normal research, scientists discover anomalies. Some anomalies, and more likely when many anomalies of the same type are found, it can trigger a crisis in the field--the paradigm ceases to adequately explain the world. Then, from that crisis, a revolution in science can occur, in which a new paradigm emerges to explain both the old paradigm and the anomalies as well. A paradigm doesn't need to completely explain all phenomena, it just needs to be better at doing so than its competitors.

    Paradigms are useful because, once they can be taken for granted, scientists don't need to publish long treatises, establishing very fact upon which they make assumptions for more detailed research. Rather, once a paradigm has crystallized out of experience and theory, scientists can publish shorter articles, acknowledging, sometimes implicitly, the paradigm under which they work, and continuing to develop more detailed knowledge within that paradigm. Then, information can be passed on more quickly through textbooks that compile the normal research that occurs within the paradigm. Given this, scientists need to be aware that the science they learn in textbooks is an incomplete history of science. The science of textbooks, by eliminating all the rejected paradigms and interpreting all research through the accepted paradigm, imply that the development of the field has been a linear process of construction one block onto another. A more accurate conception of scientific development would be something like a story of searching for a road through dark woods, with different paths representing different paradigms, and the normal research under the current paradigm being the best and longest path out that has been discovered so far. But other paths have been taken in the past which led to becoming lost, backtracking, and working down the current path/paradigm. This means that, when looking back, all scientific production would seem like progress, but it may in fact be leading to a crisis and revolution.

A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs, by Theodore Draper

    This book is way too long but it is just so impressive. I found myself being so bored with the granularity of getting three versions of mundane conversations, while also being so impressed with how detailed Draper's research was. He not only reported on Iran-Contra at the time, but Draper went through over 50,000 pages of primary sources to create this book, which is essentially a reference book for the Iran-Contra Affairs (Draper says they really should be thought of as two separate but connected schemes) told in chronological format.

    So why did I read this book? Well, I had some questions about the Iran-Contra Affair. I did not need this many answers. But anyway. This is what I knew. I understood the Iran-Contra Affair to be a scheme in which the Reagan administration sold weapons to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War in order to make money to send to the Contras in Nicaragua, and that Ollie North was the fall guy. This was a very incomplete understanding, and it also made me wonder why the Reagan administration would work with Iran, a country/regime that was not Reagan's preferred one. I was also curious to know what Reagan's personal involvement was. What I learned was that the Iran-Contra Affairs were caused by the collision of a vague use of presidential authority with the massive delegation of power to the "imperial presidency." The cumulative effect of growing power to the president made it so that the president was presumed by many bureaucrats to have sole power over foreign policy, and the creation of the National Security Council Staff empowered bureaucrats (Ollie North) to plausibly act with that increased presidential authority.

    The NSC, as originally created, meant four members: the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, along with two advisory members, the CIA Director and the Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were originally granted staff, but under Eisenhower, the NSC staff were put more squarely under the sole control of the President through the Executive Office of the President. The National Security Advisor position, created post-WWII, developed over the next four decades to become a rival with the Secretary of State for control of foreign policy. The NSC staff also grew to 1,600 by President Reagan's time, from just 35 under LBJ, who were mostly temporary assignees from the State Department. The Reagan-era NSC was large enough to duplicate many roles in the State Department and operate independently of it. This capacity would allow for Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North to start his own covert operations outside normal channels.

    North gained too much influence as an NSC staffer from staying too long. On assignment from the Marine Corps, it would be typical for North to spend 2-3 years at the White House, North was there for nearly six years, over and over again managing to get the White House to override the orders of the Commandant of the Marine Corps for him to follow a normal career progression to become an infantry battalion commander.

    Before this all happened, Congress passed some laws that the Reagan administration would go on to break. They were the Boland Amendments, passed between 1982-86, which limited US government assistance to the contras in Nicaragua. Moreover, in 1983, the State Department launched Operation Staunch, which was an attempt to stop the flow of weapons from any country to Iran. The Reagan administration would break both of these, one being a violation of the law and an arrogation of power from Congress, and the other being a violation of the administration's own policy, showing the internal divisions between Reagan and his own Secretary of State, George Schultz. Reagan was also just plain confused about what was going on, and also just didn't want to know. He was repeatedly telling his subordinates to do things that were very legally questionable, and then just telling them to "follow the law" over and over. 

    To get around legal restrictions on aid to the Contras, North started to coordinate funding from third party donors, starting mostly with private individuals. This alone was already pushing the limits. Congress had made clear the government could not send military aid to the Contras, but North was sort of inventing a loophole to send non-governmental money to the Contras. North even acknowledged in letters that he was deceiving Congress and hiding the money from Congress. North was not just doing his job. He was clearly very passionate about the Contras and got carried away- one private funder quoting him as saying, "no, I don't care if I have to go to jail for this and I don't care if I have to lie to Congress about this." Draper acknowledges some kind of post-Vietnam syndrome affecting North, blaming the American defeat in Vietnam on a lack of funding from Congress, and seeing this as a noble opportunity to get around Congress.

    The reason why Draper calls it the Iran-Contra AffairS is because he very convincingly shows that they were really two different issues that got combined later on, not a master plan in the slightest. The reason that Iranian money got sent to the Contras was not because it was planned that way, but because the two covert operations were both handled by Ollie North. The Iranian plan really originated outside the US government with Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi and sketchy Iranian businessman Manucher Ghorbanifar. They wanted to end the arms embargo on Iran and sell arms to Iran as a business opportunity, since Iran was in desperate need in its years-long war against Iraq. They ended up developing the idea that they would use Israel as an intermediary, which became the reality.

    The Contra affair is somewhat straightforward, since it makes sense that Reagan would want to send cash to anti-communists. But Iran makes no sense. SecState, George Schultz, was opposed. SecDef, Caspar Weinberger, was opposed. But analysis out of the CIA and the NSC Staff showed that there was some room for a rapprochement with Iran, which felt threatened by the ongoing Soviet invasion of its neighbor, Afghanistan, which would last until 1989. But there was some confusion about whether it would be weapons sold to the government of Iran for rapprochement or to some opposition group to topple the government. And there was also analysis of different camps in the Iranian government jockeying for power (mostly invented by Ghorbanifar), which confused things more. Ultimately, it seems like Reagan did not know what he wanted out of Iran policy, but wanted to free hostages in Lebanon that he thought Iran could control. But Iran didn't even have these hostages! Hezbollah did! The State Department's policy was still that there was an arms embargo on Iran, but by the late summer of 1985, people in government were explicitly talking about an arms-for-hostages deal through Israel with Iran. Simplified, the plan was for Israel to sell weapons to Iran  and for the United States to resupply Israel. Israel thought that new weapons for Iran would prolong the war with Iraq, but official US policy was that it wanted the Iran-Iraq war to end, not stalemate for years.

    On August 20, 1985, the first shipment of arms reached Iran from Israel. But no hostages were released. Ghorbanifar explained that these weapons were seized by an "extremist" faction, and did not make it to the moderates for whom it was intended, as if they existed or were separate groups in the government controlling weapons (false). Then, arguments broke out--it turned out that the weapons were mistakenly delivered on an Israeli-marked plane, which could cause huge embarrassment to Iran, and were also of the wrong type. So, the Israelis agreed to send more weapons in exchange for one American hostage, who was the least valuable. The most valuable hostage was a CIA agent who was, unbeknownst to all, already dead in Lebanon. In November, to avoid the earlier embarrassment, Israel planned to ship the weapons to Iran by way of Portugal, so it wouldn't be clear what was happening. But nobody told Portugal, and the Portuguese authorities detained the flight. North became involved at this point and directed retired Major General Secord, who had been privately working on the Contra affair, to go to Portugal to try to get the plane off the ground. The Portuguese were befuddled at why the Americans, whose State Department was proclaiming an arms embargo on Iran, was trying to get them to let a shipment of arms reach Iran. To finally solve the problem, the CIA provided a charter flight from Portugal to Iran for the weapons, for which the Israelis deposited one million dollars into Secord's private account, Lake Resources, which was used for Contra funding, mixing the Iran and Contra funds. This was the first direct use of US government funds to support the Iranians. Critically, CIA covert activities require a finding of their necessity by the President, which nobody did at the time.

    As the relationship went on into January 1986, significant profits were made, some of which were due to typos, which resulted in the Army selling the weapons too cheaply to Israel, who marked them up and sold them to Ghorbanifar, who marked them up and sold them to Iran. North, who never ever took a cut for himself from these funds, took the "residuals," $16 million from the arms sale to Iran, and diverted it to the Contras. The US government just got bad deals over and over on the arms shipments. The original goal, hostage release, was not being met, since Iran could not get Hezbollah to release hostages. And the money that the Department of Defense got was miniscule compared to what Ghorbanifar, Secord, and the Contras were getting. I really wish that Draper had more information on the Hezbollah-Iran negotiations, which were impossible for him to get, but that would have revealed a whole lot of information about a whole other side of the negotiations. It was honestly just so funny that in May of 1986, somebody finally asked Hezbollah to release the hostages and they said hell no- we'll release them when Israel withdraws from the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon, Lahad prisoners are returned, Da'wa prisoners freed in Kuwait, and for the United States to pay all of Hezbollah's expenses in holding the hostages. Come on now. 

    As the scandal was revealed, the nightmare was impeachment, a la Watergate. People in the executive branch reacted so differently than they would in today's much more partisan environment. They were hurt by the fact that they pissed off both liberals and conservatives in both parties. And the public generally didn't believe the administration's explanations. Even Barry Goldwater, Mr. Republican, said, "I think President Reagan has gotten his butt in a crack on this Iran thing." Nowadays, I think the president would just say he can do what he wants and nobody in his party would blink, but then, North was shredding so many documents that the shredder broke, and the Attorney General was investigating his own president for breaking the law.

    The fundamental problem that caused the Iran-Contra Affairs was a failure to respect the Constitution. The Constitution empowers three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances on each other. But LtCol North and his boss, National Security Advisor John Poindexter made clear in later testimony to Congress and trials that they gave their absolute loyalty to the President. They thought this was they duty, but they were mistaken. While they served at the pleasure of the President, they swore an oath not to the President, but to the Constitution. And it is Congress who the Constitution appoints as the holder of the power to appropriate funds, not the President. North and Poindexter asserted that the President controls foreign policy, but this is not what the Constitution says. While the Constitution grants the President significant affairs over foreign policy, it requires approval of the Senate to approve treaties, and both houses of Congress must be responsible for any funding. Similarly, when North and Poindexter made calls to other government officials from the White House, those officials "snapped to," thinking of doing what the President wanted, but not that what the President wanted may have been against the law. Draper concludes the book by focusing on these constitutional issues. He points out that Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist Papers, was clear that 

The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world to the sole disposal of a magistrate, created and circumstanced, as would be a president of the United States.

The massive power that rested in the executive by the time Reagan was President, and is even greater today, has proven to be the greatest danger to the existence of the constitutional republic in the United States. None of this power has been taken by force, but has been willingly granted by Congress and the courts. The problems of the Iran-Contra Affairs were not problems unanticipated by the founders and framers of the Constitution. The founders understood that the power of foreign policy could not be solely controlled by the executive. As James Madison put it, "In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace in the legislature, and not to the executive department..." and later, in a letter to Jefferson, that 

The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse of all the trusts committed to a Government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views; and because the body of the people are less capable of judging, and are more under the influence of prejudices, on that branch of their affairs, than of any other.

 

 

Mexico in Review

    As I finished the Russia unit, I started to intersperse some miscellaneous books because it gets boring to read only the same topic over and over again. But the big unit I moved to next was another country, Mexico. I read 6 books about Mexico: Pedro Páramo, Mexico's Crucial Century, 1810-1910, In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl, Fifth Sun, El laberinto de la soledad, and then All the Pretty Horses. All the Pretty Horses is the first in a trilogy that I plan to read, but I am cutting off the blog post here, and I hadn't even been sure I would include it as a Mexico book, but the book was set mostly in Mexico and I finished it before writing this post. Two of the authors, both of more "literary" books, were Mexican. I tried to avoid the Mexican Revolution since I think there is just so much on it, but it was impossible to truly avoid it since almost everything in modern Mexico is touched by it. So Pedro Paramo, El laberinto de la soledad, and All the Pretty Horses all discussed the Revolution or the Cristero War in some way or another.

    The first big theme I picked up on in my reading was modern Mexico needing to catch up to the modern world. There is sort of a feeling that Mexico was this great empire under the Aztecs and then a really successful colony under the Spanish through the 18th century, but that it fell behind, and that the 19th and 20th centuries have been a big effort by Mexico to catch back up. This is really noticeable in Mexico's Crucial Century, as well as in El laberinto de la soledad, where Octavio de la Paz is very explicit that he sees the Revolution as a big moment that allowed Mexico to reach modernity.

    The other big theme was most apparent in Shadow of Quetzalcoatl and Fifth Sun, which was the birth of Mexico through contact between the indigenous people and the Spaniards, resulting in alliances or war between and among all the different people in contact with each other. It is pretty unusual in world history for two people to merge so fully like in Mexico, and when I went to Mexico City in June, it was apparent in murals and art and in the history museums that Mexicans see themselves as a combined people, who glorify their European and their indigenous history, especially the Aztec side of things. 

    Visiting Mexico in June made all of this a lot more significant and salient for me. Getting to see Teotihuacan and the Templo Mayor made it really cool to see how massive of structures the people of Mesoamerica could build, but then also how primitive it was compared to what the Spanish were doing an ocean away. The arrival of the Spanish was nothing short of cataclysmic, just like the arrival of the English and the French to the north. But the difference was that the natives combines with the Europeans in Latin America in a way that didn't happen to the north, and the way that people conceive of themselves in North and South America today are different as a result. North Americans can only really claim either Native American or European heritage, but it is very unusual to be able to claim descent from both like is common in Mexico.

    A big difference from the Russia unit is how the state is felt in each country. In Russia, the state is the primary violent actor. There was tons of death and destruction, but it was all at the hands of the Russian state or a state invading Russia. In Mexico, it was the opposite: a more extensive violence that operated at a higher level than Russia at peace but a lower level than Russia at war. The big danger to the safety of the people I read about in the Mexico books was not the government of Mexico, but the local government or criminals. 

    Reading the Mexico unit made me want to read a lot more literature in Spanish, building on my goal of reading more fiction this year. I think I've turned a corner and gotten a lot more interested in reading fiction, but I still don't know how to write about it yet. With my non-fiction books, I've settled into a "reflection," where I write the things I think are important to know from the book and I give a couple of my thoughts on it. But that has gotten a little redundant so I am trying to mix it up in these units where I can do some comparisons. With fiction, it is a totally different ballgame and I still don't know exactly what to write about for those books. But this unit has encouraged me to add more books in Spanish to my miscellaneous reading in between and throughout units, because I really need the practice. Next, I am moving on to some books broadly in the category of science.

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

     Man, this was a good book. Better than I expected. Contact McCarthy can really write. He doesn’t just create a good story about boys going on horseback from Texas to Mexico in the fifties, he can make it all about the important things in life without taking you out of the context of the story for a moment. He can put such interesting words in peoples’ mouths and also just describe what they say really well. At one point he writes,

     

He spoke of his campaigns in the desert of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold. His own father said that no man who has not gone to war on horseback can ever truly understand the horse and he said that he supposed he wished that this were not so but it was so. 

     Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shared a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all and makes it mortal. He said that if a person understood the soul of the horse then he would understand all the horses that ever were.

     McCarthy writes wise characters who go on soliloquies about life in believable ways, despite being teenagers or peasants. When he writes words into the mouths of peasant children, they are simple, but cut to the heart of issues like love, money, etc. the people in his writing all have a very functional intelligence. The protagonist, John Grady Cole, is a teenager who loves horses and doesn’t need to speak much. But he is a talented young cowboy who loves horses and the western lifestyle. When he is in a dark cell recovering from knife wounds, McCarthy writes, “So he thought about horses and they were always the right thing to think about.” The horses are honestly big characters in the novel, and their connections to their riders are so important. It is no coincidence that McCarthy calls Blevins’ big bay horse “thunderstruck,” when it was Blevins who feared being struck by lightning.

     All in all, I loved this book and crushed it in a few days, and I will definitely be continuing with the rest of the border trilogy. Thanks to Frank for the recommendation. 

El laberinto de la soledad por Octavio de la Paz

 Mientras leía este libro, perdí mis anotaciones, y ahora no tengo con que recordarme de mis pensamientos. También estoy de vacaciones y prefiero relajarme que escribir tanto. Voy a decir esto- la gran diferencia entre México y los Estados Unidos se ve en las relaciones raciales y étnicas. En Estados Unidos, hubo un genocidio de los indígenas. En México pasó lo mismo, pero el fenómeno más significante es la combinación entre los indígenas y los españoles. Por eso, la fundación de México es un nacimiento doloroso, pero en Estados Unidos es un cuento de desplazamiento y una conquista más pura de puede decir. Creo que esta diferencia impacta toda la auto concepción de los dos países. La otra mitad de este fenómeno tiene que ver con la esclavitud pero no forma tan gran parte de la historia mexicana, pues no voy a escribir tanto de eso ahora.  

     Otra cosa importante de que escriba De La Paz es cómo imperios sienten una “seducción  al muerte” en sus últimos días, sin embargo, los aztecas nunca sintieron eso porque estaban todavía muy temprano en su ascendencia sobre los pueblos de Mesoamérica cuando llegaron los españoles. Me parece inusual que cae un imperio así, en plena ascendencia, de una fuerza external. Lo más usual sería el largo declive hasta un colapso, como el imperio romano. Pero no sé. Quizás me parece así porque me siento que veo en mi mundo más declive.

     Algo interesante del libro es que De La Paz está escribiendo sobre “el fin de la Historia” en México, anunciando la llegada de México, después de la revolución, al laberinto de la soledad, que describe el dilema de los pueblos cuando llegan a la modernidad. Para él, a diferencia de Fukuyama, el mundo alcanzó el “fin de la Historia” después de la segunda guerra mundial. Para Fukuyama, la Historia finalizó cuando cayó la unión soviético, revelando que la democracia liberal es la última fase del estado o del gobierno. Para De La Paz, el dualismo de la unión soviético y los Estados Unidos es una especie de fin de Historia porque es un “empate.” Sabemos nosotros que se rompió este empate unas décadas después de la publicación de este libro, y también sabemos que el liderazgo de los Estados Unidos sobre el mundo ha sido en declive desde el libro de Fukuyama.

     Lo interesante de este libro que no contiene The End of History and the Last Man es que es el primer libro en que leo de la llegada al fin de la Historia un país desarrollando. Fukuyama solo habla de países desarrollados. El consejo de De La Paz a México al fin de la Historia es lo siguiente: México, como cualquier otra nación, llega solo an fin de la Historia. En este laberinto de decisiones que encuentra, los mexicanos deben buscar los demás naciones solitarias para formar una solidaridad entre las naciones contemporáneas. Así todos se trascienden los problemas de la modernidad.