The Bear Dance (c. 1870), William Holbrook Beard
The Last of the True. The Last of the True.
Out in the vast plains of the American West, where all covenants between men are brittle—the judge serves as a chronicler of what lies in men's hearts. He acts as an anthropologist studying what men are and what they value in the absence of a political community. While there are dozens of different valid interpretations of what Judge Holden is, I'm going to assert that, first and foremost, the judge represents a radical form of American Transcendentalism.
While there is a common interpretation of the judge as being a herald of war itself, I think there's a case to be made that it's slightly more subtle than that. I see him more fundamentally as being—albeit rather brutally—an advocate of living authentically with nature, with war merely being the extension of what man really is. The fact that man's violent nature devolves into war is just the way it was and will be.
It isn't really until after the Götterdämmerung of the Glanton Gang and the completion of his study of their journey that the judge sees fit to actually articulate this philosophic view more systematically to the kid.
In the final pages of Blood Meridian, the judge appears before the kid at a bar in Fort Griffin, Texas, to explain what he terms the dance. The dance is the judge's terminology for the great interconnected fates of all men and represents the great arc that traces the lives of everyone and everything in existence. Regardless of consent or awareness, all creation participates in this cosmic dance
The only real choice that anyone has in this dance is if they recognize it as such. Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war... and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance. The point I think the judge is really making here is that we are all going to die. We all step down into the darkness before the floor lamps. Bears that dance, bears that dont. Those that recognize this, and act in accordance with it, are able to be authentic participants in their lives.
It is the difference between the bear that steals away the Delaware scout during the odyssey of the Glanton Gang, as though it were a primordial terror, and the dancing bear rendered impotent by its human masters. That which acts in accordance with its true nature acts in accordance with authenticity. It earns its place in the dance.
The rituals of the dance take paramount importance here—the sense that we are legitimately recognized as acting within our nature renders a certain dignity to the participants of the dance. It is a particular fixation for the judge that there be rituals in the dance that contain within them the shedding of blood.
Take, for instance, the traditions of various militaries over time; when performed by a backwoods militia merely playacting, these traditions are rendered meaningless. Does anyone really respect the guy that calls himself a colonel in his Oathkeeper militia? We understand implicitly that these rituals and customs only have power when they are bound with some form of true risk.
When the kid was lapsing in and out of consciousness from his wounds following the collapse of the Glanton Gang, the kid (possibly) hallucinates the judge working alongside a minter of coins. Shaping various faces from the cold slag, the judge searches in vain for a specie that will pass for an authentic form of meaning for men. No matter the face that is imprinted on the coin, it only appears as a currency of the false dance the judge decries as denying the warrior his rights. It can never really supplant man's experience of his true nature as a maker of meaning.
The marketplace and coinage can never carry a similar weight. Who could really believe that an award given by Goldman Sachs is the same as a ribbon granted for military service? Are any of us convinced that our desk job carries the same existential weight as a great trek through the mountains of Arizona? As Judge Holden makes note of—it is akin to playing poker without staking any money.
The revelation of this coming false dance is where I think the judge reveals his core philosophy that approximates something like a variation on Transcendentalism. His reference to the kid as the last of the true is more than just a reference to the kid being the last-standing member of the Glanton Gang, but as the last of those who are authentic participants in the natural world.
The closing epilogue of the book describes a man blowing holes in the ground as an impending herald of civilization advancing west. It is the coming of governance, society, and trade. It's the nightmare of the transcendentalists, where great railways streak across the American frontier, wiping away the ability for man to experience the great interconnectedness of natural life.
Now obviously, an important difference here is that by and large, the transcendentalists were humanists and, in many ways, proto-socialists. Hardly the same conclusions that the judge comes to.
I would argue that this is really only a feature of differing views of what nature really is, though. Neither the judge nor the more traditional transcendentalists would take issue with the notion that man's real metaphysical purpose is found in the wilderness. They would both certainly agree that the individual must assert his own freedom.
The American West is shown to be hostile to all life that inhabits it. Lightning constantly flares like great fires, bones are bleached so white they blaze incandescently in the sun, and the men that traverse the desert are described as pilgrims on the face of an alien planet.
If the judge's dance does not represent a metaphysical extension of living in harmony with this nature, what else could it be? Does he not continually assert the importance of man living a free life in alignment with this?
To put this another way—would Emerson have come to his same set of conclusions had he lived amongst scalp hunters instead of in a cabin in Massachusetts?