Darkness on the Horizon

On being an American writer

Part One: Macro

The other night, I was sitting on the rug next to the record player, listening to The Joshua Tree. I really love that album. I can feel its hunger and power and hope and rage, and the production is so layered and complex. I was reading the liner notes (<3), and something struck me: the way Bono told the Edge to “put the war through the amp” to achieve the sound of “Bullet the Blue Sky.” That war was a proxy war—the US backing military regimes to overthrow peasant uprisings in Nicaragua and El Salvador. It bears a striking resemblance to a number of current wars, because war is war is war. And the America I’ve lived in has never not been at war.

It’s too easy to romanticize America. And war is part of the romance for many Americans, clearly. But it has always been too easy to romanticize America. It was an empire. Empires have always, from the very moment of their inception, encouraged romanticization. America the empire took self-regard, self-obsession, self-mythologizing to new heights. Fine, ok, whatever. I don’t want to conduct an autopsy here. For all the writing I’ve done in my life—years and years of writing, page after page after page—and for all the ways that my writing has always been attuned to as many aspects of life as possible, I’ve never wanted to write about America.

But I will never be able to not write about America, because I have (also) always been writing about what happens when the bottom starts to fall out. This is the question that has possessed me since childhood. This is what I thought about as I listened to Bono singing “outside it’s America, outside it’s America.”

And what have I done with the questions that have possessed me since childhood? I’ve put the war through me. My mind, my body, my heart—that’s my amp. I’ve put the war through me, and I’ve used every single ounce of energy to transform it into something beautiful. To the best of my limited ability. That’s all an artist does. Sometimes they do it in facile ways that end up increasing the odds of perpetual war, and I’ve tried to avoid that, but who can say what succeeding at it looks like. It’s why art is more political than most acts, and yet, it can never, ever be political in the way a general preparing for war is political. (If it is mere preparation for war, or instruction for becoming a more perfect subject of a place perpetually at war, it’s not art, it’s propaganda. This is a hill I’ll die on.)

In “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” Bruce Springsteen sings “the highway is alive tonight,” and because I am an American, I know too well what he means. Highways have been my arteries for most of my life. (Lana knows too.) But the highway’s aliveness is fragile, tender, broken, violent. Because “nobody’s kiddin’ nobody about where it goes.” The stakes of kidding ourselves might be the highest stakes an empire has ever faced. Some mornings this is my first thought, and some nights this is my last thought, and I can’t explain it, but I don’t feel fear.

Part Two: Micro

Something in me knew he wanted to be found, needed to be found. The beautiful, tender pillhead who introduced me to Tori Amos, sitting on a bench downtown. I was so much younger than him, my head buried in books and Bob Dylan. But I knew his taste was true. He lived for art. He lived it and breathed it and he was it.

“Listen to this,” he said, and he played me “In the Springtime of His Voodoo.” Nothing was ever the same after that moment.

Last month, I went looking for him online. I don’t know why. Maybe it was a hunch.

I found him. I saw his eyes, those eyes that had gazed into mine and sent me straight into the cosmos, and I saw his eyes in the eyes of his children, all six of them, posing happily, triumphantly, underneath a giant inflatable Donald Trump, Trump punching the heavens, more than halfway to the death salute. His teenage daughters (so he had kids young—like young young) tagged him in videos of themselves dancing in their tiny shorts to that song that goes “my pronouns are U - S - A.” And the kind-hearted girl he went back home to find—because her love for him was so pure and so true—she is now a woman, mother of six children, and she points happily to a Trump Vance yard sign. He has hearted the photo.

Like Bruce says, he had the only thing America would give him. A hole in his belly and a gun in his hand. And a one-way ticket to the promised land.

Twenty-plus years ago, late at night, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes with him at the cafe, I could feel his sorrow. I knew his tenderness was too much for this world. Everyone I’ve ever loved has had the same tenderness, the same perfect woundedness. How alive he was—lost, radiant. But he was also ready to be found. And something found him. I just can’t understand why he let it find him. I feel haunted.

Once, we watched the sun come up together. We were way out in Yarnell, Arizona, near the edge of Peeples Valley. If you’ve ever seen a sunrise out there, you know how it makes it clear that existence is a miracle. Miracles are both dark and light. Watch the sun go down, watch it come up—it’s yes and energy all the way. It’s the impossible becoming possible, over and over again, ad infinitum. He was on his twelfth beer and his third bowl of weed and he was calm, relaxed, and sweet. I was in near-total observation and absorption mode. We had been up all night talking about friendship, about life, about music. I didn’t know what I should do with myself, my life. I remember him telling me—clearly, passionately—that what I must remember is that the company you keep matters, that it shapes you, that it will always matter. His dad had told him that and it had pulled him out of a dark time, he said. He was still understanding the wisdom of it, he said.

All I can say is happy trails, fellow traveler. I wish he hadn’t taken that ticket. But he has. He’s got his life to live, and I’ve got mine.

I moved to Berlin, and the first place I lived (friend of a friend’s flat, for three in-limbo weeks), Route 66 was there, waiting for me, reminding me: the highway and the desert are within.

Part Three: The Highway is Alive

A simple prayer: may I have the strength to stay lost.

LL

P.S. Here’s me, back in the desert last winter holiday season, all grown up, my heart split between two continents: