It is quite unexpected to come across “otherworld” moments when first encountering Cormac McCarthy’s writing, but when one gets used to it, one looks forward to it. But, what’s going on in these passages reminds me of Freud’s “Uncanny” or “unheimlich”, which is a strange German word I trust the reader will track down.
Does any of this call up PP? In the dark edges beyond the fires Billy Parham builds, I wonder:
Of the wolf Billy captures to return to its home (yes, the wolf herself is “unheimlich”): “Her eyes did not leave him or cease to burn and as she lowered her head to drink the reflection of her eyes came up in the dark water like some other self of wolf that did inhere in the earth or wait in every secret place even to such false water holes as this that the wolf would be always corroborate to herself and never wholly abandoned in the world.”
And the “gatelamps” to what? “He woke all night with the cold. He’d rise and mend back the fire and she was always watching him. When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood’s alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was that nothing save blood had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to devour it. He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins there would perhaps be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. But they would not be this one.”
A blind man tells Billy he believes “the light of the world was in men’s eyes only for the world itself moved in eternal darkness and darkness was its true nature and true condition and that in this darkness it turned with perfect cohesion in all its parts but that there was naught there to see” and that it was “sentient to its core and secret and black beyond men’s imagining.”
What’s McCarthy after?