THE SUMMER I was 26, the woman I loved ended things and set me so utterly adrift that most nights I could not sleep, and unless I was at work I was consumed by the thoughts and feelings that come with first romantic loss. I made it through those dry, quiet and sunny afternoons in my hometown on my reservation by hanging out in my grandfather’s small, usually empty laundromat and reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Only McCarthy’s aestheticized world of horror and violence could turn me away from my pain. Only his vision of an apocalyptic, historical American West — the same that gave rise to my own life — could bring me that internal stillness I felt in the presence of great art.
I first encountered Cormac McCarthy’s name in an interview between Gus Van Sant and the late David Foster Wallace. The interview is very late-’90s, and it fills me with nostalgia for a time when the status quo relationship to art in America was not primarily one of political and social expectation. Because the conversation took place the better part of a decade before McCarthy won the Pulitzer and his name exploded and in — Wallace discusses him the way you would a lesser-known writer. A writer’s writer. Because of the way Wallace talked about — it was the greatest Western, it was horrific, the language biblical — I brought it to the attention of HRH, my former high school English teacher. I had not yet read the book, but I felt its dark, humming presence out there in the world, waiting for me.
