Depends on the source. I've been doing nogi BJJ (not on the comp team: I am old, we train hard but not competition hard) about ten years or so.
People training technique will grey out pretty much routinely as they talk through things with their partners and work strategies for techniques.
People go out now and then, usually on purpose with folks who understand when it happens.
The BJJ community is mature at this point. There are folks on comp teams basically having fights every day. I suspect when those people go out, you are right. Damage is done and it accumulates.
I suspect when folks like me and my training partners go out, there is no trauma to speak of.
What is the net of this lifestyle? I don't know; I've had no major injuries (requiring surgery or major downtime-- popping the cartilage in your rib working top control drills will take fucking forever to heal tho), I've learned a lot, made good friends, and have only this life to spend as I see fit, so I can only anecdata.
But the understanding in our world is this: trauma is traumatic (and sometimes causes loss of consciousness, sometimes not), but not all loss of consciousness is traumatic.
I think McCarthy is one of the greatest American writers, but I will say my two main gripes with him are his tendency to drift over the line into overwrought (sometimes the biblical language is incredibly powerful, sometimes not), and his utter inability to write women.
He did ok with Alicia in his last couple books, but even there he flounders some. "If I had a baby I wouldn't care about reality"? Hmm, ok?
"His face was all covered in girljuice"? C'mon bud.
Watched a video essay yesterday by a female reader who found the Aunt’s four page monologue in ‘All the Pretty Horses’ one of the most insightful and moving explanations of women she’d ever read.
She was particularly surprised to find such a passage in a book by McCarthy who she expected to be some gruff man’s man.
I haven’t read that passage myself, but seemingly Cormac was capable of writing women when he chose to. Perhaps not enough, though.
It's funny you mention it; I have a friend who writes books who had trouble with McCarthy and I recently mentioned this same criticism. I suggested ATPH to her and this same character came to mind as a decent piece of work on that subject.
I will say this about the passage tho: McCarthy writes a small narrative which does seem to explain her choices and character as it affects John Grady. It's convincing, and she's a good character, but even there she's something of a set piece.
I can't think of a single character in the book for whom nihilism is their defining trait, and certainly not the primary characters. The effort to preserve goodness in the world only really matters when it's hard, when it comes at cost. The book turns that up to 11, but that is why it is hopeful.
If you want to read McCarthy doing nihilism, maybe try the sunset limited.
"You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left."
I hope, at least, you managed to watch the films before you had an opinion on them. Tarantino's, I mean.
The Road is not a violent or pessimistic book, tho there is violence and pessimism in it. Don't confuse the set and the setting.
Why write about, 'the worst among us'? Some art (and Cormac tottered over the line between wrought and overwrought plenty) is about finding meaning in the margins, in the edge cases. The statistical noise at the outerbands of anything might make it an impossible endeavor for meaning-making, but that's why art. You try anyway. Some writers are skilled enough to make the mundane sing and that's great, but McCarthy obviously didn't seem to care for that approach.
I think I can see why Child of God put you off enough for the thoughts of others to prevent any further effort, but I'd suggest you give him another go.
I'd save blood meridian for later tho; If you don't get too distracted by the setting of the road, it's a perfectly optimistic book.
As the poet said, something in us does not erode (free pun!)
I would argue that the ending of the book is optimistic despite the event that precedes it. An imperfect father wants the best for his child, and does the best he can with the hand he's dealt. In a dying world of cannibals and worse, there are people who are good, and whose surroundings don't poison their view on what it means to be good. "Do you carry the fire?" is, to my mind, an incredibly optimistic sentiment.
The ending is definitely the most optimistic part of the book, but on balance I think the overall picture is still excruciatingly bleak. It gives me the impression that any optimism of the part of the characters is likely unwarranted. They're still doomed.
The point is that everyone is doomed (even if you imagine we can survive the civilization-murdering tools we've cobbled up, we can't outrun physics), but that even at our most vulnerable, since the book occurs during a period directly after Armageddon, it is possible for some goodness in us to persist.
I don't want to spoil, but the optimism isn't for the characters, it's for we the reader, and the species.
The thimble of fire joins the wider flame. Goodness survives even there, and even then.
I don't think so; preserving goodness and decency comes at little personal cost to most of us, but McCarthy's effort in the book is at its core a depiction of these things surviving even the apocalypse, and at an incredible cost.
That fire they carry is not extinguished even in a world where all systems and pretenses at civilization have been ruined. It finds the wider flame, and decent folks to tend it.
It is one of the more optimistic works he's done, not despite the setting, but because.
"A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it."
McCarthy's perspective on language is interesting in this regard: dreams being a sort of pre-language mind for operating an animal without the kind of consciousness that developed in us quite some time ago. That mind remains, it is distrustful of the language virus that took over, but it tries to help.
Thanks for this read. I enjoyed its down-to-earthiness. I felt pranked at times the author's assertions of obvious truth that are quite challengeable. It felt like there were many but here's one I could recover:
"There are no languages whose form is in a state of development. And their forms are all basically the same."
I made a double take at that, and moved along for the ride.
Ultimately I wonder if my enjoyment of the piece is because it takes great acrobatics to be bereft of reason, just enough to make you think. No, not you. That other you.
Spoken like a religious tenet, detached from everything interesting.
Which board? What implementation of capitalism? You don't pretend that the States are running a free market or anything absurd like that, do you? The States have a Crony system at best.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for capitalism. I think humans are a rotten animal at heart and capitalism is the only way to effectively harness that bad nature for good results. But like any technical system, the implementation matters, and the implementation in the States in the last 50 years has been dreadfully short-sighted.
We have gradually whittled away at every collectively positive subsystem for generations now and are left with an inordinate number of miserable people whose day to day life would show up as, 'improved' on the Pinker style charts & graphs.
The subjective is the core of wellbeing.
Objective reality matters, certainly. But all the more so when you apply nuance to your reading of it.
People training technique will grey out pretty much routinely as they talk through things with their partners and work strategies for techniques.
People go out now and then, usually on purpose with folks who understand when it happens.
The BJJ community is mature at this point. There are folks on comp teams basically having fights every day. I suspect when those people go out, you are right. Damage is done and it accumulates.
I suspect when folks like me and my training partners go out, there is no trauma to speak of.
What is the net of this lifestyle? I don't know; I've had no major injuries (requiring surgery or major downtime-- popping the cartilage in your rib working top control drills will take fucking forever to heal tho), I've learned a lot, made good friends, and have only this life to spend as I see fit, so I can only anecdata.
But the understanding in our world is this: trauma is traumatic (and sometimes causes loss of consciousness, sometimes not), but not all loss of consciousness is traumatic.