Death: I Cannot Attend. Sorry.

With life comes death.


There can’t be one without the other. We know that eventually we are going to be ashes spread across a flowing river or rotting flesh buried in the muddy pits of earth.

Whether we consent to it or not is a completely different matter. Woody Allen, in his typical witty humour, once said, “I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Obviously, he is one of those people that are startled by death and ergo refuses it. But some people embrace death. They don’t fear it and they swim through life floating on with no worries as to the inevitable. Some even anticipate it.

In Emily Bronte’s poem, “Fall, leaves, fall,” she orders the leaves of youth to fall, and instructs the recently blooming flowers to die. She commands youth, in terms of summer, to leave, while she beckons winter, the end in terms of old age and death, to approach. She desires winter. She is openly pining for death. She “shall smile when wreaths of snow Blossom where the rose should grow.” The thought of snowy death consuming the life that existed in the presence of the flower enthuses her.

She has no fear.

In The Road, death is a very popular theme, seeing as the novel subsists on survival and the resoluteness to stay alive. Unlike Emily, though, the father and son don’t embrace death. They hide from it, and yet they have simply grown resigned to it. It is clearly engraved into their minds that death is a high possibility and it resides nearby.

They don’t exactly summon it.

But they accept it.

Blind Eyes, Departing Lives, and Evil Little Snakes

Cruelty is what leads rough men to willingly throw live snakes into a roasting fire and stand by while they thrash, scream, twist, burn. And indifference and lack of altruism leads them to walk home to supper, minutes later, as if it were just an ordinary day.

This is a memory that clogs the man’s mind, a memory that took place when he was his son’s age. God knows in what circumstances and his reasons for witnessing said atrocity in the first place, but there must be a reason the recollection is so distinctly exposed.

Snakes are a symbol for evil. Adam and Eve and just the fact that the food chain and Animal Planet portray them as sinful, wicked creatures leads towards this denotation. So the destruction of evil, the burning and suffering of wickedness, is taken as a good thing and even praised. The man recalls this memory, and I have yet to know why. Maybe he’s merely seeing the indifference with which we view death when we find it just and deserved. And in a way it makes life easier to deal with, and it makes the suffering and emaciated people somewhere down the road, or the carcasses on the rubble streets seem less impacting. Less traumatizing.

He and his son happen to come across some imprints and corpses scattered around. When the man tries to shield his son from said sight, and tells the boy, “I don’t want you to look,” the boy responds with, “They’ll still be there.” This brings us to the topic of turning a blind eye. When you know something is obviously and clearly there, but its existence affects you negatively, we sometimes try and make ourselves believe its not their. We lie to ourselves to protect our wellbeing. But not acknowledging something won’t make it all the less real. The boy sums up a concept that plagues us everyday. No matter how hard you try to pretend or not believe something, it will still be there. You might as well accept things as they are.

After the treading past the dead-infested woods, they make their way through the country, Cormac describing them to a T: “The country went from pine to liveoak and pine. Magnolias. Trees as dead as any. He picked up one of the heavy leaves and crushed it in his hand to powder and let the powder sift through his fingers.”

Nature in general, trees, represent life. They symbolize the act of growing, living and existing. So the man and son are actually walking through a road of life, longevity, and immortality. The liveoak being such a twisted and spaced-out tree, demonstrates the twists and warped courses one takes while alive. The magnolias represent perseverance, blooming in an all-out lifeless world. This walk through the country seems like a positive outlook and reassurance for both characters. But then we find that the trees are dead. Life has departed. Just its ashes remain. But the man lets the ashes of life slip through his fingers. In a way, this means he is not truly grasping the fact that life can end so easily. He still has hope.

And that’s all he needs.

Fuel and Punishment in Commissaries of Hell

Fuel.

Oil and petroleum distilled from the earth’s crust come to mind. Power stored to make cars run, lights ignite, and set the world in motion.

And in The Road we see fuel in its common form when the father is in dire need to build a fire.

But fuel is not only the physical and concrete article that powers energy, but a more figurative symbol for a trigger, motivation.

Fuel is what inspires perseverance in the man, and in turn, his son. Fuel is a symbol for the catalyst, the stimulus that keeps these two going. In the father’s case, his incentive to persist in the struggle for survival is his son while the kid himself is probably pushed by the fact that his father is a constant that regularly bleeds motivation. And we can see this when his father asks him if he believes him and the son proceeds to say, “I believe you, I have too.” Because believing in his father is the only reason he hasn't given up, the reason he's still trying.

Fuel is why they carry on.

“We carry the fire.” They carry enough drive to handle the scattered carcasses piled on a deserted and ash-strung floor that remind them of death. They carry enough fuel to handle anything.

Speaking of carcasses littered everywhere imaginable, McCarthy vividly describes the beginning of this frightful era, his beautiful words contrasting with their gruesome significance:

“The world soon to be populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunnelled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.”


You can’t help but picture surly shadowed men sinking their teeth into the flesh of your child, their screams daunting and rendering you agonized with the memory. Cities that are only upheld by strings of robbers and evil thieves crawling out like unwanted and suspicious bats come nightfall. The nylon nets protect the mysterious and dreadful food that you might as well have gotten in the deep confines of a burning and excruciating hell.

Cormac sets the beginning of this horrendous tale as something comparable to the pits of the underworld, which is known a place of eternal punishment, torment, and anguish. And so it’s as if the people caught in this abyss are in some way being punished.

Punished for what, I have no idea.

Sixth Senses and Punctuation

The closest we will ever come to obtaining any type of supernatural power will be when we use our sixth sense. Which in this case would be? I like to think of it as our ability to read people. Sometimes we meet people and we decide that we just don’t like them because is something there, subtle, and yet extremely powerful. Gut feelings go a long way. I find myself having some sort of six-sense-y feelings towards the old man the father and son meet.

But they’re more awe-inspiring feelings and less I-feel-like-this-guy-is-going-to-behead-me-with-a-chainsaw feelings. For some reason, I feel like he’s some sort of prophet or sign sent by God. A sign of hope, maybe? But if he were sent by God, who in his right mind would say, “There is no God and we are all his prophets.” Firstly, let me say that having your boss send you to help his campaign for presidency and then stating that said candidate doesn’t exist? Yeah. That won’t help your case much. There’s also the fact that it’s a juxtaposition given that he says there’s no God and yet we are all his disciples. In order for there to be disciples pertaining to him, he must exist. So maybe he’s trying to transmit the fact that….okay, I really can’t come up with anything. Epic fail.

So. The old man somehow atones his resource of food being random people. Who, he doesn’t know. Then he admits that he made those people up. So where in the world are you getting your food from, you dingo? He also lied about his name, too. Fishy? TELL ME WHO YOU ARE!

Please?

I’m still with the idea that he’s sent from God for God knows what reason. The point is, he’s probably going to play a role in the ultimate ending. Which brings me to, how in this world is this going to end? Apparently, McCarthey didn’t know either, his exact words being, “I had no idea where it was going to end,” when Oprah asks him whether he knew this in the beginning. That makes two of us.

So I guess we’re just going to have to be held in suspense. The funny thing is, when he wrote, he didn’t know what exactly he wanted to write. It just flowed and shaped itself into what ultimately became this masterful work. It’s kind of the like the road the father and son are taking, they don’t know where it’s leading, they’re just wandering around, with no direct goal in mind (besides the obvious, survival, I mean) and eventually they’ll get their ending. Whether it be happy or sad, it will be how it was meant to be. Period.

What also got to me was McCarthey’s view of achieving ‘perfection’ or his ideal novel when writing. And he said something that truly got to me:

“You have this interior image of something that is absolutely perfect. That is your guide. You’ll never get there. But without that you won’t get anywhere.”

It’s true. We will never amount to perfection because it just doesn’t happen, and let’s face it, we’re not Jesus. But if we set up goals for ourselves, high goals, then at least we’ll try and we know we will achieve something that at least is in hopes of reaching fulfillment and success. Without aims in life, we wouldn’t strive for anything, to become anything. We’d be…nothing.

As for finally fulfilling my curiosity? The reason he doesn’t use certain types of punctuation (Quotations!) is “to make it easier, not to make it harder.” Apparently good writers can not use quotations and still make it obvious to the reader who is supposed to be talking. And that’s exactly what I feel and I never question it, in this novel. You’re a good writer, Corman. Be proud.

One day I shall be able to abstain from using punctuation and still sound smart. Er. One day.

Focused on the Future

When I take time out of my life to randomly go to dry, middle-of-nowhere desserts and climb steep rocks (which is very frequent, let me tell you), I make it a personal rule not to stop on hills. Why? Because if I do that means I can be attacked by anything that flies. Meat-eating birds? I think not. So, actually I do tend to stay on hills seeing as I have the perfect, dominant view of anything and everything. All the more protective and efficient, no?

But seeing as this is my own (I like to think, clever) logic, why is it that the father says that people don’t like to stop on hills, ergo their (he and his son) stopping to take shelter on one. I see the fact that it’s smart to go somewhere where the average cannibal, psycho humans (which in this case is the whole population) like to accommodate themselves. But I would just love to know why these people don’t stop to rest at hills. Maybe hills are a new perspective, a new height, which they can’t fathom. Or maybe they’re just so up high that the pressure of the atmosphere affects people’s sinuses and causes unimaginable pain. And that’s why they don’t care for staying there. Or not.

But apparently not everyone harbours the same feelings towards hills. Because that is where they meet this old man who just happens to think they are going to go all Robin-hood/raving-hyenas on him. Basically, he’s peaceful. The son begs his father to help him and give him some food, and during that process, the old man says something I just can’t get off my mind. He starts out by saying that he knew this (the apocalypses) was going to happen, and when asked if he tried getting ready for it, he said, “I don’t know. People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.”

It’s true. We spend so much time thinking of the future, or doing specific things, not for the enjoyment of it, but because they go towards affecting our possible future. Which reminds me of a quote I came upon one day when reading Looking For Alaska by John Green that says that “Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.” And it’s true. We spend so much time focused on planning/controlling our future that we barely pay attention to the present which is the one we do happen to have control of. And in this case, I guess it would have been very helpful for the old man to have gotten mentally as well as materialistically prepared for this suffering, but then life would be about living for the future. But once the future keeps passing by and you keep on working towards that perfect future, there will come a time where you won’t have a future. You’ll die and you still won’t have appreciated the present.

All because you were too busy planning the future that you never got around to enjoying it.

Dead Bodies and My Gag Reflexes

There’s something about dead bodies that just gets to me. That probably explains my gag-reflex at seeing pictures from the holocaust and my lack of enthusiasm for such entities. And so when McCarthy says that “the charred meat and bones under the damp ash might have been anonymous save for the shapes of the skulls,” I get a little peeved. Okay. A lot.

But yet I still notice that the description itself is beautiful in way that the charred meat is the burnt remains of what used to be alive and bones are obstructed from the view by damp, dirty ash that reminds them of the destructive place they inhabit. Later on he goes to explain that there is no longer any smell. So there’s no smell for death? There once was a smell when they were alive, and probably when the flesh was burnt, but now it’s almost non-existent. There’s no smell. It’s as if they were never there.

This occurs when they pass through an abandoned town and find a metal trash dump. After falling asleep a few hours later, the dad is woken up by another dream. A dream in which “he’d been visited by creatures of a kind he’d never seen before.” Said creatures didn’t speak. And that’s all he could remember. No matter how hard he tries, all that is left is the feeling of it. But why did he dream of that? Is it possible that the world is going to be taken over by mute aliens who make a habit of haunting your dreams? TUN TUN TUN. Or maybe they’re coming over to save every single living human being. Okay, who am I kidding? No one would intentionally try to save the human race (let’s just face it, we suck). Maybe they came to warn him that all that waits in the future is more foreign concepts and shades of grey that don’t make sense (this being because they’re probably more ashes, atop of more ashes, atop of sad remains of death). Maybe.

After he wakes up, he has another conversation with his son. It surprises me how naïve and unknowledgeable the boy is. It never ceases to amaze me that he asks the most random questions like if they could go to Mars if they had a spaceship or crows could fly there in their feathery wings. The fact that he asks the questions truly wanting a response and actually being so youthful in asking whether people know where Mars is. It is cute and sad at the same time. Because while the boy learns about all these ‘brand-new’ things, I think about the life he could have had where these would have been basic knowledge. But he doesn’t.

Let’s not forget the constant “Okay’s” this little one has made his signature style of conversation. “Dog’s lay eggs. But all dogs are dead.” Response: “Okay.” He asks “Are we going to die?” only to be answered by a “No, because we have magical faeries that will send us female counterparts so we can fornicate and save the human race,” and his answer? “Okay.” Now for an actually quote from the novel, when his dad tells him he threw away his flute, he asks “You threw it away?” And when they father answers in the affirmative all he says is, you guessed it, “Okay.” Okay is usually used to agree with something. The boy is so simple and trusting that whatever his father says, he accepts. He accepts every little thing and so I wonder if deep down he’s that resigned.

If deep down he’s as passive and docile as he outwardly seems to be.

Dream Until Reality Doesn't Exist

We dream to escape.

We slip into trances where everything goes our way and for a second there, everything seems perfect.

And then we get back to reality. Our dreams are fun and all, but they have one tiny fault: they frustrate you when they disappear. “Rich dreams which you are loathe to wake up from.” Because then we have to accept the fact that we’re back in the real world, where those things just don’t happen.

But the father has to come back to a reality, not just where those things don’t happen, but a reality where those things are “no longer known in the world.” Where they don’t even exist. And dreaming is the remedy, however small, with which he can escape his pain, anguish, anxiousness, and fear. Dreaming is his way of coping.

And then he wakes up.

And his mind is clustered by thoughts consisting of “How many days to death? Ten?” and the like.

A life where every hour is spent with the knowledge that you’re going to die and it’s only a matter of when. And I feel pity because even in this perfect (relatively) world, we know we’re eventually going to die but it seems so far away that we don’t give it a second thought. Well, most of us, considering when I was ten there was a period where everyday I imagined dying and the pain and the suffering and the overall gory-ness of it all. (I was not crazy, no matter how emo-friendly, weird, and strangely disturbing my ten-year-old mindset may seem).

The point being that even though with life comes death, and we all know it, we don’t really give it a second thought because we see death as we see a sunset. You can see it, you know it’s there, but you can’t touch it and it can’t touch you. Its an intangible concept that happens in the unforeseeable future. In the very faraway future. Basically, when you’re breaching on geriatric and the wrinkles sown on your flesh are so that they can tell a story.

And we have the sufficient amount of money to not give a crap about food and survival.

That’s just the way it is.

Your Point?

Since when can you smell water?

Yeah, you drink it, but even then it is practically tasteless. All we know is that it’s healthy and one of the main things that keep us alive. So we drink it. But it’s not because we like it.

The thing is, we tend to not appreciate things when we have them. Which can be seen when the father finds “a cistern filled with water so sweet that he could smell it.” Maybe the absence of something makes you notice it all the more, noting the aspects you barely knew existed once upon a time.

Water is a symbol for life. But we have yet to figure out that ‘life is a gift and not a given right’ (Nickelback). We live as if it is written in stone and the world is lucky to have us claiming our territory. Which in reality is a misconception, considering our presence means agony for this Earth and we're the ingredients for its future demise.

We don’t notice the sweetness and the pure bliss of living until we end up in a world where the only humans who exist are trying to eat our flesh and instead of pink sunsets you see a constant grey. This is the dad appreciating what before he wouldn’t have given a second thought. Life in all its non-post-apocalypses glory.

It’s times like these, when their suffering is described and the hunger is all but screaming, and the cannibals are oh-so-very near, that I wonder how this book is going to end. I could totally flip the pages until the very last one and fulfill my curiosity. But who even does that? I never have, and never will, ruin the anticipation and the pure essence of reading a book, by ruining the end. That's just blasphemy. But I still want to know. I want to understand the meaning of this novel and whether father and son are going to, after this huge struggle, die (which would lead to me pounding my head repeatedly against a very, very, hard, solid object). Or if the world is somehow going to magically surge into a replica of the dream it was before. Because the ending will be what truly gives this novel a purpose.

Or else its just a pile of ash and depressing words and pitiful moments that drown in negativity.

And pointless.

What Once Was

You might think that the things in this world that truly hold any power are communist dictators and corrupt governments as well as over-indulged celebrities.

But ever thought of the power of words?

How every syllable of every string of letters makes you feel, makes you think, or means something?

What truly sucks is when certain words just don’t mean anything to you. Partly because you’re not cultured enough to know their definitions and you feel stupid at not having ever heard them in the first place. Which is what I felt at hearing the phrase, “Shh. The phalanx following the carried spears or lances tousled with ribbons…” Phalanx? Is that some biology term like trachea or femur? Nah. Apparently it just means ‘a compact or close-knit body of people.’ Now I know what to say next time I’m walking down the hallways in order to seem like a walking dictionary. Be ready, oh people of CNG. Here, I come!

Or not.

So that’s basically the one word I found which could account for a foreign concept.

But that’s not it. Words? Yes. They might have a specific definition that states what they mean, and what they're supposed to mean to everyone around the world. But there’s more to them. The definition of snow is 'a precipitation in the form of ice crystals, formed directly from the freezing of the water vapor in the air', but for someone whose father died in an avalanche, snow might mean death and ergo bring a sense of dread.

Just like in The Road the author tends to make a huge deal of the word ‘ash.’ And not make-a-big-deal in the way that he says that ash is some alien-like force made to create mass destruction, but make-a-big-deal as in repeating the word so many times to the point where you just can’t help but think it means something. And by ‘mean something’ I mean something more than the obvious 'powdery residue of matter that remains after burning.'

Throughout the novel, “ash” is used repeatedly to describe their surroundings. Everything is covered by ash. Constantly. I have to admit in the beginning I was considering yelling at Cormac McCarthy for his repetitiveness, unoriginality and inability to obtain a thesaurus. But I guess there must be a reason, no?

Ash is the remains of what once was power, happiness, hope, love, fire. Fire in all its powerful and amazing beauty. And ashes are the sad remains of what used to be so glorious. They’re the reminder that once upon a time their was something meaningful there and now all that’s left is a pile of powder all pale and a lack-luster gray. Here, they’re a memento for what used to be America and what is left of it. And in a pessimistic way, the ashes are always there to assure them that what they’re living in is a disaster of what once was an almost perfect place.

A reminder of what once was and will never be.

Fire and the Canine Species

I’ve always had a soft spot for the canine species.

And I’m sometimes repelled at myself for feeling a much harder tug at my heart-strings when I see an unfed dog walking along a deserted road then when I see an actual person begging for money on a random corner so they can make it through the day.

I’m not proud of this. But I can’t help it.

So it’s safe to say that when I there was a dog in the distance and the son begged his father not to kill it, which he didn’t, I felt relief.

But that’s of no importance.

What truly got my attention was when the father told his son that nothing bad was going to happen, he backed up this statement with “Because we’re carrying the fire.”

Of course, literally, this could mean they have some sort of torch that has the double-use of providing light and the ability of burning someone’s ass in the rare chance they got too close.

But we’re not talking literally, are we?

So what could ‘fire’ possibly mean? Destruction? An eternal love? Desire and determination? All I know is that fire is something that burns so passionately and determinedly and has a magnanimous power for creation or destruction. And maybe the both of them have this undying flame of determination that renders it impossible for anything to get in their way. They carry resolve, desire, hopes, and persistence. What else do they need? (Besides a world that hasn’t gone all Abra-kadabra/WWII/destruction on them…?)

But who’s complaining?

Who We Are. That's Just It.

Who are we?

I’m serious.

There’s a part in The Road where the boy happens to see a living human being and in turn asks his father, “Who is he?” only to have the father respond, “I don’t know. Who is anybody?”

It’s like in those interviews (god, how much I dislike interviews) when they ask you all the questions possible and then they come up with the five-star bonus question that will decide your fate: “Who are you?”

And God knows what to respond to that. ‘Is’ is a term that can be interpreted in different manners. By is do you mean the talents he obtains as in he is smart, musically-gifted, or artistically amazing? Or do you mean what is he in the character traits that make him selfish, resolute, and a hope-less romantic? Maybe. But ask someone who they are, and there are going to be some difficulties. Because, in reality, who are we?

Beats me.

And then I come upon the scene where they find this random guy who ends up scraping a knife against the boy’s throat only to be rewarded two bullets through his flesh by the protective father. And then I think:

We’re survivors.

But then I was like, “Dude, they are the ones that are making ends meet because they don’t have the sufficient amount of resources to live. They are survivors. People who live life with cash as an every-day commodity and whose biggest issues are whether their blackberry is stolen or if they’ll get a date to prom? We’re not survivors. We’re hopeless pawns that just follow the materialistic/uncaring trend to the finish line.”

So much for that dramatic statement.

Well.

I happen to come by the part where the man carves a flute from a piece of roadside cane and has the son play a tune. And I can’t help but think that maybe what they say about music is true. Like Jazz in Coming Through Slaughter the flute itself might be a harmless try at reaching peace. A type of comfort and hope. Like Kurt Vonnegut said in his novel A Man Without A Country (I highly recommend this book, by the way) :

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"

And so maybe it makes no sense and isn’t supposed to mean this in the novel, but maybe the flute and the music is a symbol of hope and reassurance that God does, indeed, exist, and that they are there for a reason.

So who are we? I don’t know. Does anybody know? But what I do know is that life is not just placing things into categories and definitions. The son is all up on thinking this is worthless and they might as well just give up. But following though with that decision will define who he is, the definition being a coward.

Our actions make us who we are. That’s just it.

But the father pushes him on, and who knows?

Maybe hope and music mean something in the end.

Destruction and Other Foreign Concepts

Loneliness.

We might sometimes say we pride ourselves on enjoying some ‘alone time’. But spend some time breathing your own air and you’ll start to get bored. Spend a little more time alone and you just might get anxious. Spend a tiny bit more time confined in a place where you are your only company and you’ll start to feel lonely.

And loneliness is just the worst of all. We need human company just as much as we need oxygen. It’s a necessity.

So I try to imagine life without human companionship save my son (Not like I actually have one. Jeesh. But I can imagine). I try to see myself surrounded by a very little amount of survivors that mean absolutely nothing to me in comparison to the huge, desolate mass I am living in.

But I can’t.

And yet I see the dad going inside what used to be his home and find himself attacked by carefully detailed memories that rush towards him all at once. The people who he loved and loved him in return are just images in his brain. And they keep reminding him of what he had. And what he now lacks.

He and his son find themselves in the middle of the snow, trying to manage on whatever little resources they have. And the dad is a master at selflessness when he gives the cocoa to his son and is pleased with just a small cup of water. “You promised not to do that,” says the boy. So apparently his dad is always negating any type of remotely comforting food or entity as long as he can give it to his son.

Does love really make you so noble? I consider myself extremely greedy when it comes to food (Hey, I’m not proud of it) and yet if there was someone who I cared for more than myself and who I loved with my entire heart? God only knows what I would do.

But what I do know is that I would not want my son being born into this type of life. Which is exactly the case. He has never tasted a soda until this day. He didnt’t know what the States were, and for the first time in his life he has come across the glory of what are mushrooms. Seriously, this boy was not born before everything crashed down into a pile of death. This kid was born into this life, and ergo doesn’t have anything to compare it with, which I find preferable to having this perfect pre-apocalyptic world and to compare to my current dooming present.

And I think that’s what the mom thought, too. Of course I find her extremely selfish and bitchy for killing herself in order to be the “lover of Death” because she couldn’t handle strategizing the “pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall.” I mean, if you’re by yourself, with absolutely no one who is impacted by your presence (or the lack thereof) then do it. Go stick a bullet through your brain because chances are either you do it or nature will wither you away at the snap of its fingers. But if you have a son and a husband that love you dearly and you mean something to them? How could you be so selfish as to put your happiness and relief before your kid’s? Yeah, you’ll die eventually, but at least have the decency to try.

But not everyone is brave. Some of us are cowards and we don’t know yet because we have never come to face a situation that would un-shield that side of us. And some of us are heroes. But we will never know.

Because ‘destruction’ and ‘survival’ (real survival) are foreign concepts to us.

Thank God.

Alabaster Bones, Memories, and A Pretty Messed Up World

So I find myself in an isolated place where creatures with white eyes and alabaster bones drink water from a lake and where people walk with a chrome motorcycle mirrors on a shopping cart to check if they’re being followed.

Fine.

Not ‘people’. More like two persons. Father and son trying to live in this atrocity of a mess.

Where in the world is this taking place? Ah, wait. I already know this. (I just wanted to make everything all the more dramatic). It’s in post-apocalyptic America, just in case it was still an unknown fact.

The idea itself is pretty thoughtful. But I can’t help but ask myself some things.

Every time the boy or the father talks, not once do I see the existence of quotations. Of course, this must be done on purpose, but what type of tone or message it’s trying to convey is beyond me. Does Corman want to somehow explain to me that with the destruction of almost every living thing and very visible material and city chaos, there also comes the extinction of writing laws?

Guess so.

And since when do ‘slutlamps’ exist? Maybe it’s a commonly known term which I just happen to not be very acquainted with. But even if it is, how can I not imagine a very, how shall I say this? Promiscuous, (in other words, slutty) female with lights piercing from every visible crevice in her body. Why is that?

As for the actual story, I’ve got to say there is a very interesting and creative plot thing going on. People isolated from humanity and they’re left in a messed-up, ash filled world. Never heard that one before, have you? Well. I have.

I’m not saying I don’t like The Road. I mean, there are some very interesting ideas mixed into it that truly make me think. Like when the father says that “You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.” Which in a weird way makes sense, and makes me wonder if that were to happen to me, just how out-of-my-mind and suicidal would I be? But let’s not go there.

And maybe the way the man happens to come across what used to be a farm and describes the very recent trash on the floor, as well as the newsprint and the broken china while furniture and a stuffed animal take up a boy’s room. What used to be a boy’s room. This makes it seem so recent. It’s as if just the day before someone had been living here and so I wonder if this so-called catastrophe is recent. And then I remember that in the beginning the man states that they had been like this for years. Which in itself is so pitiful in the way that everything looks just like it did that oh-so-unfortunate day, and everything is a walking memory of the good times that are gone forever.

The concepts and the quotes, as well as the thoughts, are pretty deep. And not just deep as in ‘they sound so metaphorical and yet they make no sense’ deep, but more the ‘this is truly inspiring and I wonder what that would be like’ deep.

And I still can’t help but wonder.