1- At one time there had been two moons in the sky

Manifest Destiny, the Comanche Empire, Cavalry Landscape Painters, and the Affective Realism of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

I’m going to post my Master’s Thesis from Spring 20203 here in parts. It’s long. This is the Prologue. Substack is fairly limited when it comes to formatting and so this version won’t be as good looking as I’d like it to be (I’m anticipating footnotes will be a mess and I also cannot publish everything on a single post), but so it goes. For those of you who read my entire thesis, you will be in a very select company. For anyone that is a fan of McCarthy and Blood Meridian, I hope there are portions here that add to your appreciation of the novel.

Flying across the frozen expanse of the American continent, in the relative ease and safety of airline travel, my small dog sleeping at my feet in a carry on, I’ve crossed over the country between graduate school and my home in California nearly half a dozen times in as many months, back and forth for breaks. The flights ascend from the wet grey green ridges and hills of the Pacific’s coastal mountains or from the grey brown sandy wetlands and forests and suburbs of the Atlantic and for nearly six hours, in the roaring quiet of jet engines, pass over the snow draped landscape of the country, in cloud shrouded terrain of brown and black and white. From the air, the topography has an observable symmetry, water and snow in rivulets and rivers carving endless fingers and channels into the rock and soil. It is mesmerizingly beautiful, all parallel weaving lines, the patterns of wind and water on the land. To live amidst this landscape, amidst the steep valleys and peaks, lost in the wide steppes and in the wind, one quickly forgets this grand mindless design, becomes subsumed in the pain and difficulty and rage of a moment located in a void. Joan Didion describes this land as “country so ominous and terrible that to live in it is to live with antimatter.” “It is difficult,” she writes, “to believe that ‘the good’ is a knowable quality” (Didion, 159). This is a hostile and unforgiving landscape.

This is also a journey that, in the context of history, owes its effortlessness and comfort to a specific fulcrum in our nation’s trajectory. To cross the land acquired in the Texas Annexation and the Mexican American War is to pass across the width of the territorial vision of a few men, realized in decades. To exist in America in any capacity is to participate on some level, however willingly, in the expansive dreams of an empire that destroyed the empires before it. This paper is about this landscape and about the violence within it. To my mind, there is no better representation of this landscape, of the bloodshed that created our empire, of this specific moment of encounter and violent exchange, than Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 western epic, Blood Meridian or the Evening of Redness in the West.

Figure 1 Somewhere over America, January 31, 2023, 1

Figure 2, Somewhere over America, January 31, 2023

Figure 3, Somewhere over America, January 31, 2023