I
“It’s better to burn out,” sang Neil Young as the house rocked, as his guitar fuzted and fuzzed its rough way, “than to fade away.” And burn they did, through the blue, right into the black: the light, star white that bright and dry Texas morning, scarring sage and the tar of school roofs, the parking lot of the local Best Buy. Neil Young seems more prone to rust, these days, but, to be fair, both entail oxidation.
We place our stock in big, cheap, pyrotechnic symbols, though. Young knows this, repeats the line, “the King is gone, but he’s not forgotten,” only to remind us that “this is the story of a Johnny Rotten.” The story wells up from the dirt, any dirt, Thatcher-poor and dole-queue weary. The other rains from the sky, the very angels falling, burning into the retina.
II
Fallen angels are symbols—bottle-rockets moreso. A symbol, at its best, is a poor and flimsy thing, a bit of black powder, paper, and a stick. It’s a spectacle when aloft, though: this cheap trick of rare earth and fire, a streak of sparks, a while flash and a flat, echoing bang, scarring that small spot in the vision, rending the ears ringing and abuzz. A great pyrotechnician can keep you captivated for hours, embers lingering in the dark air as the florid shower gives over to the straight streak of another shell, then more blooms! Emerald, azure, gold brighter than any alloy. But those are symbols for you: precious compression of light and noise, then the lingering, sulfurous phantom.
III
There’s a word here at issue: angel. “Angel” equals “messenger.” The word heard once is seldom believed. Jonah ran from words as Nineveh boiled in its own iniquity. Dogs and children hide under their beds on Independence Day. Maybe they are smarter than we are. What was Mary to think when she heard the buzz of angels in her head? “You shall give birth to a symbol which will burst, a symbol whose shockwaves will last longer than his light.” Trees will smolder sometimes for days before they finally catch fire.
IV
I often think that if people really understood symbols, they’d begin again to hear angels. But we’re far too literal for that. We accept only grace or insanity, not the low, loud power of the arbitrary turned meaningful, the beauty of the ready and the cheap. Neil Young’s guitar is perfect because it’s rough, no other reason.
Paper flutters down in the bottle rocket’s wake, the waste of spent words. Hearing, what would we make of it? Listening, what could we know?