Black Horse Turning
On Angels and Embers
When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out. The tender boughs of innocence burn first, and the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy.
—The Log Lady (Twin Peaks)
We watch the black horse turn back toward the smoke, toward the fire. It reverses course, running past uniformed men on the highway, back into peril for its family. A camera captures the gathering in real time; we see that one is a foal, our version of a child. We don’t know they belong to each other until later, but it doesn’t matter. Turning toward danger for what appears to be love mesmerizes our disorganized minds.
My God, we will think as we watch,
Just look at that.
Days later, skeleton keyholders to our brains surround the felon at a ceremony of swearing-in where his tiny, sallow hand never touches an actual bible.
The black horse turns back toward disaster, and we tell ourselves tales about why.
Once horses are freed from a barn that is burning, you’re supposed to bolt the doors shut behind.
David Lynch dies, and it’s terrible and perfect. Los Angeles, in all its panicky sunshine, in all its garishness and glamor, the valleys and beaches, the hilltops and the canyons, twisting highways attended by palm trees — as much as his muses were Laura, Kyle, Isabella, and Rosanna, so too was this sprawling city first named for the Queen of the Angels.
Surrealistic and noir, full of secrets and longing, Lynch’s brush was forever dipped in shades of dark contrasts. Lonely outsiders mixed with alabaster cheerleaders, slow-voiced government agents haunted by phantasmic prophets. Jungian logic swirled into the brittleness of deadpan, a warm bubble bath of macabre. Cowboys and waitresses, gangsters and starlets, wizards and lounge singers, giants and doppelgängers, magicians and wild-eyed ghosts.
Los Angeles is an invention built on a myth spun from a rush of gold. For over a hundred years, wars have been waged over the water it never had enough of to sustain its boundless treasure seekers. Expansion and diversion, sabotage and corruption, nature’s suffering, and reality’s punishment.
The pendulum never stops.
Numb from interminable scrolling and wracked with helplessness, having no claim to the most recent disaster other than family members and friends who live there, one who lost her home, many who were forced to evacuate, more who spent nights sleeping in shifts, checking the apps and the maps, packing and repacking bags, gathering cherished possessions, those who had time’s fortune to do so, and so why should I even attempt this? Why try to say something sitting in my apartment three thousand miles from all of that trauma and devastation?
Because it occurs to me that where I’m trying to write from might be relevant.
For the last eight years, I’ve lived where steel structures that once touched the clouds collapsed in a manner so unbearably cataclysmic, a conspiracy by our own government felt more reasonable to some than religious fanaticism to explain it. The worst terror attack in American history. Ten blocks away from where I’m sitting. On a September morning so perfect, you might’ve stopped in your tracks and sighed out loud to acknowledge it.
Before the horror was unleashed. Before the frantic final phone calls. Before the first responders went back up the stairs. Before the sound on the pavement. Again. And again. And again. Before survivors ran through the ash and the smoke, through the sirens and the shock, toward the bridges and the river, for home.
When ash rained down on the city of my birth, mine, and the two generations before me, it was white like snow. However white the color of ash is, enough of it falling at once will temporarily blacken a clear blue sky, blocking the sun.
I moved here fifteen years later, in the summer of 2016, after a series of smallish fires were intentionally set in my Williamsburg condo, the one that the then-about-to-be President’s son-in-law had recently purchased. I moved to a neighborhood that, not long before, surrounded the most catastrophic day in my city’s history, seeking refuge, seeking safety.
And I found it.
Because the thing about living here now is that if you weren’t old enough at the time, or you weren’t yet born, if you managed somehow to stay ignorant of the recent past, if you never stopped in the open space, now edged by a coven of young trees, if you were too busy to pause and wonder why so many names are carved into the bronze squaring the water rushing down, if you never asked why so many people come to strain their necks toward the sky and gaze into the ground, you might not know. You might not see.
The new tower is the Western Hemisphere’s tallest. The structures they built around it are airy and white. In a town known for being dirty, they are always clean.
There’s a museum where you can buy a tote bag, a T-shirt, or a keychain.
Teenagers come from across oceans with their parents or on school tours. They take selfies with their index and middle fingers before their faces in a V. Sometimes, the Gen Z girls do that Instagram pose they all do, spines cocked like guns, phones held above like swords, tongues lolling out of their mouths.
I’m not sure what any of it means.
—
Corporations send pallets, trucks are unloaded, volunteers gather and organize. Food, formula, diapers, underwear, and socks, among other disaster supply standards. Social media erupts into hundreds of GoFundMes. Short histories of human lives prevail upon the generosity of strangers to survive sudden homelessness in the world’s wealthiest economy.
Image after image. Clip after clip. Link after link.
An ex-reality show villain chronicles the burning of his family’s home perched upon a Palisades hilltop. His wife, whom he married during the mid-aughts on MTV, and who at the age of twenty-three, underwent ten cosmetic surgeries in a single day, because way more than a pound of flesh is what girls often pay for the devil’s idea of beauty.
A self-devised scoundrel, once universally loathed, better known recently as a Swiftie who fed hummingbirds out of his hand, Spencer Pratt forces Heidi Montag’s fifteen-year-old pop song to the number one spot on iTunes through sheer force of will, jujitsuing the almighty algorithm. Leading us through the smoldering wreckage of his demolished house, a lone toy is rescued, a charred pot is found, and a few of his prized crystals remain salvageable. We watch the couple weep into their respective phones over days, first in grief for all they lost, then in gratitude for all the support they’ve gained. The cameras show us their dinner and pan to their giggly, towheaded little boys while a digital army around the world dances to that ear-numbing song.
The apocalypse is monetized in real-time, and when the country of its origin is being sold off for parts, who can blame them?
The rest of us?
We stare, and we scroll, and we scroll, and we stare because this is how we live now.
—
Are you responsible for this deal, or is Trump?
The last question shouted by the press toward the outgoing President at the end of four years, following his announcement of a ceasefire, finally, fifteen months after an unspeakably barbaric terror attack and subsequent war, both filled with atrocities in an ouroboros of suffering and retribution, there’s no way anyone could begin to process it.
Is that a joke?
Biden’s final rhetorical response to members of the corporate media before turning to walk through the heavy doors, flanked by his Vice President and Secretary of State, dust hanging in DC’s soft winter light, circling the camera’s lens, fine particles all that remain visible in their wake.
—
The fires continue to burn, and their cause is still a mystery. Maybe it was arson, or an accidental spark merging with a record-shattering wind, or someone with malevolence in their heart harnessing the pure power of Santa Ana for unknown revenge.
Does a fire’s beginning ever matter more than its end?
The thing about being alive among the wreckage after the seemingly unsurvivable, whether natural or intentional, whether disaster strikes your home, your country, your family, or your heart, is that there will be remains—things that refuse to burn or collapse, that cannot be lost or forsaken, dusty artifacts of faith.
Your tribe is forever gathering. A black horse instinctively turns. The wind carries embers and angels equally. We are all trying to get home.
Mercy comes when you least expect it in forms you can’t always see. What feels like pure destruction may turn out to be a seed.
The angels will return, and when you see the one that's meant to help you, you will weep with joy.
— Doc Hayward to Laura Palmer (Twin Peaks)
Bravo !!! One after another...hopefully, they never stop. Keep up the extraordinary work.
Exquisite and profound, as always.