You committed yourself here.
At Stella Maris.
Yes.
If you get committed you get certified but if you commit yourself you don’t. They figure you must be reasonably sane or you wouldnt have shown up. On your own. So you get a pass as far as the records are concerned. If you’re sane enough to know that you’re crazy then you’re not as crazy as if you thought you were sane.
Presented as a “coda” to Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, Stella Maris contains the transcripts of seven therapy sessions between a psychiatrist and Alicia Western; the genius mathematician sister of the main character in The Passenger; a troubled young woman whose eventual fate is described in the previous novel’s first few pages. Whereas The Passenger only had generalised passages about math and physics, Stella Maris features a deeper dive into mathematical thinkers and their work — with a particular focus on Alicia’s speciality in topography — and as it is entirely presented in dialogue, this reads as a Socratic investigation into the nature of reality (and our inability to translate what we unconsciously intuit into communicable language, whether verbal or mathematical.) I did enjoy this as a followup to The Passenger — and if the math references were going over my head, they were going over Dr Cohen’s, too, and he asked for clarification where necessary — but even more so than with the previous novel, this feels a bit like a vanity/legacy project; as though McCarthy just wanted to put the summation of his life’s thinking into print without feeling particularly indebted to novelistic expectations. As a completionist, I am delighted to have read this, but this is going to be one of those rare occasions upon which I will not assign a rating; this feels outside the scope of such things. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The problem with the unknowable absolute is that if you could actually say something about it it wouldn’t be the unknowable absolute anymore. You can get from the noumenal to the phenomenal without stirring from your chair. In other words, nothing can be excerpted from the absolute without being rendered perceptual. Bearing in mind that to claim reality for what is unknowable is already to speak in tongues. The trouble with the perfect and objective world — Kant’s or anybody’s — is that it is unknowable by definition. I love physics but I don’t confuse it with absolute reality. It is our reality. Mathematical ideas have a considerable shelflife. Do they exist in the absolute? How is that possible? I said to myself. But then myself became another self. No more than right. It took the math with it. The idea. A long period of uncertainty. When I recohered I was someplace else. As if I had escaped my own lightcone. Into what used to be called the absolute elsewhere.
I dont understand.
I know. Me either. It’s just my view that you cant fetch something out of the absolute without fetching it out of the absolute. Without converting it into the phenomenological. By which it then becomes our property with our fingerprints all over it and the absolute is nowhere to be found. Now I’m not so sure.
As a senior fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, Cormac McCarthy has long been incubating his ideas about the world in conversation with a cross-disciplinary assemblage of other deep thinkers. In 2017, he published his first nonfiction essay — The Kekulé Problem — in Nautilus magazine, and many of the facts and ideas from the essay pop up in Stella Maris. I appreciate McCarthy’s use of the Socratic format to present and debate these ideas — the psychiatrist/patient dialogue was perfectly suited as a fictional framework — and there’s just enough plot tie-in with The Passenger to warrant reading this to complement Alicia’s brother’s story. I don’t think I would call this a complete and satisfying novel on its own — “coda” does seem about right — but again, I did find considerable value in it.
I look unhappy? Tougher mettle is called for I suppose. I’m all right. For a long time I’ve suspected that we might be simply incapable of imagining the epochal evils of which we stand rightly accused and I thought it at least a possibility that the structure of reality itself harbors something like the forms of which our sordid history is only a pale reflection. I thought that it was something Plato might have considered but could in no way bring himself to express. I see by your look that you have at last beheld the very incubation of lunacy.
I am happy that this duology exists as a summation of McCarthy’s thought and craft — I know of no other living author who writes at this level — but I think it needs to be read in the context of his entire oeuvre; Stella Maris certainly needs to be read in concert with The Passenger, or if one wanted to mainline the ideas, The Kekulé Problem is complete unto itself. And again: If McCarthy’s main thesis entails the futility of expressing sensed truths in communicable language, I beg patience for my clumsy words.
