The Judge On War

17 Dec 2003

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"Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West" by Cormac
McCarthy

  On a rise at the western edge of the playa they passed a crude
wooden cross where Maricopas had crucified an Apache.  The mummied
corpse hung from the crosstree with its mouth gaped in a raw hole, a
thing of leather and bone scoured by the pumice winds off the lake and
the pale tree of the ribs showing through the scraps of hide that hung
from the breast.  They rode on.  The horses trudged sullenly the alien
ground and the round earth rolled beneath them silently milling the
greater void wherein they were contained.  In the neuter austerity of
that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no
one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth
claim to precedence.  The very clarity of these articles belied their
familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part
and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more
enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all
preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with
unguessed kinships.
  They grew gaunted and lank under the white suns of those days and
their hollow burnedout eyes were like those of noctambulants surprised
by day.  Crouched under their hats they seemed fugitives on some
grander scale, like beings for whom the sun hungered.  Even the judge
grew silent and speculative.  He'd spoke of purging oneself of those
things that lay claim to a man but that body receiving his remarks
counted themselves well done with any claims at all.  They rode on and
the wind drove the fine gray dust before them and they rode an army of
graybeards, gray men, gray horses.  The mountains to the north lay
sunwise in corrugated folds and the days were cool and the nights were
cold and they sat about the fire each in his round of darkness in that
round of dark while the idiot watched from his cage at the edge of the
light.  The judge cracked with the back of an axe the shinbone of an
antelope and the hot marrow dripped smoking on the stones.  They
watched him.  The subject was war.
  The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by
the sword, said the black.
  The judge smiled, his face shining with grease.  What right man
would have it any other way? he said.
  The good book does indeed count war an evil, said Irving.  Yet
there's many a bloody tale of war inside it.
  It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge.  War
endures.  As well ask men what they think of stone.  War was always
here.  Before man was, war waited for him.  The ultimate trade
awaiting its ultimate practitioner.  That is the way it was and will
be.  That way and not some other way.
  He turned to Brown, from whom he'd heard some whispered slur or
demurrer.  Ah Davy, he said.  It's your own trade we honor here.  Why
not rather take a small bow.  Let each acknowledge each.
  My trade?
  Certainly.
  What is my trade?
  War.  War is your trade.  Is it not?
  And it aint yours?
  Mine too.  Very much so.
  What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff?
  All other trades are contained in that of war.
  Is that why war endures?
  No.  It endures because young men love it and old men love it in
them.  Those that fought, those that did not.
  That's your notion.
  The judge smiled.  Men are born for games.  Nothing else.  Every
child knows that play is nobler than work.  He knows too that the
worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather
in the value of that which is put at hazard.  Games of chance require
a wager to have meaning at all.  Games of sport involve the skill and
strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride
of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in
the worth of the principals and define them.  But trial of chance or
trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that
which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
  Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives.
Who has not heard such a tale?  A turn of the card.  The whole
universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which
will tell if he is to die at that man's hand or that man at his.  What
more certain validation of a man's worth could there be?  This
enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument
concerning the notion of fate.  The selection of one man over another
is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed
who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance
either one.  In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of
the defeated the decisions are quite clear.  This man holding this
particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from
existence.  This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once a game
and the authority and the justification.  Seen so, war is the truest
form of divination.  It is the testing of one's will and the will of
another within that larger will which because it binds them is
therefore forced to select.  War is the ultimate game because war is
at last forcing of the unity of existence.  War is god.
  Brown studied the judge.  You're crazy Holden.  Crazy at last.
  The judge smiled.
  Might does not make right, said Irving.  The man that wins in some
combat is not vindicated morally.
  Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of
the powerful in favor of the weak.  Historical law subverts it at
every turn.  A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any
ultimate test.  A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to
be proven in error as to his views.  His very involvement in such a
trial gives evidence of a new and broader view.  The willingness of
the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in
fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical
absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and
of what great moment the divergences thereof.  For the argument is
indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest.
Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his
knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his
judgements ultimately he must submit them before a higher court.  Here
there can be no special pleading.  Here are considerations of equity
and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and
here are the views of the litigants despised.  Decisions of life and
death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of
right.  In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed,
moral, spiritual, natural.
  The judge searched out the circle for disputants.  But what says the
priest? he said.
  Tobin looked up.  The priest does not say.
  The priest does not say, said the judge.  Nihil dicit.  But the
priest has said.  For the priest has put by the robes of his craft and
taken up the tools of that higher calling which all men honor.  The
priest also would be no godserver but a god himself.
  Tobin shook his head.  You've a blasphemous tongue, Holden.  And in
truth I was never a priest but only a novitiate to the order.
  Journeyman priest or apprentice priest, said the judge.  Men of god
and men of war have strange affinities.
  I'll not secondsay you in your notions, said Tobin.  Dont ask it.
  Ah Priest, said the judge.  What could I ask of you that you've not
already given?

The Judge On War

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