11

Everything Dies : Facing Fatalism in “Atlantic City”

JOHN JACOB KAAG

 

 

 

Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” is about passing and about passing away uncontrollably. It’s about a type of fatalism, the type that keeps one up at night—out of despair or out of sheer defiance of the dark. When Springsteen points us into the Darkness on the Edge of Town, he is pointing us toward “Atlantic City,” a song he would release six years later. Dave Marsh, in his 1978 Rolling Stone review of Darkness, says that the album could take as its text two lines from Jackson Browne: “Nothing survives—/ But the way we live our lives.” ³⁷

For Springsteen, however, this is not some stoic fact, but an invitation to explore the ways that “nothing survives,” the way we might live our lives in the face of this nothingness. “Atlantic City” beckons. Thirty million people, undoubtedly many more, continue to return to this not-so-imaginary place, attracted to its fatal freedoms, intimate possibilities, and carefully disturbing atmosphere. It is here, in the darkness, that hopes and beliefs are lost and found.

This song is sung by and about a loser, one who comes to experience the loss that quietly underpins human finitude. At one point, Springsteen wails—“there are winners and losers / and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line.” He, however, remains caught as if by fate on the “losing end.” Winners, on the other hand, do occasionally win in Atlantic City. That is to say, they are free to leave. They take off before night sets in. They end up in the suburbs or in enormous libraries with marble floors that remain peaceful and bright even in the darkness. They may even become philosophers of a sort—but not good ones. Springsteen, however, suggests that something has been lost in this sort of suburban and intellectual victory—the capacity to feel deeply, the sense of being crushed, the power to create in a fatefully fragile world.

A similar suggestion emanates from a corner of contemporary philosophy, from the writings of John J. McDermott (born in 1933). He writes that “some of us all the time and most of us most of the time are dead to the possible rhythm of our experiences . . . We look alive, but we are dead, dead to our things and dead to ourselves.”³⁸ If McDermott has us pegged it is because he has come to know us from firsthand experience. He is not Thales, peering up at the sky, Descartes, staring out his philosopher-window, or Kant, never venturing beyond the gates of his familiar Königsberg. McDermott, a committed teacher, avid baseball fan, and city-dweller, is not a detached and isolated onlooker, which is to say that he is not your average philosopher.

Born Irish, McDermott grew up in New York, not too far—geographically, dispositionally, or spiritually—from the place that Springsteen would call home. I don’t know him well, but he seems to be the personification of the country that he describes in his writing: “America / One of a kind, but special / Nonetheless / Pockmarked, heroic, bewildered / arrogant, sensitive, never / plodding.” Yes, this is Springsteen’s America also. I guess this is why McDermott’s philosophy can accompany this sort of music. I once had the chance to take a look at his library that wraps around his house in College Station, Texas (Yes, he now lives in Texas). What I found did not surprise me. On the Road, Being and Nothingness, Don Quixote, Emerson’s Essays, The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions—all of which seem at home with McDermott.

The only real conversation that we ever had was the one that motivated me to write this chapter. In truth, the conversation was more like a Springsteen show. McDermott talked, I listened, and afterward I couldn’t remember most of it. But I did remember this. One of his students had missed class the week before and McDermott, like any good teacher, had remembered to give the student a hard time face-to-face. The student—a good student—responded by saying that her father had passed away and that she was at the funeral. McDermott does not take death—or life—lightly. It is deadly serious—this business of life. Sympathetic and fiercely sincere, McDermott tried to comfort the freshman. The freshman didn’t need comforting. “That’s okay,” the student said with a shrug, “no big deal.” McDermott was stunned: “No BIG DEAL!?” For McDermott, nothing is bigger. The mildness of the student’s response betrayed a type of ignorance, or even worse, a blatant refusal to examine the questions that fatalism inevitably begs. Under his breath and with a shake of his head, he muttered, “If death doesn’t matter, what about life? Are we even awake?”

Drawing heavily from European existentialism, American philosophy, and his experiences in the urban centers of America, McDermott encourages his readers to remain alive to their experiences and to return to the dark issues of tragedy, finitude, and death not as abstract subjects, but as meaningful ways of thinking about, and participating in, human existence. This way of thinking is highlighted in his most recent work, the Drama of Possibility, but the way was first trail-blazed in earlier works compiled in McDermott’s Streams of Experience. It is by way of this stream of thought that we arrive at the meaning of “Atlantic City.” In his early writing and in Springsteen’s music, night creeps in and even winners can be drawn back to the flickering lights of the coastline city. I want to negotiate the fatalism that emerges in their cityscapes and explore the dim and intermittent glow that hope casts in the darkness.

Living in “Atlantic City”—Permanently Afflicted

In McDermott’s words, “No reader of this chapter has died” (p. 157). But it is equally true that every reader of this chapter is dying, passing away as this word passes into the next. The inevitability of one’s own death resides as the irreducible kernel of our human situation. To the extent that philosophy seeks to enrich and deepen our situation, McDermott insists that its job is to gnaw at this kernel. We will, for better and for worse, never fully digest the meaning of our terminality. Think about it. See how it sits in your gut: You are going to die next Wednesday and every moment is a moment closer to humpday. Perhaps it puts a new spin on the meaning of the “daily grind.” Perhaps, in darkness of this grim situation, you ask the question that philosophy seeks to negotiate: “What should I do?” Perhaps you cry out with the question to which all philosophers should respond: “Can you help me?” Death remains, for all of us, in the words of Martin Heidegger, our “ownmost possibility.” If death remains our “ownmost” so too must the questions that accompany it. They are always ours to ask and always ours to answer.

In this age of whitewashed hospitals and quietly secluded nursing homes, it is difficult to understand McDermott’s claim that all human beings, at every moment, are “permanently afflicted.” Our lives, for the most part, are so pleasant and so healthy. Death happens at the end of a full life—and not before. It happens quietly, in a geriatric playground of wires and ventilators and sodium-free meals. By means of technology and modern medicine we desperately pretend to hold death at bay. Death happens, but we would like to think that it always happens elsewhere. Death happens, but it happens to someone else. Death happens, but not right now: “How strange, how singular, how unusual is our understanding of death,” McDermott says. “Each of us claims to know of death, yet our experience is necessarily indirect, vicarious, at a distance.”

Poets and musicians have the uncanny ability to close the distance between life and death, or more to the point, to understand life as the personal process of dying. In the words of the seventeenth-century satirist, Bishop Hall, “Death borders upon our birth, and the cradle stands in the grave.” After the Darkness tour in 1981, Springsteen seems to have confronted this dark fact; he gets the message and successfully relays it to us. We see that human finitude emerged as a central theme at the end of Darkness, in “Wreck on the Highway.” In this case, Springsteen is still the onlooker, the innocent bystander who witnesses, or imagines, the death of another human being. The theme of death, and life as a process of dying, becomes more pronounced after 1981. The songs on Nebraska would be more personal, more suicidal. Is it any surprise that Nebraska did not sell well? As McDermott explains, Americans don’t like to talk about death, especially when it is framed as sui-cide, described so vividly as “my own.” I guess they don’t like to hear about it either.

The title track is the story of Charlie Starkweather, the serial killer whose personality Springsteen assumes in a frightfully calm, almost pastoral, voice: “I am not sorry for what I have done / at least for a little while, sir, she and I had some fun.” This is a life literally shot through with death—the death of others and the death of oneself. When Starkweather is sent to the electric chair, his response remains indifferent, as if this fate is just another part of life. Like Camus’s Stranger, Starkweather reflects an unyielding candor concerning the terminality of our condition and the way in which our finitude may cut us off from others, may make us aliens in our familiar world. Like Franz Kafka’s Trial, “Nebraska” invites us to sing along in a fatefully disturbing song: “They declared me unfit to live / Said into that great void my soul’d be hurled.” We might not want to sing along, but Springsteen and McDermott suggest that we have no choice in the matter. At some point, all of us are declared unfit to live. This most lonely, but most common, of situations begs the question that McDermott’s writing occasionally seeks to answer: “Can we experience ourselves as terminal yet live creative, probing, building lives which nonetheless, ask for no guarantees and for no ultimate significance to be attributed to this endeavor” (p. 84). This is the question that plays out in Springsteen’s “Atlantic City.”

The violence and terminality of “Nebraska” bleeds into “Atlantic City” and stains the song from the very beginning. On March 15th, 1981, a nail bomb went off under the porch of a row home in South Philadelphia. The explosion destroyed the house and killed Phillip Testa, the owner of a local poultry business and the head of the American Mafia in Philadelphia. Springsteen opens “Atlantic City” by recounting this story: “They blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night / they blew up his house too.” According to Testa’s neighbors, his body parts were strewn for blocks—messy reminder of human brutality and vulnerability. The hit was supposedly initiated by a rival family from Atlantic City.

Why does Springsteen open with such an explosive tale? Let’s look further into Springsteen’s angle of vision. The early 1980s saw the sedimenting of suburban life in America, a kind of human existence that had been, for various reasons, torn free of its existential moorings. By then, we had not only actively fled from but had lost sight of the dangerous prospect of our vulnerability. Our mechanized lifestyles and technological habits evidenced the deadening consequences of this cultural development. Our flight in the face of human fragility lay at the heart of “white flight,” the dispersal of our city centers in the two decades before. It was safe outside the city. In the suburbs, life became happily boring, forgetful. Springsteen, however, was not happy and insisted that we ought not to be. Along with the punk movement and the later works of the modern painter Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Springsteen’s songs anticipated McDermott’s observation that “Boredom and ennui are signs of a living death. In that the only time we have is the time we have, they are inexcusable faults.” To counteract these faults and to remind us of the precariousness of our human condition, Springsteen attempts to rouse us from our suburban complacency. “Coming to consciousness,” the point and purpose of good philosophy and good music, stood in marked and violent contrast to everyday suburban modes of living in the 1980s. “Coming to consciousness,” according to McDermott, “has nothing to do with the traditional pursuit of happiness, an attempt illusory and self deceptive for a human organism whose denouement is the inevitability of death without redemption.” Indeed, “Atlantic City” continues to be jarring to the traditional pursuits of Springsteen’s average listener.

The murder of the Chicken Man initiated a cascade of death that swept across the crime families of the Northeast for the next fifteen years, ending in 1995. It’s in this sense that “trouble is busting in from out of state” and why the “boys on the boardwalk are getting ready for a fight.” This is precisely when my own mother would have whisked her two boys back to the suburbs—more about that a little later. Springsteen, however, encourages us to linger in the possibility of loss. Indeed, it is precisely in the face of this “trouble,” simultaneously existential and criminal, that Springsteen cashes “out of the Central Trust / and buys two tickets on that Coast City bus.” He goes to Atlantic City, to the city of loss, not in spite of the danger, but because of it. This is not, however, a romanticized journey and this character, like Starkweather, is by no means your garden-variety hero. This character is less a journeyman than a transient, for the former “connotes a definite goal, an end in view, or at least a return home. A transient, however, is one who is passing through,” and passing away. On his passing through “Atlantic City,” Springsteen’s only triumph, if one could call it that, is his coming to consciousness as shown in the refrain: “Everything dies, baby, and that’s a fact…” Death is not something that happens elsewhere. It is not even something that “happens” per se, like some onetime event. Death is here and now—in everything. In describing the passing of time and human finitude, McDermott writes that “Time passing is a death knell. With the license of a paraphrase, I ask, For whom does the bell toll? It tolls for me and thee and for ours” (p. 132).

Celebrating Transience

The “fact” that is repeated in Atlantic City’s refrain is also a question: can I deal with the fact of human finitude—can I live with this knowledge? McDermott directs us to Albert Camus’s rendering of the question. Camus writes, ‘I want to know if I can live with what I know and with that alone.” The answer always cuts in one of two directions. Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, and Woody Guthrie traveled the path of suicide, whether slow or fast, or both; this is an alternative that may be reasonable if followed, not as a route of escapism, but as an existential choice that attempts to reject a dehumanizing fatalism in our lives. Springsteen flirts with the plausibility of suicide throughout Nebraska, but also seems to suggest another option.

This second option is defined, in McDermott’s words, “by the imaginative and ameliorative strategies for coping with the stark reality” that “everything dies.” It is only through these strategies that we might understand the second line of Springsteen’s assertion: “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact / but maybe someday everything comes back.” Terminality and possibility are held together in the refrain of the human condition. There are, however, no promises here. As McDermott indicates, our hopes for amelioration and salvation are possibilities, tentative “maybes,” rather than actualities. Like the “suicide machines” Springsteen describes in “Born to Run,” McDermott places the volatile mix of finality and possibility under extreme pressure. The result is the combustion of human action—the “life of the live creature.” McDermott is taking this phrase from John Dewey (1859–1952), the American pragmatist, but recasts it in a tragic way that Dewey never quite pulled off. This creature, like Springsteen’s character, is a homeless one. As soon as we come to face our homelessness, however, McDermott writes that we “can proceed . . . under the assumption that we do not belong.” Along with Springsteen, he suggests that our existential situation is an invitation to explore the darkness of our lives. Remember that fatalism has the power to keep us up at night. That’s why Springsteen’s refrain of “Everything dies” gives way to entreaty: “So put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City.” This is the way that we proceed in the face of finitude. This is a rendezvous with possibility in a city of unavoidable loss and risk.

This ongoing and active encounter in Atlantic City serves as the conclusion of experiential observation and belief. Here, Springsteen echoes McDermott and the pragmatist, William James (1842–1910): a resolute evaluation of our human situation should drive us out of the realm of thought and onto the road of action. The chauvinism and unstable power of Springsteen’s character indicates that our response to human finitude will always, or less cynically, usually, be sub-optimal. This being said, if our fundamental situation, as Springsteen and McDermott suggest, is one of transience, we are to realize that the “meaning of the transient’s journey is . . . the journey itself.” Meaning-making is always on the way, embodied in precious and fleeting moments of transaction with the world.

Earlier I mentioned the way that de Kooning’s late paintings—big, frightful pieces of abstract expressionism—might jar us from the inertia and “bad faith” of suburban life.³⁹ At the very least, they can shake us up. De Kooning, like McDermott, like Springsteen, seems to suggest that ennui and boredom are not proper responses to the tragedy of our human situation. Instead, in the face of our finitude, we are called by an aging de Kooning to “paint (and act) like this stroke may be your last.” McDermott agrees and reflects on the aesthetic character of ordinary experience; we may not have the artistic genius of de Kooning, but it is possible and suitable to “to make our (life) journey ever alert to our surroundings and to every perceivable sensorial nuance” (p. 165). We are to be alert, even in the fading twilight, noticing the specks of sand that might still reflect the sun’s last efforts—and our own. This alertness, however, does not guarantee sunny days and smooth rides. Indeed, it often makes us prone to experience, with bone-jarring sincerity, the unavoidable potholes of life. Sensitivity can be a real pain sometimes. But everything, including a pothole, dies; this too shall pass.

McDermott says that “Transience as the ‘form of life’ can be celebrated . . . for us, novelty is crucial and even failure and mishap is to be integrated into the pedagogy of history.” As “Atlantic City” plays out, Springsteen states that, “Luck may have died and our love may be cold / but with you forever I’ll stay.” The relations that we create in life are by no means permanent and immutable, but his character insists that he will, despite this fact, remain faithful to life’s journey: “Were goin’ out where the sands turnin’ to gold / Put on your stockins baby, ’cause the night’s getting cold.” This journey is defined by hopes that are both intense and fleeting, like the sun on a shrinking patch of Atlantic City sand. Echoing Dewey, McDermott repeatedly claims that meaning is not realized in the duration or sustainability of an experience, but in its quality. The journey is defined by human pathos, imperfect in its expression, but meaningful in its emotional and qualitative resonance.

It is defined by its pathos, but also by its terminality: Just as we think that Springsteen is going to arrive at golden sands, at a lasting and terminal consummation, the song turns dark again: “Now, I been lookin’ for a job, but its hard to find.” And “down here it’s just winners and losers and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line.” The man has debts that no honest guy can pay and is “tired of comin’ out on the losin’ end.” In light of this situation, Springsteen explains to his lover that a not-sohonest solution can be reached: “So, honey, last night I met this guy and I’m gonna do a little favor for him.” Ironically, his attempt to become a winner draws him ever closer to the ultimate loss of being human. Echoing a sentiment expressed in “The River,” Springsteen searches for the cross-current of personal salvation, but those waters have ceased to flow. The Atlantic City sand won’t be turning to gold. Or maybe this summary moment has simply passed away. Other inevitable waves crash on the shores—dangerous, self-destructive, tragic, violent. What is this “favor” to which the singer commits himself? The “trouble” that “busted in from out of state” seems to have found a home in the inner sanctum of his character, and he seems to have been caught up in the violent and fatalistic movement of the city, described in the opening of the song.

Citing Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), McDermott describes this movement as a “flux (which) sweeps us into the whirlpool of ceasing conquest and creation, of loss and gain, in which we painfully circle, subject in the main to the power of the current, but able, now and then, to exert ourselves within a restricted sphere of influence.” Asserting oneself in, and against, this inevitable movement takes courage, commitment, and a certain amount of defiance. This is the fundamental challenge of our lives: “To convert the personal weaknesses into strengths and to drive our strengths into the teeth of a personally neutral, but relative pregnant world” (p. 151). It’s not surprising that the challenge of life is, at once, a fight to the death. At least it is in “Atlantic City”

My grandfather still tells me about Atlantic City, the flourishing middle class Mecca of the early 1940s. When thirty million vacationers made their pilgrimage each summer he says that it was “a real city,” and a beautiful one at that. I have never quite been there. Urban decay, white flight, “race problems”—things just died I guess. I am not nostalgic. I don’t know what I am missing. As kids, my mother would take us on a few of the safer rides and let us run around the boardwalk and this was called “going to Atlantic City.” We would always leave before dark. Her attempts to shield us from what the city had become were—at least temporarily—successful. My only real exposure to the town was through my father, an oddly fanatic Springsteen fan. He, like the city, parted company before establishing any real acquaintance—appropriate, since the song is about absence and loss. I guess my mother could not shield me from Atlantic City altogether. And, undoubtedly, I am better for the exposure. Now I return to “Atlantic City” almost willingly. Absence and loss have lessons to teach.

Lesson One: In passing into Darkness, one’s eyes must work harder. Indeed, we are called to use all of our senses to negotiate the streets of “Atlantic City.” Lesson Two: The darker it gets, the more sensitive we must become. If, in Thoreau’s words, we are to be awake to the dawn, we are also to be wide-eyed in the night. It is in this way that death—imminent, present, ownmost—places demands on our lives. Lesson Three: Each of us has “Deadlines” that we can neither shirk, nor fully meet. We ought not bemoan this fact, but rather realize that we are to work away, fully awake, on this deadline. In doing so, we might have the chance to realize that this deadline is also a type of lifeline. I leave you to work away on McDermott’s “Deadline” in your little corner of “Atlantic City:”

A festering presence
takes
on the inappropriate
Label
of
Dead
As in no life
no play, no more
How does a line
Die
only to live
forever
as a sign of
failure
if one goes over
the line
But if we meet
the dead
line
Then the line
dies
Living only when
not
met.