Dreams and Visions

Many of us not only grew up with Springsteen, we grew up on Springsteen. He has always had an almost magical power over those who were in the frightening transition between childhood and adulthood, the time when we are on the threshold of responsibility, when we are old enough to see what became of our parents and young enough to believe that it need not happen to us. And Bruce knows a secret about us. We may be growing up, but secretly we still want someone to read to us in bed at night, to fill our imaginations with possibilities and hopes. To remain on the path we are following results in broken backs, broken wills, and broken hearts. We see it in our parents.

This moment of awakening is a doorway, or more likely, a window, and Bruce appears there at bedtime telling us stories about places we haven’t been and things we haven’t done, but still might go and do if we don’t wait too long. Yet, we are too cool for the same old fairy tales—now we need more than just directions to Highway 9, we want suicide machines to take us there, because the crocodile that swallowed the clock is turning us all into pirates. It’s a death trap. We need to flip a Never Bird to that whole dying town on our way to, well, wherever we’re going—second star on the right and straight on until morning. So I think Bruce is a rebel with a cause, and the cause is keeping the dreams and visions alive, and not quite growing up—at least not if that means killing off the madness in his soul.

Bruce is Peter Pan. And he knows it. That is why he sings his most passionate seduction song to Wendy. Some people will have forgotten, and younger ones would not know, that NBC did a famous live broadcast of the play version of Peter Pan in 1960, starring Mary Martin as Peter, and it was so popular and beloved that it was repeated (with much publicity) in 1963, 1966, and notably, 1973, about the same time Springsteen was writing “Born to Run.” Kids of Bruce’s generation grew up with the play on television, as well as with the 1953 Walt Disney animated movie version.

One thing that has always been fascinating about Peter Pan is that tantalizing relationship between Peter and Wendy. If you have never read J.M. Barrie’s classic book, but have settled for just the stage version or the many movies based on it, there is probably something about Peter Pan that you don’t know: the play may be about Peter, but the book is about Wendy. (The play was first produced in 1904, but Barrie did not write it into a full book until 1911.) It begins with Wendy and ends with her, describing a girl who has an issue with her mother, Mrs. Darling. Mrs. Darling’s position as the center of attention is threatened by Wendy’s birth. As Barrie describes Mrs. Darling:

She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet mocking mouth. Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner. (p. 7)²⁹

You’ll want to pay attention to that kiss, the one Wendy can’t get from her mother. It’s important. Barrie makes it clear that Mr. Darling can’t get the kiss either, and eventually he forgets about it or pretends it isn’t there. But Wendy sees it and she wants it. Mrs. Darling doesn’t know it, but by withholding the kiss she is creating Peter Pan in Wendy’s imagination, and the more she strives to control Wendy’s “dreams and visions,” the stronger Peter becomes. Here is what Mrs. Darling does to Wendy:

Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children’s minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on. (p. 9)

Is this a children’s story? I suppose that if the (aptly named) Brothers Grimm are telling children’s stories, so is J.M. Barrie. But this is dark stuff, the sort of thing that could keep Freud busy for a lifetime. Even from watching the sanitized play or the movies of Peter Pan we can tell that the children aren’t happy, that they want to escape, to fly away, but we are never told precisely why. Taking a gander at what Barrie says above, it becomes a little clearer. If Bruce wants to “guard” Wendy’s “dreams and visions,” I think I know why she needs a guardian. Maybe we all do.

Barrie enters the darkest corridors of childhood, parenthood, and adolescent struggle, and in that place he finds the character Wendy. Scholars agree that while the name “Wendy” can nowadays be a diminutive for “Gwendolyn,” it appears that J.M. Barrie simply made up the name “Wendy.” There were no “Wendys” before Peter Pan, even if there’s a Wendy’s on every third street corner now, serving up gigantic slabs of beef tallow to clog our arteries and dull our minds. But Barrie’s Wendy is all women—as they wish to be, not as they must be to satisfy a world that will brand them as tramps if they don’t comb their hair in the rearview mirror. But Bruce can see that Wendy doesn’t want to be one of those girls, she is different—the object of his passion, the mother of lost boys, the May Queen who returns to Neverland in spring to clean the winter’s mess.

Falling for Wendy

Every boy who has so much as a sliver of imagination falls in love with Wendy as soon as he first hears the story of Peter Pan. Those boys who have a romantic turn of mind never get over it. Bruce never got over it. I can tell. Neither did I. That is why “Born to Run” affected me (and millions like me) so profoundly.

The mansions of glory and suicide machines may have drawn in the boys on the football team and the ones in shop class, but the romantics demurred until the first line of the second verse: “Wendy let me in, I wanna be your friend.” He’s singing to Wendy, we all gasped. “Let me in?” we asked. “Where?” But romantics all know, and Bruce knows that we know: Let me in the nursery window. Peter Pan appears at the window, and he can’t come in unless Wendy opens it. And Wendy always does, because that is what Wendy really wants.

This is all quite conscious on Bruce’s part. He didn’t pull the name “Wendy” randomly from a hat or ask to be “let in” just because it was cold outside. He knows who he’s after. And as I imagine it, Bruce must have asked himself “who is the girl every romantic boy wants to steal . . . no, not steal, she has to choose it . . . to liberate?” That girl has had many names: Persephone, Helen of Troy, Rapunzel, Juliet, Becky Thatcher, and for boys of the twentieth century, her name is Wendy. We have always loved her and we always will.

I think all the boys, including those destined to be gay, fall for Wendy (even if a few just want to be Wendy, which is fine by me and Bruce). Most of us recover, which is to say, we eventually grow up. But while we’re still boys, rescuing Wendy is our very calling. Sometimes she is trapped in Kansas on her aunt and uncle’s farm, until a cyclone takes her to Oz. But the Tin Man and the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, those romantic dreamers, all love her, whether in Kansas or Oz. Sometimes she lives on the bluffs above the Mississippi River in Missouri and is lost in Injun Joe’s cave. Sometimes Wendy is the Pretty Woman trapped in a life of prostitution until Richard Gere shows up to bring her the fairy tale. But sometimes Wendy is stuck in a toxic, rusting hole in New Jersey. For every Wendy there is a Peter Pan. Sometimes he’s made of tin, sometimes he arrives in a big black limousine, and sometimes he’s just a scared and lonely rider. What is always true of every Peter Pan is that he hasn’t really grown up, and he doesn’t plan to do so. He’s the man-child, the puer aeternus, as C.G. Jung called him, the eternal son. He leads with his heart, not his head, and he deals with the fallout of doing so, regardless of the cost. The lost boy loves Wendy and only Wendy—well, it might be more accurate to say that he loves every Wendy.

For you girls reading this (and I do mean girls, since I’m not attempting to address the woman in you), I am well aware that your perspective is being left out of this. To this complaint I have only two things to say. First, I’m a boy, so I can’t easily pretend to understand how Bruce’s song affects you. Second, I have something else for you to read. I recommend Hope Edelman’s essay on losing her virginity to Bruce Springsteen’s music called “Bruce Springsteen and the Story of Us.”³⁰

And here we come to a point that bears some investigation. If it were just me, I’d be too embarrassed to proceed with this, but over and over I hear from men and women across generations that this damnable song, “Born to Run,” reaches down into a place inside of us, grips the vitals of our souls, and tugs until it loosens the scar tissue and frees an almost uncontrollable pentup passion. We yearn and pine for something that seems lost, we want out, we want it back, whatever it is. Finally, as the words fail, as the music reaches a screaming crescendo and then falls down in a chromatic scale that touches every single note and into a vortex of anarchy (that is where Wendy is, at the bottom of that musical hole), Bruce counts off and we learn that the highway is jammed with broken heroes, just like us, on a “last chance power drive”—and I don’t know in my intellect what that is, but my heart knows, and I don’t care if I lose my mind, I’m headed there, with Wendy, and if it costs me my very life I’ll die with her on the street in an everlasting kiss. And somehow, at the moment we feel it, this doesn’t even sound stupid.

It may seem anti-climactic, but when I recover my full-grown wits, I would like to know, frankly, how does Bruce do that to me—and to half the people I know or ever knew? And why do I pity the boys who don’t see it, who don’t share it? Don’t they love Wendy? Cynical, pathetic bastards. Bean counters. Senators and sons of senators. They have no imagination. They don’t believe in fairies. Screw them.

The Wild and the Innocent

Most philosophers are uncomfortable with discussing imagination—they discuss it, but they don’t like it much. It has been thought to be just the opposite of “reason,” and philosophers like reason. Imagination is unruly, it deceives us, it likes to play tricks on us, and it doesn’t want to be pinned down to just one orderly way of doing things. Thus, it is not surprising that most philosophers in the Western world have, since the days of Plato, belittled and condemned imagination—most, but not all.

Robert Pirsig’s lonely rider in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance discovers, with great effort, this same conspiracy to kill imagination, and while it may cost the rider his sanity, he resolves not to give in to the pressure to “grow up” and be rational. Pirsig’s narrator’s alter ego, Phaedrus, is overwrought to say the least, but it isn’t a bad idea to read this character as Peter Pan, and the lonely rider as a grown up Peter Pan trying to remember what his younger self once knew.

For a small handful of devoted ponderers, the power to create images before our minds has seemed like the grandest and finest mystery of all. They admit that imagination is the servant of our emotions and passions (it’s hard to argue with that), and they readily confess that in serving these fiery masters, imagination also further inflames them. But, some of them have countered: given that we humans are such emotional and passionate beings, it seems strange to neglect the topic, or to demote the powers of consciousness which spring from and serve our passions to the level of mere annoyances and obstacles to the “serious” work of the mind.

Perhaps the most notorious defender of imagination was an Italian philosopher named Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). Most professional philosophers have heard of him, but only the most intrepid among them will dare to study his ideas. Studying Vico could cost you your sanity. His masterwork, The New Science (1744) is one of the wildest rides you could ever take.³¹ This is the philosophical equivalent of a moonshot. Why?

Vico was a fairly ordinary and respectable philosopher until he became (dangerously) curious about the origin of human law. Being a thorough sort of inquirer, he dug around in ancient books until one day it occurred to him that he couldn’t really escape the conclusion that law—and religion, and science, and just about everything else—comes from myth, and the bad news is that we made up the myths. This can be troubling to the sorts of people who want “truth” and “knowledge” and “morality” to be something more than just our collective imagination. But Vico was fearless. Twenty years of study followed this disturbing realization before he discovered the “master key” of his new science: what he called the “imaginative universal.” You know this idea by a different and more familiar name, the “archetype.” The notion is so much a part of our parlance and culture today that you may not have realized that someone somewhere along the way had to come up with this idea. Vico was the guy who first saw it and named it. People thought he was crazy. Many still think that.

What did Vico discover? It’s so simple that it is hard to believe the idea wasn’t obvious all along. But it wasn’t, not to grown up minds. From the time of Plato, people on the Western side of the world had been working without surcease to discredit myth and to prove that reason was the legitimate root of all human knowledge—even God was rational, they said. God didn’t imagine the world into existence, He spat out mathematical formulas, and here we all are. These laborers were so successful that the Western world finally forgot that there was ever an important constructive connection between myth and reason, even though the connection was plain to see in Plato’s own works. When they demoted myth to the status of falsehood and lies, they made human imagination the liar. In short, we all forgot the childhood of the human race and tried to pretend that reason was its own self-sufficient creator. But Vico was determined to help us remember our childhood.

He argued that imagination has a logic all its own, more basic and far richer than what we call “logic” today. When we think, Vico said, our operating platform is made of these “imaginative universals.” You can’t think at all without them, but you can’t grasp them with reason; you have to grasp them in the way that you understand fables and fairy tales. It sounds wild to an adult, but any innocent child can do it, as Vico pointed out.

Darkness on the Edge of Town

There are lots of examples of imaginative universals—every myth is packed with them, but let me isolate just one imaginative universal to help you along. Vico says that in mythic imagination, a city is actually an altar to the gods. Cities are not like altars, they are altars. We create cities as altars, and the whole idea of a city comes back to that. If you dig deep enough, you’ll just see it. But let me offer a few analogies to help you.

Traditional villages of indigenous people are organized around certain crucial places. They have a heart, which is usually marked with a consecrated totemic symbol. In modern cities, the area is called “downtown.” As for the totemic symbol, I happen to live along the Mississippi, and it is pretty difficult to miss the Arch as one approaches St. Louis, or the Pyramid as one approaches Memphis. What the hell are those? They don’t always put them downtown, but these totemic symbols still mark the meaning of the place, its heart. There is a giant statue of Vulcan in Birmingham, and a giant Jesus overlooking Rio de Janeiro, a huge obelisk in downtown Buenos Aires, and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, a Space Needle in Seattle and another in San Antonio, and even Mary of the Mountain overlooking Butte, Montana. Washington D.C. is simply nothing but totemic symbols. In Atlantic City, it’s the Boardwalk, where Madame Marie used to tell fortunes better than the cops.

Traditional villages have a place where decisions are made, a place where the elders meet. It is the “head” of the village. In modern cities, that is city hall. It may be downtown, it may be somewhere else, but this is the place where the decision-makers are supposed to consult the wisdom of the ages. This is where the “law” is kept. It is like the chancel area in a church or synagogue or mosque where the sacred writing is kept. The sacred writing of a city is its law and its history. That’s why you expect to find statues and portraits of past leaders throughout the place—these are the ancestors, and wherever we keep their images or their possessions, we do so because we know we cannot forget the ancestors without also forgetting the law.

Traditional villages have places, usually a dark place on the edge of town, where the dead are buried. We still consecrate the ground and fill it with symbols, creating a “necropolis,” a “city of the dead” that mirrors in form and structure the city of the living, with its own heart, head, and sacred writing.³² And finally, traditional villages all have a place where the refuse of collective human life is deposited—archaeologists love digging around these places. In modern cities, this is called the dump. It may be the necessities of communal living that determine the need for such places, but it is the human imagination that separates and sanctifies them as the proper altar to the gods. Your house is organized in a similar fashion, a microcosm of the city, an altar within an altar.

If your city lacks a consecrated heart, or if it doesn’t properly respect its own law, or its ancestors, or if it treats itself as though it were simply one huge dump, the sacred order is upset. The city is an altar, and you don’t want to defile it. The child in you already knows this. The grown-up will have to remember it, which is hard. But remembering this piece of poetic wisdom is the only way you’ll ever really know why we want our cities to be beautiful and prosperous and orderly and safe and bustling with life—such cities make the gods happy when they are. This is also why we want a winning sports team; it proves the favor of the gods upon our city. And you already know this. But if you treat your city like we have treated, say, Newark or Camden, you soil not only your own nest, but you defile your altar to the gods. Don’t be surprised if the sports teams can’t win. This is part of the reason Bruce’s songs about the hopelessness of the dying city and the desire to find a better place strike us so deeply. We simply know that to live in a death trap is a suicide rap. We have to get out while we’re young.

Obviously Wendy is also an imaginative universal, as is Peter Pan, and Captain Hook, and the Crocodile who swallowed the clock, and Neverland itself. There are many thousands of imaginative universals, all of them deep and rich in imaginative content. Poets, like Bruce Springsteen, write with them. These images can morph and change into infinitely many forms, but when they have been packaged well, we grasp them—not with our rational minds, but with our memories. Vico says that memory is imagination, and it is far more important than rational thinking. Vico also points out that the education of children deeply depends on these mythic stories and their archetypal characters. He says that if we fail to teach our children the fables of the race when their imaginations are strong, in childhood, they will have nothing to think about as their imaginations wane in adulthood. I fear that northern New Jersey has a lot of people whose parents didn’t tell them stories, or more likely, the leaders and the wealthy people of these dying towns just don’t believe in fairies.

But it is also pretty hard to listen to Vico. He seems like a hopeless romantic man-child who taps at the window of the mind’s nursery, not a serious scientist of thought. And his (ironically titled) New Science reads like a description of Neverland. The pirates don’t like it. Before you get all indignant about this, consider at least one of their arguments.

Captain Hook

René Descartes (1596–1650) was probably the most unrelenting critic of imagination who ever lived; he was ingenious, and he looked just like Captain Hook. He had lots of very impressive rational arguments, but one was especially effective at proving that there was a great difference between thinking about something and imagining it.³³ He instructed us to think about a figure with exactly a thousand sides of equal length. He called this a “chiliagon.” There’s nothing unclear about this concept, and it would be easy to verify, mathematically or empirically, whether any given object in our senses or our minds was or was not a chiliagon. You could, for instance, ploddingly count the sides, but the best way is to measure just one side, multiply by 1000, compare the result with the area of the entire figure (arrived at by another precise formula), and thereby determine whether the figure has exactly one thousand sides. The object in your senses will perfectly match the concept in your mind.

But now, try to imagine a chiliagon. You quickly discover that you sort of can’t do it. You can imagine a figure with a lot of sides, but you can’t tell whether it has exactly a thousand, or maybe 999 or 1,001, or just a lot. Why, Descartes wants to know, can’t you get a determinate and clear idea with your imagination, when you can do it so easily with your reasoning? There must be a difference between imagination and reasoning, he concludes, and you would do well to trust your reasoning, your “thinking” and not your imaginings, at least if you want knowledge. And Captain Hook wants knowledge.

Famously, Descartes then insisted that “I think, therefore I am,” is the safest bit of knowledge anyone can have. And this is pretty much the opposite of “I imagine, therefore I am.” This is very convincing. It is so clever that it pitilessly turns children into pirates. It is so convincing that it seems to deal a near fatal blow to Peter Pan, while Descartes and the rest of the pirates capture Wendy and condemn us all to a life of running from the crocodile. Western philosophy grew up, and growing up means counting and measuring everything until imagination simply dies, the light goes out and no one claps for Tinker Bell. Such are the leading men of Newark, and maybe your hometown too, and maybe your nation. Bruce shows us the situation in “Born to Run” and a hundred other songs. And that’s where Wendy is being held by the pirates.