Chapter Four- Independence Day
The largeness of Cash's mythic self is a necessity for his theme to work, as it is this largeness that allows him to span the distance between the holy and the America, between the promises a country makes at the front door and the accumulation of bodies out behind its pleasant orchard greens. This is not a simple contradiction nor (dearest Lord) hypocrisy; just the wages and the times at hand. The nation's burdens and its pleasures both are in our possession, Cash's voice says, and both will k** you just the same.
"Even when he was a sort of native pagan, knowing little of the bible and hooting contemptuously at parsons,” W.J. Cash wrote, "he was nevertheless at bottom religious. Ancestral phobias grappled him toward the old center, and immemorial awes, drawn in with his mother's milk, whispered imperative warning in his ears." When Johnny Cash's father, Ray- a hard man cruelly raised by an older brother, a man who never told anyone of any love buried in his heart, who went to the grave resenting his son's prodigal triumphs- finally let out his last unhappy breath, on Christmas Day 1985, his famous son set off fireworks in the front yard. The explosions that ran up and down the sky must have been discharges from the deepest wells of Cash's being, signals of an ancient independence, of one's sudden relief at no longer being a father's son. They were a measure of something he would struggle to say. “The light grew in intensity and I couldn't see him through it,” Cash wrote. “Suddenly the light was gone, and so was he ... the only thing in the yard were spent fireworks from that evening.”
Once upon a time, they tell us, a man's age was measured by the years pa**ed since the occasion of his father's d**h. “Once,” Gertrude Stein wrote at the start of The Making of Americans, “an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. ‘Stop!' cried the groaning old man at last. ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.'”
Let us say a person has two ages, their literal age and their mythic age. The first age is simple enough to tally, in most cases; the second age, a moving target, is a harder call. Throughout his career, Cash played dress-up like a house full of schoolgirls: sometimes a cowboy, a Puritan, a Confederate general, a riverboat gambler. “I'll fly a starship,” he once sang, “across the universe divide.” Like any child, Cash was clothing himself in myth, expelling a new self again and again through labor. In myth, each birth returns again, like each and every d**h; like rituals, or drops of rain, they recur, coming back again and again, one mask slipping off to reveal another. The promises and the betrayals both: our birthright, and our inheritance. “And there are those days when the earth whimpers in dread, when the lightning clicks in awful concatenation with continuous thunder, and hurricanes break forth with semi-tropical fury,” wrote W.J. Cash, “days when this land which, in its dominant mood, wraps its children in soft illusion, strips them naked before terror.” The promises always ride upon the betrayals, the betrayals upon the promises. If the mythic Whitman contains multitudes, then the mythic Cash contains the woeful fluencies that bind the multitudes together; as fathers and murderers, as wives and philanderers, as children of the world.
It will always be easier for us to forgive one another in our songs than in our hearts. “I set them up in a row across the middle of the front yard of my parents' house,” Cash wrote, recalling his father's d**h, “sky rockets, roman candles, sparklers, colored fire fountains, bursting stars, rainbow cones, everything that would shine.” Someone should write a song about a night like that. “The darkness of this house has got the best of us,” it could go, “there's a darkness in this republic that's got us too.”