King, A Life and Blood Meridian: Reading under the Heat Dome

By September 1st in Dallas, Texas, we’d been living under a heat dome for two and half months. The days during which it was actually pleasant to be outside could be counted on the fingers of one hand. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who kept thinking about packing up and moving away, as if we truly enjoyed that sort of flexibility. Besides, where would we go? The summer has been brutal, that’s true, but that brutality is preferable to one’s house burning down in a wildfire or flooding in some unprecedented rain event. No one is safe. No one is well-positioned. The climate emergency is too enormous.

Yet we can meet it, experts tell us. The tools and know-how exist. All we lack is the political will. Okay, all right, but that’s not a lot of comfort when what’s happening today in the environmental realm is only slightly more scary than what’s happening today in the political.

In short, I don’t think one be living under a heat dome all summer to experience multiple varieties of anxiety, climate grief, extreme mood swings, and the back-and-forth between brave efforts to generate hope and the far more frequent lapses into dread and despair.

The ups and downs of it all came home to me in a personal way when I happened to notice a couple of the books I’d been reading over the summer, one stacked on top of the other, on the end table next to my living room chair: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985) and this year’s King: A Life by Jonathan Eig. The juxtaposition was commentary.

The McCarthy I read decades ago; why on earth would I pick it up again? Partly it was to commemorate the author’s recent death, but mainly it was due to his two interconnected final novels published late last year. The first of the two, The Passenger, which I read almost the moment it became available, was so disappointing that I needed to go back and see if alleged masterpiece of decades ago actually held up. So much has changed since the 1980s. So much I took as foundational, as canonical, has required re-evaluation, especially concerning matters of geopolitics, gender, and race. The world has changed. I’ve changed. Maybe the books changed, too.

So I’ve been giving Blood Meridian a slow, patient read, a section or so per day. The verdict? I don’t know, maybe my capacity for horrific input has increased, or maybe it’s just life under the heat dome, but yes, it holds up. It’s even better than I remember it. I’m in awe of the language and of the achievement of imagination, even if it’s a question whether that achievement is ultimately defensible, given that what has been imagined is human depravity in all its depth and detail. The roving band of scalp-hunters ride into the city of Chihuahua, “to a hero’s welcome,” newly arrived from their latest massacre. They strip naked and settle into the public baths, the waters of which rise around them, transformed into “a thin gruel of blood and filth.” Such examples of virtuoso granularity can be found on pretty much every page.

There are also gestures here and there that I wouldn’t have picked up on when I read the book the first time simply because they speak to issues that weren’t on my radar. In the very first chapter, for instance, setting the stage for the whole book, “the kid” is pushed westward by fate into the contested borderlands where “not again in all the world’s turnings will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.”

May the stuff of creation be shaped to “man’s will”? Yes, it may, which is why we’re calling that stuff today the Anthropocene, and why the planet is heating so rapidly. But what does this say about “man’s will”? Were heat domes, wildfires, floods, climate migrations, and the sixth extinction the shaping that will intended?

We must cease the burning of fossil fuels, but one doubts whether habits so deeply sunk can be broken. It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of our dependence on fossil fuels (to slightly tweak a well-known phrase). I’m not much persuaded by new programs for shaping “the stuff of creation.” By reason or by temperament, I’m more drawn toward those that advocate for reshaping what McCarthy refers to as man’s “own heart,” that “another kind of clay.”

But at this point, we can’t continue to use such language as “man” and “his own heart” in the same, once-routine way that McCarthy does. The “man” responsible for the Anthropocene is not universal man but the man of the modern West and his particular way of organizing perception, the man we associate with Western imperialism and the industrial and technological revolutions. That man tended to perceive the New World the same way McCarthy does: as terrain empty of history and therefore a kind of laboratory in which such things as progress and “man’s will” might be tested.

Rather, we think in terms of particular societies with particular histories and ways of seeing the world. We examine bedrock assumptions about nature, human nature and society, and how these assumptions expand or limit what is imagined to be possible. Rather than some universalized human heart, these particular assumptions and habits of perception become the locale of change. Many terms have been used to refer to this change space: worldviews, mindsets, orientations, paradigms. The technology-minded might favor the term “programming.” A term newer to my experience is “imaginary” or “social imaginary.” At times, people have spoken about that space as the realm of values, as in the call for “a radical revolution of values.” This was the change that Martin Luther King, Jr. called for in his April 1967 speech in which he connected the civil rights struggle to economic exploitation and the American military intervention in Vietnam.

If reading McCarthy put me in awe of his artistry, but also kindled feelings of despair over human prospects (to put it mildly), reading Jonathan Eig’s new biography put me in awe of King’s faith and courage, and moved me in ways that, at least in moments, relieved the despair. As expected of a new life of such a significant historical figure, Eig makes use of newly available sources of evidence and emphasizes what they reveal. In this case, much new material came from FBI records, and Eig provides a clearer understanding of J. Edgar Hoover’s racist hatred for King, how personally affronted he was by King’s sexual indiscretions, and how relentless he was in using institutional power to thwart King’s efforts and the movement in general.

What does it mean to be made a target by the very powers assigned to protect you? What are the consequences of that? (The election worker Ruby Freeman, also of Atlanta, has recently asked the same question.) Years ago, I read Taylor Branch’s “America in the King Years” series, but I don’t remember feeling such appreciation for the psychological battering King accepted from the moment he stepped forward to become the voice and face of what became the Civil Rights Movement. That battering included, from the beginning, the fear of imminent assassination.

What sustained King? Partly, Eig tells us, it was the faith that he had been called by God to serve. Early on, King claimed that this faith allowed him to make peace with death. Eig’s narrative shows how uneasy this peace actually was. King paid an enormous toll in damage to his physical and mental health and was regularly hospitalized for episodes of severe fatigue and depression.

King was sustained, too, by the belief, also grounded in his Christian faith, that personal suffering was a necessary step toward societal redemption. Eig comes back to this point again and again. “King was a product of the Black church,” he writes. “He learned the values of love and sacrifice and humility from the church, and he learned to live those values. His visions served to intensify what was already an intense personal relationship with Jesus Christ. One part of that relationship was his understanding that Christian social action, suffering, and martyrdom were connected.”

I don’t relate to the doctrinal particulars of King’s faith, but I’m intrigued by the dynamic that faith proposes. I’m struck by how it’s aimed at the very change space of the social imaginary. I mean, if anything runs more counter to the imaginary of competitive self-interest and material growth that predominates in American society and that frames our behaviors collectively and individually, it’s the voluntary acceptance of suffering in the interest of societal redemption. And for that matter, is there any better scenario, not for countering that imaginary, but for reinforcing it, for taking it to its logical conclusion than the one Cormac McCarthy describes in Blood Meridian page after page after page?