Cormac McCarthy Took Us Beneath the Surface

A note from Nautilus editor Kevin Berger on the great novelist’s passing. Plus: we’ll miss the vulture; why we believe supernatural explanations; this week’s Facts So Romantic; and more. [View in browser]( | [Become a member]( June 15, 2023   Did a friend forward this? [Subscribe here](. Dear Nautilus Reader, I always feel grateful that Nautilus is associated with Cormac McCarthy, who died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe. He was 89 years old. In 2016, the great American novelist published his first and only piece of nonfiction, “[The Kekule Problem](,” in Nautilus. Since Nautilus set sail in 2013, we’ve tacked in line with the [Santa Fe Institute](, where brilliant minds have convened since 1984 to illuminate the complexities and connections beneath the world’s surfaces. Santa Fe Institute cofounder Murray Gell-Man, a Nobel laureate in physics, met McCarthy in 1981, when the novelist won a MacArthur Fellowship, the famous “genius” grant. The physicist learned the artist had a curiosity as boundless as the universe. At the Santa Fe Institute, McCarthy had a home away from home for 39 years. Cormac McCarthy at Santa Fe's La Fonda Hotel in 2023. Courtesy Kate Joyce Our print journal made its way around the Institute, where McCarthy read and admired it, we learned from the Institute’s president, [David Krakauer](, who has written a host of articles for us, including one last year about his [friendship with McCarthy](. When McCarthy wanted to publish ideas that had been cycling through his mind about language and the unconscious, he turned to Nautilus. I was excited to publish “The Kekulé Problem” because it reads in tune with McCarthy’s fiction. It’s a song to the mysteries of the unconscious, a dreamland that feeds solutions to our conscious minds, as it did when it offered the configuration of the benzene molecule to 19th-century chemist August Kekulé while he slept. The idea that language is the root of thinking, that it evolved to bond humans, seemed to offend McCarthy. Language wasn’t a biological invention; it was a human invention. Let’s say language emerged 100,000 years ago, as “influential persons,” a sly McCarthy writes, say it did. That’s an eyeblink to the 2 million years “in which our unconscious has been organizing and directing our lives. And without language you will note.” This is the artist talking. You can appreciate the language in McCarthy’s fiction for its lexical richness, gothic rhythms, and descriptive precision. In Suttree, you positively live on the grimy shore of the Tennessee River, where the “water was warm to the touch and had a granular lubricity like graphite.” Same for Blood Meridian. The Southwest desert is your home, or prison. You look up at the night sky. “All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.” The artist doesn’t want you live on the surface. McCarthy’s fiction is a portal into the unconscious where primeval feelings dwell. Language is paradoxical that way. It’s a signpost to the places where language has little say. It might seem like another paradox to say the artist of the unconscious was deeply engaged in science, where conscious precision rules. Not so. McCarthy’s fiction captures the life force that is the very subject of science. McCarthy’s final two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, delve explicitly into physics and math, reflecting his decades of conversations with scientists at the Santa Fe Institute. But his microscopic eye on the natural world was always there. In this exquisite passage from 1979’s Suttree, the narrator, on a “hushed and mazy” Sunday afternoon, lies down on a cot in his houseboat on the river: “The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow cranies. In the leaves, the toad’s pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop.” That is science. And art. “The Kekulé Problem” [received criticism]( from linguists who felt McCarthy was, in short, giving language short shrift. To me, McCarthy was saying language, the remarkable human invention, could open us to the verities of life and our connection to nature before the modern world closed the doors. This has always been his theme. In McCarthy’s 1994 novel, The Crossing, a teenage cowboy traps and becomes emotionally attached to a pregnant wolf in Mexico. The boy is briefly arrested by Mexican deputies and the wolf is mauled by dogs when it's chained in a pit and forced to fight. To put the wolf out of its misery, the boy shoots it in the head and carries it to the mountains to bury it. As he closes the wolf’s dead eyes, he “could see her running in the mountains, running the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun's coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from.” —Kevin Berger, editor of Nautilus. [READ NAUTILUS](   [ENVIRONMENT]( [We’ll Miss the Vulture]( Ecosystems are suffering without their invaluable scavenger, victim of a bad reputation. BY JORI LEWIS In his poem “Vultures,” the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe makes the scavenger bird a metaphor for the evil of a concentration camp. [Continue reading →]( Experience the endless possibilities and deep human connections that science offers [SUBSCRIBE TODAY](   [Help Us Support A Healthy, Sustainable Ocean]( Introducing [MOBILIZE for the OCEAN](, a Nautilus Ocean and UNESCO partnership to provide engagement, education, and financial support around organizations working for a healthy, vibrant, and sustainable ocean. Find out how you can join the mission. [LEARN MORE](   [ZOOLOGY]( [The Perilous Life of the Solitary Pangolin]( Poached to the edge of extinction, the bashful animals are getting by with a little help from their friends in Africa. BY CHARLES DIGGES [Continue reading →]( [PSYCHOLOGY]( [Is Morality in Decline?]( One question for Adam Mastroianni, a psychologist at Columbia University. BY BRIAN GALLAGHER [Continue reading →]( [PSYCHOLOGY]( [Why We Believe Supernatural Explanations]( We’re not so different from a hallucinating chatbot. BY TANIA LOMBROZO [Continue reading →]( [ARTS]( [The Cormac McCarthy I Know]( The president of the Santa Fe Institute shares his insights into the novelist, with whom he has discussed science, writers, and ideas for 20 years. BY DAVID KRAKAUER [Continue reading →](   FACTS SO ROMANTIC The Best Things We Learned Today [If a cow died of anthrax](, a vulture could eat the remains, digest it, and emerge unscathed. [Nautilus→](   [Despite their otherworldly appearance](—pangolins resemble an artichoke with legs—their scales have a characteristic familiar to every human: They’re made of keratin, the same protein that makes up our fingernails and hair. [Nautilus→](   [Young people complain]( just as much as old people about society becoming more immoral. [Nautilus→](   [When ChatGPT was asked to describe]( an 18th-century image of God bringing forth rain from his chest, the chatbot hallucinated God using a wand or a magical staff. [Nautilus→](   [Earth is about]( 10 times drier than crackers. [Nautilus→](   BECOME A MEMBER [The Dark Side of Storytelling]( [Issue 49 of Nautilus]( features “The Comet Year,” in which emergency physician Clayton Dalton meditates on the nature of the divergent storytelling around the causes of COVID-19—and what our fractured standards for truth could mean for the future. [GET NAUTILUS IN PRINT]( Thanks for reading. [Tell us](mailto:brian.gallagher@nautil.us) your thoughts on today’s note. Plus, [browse our archive]( of past print issues, and inspire a friend to sign up for [the Nautilus newsletter](. [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( Copyright © 2023 NautilusNext, All rights reserved. You were subscribed to the newsletter from nautil.us. Our mailing address is: NautilusNext 360 W 36th Street, 7S, New York, NY 10018 Don't want to hear from us anymore? Click here to [unsubscribe](.