Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story
- Nov 29, 2022
- 5 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
★★★★★
If, like me, you saw a promotional clip of Bono reading an excerpt from Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story wonderfully animated in squigglevision (and if you haven’t, go watch it now), you couldn’t wait to get your hands on this book. I immediately put a request in at the local library, and I’m pretty sure I was first on the list. Surrender is, as the subtitle plainly states, 40 chapters, each one an episode in the life of Paul David Hewson, aka Bono Vox, aka Bono, loosely based around the lyric of a different song. It’s a compelling conceit, though one that, even at 576 pages, leaves a lot left untold. That’s not really different from the few other musician biographies I’ve read—Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One or Elvis Costello’s Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink or, perhaps most especially, Beastie Boys Book as told by B-Boys Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz—but it somehow feels very different.
The difference? Actually, I think there are two differences: one is Bono, the other is me.
Bono is, first and foremost, a restless seeker, a tireless pilgrim on a quest, to quote Thoreau, “to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life.” His is not merely a story of a lad from the scrappy streets of Dublin (or is it scrappy lad from the streets of Dublin?) who dreamed of becoming a singer in one of the biggest rock ‘n’ roll bands of all time (and you should know that he was not interested in being a singer in any other kind of band). Yes, that happened, but that’s what happened on the way to finding his true calling as an activist, fighting for the world’s poor. And that happened—I lied before—because Bono is first and foremost, a spiritual man, a Christian man, a believer in God (though not so much in religion, a distinction I find very meaningful), who has tried to live his life as Jesus would have wanted, in service to others not to himself. That might sound absurd, or at least suspicious, considering the general impression of Bono and his ego, which he has owned up to as being “far taller than [his] self-esteem.” I assure you it is not. Though to be certain, Bono is a mere mortal, as flawed as any of us, and while his ego may have given him the belief (audacity?) to accomplish what he has on stage and off, it has, at times, not served him so well. His unvarnished frankness on both sides of the coin isn’t just refreshing, it’s moving.
As for me? Well, that’s less interesting, but this is my review, so I’ll go wherever the words take me. I, too, am on a journey (aren’t we all whether we realize it or not?). Mine is also a spiritual one—intensified since moving to the Flint Hills of Kansas and living in and of and for the land—though more animist than Christian. And though I didn’t lose my mother at the early age Bono did, I was a very young child when my parents divorced and whose “use” of me and the second families they created pushed me, like Bono, to find family elsewhere. I eventually found it in animal rights and straight edge circles (though I gave up the edge just before my 22 birthday, I have been vegan since 1991). I also formed a band (two actually, the first a straight edge hardcore band called Warcry, the second a post-hardcore outfit called Shadeland) with some of my best friends, though we had little-to-none of what it took to rise above near-total obscurity. But I digress.
On the back jacket of the book, in Bono’s signature scrawl, it reads, “… confessions of an artist, activist, actualist.” That’s true. But Surrender is really a book about learning to let go. There’s a section in chapter 38 that simply gutted me. And it gutted me because Bono had arrived at a place I, too, had come to or was, at the very least, near to arriving at. The day before, I was on a hike. I was in a dark place, haunted by the old demons of inadequacy, self-doubt, failure, limitation, and more, and wrote, in part, “I have the vague notion that I am not living my life so much as being run by it.” The next day, I read these words from Bono’s hand: “Carl Jung observed that the very things that made you successful in the first half of your life not only no longer work for you in the second half; they positively work against you. The Franciscan friar Richard Rohr put it to me like this: ‘It’s our strengths rather than our weaknesses that often hold us back.’” Eighteen months ago I wrote a poem called “Stillness”:
World, do you want to know how I became still?
By placing one foot in front of the other, walking
your miles until I lost track of time, of thought,
of all your yesterdays and todays and tomorrows.
Until I lost myself.
Bono continues, “A call to shut up and listen is not what I want to hear. ‘Be still’ is hardly an epiphany. But ‘be still’ is all I hear from the silence. I was hoping for something a little more rock ‘n’ roll. ‘Surrender’ might be the most powerful word in the world, but now I’m caught between the life I know and the one I don’t.… Can I take in the view without having to be in it? Can I not take that call, in favor of this other call, to stillness? Is this what vision over visibility looks like now?… Maybe I’m discovering surrender doesn’t always have to follow defeat and may be all the fuller after victory. When you’ve won the argument you now understand you never needed to have. The argument with your life that’s no longer necessary.”
Now, I’m no Bono, but his story, not in specifics but in generalities, feels universal, and, as crazy as it may seem, I find quite a lot of my own story, my own journey in his. I can think of a good friend whose story, as far as I know it to be, might align even more closely than mine. Perhaps yours does, too. And here I am, aged 49, fairly freshly arrived at a new chapter in my life (rough draft though it is). One that, in many ways, consciously at least, I’ve been trying to get to for nearly two decades. But also one that is full of uncertainty and is, in large part, predicated on the skill and ambition that got me here. Traits that once lifted me up me now feel like they’re working against me, not practically but emotionally, spiritually. “Caught between the life I know and the one I don’t.” Indeed. “Move or die” as John Quincy Adams said, and my journey, like Bono’s, will continue. I suspect, he and I, and perhaps all of us, really, will struggle and stumble and even fall along the way. It is my hope, for myself as much as for anyone, that we can give ourselves the grace of forgiveness, not judge ourselves too harshly, and that we might be surrounded by the love and support of those who care for us and want the best for us as we want for ourselves. That’s some heady stuff to get from a rock-star biography. Coming from Bono, that should surprise no one.
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