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Blood Resonance: Ontological Intrusions Between Deleuze and McCarthy Darren Hutchinson
Abstract: In this essay, I follow the mutual intrusions of things as the works of Cormac McCarthy and Deleuze/Guatarri come into a strange resonance. This juxtaposition not only shows how the texts of A Thousand Plateaus and Blood Meridian provide reciprocal illumination, but also facilitates a tracing of the interplay between the voices of philosophy and fiction. This work follows the playing of complementary passages as the ontological voice is set to war with itself and the narrative voice is allowed to inherit this ontological war, irrupting as the Earth speaks beyond ontology.

On the plain behind him are wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which there are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. (McCarthy, 337)

I. It would be wrong to say that fiction could essentially function as ontology or even that it presupposes an ontology. Insofar as ontology heedingly proceeds towards mere being, even when this mere being is not considered as a totality but rather as the opening perpetual inception of be-ing, fictional prose is much too specific to achieve ontological aimsmuch too detailed, much too singular, with the weight of authorial voice, character, setting, narrative, and concrete description pulling it down from the heights of the necessary transcendence Fiction, it would seem, at most could provide raw material for the machine of ontology, either through presenting examples which could be studied from an ontological vantage or else through giving data for the investigation of the object and nature of fictional writing itself (are fictional objects real?). If one attempted to object to fiction's limitations here and hold that it may symbolize or metaphorically present an ontology, then it is immediately obvious that this claim cannot be maintained, since it could be instantly countered that the ontology could be presented on its own as a generalized discourse and the fiction dispensed with: following (through altering) Wittgenstein's pivotal statement about ontological representationwhat can be said (about mere being) can be said clearly.1 In such a case, the presupposed or symbolized ontology would
1 Wittgenstein from his Tractatus: Was sich berhaupt sagen lt, lt sich klar sagen; und wovon man nicht reden kann, darber mu man schweigen. (Vorwort) Wittgenstein was aware that all philosophical language allows for literary intrusions, metaphorical attempts to say the unsayable which amount only to the coming forth of meaningless marks, pure materiality, nonsense, the Earth showing itself from itself. Or rather, silently being without sense (since even the saying of the difference between sense and nonsense falls silent), showing nothing, a mystical darkness which perpetually crosses itself out, totally other.

2 be a surface interpretation, nothing essential, and thus stand in competition with countless other possible interpretations, even a multiplicity of incommensurable ontological frameworks (the works of Dickens may take place in the material world of Marxist struggle or in the mind of a Berkeleyan mad God.) And yet, at the limits of ontology, when it focuses to a laser point, a Parmenidean locus, where the very words of ontology become being (or are, as becoming), thus at the point where ontology ceases to be discourse about being altogether, evincing itself instead as an alternation between the silence singularity of a mystical implosion and the endless pluralization of linguistic performances, shattering the being they would comprehend, then there is a certain return of fiction, a certain (re-)intrusion of literary specificity, almost as if the earth began speaking in the silence left behind at the end of metaphysics.2 In such an event, literature does not function as ontology or presuppose ontology but rather intrudes into ontological space, twisting this space into unheard-of configurations. Witnessing this event places one in the path of the violent return of the things themselves, beyond their ontological reduction. The sites of the death of ontology (there are many) provide the perspectives from which we can study these literal intrusions. For instance, in Descartes' erection of the subjective barrier which limns the outside and inside of the modern world, mirroring the simultaneous destruction of the medieval God, Aristotelian substance, and the Christian soul and invention of the psychological interior, pure physicality, and the divine ideal of absolute knowledge (not the omniscience of knowing all things but rather the knowing of all knowing, the target of epistemology), there occurs within, alongside, and as a part invasions of the winter dressing gown, the fire, the paper, madmen, and satyrs, along with the re-materialization of the excluded God as possibility and the imminent threat of the evil deceiver. These figures quite literally inhabit the stage of the Cartesian drama as necessary characters. Doubt, no matter how severe, must always engage these hands and that wax and those automata-like people out in the street, so in a certain sense, those things themselves always escape it, slipping like mercury from beneath its pressure. Or, for another instance, at the very singularity of infinite being, before the gateway of the eternal return, the site where all existence knits together and exposes itself to itself, destroying all meta-physics forever, Zarathustra encounters not only the gateway itself and the dwarf, but also the moonlight between the trees and the spider, the howling dog and the roof and the ghost, all the things which would return forever, their singular repetitions replacing the figure of the return itself through showing it to be one thing among countless others.3 (And is it not strange that this night and that tree are also figures involved in the overcoming of the immediacy of sense-certainty in the opening of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit at the very inception (which already presupposes the end) of the movement of absolute knowledge?)4 Or with
2 Parmenides: . (BVIII 34) When thinking is the same as that which it thinks, when heedful perception is the same as that toward which it proceeds, then neither an identity of presence nor a moment of knowledge occurs but rather perpetual oscillation, as being falls away from comprehension and passes into the endless surging of the Earth. 3 Or in the first formulation of the return from Die Froehliche Wissenschaft, Nietzsche formulates the encounter with the return so: This life, as you have lived and do live it, you will have to live once again and even uncountable times again; and there will be nothing new about it, but rather every pain and every desire and every thought and sigh and everything inarticulably small and great will have to return to you, and everything in the same order and sequenceand even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I. (570) 4 Hegel: To the question What is Now? We answer, for example, Now is night. and Here is a tree. I turn

3 Heidegger's Being and Time, even though no singular things are mentioned at that juncture, where he says, Only a being that is essentially futural in its being so that it can let itself be thrown back upon its factical There, free for its death and shattering itself upon it . . . can hand down to itself its inherited possibility, take over its own throwness and be in the Moment for 'its time,' it is hard not to undergo an uncanny incursion of the factical as one imagines Heidegger handing down to himself his inherited possibility in the guise of a stack of National Socialist paperwork on his desk and a swastika pin on his jacket. (352) Critiques of the warping of Heidegger's philosophy through his politics are only possible through the non-critical event of imagined ontic incursions at the heart of ontology. Although such intrusions are certainly not merely accidental (though one could not say that they are essential either, since the formulation of the meaning of essence invites them: examples precede definitions), they are usually not intentional, at least insofar as the intentional involves following a programmed operation, a method, a formula. Like many human associations, their arrival in philosophy usually happens through happenstance, coming as oracular inspirations from the daemon of the earth. But this is not entirely true of the philosophy of Deleuze/Guattari. The things themselves manifest within their thought not only through the creativity of their mad dialogical associations in the mystery of shared writing, not only through their fractured (anti-)Freudian unconsciousness, as it is exteriorized and spread across the entire surface of their work in fragments but also through a certain orchestrated plan. How do you make yourself (your text?) a body without organs?
1) You may tie me down on the table, ropes drawn tight, for ten to fifteen minutes, time enough to prepare the instruments; 2)One hundred lashes at least, a pause of several minutes; 3) You begin sewing, you sew up the hole in the glans; you sew the skin around the glans itself, preventing the top from tearing; you sew the scrotum to the skin of the thighs. You sew the breasts, securely attaching a button with four holes to each nipple. You may connect them with an elastic band with buttonholes . . . (TP, 151)

One gets the picture. The equally masochistic program of the production of the Deleuzian/Guattarian text might be formulated as follows: 1) You spend a good half of your waking hours hunched over a desk, reading minute print until your eyes redden. 2) You write page after page, smoking one cigarette after another until your lungs burn to keep focus, castigating yourself each time your attention wanders. 3) You give up all hope of maintaining past friendships and forming new ones as you withdraw into your silent space of thought each day. 4.) You put forth your ideas, only to have most of them misunderstood, bastardized, plagiarized, or worse unnoticed. Many think you are madder than the schizophrenics you extol. You grow your fingernails long to confirm their suppositions. Whereas the first program allowed for the literal intrusions, not only of waves of pleasure and pain, not only of emotional agonies and terrors, not only of cathartically recalled traumatic memories and associations, relived and managed in a semi-voluntary situation, but also of the
myself around and this truth has thereby disappeared and has turned into its opposite. (84-85)

4 table's smooth surface against one's skin, the thread and the needle into the body, the whip across multiple surfaces, and the elastic band and the buttons through vulnerable remainders, the second program awaits and calls for the literal intrusions of packs of wolves, roving bands of nomads, strange eggs, abstract machines, masochistic bodies, great plant growths, geological eruptions, desert planes, schizophrenic inventions, sorcerers, etc. as a plethora of insane haecceities arise on the surface of the tightly controlled and orchestrated textual space, a space which (re-)describes a material outside, carving strange new moving figures into its static landscape, but also moves as an instance of the manifestation of these haecceities themselves, as the body of the Earth juts into the world of the book.. The praise of the structures and strategies of Anglo-American literature given by Deleuze could equally be applied to his work with Guattari in this light:
One only discovers worlds through a long, broken flight. Anglo-American literature continually shows these ruptures, these characters who create their line of flight, who create through a line of flight. Thomas Hardy, Melville, Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Miller, Kerouac. In them, everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside. They create a new Earth; but perhaps the movement of the earth is deterritorialization itself. (Dialogues, 36-37)

Here we can attend to the way in which literature intrudes into the Deleuzian/Guatarrian text. On the one hand, the preceding passage indeed contains a material ontology, a concrete formulation of general structures of being through which literature is inherited. This ontology is presented through sutures on the smooth surface of the body of the philosophical corpus, the lines of force which draw it together, weaving it into a coherent whole. The philosophemes of the rupture, the line of flight, the Earth, the inside and the outside, the entire presupposed relationship between impossible transcendence and necessary immanence, doctrines of creation and pre-existence, time and becoming, practically everything metaphysics has ever dreamed of is already contained in those few words, provided that one hears them at their proper depth. This micro-abstract machine of Deleuze's/Guattari's writings readily affirms an ontology of an entire configuration of smooth and striated surfaces, bodies without organs, nomadological excursions, becoming other, the resistance to Oedipus and capital and all the rest. And yet, in the midst of this invocation of the whole, as invited guests, a series of proper names enter. These names include not only surnames such as Hardy and Woolf, and also not only the twisting of the surnames into a weird zone between fiction and autobiography, as for instance Kerouac and Miller become their own characters as their characters become them, but also the great white whale and the deserted island, the tortoise and the mayor, and the cracked lives of the bourgeoisie. All of these names can enter only because a gateway has been prepared for them to return, the arduous stacking of stones and the backbreaking work of layering and polishing undertaken. On the surface of the earth, a body has been created through a sacred ritual of selfimmolation, and on the surface of this body, Queegueg's tattoos are inscribed, memorial images of an Earth that refuses to be replaced by its idols. After all, according to Deleuze's reading of this list, it is not (only) the authors who are speaking, creating thinking, but rather the movement of the Earth irrupting in authorial form. The author is nothing other than the Earth freeing itself from itself, deterritorializing; another earthquake, another volcano, another slowly forming chasm as rain erodes the striated surfaces.

5 Through and as the authors, terra-machines move and operate, randomly forming enzymes and proteins, combining and recombining to shape the semblance of organismal life. Through and as the authors, departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside happens in the lyricism of letters, as desires and consummations, screams and exhilarations, cobbledtogether memory-associations, impressions as wounds, and the crystalline formations of the concepts of others become alphabetized on the plane of a great stitched palimpsest. In their readings of literature, Deleuze/Guatarri do not use the texts as examples or interpret the works but they rather inherit them, receiving the propagations from the fictions they value (as sent from the earth itself) into the fabric of ontology, joyously allowing it to be ripped and sheared and stained, threatening to unravel entirely in wanderings beyond the division between madness and reason. Insofar as it is always the Earth which speaks, all writing is automatic writing, thought is always already composed entirely of unthoughts, and the only difference between a self-aware ontology which allows itself to be eviscerated by the stalagmites and stalactites of the cave of the Earth and an ontology which attempts to represent the earth as an idea (making it into a world, a totality, a universe) is the degrees of fascism to which these uncontrolled ingresses are subjected. Deleuze offers his panegyric to Anglo-American literature precisely because he sees in certain texts of this genre this radical practice of automatism, and because in attending to this practice, he finds the earth singing with such intensity that it breaks the walls of old concepts, allowing new ones to be formed on the wasteland of ontological insight. II. To the extent that fiction manifests as nothing other than the intrusion of the Earth into/as language, fiction cannot function as even a form of failed ontology, since it lacks the appropriate inscriptive surface, the plane of concepts which will be ruptured, warped, weathered, and sent into untoward directions. And yet, everything that can be said is possible in the work of literature, since that work is possibility itself, the genre of all genres, the place where the entire saying of being and beings may be displaced into an imaginative register of words. It will come as no surprise that even though fiction cannot operate as ontology, it may, in its own characteristic operations, mime ontology, include ontological speaking inside it, moving into a philosophical cadence, perhaps even for the entirety of a volume (as in Borges).5 Or perhaps for only a few sentences. In Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, the great Anglo-American work of the earth, possibly the most resonant work with Deleuze's claims about this sort of literature (even though Deleuze's claims predate the publication of Blood Meridian by eight years), McCarthy mimes an ontological orator who would claim to provide a theme for his work, a trajectory, a question to be posed and solved:
See the child . . . .He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man. . . .
5 Borges: If an eternal traveler should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorderwhich, repeated, becomes order, the Order. My solitude is cheered by this elegant hope. (118) For instance, the surveying voice of The Library of Babel both hovers above and stands outside, understanding the library as a library, when in fact it would be the arche-library, the library beyond libraries, the unsayable and non-archivable itself. And yet, this impossible voice is placed as a figure, one with hopes for consolation in an endless world, a sad and alone fellow traveler.

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Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become as remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning 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 another kind of clay. (3)

Not only in that visage but also in these words, all history is contained, or as is inscribed on the infamous Judge's rifle, et in Arcadia ego. (125) The novel begins with the only selfavowed vocalizations of its spectral author, an author who hovers over the brutality of the West itself, with that term to be heard in all its connotations. The spectral voice of the the ontology of the West announces itself only to withdraw into the silence of presentation, holding itself steadily in place, expectant for the lyrical intimations of being. The weird oration, an oration neither authorial nor of a distinct character, the oration of narrative itself, the strange region between the speaking of the speaker and the inspiring daemonics of the oracular muse, the fusion of words of Homer(s) and Herodotus and Sophocles and Plato, blended with the urgency of the Jahwistic prophets speaks from nowhere and to no one, thus to everywhere and everyone, saying the (non-)meaning of the earth. Such a voice, within fiction, is nothing other than a mimesis of the fiction of the metaphysical voice itself, par excellence, the voice which has distilled itself from the epic history of narrative only to disavow its own origins, the lie of necessary truth. On the one hand, the voice occasionally forgets its detached imperative, evincing its mundane stance: God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. (3) But on the other, it speaks from a great distance of the world and destiny, of freedom and will, of creation and predetermination, of the coming forth of everything without limit. It is only through and within the work of fiction that such a voice can be molded and placed. When this voice speaks in ontology itself, it displaces itself, not only hiding itself beneath the web of general concepts it weaves, but also reduplicating itself on the outside. For when one attempts to point out that the voice is in fact not speaking from nowhere, that it presupposes values, a history, a particular set of circumstances, then despite oneself, one finds the daemon of history speaking through one, the voice having duplicated itself as an insistent outside. Only in the work of fiction can the ontological articulation presence as figure, as character, as clay itself, as having the tone and cadence of a misbegotten singularity, and like the child of which McCarthy speaks, one does not evaluate it, but rather one encounters it with the appropriate affects, perhaps a mixture of sympathy and wonder and horror. Thus, when this clay is hardened into the stone of the work of fiction, it operates as something other than a vehicle of representation or as an announcement of conceptual truth. Instead, it provides a site for another sort of truth to emerge, a truth which cannot be said but rather which shows itself through and as the irruption of the text. The mimed ontological voice becomes a sort of mystical writing pad, where the lyrical unfolding of earthly inspirations will occur. For instance, in Blood Meridian's first presentation of the epic journey in the great wasteland of the plains, with the Kid following the army, carrying war of a madman's making onto a foreign land, this voice hovers above the filibusters like an ominous buzzard, taking in the carrion of soldiers dying from illness and heat to sustain itself. (40) We begin, as these things must begin, with no beginning, already among the things of the earth, in media res. Here, we only need to follow the voice on the first leg of its journey, attending to a series of terra-intrusions which it affords:

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They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsating and malevolent behind them. (44) Now wolves had come to follow them, great pale lobos with yellow eyes that trotted neat of foot or squatted in the shimmering heat to watch them as they made their noon halt. (45) Ten days out with four men dead they started across a plain of pure pumice where there grew no weed, no shrub, as far as the eye could see. (45) They saw halfburied skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. (46) They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing. (47) That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and the beards of men. (47) The thunder moved up from the southeast and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered up out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream. (47)

In these few passages, we can find, as the filibusters found those of mules, skeletal remains of a program. A)The dimensionality of heaven and earth becomes liquified. No longer is there a projection of a crystalline firmament limited by the darkness of earthly creation. Rather, great flows of fluid pool into one another, swirling and eddying with an organic dynamics. The light of disclosure, the clearing of the sun itself, the ethereal non-hydrogenated Apollo becomes a true liquid outflow, as Sol rains down urine-colored, and one finds oneself in the midst of a great stream of emitted outpouring from the great phallus of illumination. And as the sky seeps into the ground, the ground bleeds upward, making the horizon into hemoglobular mud, the crimson of the clay and the sinking rays of day combined. Whirlwinds of dust, waves of heat, blistering brightness, energy exuded both by the bulbous clouds and the dried soil, all mix into a Terra-cosmic maelstrom. Such an Umwelt does not surround but rather penetrates and invades, filling every pore with foreign substances, until these substances become so intimate they are no longer foreign and the human organism becomes an organ in the great body of the Earth. B) In the midst of such torrents, a great plain/plane keeps itself in place. Like a great frozen surface on the polar depths, the white pumice sets the merciless scene for all human crossings. One of the filibusters remarks, This looks like the high road to hell to me, and indeed, in order to travel to hell or anywhere else, one must cross a great plain/plane, the

8 hard and unyielding geometry of an extended surface. All human trips that do not end in drowning or sudden, deadly impact (and even many of those) carry a solid region along, as Husserl noted. (Husserl 222-233) Human beings even transport the plane/plain of the Earth into space as the floor of the spacecraft itself. But this grounding ground is not merely a founding support or a necessary site of orientation. It is also a bed on which skulls can be cracked and one which sucks corpses down into its sand and catches heels and hooves, twisting them until bones break. C) Out of the war of change and permanence as the Earth endlessly contests itself, the body of a mad god caught in a perpetual auto-immunological conflict, intrusions occur. Animals emerge, packs of wolves, following and watching, miming and prefiguring, showing the filibusters what they really always were. Horses speed, European steeds turned feral, noncreated creatures running with no other purpose than the joy of speed itself. The bones of long dead beings poke through, whether men or mules, even the recent past already fossilized into things of memory. On the plain/plane, the human incursions/excursions, their conflicts, their deaths and leavings are all re-animalized, returned from universal civilization to a higher, absolute order of bestiality. D) And in the midst of all this, the mad mythological imaginations of the men make the landscape into a fevered dream. As the animals interlope and follow and precede, even on the path to hell, uncanny fantasies spun in the words of poets whose names are now lost unfurl. The desert becomes the planet Anareta, the form which destroys all form, where the men lie, clutched to a nameless wheeling in the night. (46) Unbidden associations transform the harshness of everything into the disordered excess of sublime terror, as the world becomes a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. (47) It would be incorrect to infer that the text of the passage across the plain/plane of the Earth is a metaphor for the occurrence of literature itself. As McCarthy's agent succinctly expressed to an ambitious interpreter who wished to publish an annotated version of Blood Meridian together with McCarthy, Cormac McCarthy wishes his novels to be read the way he's written them. (Schimpf, i) The great passage towards destruction is nothing more or less than an account of a passage of a group of men towards destruction (of themselves and others). If one wishes to say that it is none other than the progress of the West (in all its meanings) itself, or that it provides a moral for colonization, or that it is a symbolization of the evil inherit in the world, then one is not attending to the way the novel is written, to the thing itself of the text as it occurs. And yet from our necessarily nave ontological vantage, from the edge of a blindness which disallows us from figuring our own figures, of seeing the fictions in our truths, we may risk a few incisive interpretations. These interpretations may leave us recoiling in horror and amazement concerning what our own voices sound like. For one may indeed be justifiably horrified and amazed concerning the sound of the speaker/writer's voice throughout the narrative presented. On the one hand, the voice is the hard flatness of the plain/plane itself with no pity and no compassion. Blood Meridian opens with a quote from Jakob Boehme's Six Theosophic Points which indicates the necessity of a certain coldness when detailing the lives and deaths of those in the darkness of the wastelands of the earth. (BM i, STP 102)
It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrowing is a thing that is swallowed up in death and death and dying are the very life of darkness.

9 But the accounts of death and suffering and mindless violence in McCarthy's novel are not left in darkness. In order to do death and dying justice, the narrator must keep the voice frozen, emulating the indifference of the blackest night. Such a stone voice is the backbone of narrative, whether calmly positioned above the destruction of the temple, keeping count of the bodies dropping on the front line, or recounting the savagery of betrayal in love. The stolid coolness of the author is always exposed by the perfection of the text, regardless of the chaos ensuing therein. And when this coolness is projected inside as well, changing into the mechanical apparatus which speaks electronically, becoming the words of the book-machine, the very invention of intellectual distance, then it swallows death and dying as well, though not to obscure them in oblivion but rather to present them fossilized, ancient impressions carefully mounted in the light of day. The deadly solidity of the ghostly narrative voice is only one of its wonders. Under the still arctic night of narratival positioning, the stars burn through, searing affective scars onto the plain/plane of the text. Flows of pain and suffering which would have been swallowed up in the original void of death and dying emerge in spasms of language which shake the detached, spectatorial serenity of the speaker. Some of the men, undergoing the shirring of their meat from their bones, cried out to be left and then they died, and at night, the wretched ponies huddled and whimpered like dogs. A man named Hayward prays, Lord we are dried to jerky down here. Even after rain, they ride on with waterkegs empty and horses perishing, like a company of armed and mounted millers wandering in dementia. (46-47) Through these words, true Mitleid courses, from the author, from the ghastly orator despite itself, from the reader, perhaps even from the absent God, the few drops of rain falling as his tears over the desolation of his leaving. Together with these popping, molten bubbles of emotion, seemingly all the things of the world float to the surface of the lava sea of language, surprisingly unconsumed: beans, tentacles, meatscraps, felloes, astrolabes, wattles, porcelain, bladerbones, gore, loomshafts, hearts, coals. Blood Meridian is, of course, based on history, as all novels are, insofar as all novels inherit the ontological constellations of ordinary and extraordinary things of interest for human, whether found inevitably or artificially produced. But the stoically bizarre Stimmung of that particular text (both its sound and its mood, one might even say its vibration) allows these things to burst forth one after another with no rhymes or reasons save those of brute, contingent encounters. It is almost as if the things of history had eidolic surfaces, leaving behind paleontologized remnants of themselves, remnants which found their way into the repository of McCarthy's words, which strike us with the legible force of all those bare realities. And in their poetic coarseness, with the rhythm of McCarthy's barbaric gnosticism, the words of the text not only assault with the force of the things they present but they also pulse as things themselves, gunfire scattered into the ozone of consciousness. One cannot write of death and dying and horrible things without allowing one's words to become sadistic weapons, injuring the reader of their own accord, graphicity which elicits traumas and nightmares. Finally, in and as the figuring voice of the text, the strange characterless character which provides the unspoken background for everything said, the blossomings of affects and things, adjectives and nouns, the artifacts of the jointures of language and world, become constellated in a new Geo-mythology. What the Earth does through the author, through and as language, in the figuring event of figurative speech is to create strange dimensions for its figures, interplays

10 between divinities and mortals betwixt the bloody earth and the liquid sky. Christian transcendence and Greek glory are contorted through the return of older, more savage images of gods, demon kingdoms and changeling lands. Prayers for hope, rain, and salvation materialize not as appeals to the transcendence of the celestial spheres or the divine abyss but rather as the earth (rather than the subject) hearing itself speak in a fantastic dialogue about the order of things. After Hayward prays for rain, for instance, drops of rain the size of grapheshot fell upon them out of that wild darkness. (48) But not only does rain fall for the men as the call of the Earth-god answers itself; also the wild darkness itself falls, the thing which cannot be prayed for because it is the imaginative basis of all prayer. The gods of such imagination follow no eternal, rational order but rather show all human orders to be tragic through the whims and impulses of their chaotic will. This doubled field of figured Earth gives a template for fiction. The content of the text for the community of those who can appreciate it is provided not through the cognitive enclosure of Platonic forms of meaning, not through a coherence which yields semantics, not even through historical and psychological associations provoked by material marks but rather through the doubled earth propagating itself, the wasteland painted on the strange inner canvas of the work. The pairings impression and consciousness, reality and concept, object and apprehension are all doubled Earth-foldings, everything carried by the voice of the living-dead narrator, speaking as a thing from within the grave of the text. When this voice is reduplicated in the space of ontology, for instance here, it remains forever unknown to itself, evaporated into a conceptual ether. But from within this ethereal existence, one may undergo disturbances from this doubled propagation, disturbances which efface the clarity and comprehension of literal prose. We call such disturbances, in an effort to keep this propagated and propagating disorder under control, the meaning(s) of the literary text, even fiction itself. This disorder, however, can grow out of control, threatening to overflow all containment. The careful reader of McCarthy knows what occurs next in the text, directly following the scenes described : the torrent of terror in the coming of the Comanches. The force of their arrival in McCarthy's writing, not only with the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work on the sizing of a canvas on the hides of their horses, not only accompanied by the piping of quena flutes made from human bones, not only wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons with one in white stocking and a bloodstained weddingveil, but also with the fury of wronged, vengeful language itself, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools. (52-53) In such words, a horrific sublimity happens, where the narrators voice becomes one's own, exceeding the limits of the imagination of both, leaving only incoherent fragments of things beyond imagination, which is to say bloody real things, things intruding between historical memory, private association, and interpretive phantasms. Such things show the world to be (among other things) a mad dream, a place where the artifacts of the bourgeoisie and the sovereign and the victim and the animal and the living and the dead coalesce and conjoin as the Antarean Earth destroys old forms and creates creation anew.

11 And when the things of the Earth intrude, into the very cloth they form, into the fabrications of martial order, then the textures of the surface of the earth become rent, the veil torn by the unholy spirit of violence. After such events, one may recall a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to an alien form of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies and holding up great handfuls of viscera . . . . (53-54) Everything that would have been identified in the realm of the concept as event, process, action, temporal occurrence, even violent happening instead twist with the blades into things of war, waves of pain and nausea, shocks which move through and beyond the doubled space and into the repetition of scarred, ineradicable images, impressions which iterate themselves with no loss of impetus, an empiricism of awfulness which breaks through every pristine sensibility, returning everything to the indifferent earth, withdrawing the possibility of re-inscription into hopeful narrative projections. III. Refraining (from) ontology involves the construction of a performative machine where the literal intrusions of the earth torsion created concepts into paths of flight, escapades from the striated document of onto-encyclopedic knowledge. Particularly, since ontology can only be a song of the Earth, since the Earth is the true and only being of which it can sing, since even God is made of dirt, then ontology can only take place at its own limits, as it is deterritorialized by an absolute movement of deterritorialization itself, (scare-quotes because the concrete movements of deterritorialization are always different, whether indigenous attacks, escapes on rafts, or inspired paintings with the blood of prey on cavern walls.) For instance, in such ontology at the limits of ontology, there is the calm voice of the professor, the professional presenter, the one who maintains the order of facts in the world. A territory of general speaking is prescribed, an essential infrastructure is presupposed, a list is assembled which would indicate particular examples of a universal phenomenon, thus leading to an understanding of the being of beings. And when this voice speaks, holding everything in place through holding itself in place, with all the hidden programs and forces that it enfolds, it enumerates phenomena: (1)pilgrimages to the source as among salmon; (2)supernumerary assemblies such as those of locusts or chaffinches, etc. (tens of millions of chaffinches near Thoune in 1950-1951); (3)magnetic or solar-guided migrations; (4)long marches, such as those of lobsters. (TP, 326) In delimiting such a list, the ontologist attempts to think the essence of migratory movement, which is nothing other than the passage beyond, the very nature of all transcendence, the movement beyond planes both outside and towards the heart of things. Ontology is always already migration itself, whether repatriation or exile, and in attempting to understand the essence of migratory animals, it also attempts to understand its own animal essence. But what it finds is the essence of the non-essence of the Cosmos, as universal order is swallowed up in a flux of pure particularities:
Deleuze/Guatarri: In effect, there is no longer a milieu movement or rhythm, nor a

12
territorialized or territorializing movement or rhythm; there is something of the Cosmos in these more ample movements. . . . These are no longer territorialized forces bundled together as forces of the earth; they are the regained forces of a deterritorialized Cosmos. In migration, the sun is no longer the terrestrial sun reigning over a territory, even an aerial one; it is the celestial sun of the Cosmos, as in the two Jerusalems, the Apocalypse. (326)

Even though ontology cannot purely migrate, even though it cannot purely transcend, since the logos of ontology involves a necessary reterritorialization into the stratum of the concept, in order to do justice to the things themselves, ontology must place itself at the absolute limit of the concept, where the singularities of the Cosmic Earth intrude, taking it beyond its mediated field of subjective containment and towards reality. The asymptotic ideal of such self-immolating ontology is not objective knowledge but rather perpetual propagation beyond knowledge and into living flows of desire. Thus, when ontology seeks the essence of being/beings through its investigation of examples in the form of generalized descriptions of things or lists of data, then ontology true to the things themselves will not merely take the example and build it into the concept but will rather allow itself to migrate towards the example itself, twisting into the literary dimension of particularized description and involvement, the empirical opposite of essentially distilled phenomenology.
Deleuze/Guatarri: At infinity, these refrains must rejoin the songs of the Molecules, the newborn wailing of the fundamental Elements, as Millikan puts it. They cease to be terrestrial, becoming cosmic: when the religious Nome blooms in a molecular pantheist Cosmos, when the singing of the birds is replaced by combinations of water, wind, clouds, and fog. Outside the wind and rain . . . The Cosmic as an immense deterritorialized refrain. (327)

One will thus, for instance, not replace pastorally singing birds with the of bird, the formal nothingness of the idea which occludes all songs altogether, but one will rather following the birds into the Cosmic Earth (not the earth of scientific materialism, which is only an idea), into the fog and rain, as liquid being flows again through discrete Thalean drops of language. This is to say nothing other than ontology cannot proceed towards the things themselves without the inclusion of flows of literary lyricism at its heart, carrying it beyond itself and into contact with the beings which it would touch, changing everything in a hermeneutically engaged practice of absolute movement. According to Deleuze/Guatarri, the literary or musical work has an architecture: 'Saturate every atom,' as Virginia Woolf said, or in the words of Henry James, it is necessary to 'begin far away, as far away as possible, and to 'proceed by blocks of wrought matter.' It is no longer a question of imposing a form upon a matter but of elaborating an increasingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap increasingly intense forces, and like the literary or musical work, particularly the work of fiction, ontology must proceed through mining the resources of the Cosmic Earth, maintaining a practice of textually itinerant metallurgy. (329) But it does so not on its own, (since it never existed without the literary supplement) but only through the intensifying inheritance of the literary idiom. And in a strange turn, ontology as the conceptual appropriation of being becomes perfected precisely as it twists beyond itself, almost becoming fiction itself, meeting the literary inclusion of the ontological voice half-way, threatening to metamorphose into rhapsody.

13 Yet, the assemblage of ontology cannot operate through the pacifism of the receptacle. The ontological text can and never will be the nurse of being. The ontological work, in order to appropriately limit itself and open itself to the beings which perpetually surpass it, must transform into a war machine, affirmatively gathering materials to survive as overcoming, protecting its respective consistency not only through flight but also through mounting a stand, provisional barrages of gunfire out of a hopeless situation. In order to hold and intensify movement as movement, focusing the migration of earth like a sacred lens, ontology cannot allow itself to be reterritorialized by the naivete of the romantic child, pretending as if it does not have its own characteristic figure and voice (the saying of being), even if this figure and voice never once hears itself speak. Instead, as philosophy, in the smooth space of constructed ontological Zen (cultivated through centuries of bodily practice, the nothingness of Zen is the reality of the body), the arrow does not go from one point to another but is taken up at any point, to be sent to any other point, and tends to permute with the archer and the target. The problem of the war machine is that of relaying, even with modest means, not that of the architectonic model or the monument. An ambulant people of relayers rather than a model society. (377) The liminal ontologist fights the stratification of nomadic migration into striated surfaces and along the predetermined lines of fossilized concepts through strategic retreat, biding time, waiting for the right moment to strike and flee again. Deleuze quotes Black Panther George Jackson from his prison missive and author D.H. Lawrence from the prison of a society which manages its eroto-economics through a practice of absolute cruelty: It may be that I am fleeing, but throughout my flight, I am searching for a weapon. and I tell you, old weapons grow rotten: make some new ones and shoot accurately. (Dialogues, 36) In order to orchestrate a music of violence, the absolute opposite of spiebrgerliche Gelassenheit, philosophy (as language) must avail itself of the dramatics of blood in the eye of language, seeing not only the graceful depths of literary transcendence and the passionate movements of existential lostness and events of non-meaning within meaning, but also ecstatic slaughter which exceeds all ethical standards. Only through inheriting literary violence, whether invented by the philosopher become fictionalist in exemplary moments or parasitized from the novel, novella, or short story, can philosophy as failing ontology, the dying refrain of Socratic music, bear witness to the meaningless brutality of the things themselves, dis- and non-ordered by non-presence of even Dionysian gods of chaos. Fiction is the genre capable of bearing and maintaining the obscene voice of contingency, unconstrained by the mythology of religion and the mythology of rational thought. The eerie narrative tone of fiction can stand wounds that do not heal, gangrenous limbs, radiation-scarred planet surfaces, the trash-strewn floor of the terminal junkie, the fly-covered child who learns only of the persistence of hunger, all of the horrible things of the world in their irreducible specificity, as all the world there is. Such awful things are the primary stuff of ontology, the Cosmic first matter, the undivided substance of being. The terrible truth which fiction evinces but cannot say is that the things themselves, the venomous spider and the moonlight on murder, these things among others, are all that return, eternally or even that they do not return but rather merely are, before the discourse on being turns a verb into a god. Ontology, which here says what can only be shown, thus slipping into the nonsense of the nominal pulses which surge through it, can only persist as a template for the memory of the mundane, the ordinary and extraordinary Earth (the self-moving Earth, the original template for God) projected as the end of a cosmic voyage.

14 The most difficult and strange aspect of ontology is the necessity of maintaining it as an invisible frame through setting it against itself in an agonistics without end. If its terms become territories, reifying into ideas of the Cosmos, then the nothingness of idealism, whether physical or spritual or the dialectical movement between, destroys the Earth a priori, emptying ontology of its goal, making the things themselves into the conceptual shells of things in themselves. Language as the conceptual appropriation of being becomes a nihilistic crystal, the catalyst of the acidic subject, annihilating everything suspended therein. Thus, this language must shatter itself, never defend itself, never hold its own but rather demolish the walls which keep the barbarians at bay. But to do so, it must take up weapons to kill all nativity within itself, never allowing itself the comfort of indigenous, generic tropes. Only at this absolute limit, where ontology allows asceticism full reign, where the conceptual language of the saying of things withdraws into a point without extension, so that practically the only thing that speaks from its devastated site are mad associations, random references, litanies of contingency, announcements of suffering, reflexes of joy, and artifacts of brute incomprehension, can ontology engage the being it would have reflected, both being and ontology becoming other in a process beyond process. The voice of the one who speaks from this vantage, the failing ontologist, the philosopher at the end of philosophy, would be the epilogue of a ghost who should have winked out of existence long ago through a terrible death but yet survives to recount the dreadful things which led to its passing beyond this plain/plane, a ghastly spirit of material recollection, an undead, sepulchral vehicle of dangerous beings, forever moving, falling from the accident (Unfall) that has already befallen it. IV. In fiction (which can never be ontology), the spectral voice of the author perpetually doubles itself, becoming multiple perspectives, characters, tellers of tales within tales, figuring itself without end, even in the impossible monologue, even one where a narrator recounts what happened. In saying the figure of this authorial voice, whether reciting it as example, remarking upon it, or analyzing it, ontology redoubles it, taking its folded interiors into itself, holding it in place as the thing it is, the authorial voice and nothing other. Yet with this assumption of the literary voice, if it is done properly, respecting the literary for what it is in its emanation of the Earth, there occurs not only a passive assimilation of echoes but also a sort of exhilaration, as the desire for the things themselves is consummated, which means only that birth has been given to further desire. In the recounting introduction of the fictional text onto the surface of philosophy, a story of flight commences, of the strata of rationally-ordered desire away from itself, ascending to the summit not in order to float free from the Earth but rather to return to it, using its manna as weapons. Ontology as the nomadic absolute require an economy of violence where it manages forces, knowing when to run into the darkness of the sound of the other, knowing when to comprehend everything for an even more decisive blow, making a final stand. Deleuze/Guattari: Rather than operating by blow-by-blow violence or constituting a violence once and for all, the war machine, with breeding and training, institutes an entire economy of violence, in other words, a way of making violence durable, even unlimited. [Quoting Virilio] 'Bloodletting, immediate killing, run contrary to the unlimited usage of violence, that is, to its economy. . . . The economy of violence is not that of the hunter in the animal raiser but that of the hunted animal. (TP 396, Virilio, 11-19)

15 Thus, another flight across the plain/plane of Blood Meridian. As the company journeys into the mountain heights, the expriest Tobin retells of his first meeting with the Judge, situating a migration within a migration, one movement of violence nested inside another. As the story begins, Tobin's half-decimated party (led by Glanton) is fleeing an unnamed band of aborigines. The men are out of gunpowder, sharks without teeth, deferring their deaths only through forward movement. They come upon the Judge perched upon a sole rock in the wasteland, almost as if he carried a piece of the Earth with him wherever he went. Later, at the edge of a volcanic field, during an inverted sermon at the bottom of the mount, the Judge will deliver an :
he pointed to that stark and solitary mountain and delivered himself of an oration to what end I know not, then or now, and he concluded with the tellin us that our mother the earth as he said was round like an egg and contained all good things within her. Then he turned and led the horse he had been ridin across that terrain of black and glassy slag, treacherous to man and beast alike, and us behind him like the disciples of a new faith. (129-130)

Unbeknownst to the men, the Judge, after their initial encounter, had been leading them on an alchemical journey, foraging components for new gunpowder to slay their enemies. He takes them to a great cave that gives and receives. From the cave they take the nitred earth of bat offal, filling their wallets and paniers and mochillas with cave dirt. But as they leave, the Earth replenishes itself, as there was a great spout of bats being sucked down into the cave, thousands of creatures, and they continued so for an hour or more and even then it was just that we could no longer see them. (127) They proceed to a river where the judge leached out the guano with creekwater and woodash and precipitated it out and he built a clay kiln and burned charcoal in it, doused the fire by day and fired it again come dark. (128) Thus they come to the foot of the great lava plume, a giant Promethean head surveying the land. From the rim of the cone, the Judge mines from a weal of brimstone all about the rim of the cauldron, bright yellow and shining here and there with the little flakes of silica but the most pure flowers of sulphur. (131) And one final ingredient is required:
I didn't know but what we'd be required to bleed into it like freemasons but it was not so. He worked it up dry with his hands and all the while the savages down there on the plain drawin nigh to us and when I turned back the judge was standin, the great hairless oaf, and he'd took out his pizzle and he was pissin into the mixture, pissin with a great vengeance and one hand aloft and he cried out for us to do likewise. (131-132)

The prepared powder dries in the sun, and with it, the men turn the plateau to which they have flown into an antipodal Masada, feigning mass suicide and then reigning down hell on their assailants, massacring them all. Tobin relates his epic recollection with a mixture of awe, adulation, and fear before the miraculous feats of the Judge, almost as if he were a witness to a Greek legend, like a soldier whispering the exploits of Odysseus at an Attic campfire. But here, we can only distill the story, purifying it from unnecessary content in the avoidance of excess verbiage if not plagiarism. Derrida's laws which keep writing seemly cascade through multiple levels in the ontological text (and commentary is always a form of micro-ontology, since it says what the text is about,

16 what is contains, what it means).6 Not only must there be regular orthological rules and proper references, but also there cannot be too little or too much detail. As well, incisive examples must be drawn like blood in order to infuse the analysis of symbolism and relevance, the proper instruments laid on the operating table of hermeneutics. And when the interpretation of literature intensifies to the extent that it attempts to read the essence of the world, becoming macroontology, ontology proper, philosophy as meta-physics, then only the purest, most carefully regulated substances will do. The text is selected to combine with the theory of being compounded, providing it with adequate ammunition to allow language to reach beyond itself and towards the things themselves: for instance, in the retrieval of a story of flight conjoined to the natural manufacture of gunpowder used to illustrate the relation of nomadic theory to the Earth which it draws from, consumes, and refigures in projective barrages, massacres without end. Doubtlessly, the silent manifold of theory predetermines every selection, every word, every move, almost as if one were the author herself, the God not only overseeing but also simultaneously creating the order of events, reproducing every chosen exemplar of being from indigenous flesh. As the soldiers fabricated the gods and heroes they admired. And yet, as ontology assimilates the voices within voices, stories within stories, the Cervantean library of the novel repeated without end (a repetition prior to difference and identity), it always gathers more than is necessary. The machine that eats is also the machine that excretes. Even in the limited distillation derived above, for instance, there is not only the kiln, nitre, sulphur, and urine, but also the creek where the Judge stood naked, the flashes of silica and the strange rituals of the freemasons; not only the cave of the Earth and the lava plateau but also the bats' flight, unbidden swarms, defying any sensible interpretation other than the sense of wonder; so not only the ammunition and the foe and the slaughter of the aborigines, the becoming-Earth of men in more ways than one, but also yellow and black and glassy and eggshell and slag, paniers and mochillas, and even the dark itself. Insofar as ontology migrates towards the things themselves, making the necessary sacrifices, such remnants will follow it inevitably, like foxes in the night, alien rustles at the dimly-lit edges of a campsite, the undeconstructible in the text, the justice of the Earth. **************
The expriest turned and looked at the kid. And that was the judge the first ever I saw him. Aye. He's a thing to study. The kid looked at Tobin. What's he a judge of? He said. What's he a judge of? Tobin glanced off across the fire. Ah lad, he said. Hush now. The man will hear ye. He's ears like a fox. (135)

6 From Of Grammatology forward, Derrida never stopped writing about the doubled-violence of the metaphysical voice (and the machines which keep it operational) and of the necessary intrusions which constitute, fulfill, and destroy this voice.

17 Works Cited Boehme, Jakob. Six Theosophic Points. Trans. John Earle. Whitefish: Kessinger's 1992. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guatarri. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998. Descartes, Renee. Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Diels, Hermann. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker 6th ed. Revised by Walther Kranz. Berlin: Weidmann, 1952. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. Parmenides. Trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. Husserl, Edmund. "Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature." Trans. Frederick Kersten. Ed. Peter McCormick, Peter and Frederick A. Elliston. Husserl: Shorter Works. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. 213-221. McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian. New York: Vintage, 1992. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die frhliche Wissenschaft. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Nietzsche: Kritische Studienausgabe. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988. Also Sprach Zarathustra. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Nietzsche: Kritische Studienausgabe. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988. Schimpf, Shane. A Reader's Guide to Blood Meridian. Kolkata: Bon Mot, 2008. Virilio, Paul. Metempsychose du passager. Traverse 8. 1977. 11-19. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Logische Philosophische Abhandlung. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1963.