angelic land

 

There’s that bit in Gravity’s Rainbow. Slothrop’s in hiding, again. Is it in the mountains? And he’s letting himself go,  he’s beginning to doubt. He’s becoming a hippie in 1945. And then there’s this bit:

 

“Yup, still thinking there’s a way to get back. He’s been changing, sure, changing, plucking the albatross of self now and then, idly, half-conscious as picking his nose—but the one ghost-feather his fingers always brush by is America. Poor asshole, he can’t let her go. She’s whispered love me too often to him in his sleep, vamped insatiably his waking attention with come-hitherings, incredible promises. One day—he can see a day—he might be able finally to say sorry, sure and leave her… but not just yet. One more try, one more chance, one more deal, one more transfer to a hopeful line.”

Oh man, that America, that femme fatale, that statue of liberty, that secret sharer of the hitchhiker out in sprawl and waste of it all. When I was on the Air France jet going to the States this summer, I decided to watch A Complete Unknown. I’ve been a big Dylan fan since the age 13, so I thought this would be catnip and then I’d doze. But it had an unexpected effect on me: it made me long for the America that used to be. That America which produced villains like the army carnival freaks in Gravity’s Rainbow, yes, but that also produced something more Blake-ian, something that travelled and absorbed the improv of the people, something goodhearted as a way of life rather than a happy end in a sentimental movie.

“And so the Princes fade from earth, scarce seen by souls of men
But tho' obscur'd, this is the form of the Angelic land.”

My melancholy was exaggerated by the Trump shock. In truth, my adolescent vision of an America of endless outlaw experiences has been in permanent shock since I shook off adolescence and woke up under Reagan. And yet still, the Blake boy in me has had its own experience of that Angelic land sometimes confirmed by chance and history – I’m a doomsayer only for the bass notes I can get out of my mental piano – and I’m well aware that I’ve just got the smallest peephole to look through, viz my mortal self – but the present seems an all to apt confirmation of the meanness that has been accumulated in the American soul, all bipartisanly and shit. A moral change, that is what it seems like. The deeper truth of the Western, that it was all about ethnocide, now seems to have taken charge of us. Incredible promises indeed.

I want the America promised in the Simon and Garfunkle verse: “They've all come to look for America.” But I think I will never see that America again.