The man digging holes is a pioneer. McCarthy isn't really clear on what he does; intentionally so. He might be digging fence holes, making campfires, building railroad tracks – it doesn't really matter.
The wanderers are the settlers following the pioneer westward. They appear to be coordinated by some force, like the pieces of a clock. This is arguably the "go west" attitude of manifest destiny.
"...they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality" is McCarthy's true criticism of manifest destiny. Retrospectively, we glorify settlement of the west and slot it into a clean narrative or progress. But in its time, the expansion was chaotic, violent and devoid of morals. People were just walking hole-to-hole for the sake of finding the next hole.
Some wanderers collect bones and some don't. Perhaps McCarthy means that some wanderers kill, but we don't know. From McCarthy's nihilistic viewpoint it doesn't matter because the westward expansion is moral-less so killing someone isn't different from collecting bones on the ground.
This contrasts with the moral good vs. evil narrative usually applied to the old west (see anything written on cowboys vs. indians, sheriff vs. bandits, etc.) McCarthy portrays the old west outside of a moral framework. Horrific violence happens and there's no explanation or justification.
But after wracking your brain trying to decrypt the message, you realize that it just says there is no greater meaning to the violence of the book. It is just people doing things on a vast plain.
It's almost as though McCarthy is saying to us, "See? You're still looking for a deeper meaning that does not exist."
McCarthy seemed to deal _absurdly well_ in the banality of the pitches of life, both high and low. One always leads to another. It’s a sort of nihilism but with a karmic baseline. Reading his prose I got the sense I shouldn't make much out of anything, but all the same, it still happened and is worth talking about.
Many readers feel cognitive dissonance from this book: there’s so much detail, it must add up to some moral lesson. You’ll hear people say, “Blood Meridian is an amazing book, but I don’t understand it.”
They’re still trying to apply a moral label to the story and can’t find one. To quote The Judge, “Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”
McCarthy’s message in Blood Meridian may be that we see a higher fidelity picture of the old west if we don’t attempt to fit events into a moral arc. Still worth discussing, but we must abandon good vs. evil as a framework if we want a glimpse at the truth of what happened.
He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there
A post hole digger has two handles. When you’re using it in rocky ground you hit rocks and make sparks.
Picture:
https://images.homedepot-static.com/productImages/ed49f7f1-a...
[EDIT] As for the rest, putting aside metaphorical readings, the clockwork-like progression and repeated crossing of the line of holes calls to mind the stop-and-start movement of running barbed wire and working a ratcheting tensioner tool behind the one digging the holes, and in the right country, the curious among those workers may pause to reflect on the remains of long-dead things (fossils, "bones"—fish, horse, bison, mammoth, spine-like crinoid stems, shells and coral from an eons-dead sea, even dinosaurs—the ranches and farms of the West largely sit atop the shallow graves of life's history on Earth) sitting flat in the dirt or exposed by the digging, while others may pay them no mind. There's definitely a defensible reading of this as on the surface a plain, if oblique, description of a work crew running a fence line—not just the one digging the holes, but the whole set of folks described. I'd wager that's what's intended (though not the only thing intended), in fact.
Like like with all poetry, it's a joy to think about and dissect.
My foremost example here would be Berserk.
Then the rest follow blindly not truly knowing why and getting stuck with the destruction/dregs/etc.
If that is what is going on, I can't really argue about it however I'll take the more joyous propaganda tyvm.
By putting up a fence he alters so many things about the land, in a profound way, and the others who occupy that land have a relationship and reaction to this fence.
Edit: maybe it isn’t a fence. Could be set up for a railway? Or something else like early poles for wires for communication?
I’ve read a lot of McCarthy but not Blood Meridian