19
Elvis, 57 Channels, and a .44 Magnum: A Cross-Section of Springsteen’s Imagination
RANDALL E. AUXIER
We’ve followed Springsteen from coast to coast, border to border, and across the seven seas (or at least around the Great Lakes). The essays in this volume really do run the gamut of the Springsteen experience. How to bring it all together and leave you with something you can really get your pearly whites into? I have something for your cerebral palate—it won’t make you wise or virtuous, but it might sometimes cheer you up.
I want to teach you how to do “ontologies.” First let’s do just a bit of background on what this odd word means, and then on to the fun stuff—and it
will be fun, I promise. When you’ve learned the trick, you can do ontologies with your friends, at parties, at home alone, or when you’re camping, just any old place. If you doubt that it’ll be fun (there
is some boring stuff first), flip to the list of proper names in Springsteen songs that follows this essay. I’m going to play with that list, philosophically, and show
you how to do it for fun and profit—well, at least
I’m making a (thin) profit from this; if I can, so can you.
75Ontology is a powerful tool for thinking—in fact, while there is a difference between
thinking and
imagining (see Chapter 8 in this volume), they’re closely related: what if your “thinker” has its
own imagination? Well, it does. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) went on and on about it, and he is the third best philosopher in Western history (the judges all place Plato and Aristotle ahead of him). But Kant didn’t explain very clearly the point
I am making. I think Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) said best what I am trying to say: “Thought is like touch, comprehending by being comprehended.”
76 Heschel had a great economy with words. I don’t. I need to explain this.
Neural Novacaine
Have you ever noticed what it feels like to touch a part of your body that has been anaesthetized with a part of your body that hasn’t been? Like when you’ve been to the dentist, and you touch your jaw (while it’s asleep) with your finger? Weird, right? On the other hand, if you just touch your cheek with your tongue, while they’re both asleep, there is an odd sort of “nothing” that you feel, it’s like a total absence, and you sit there wondering if you’re hurting yourself, biting your tongue without knowing it. Better stop that. But when you touch your jaw with your finger when your jaw is asleep, it’s sort of like touching another person, made weird by the fact that you know it’s you. I’m getting paid to think about this, believe it or not.
It’s a valuable experience (the jaw thing, not the money thing), apart from whatever dental benefits were bestowed during the process, because it shows you the difference between the feel of reciprocal touch, that is, what it feels like to touch your jaw when your finger and your jaw both feel it, and what it’s like when that normal experience doesn’t happen. Feeling yourself feeling you, when everything is normal, is like seeing yourself in a mirror holding a mirror in which you see yourself, ad infinitum. It’s like instantaneous, total and infinite reciprocation—your finger feels your jaw, which feels your finger, which feels your jaw, and so on. Take away the first reciprocation and it’s like looking in a mirror and seeing someone else looking back at you, but someone who moves when you move, and you know it is you, but you don’t recognize the dude (or dudette). Weird.
Now, what I think Heschel is saying above, oh so beautifully, is that thought is like that too—your finger and your jaw, when awake, comprehend each other, mutually, by touching, and thinking is comprehended the same way. And what I am saying is that your imagination, among the many things it can do, is like the finger that touches the jaw, and the jaw is like the idea you’re thinking. That idea just sort of sits there, doing what it’s doing (being thought), without a lot of self awareness, until the imagination reaches out and touches it. And then, in being comprehended by the finger of imagination, the thinking comprehends itself, says “well, I’ll be damned, I’m an idea being thought about.” But it is difficult to give an idea a shot of Novacaine, to make an act of thinking altogether numb, unfelt. But it’s sort of like 2 + 2 = 4. You know it all the time, but aren’t working with it all the time. And then somebody (such as me, your devoted author) mentions it, and whether you like it or not, you get an image of it, floating around in some sort of imagined space . So is the image the same as the idea? Not exactly, but the image seems to wake the idea up.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to think about things without also imagining them. And for lack of contrast, you also don’t notice that you are feeling what you think with your imagination. I know of some politicians, I don’t need to name names, whose ideas come very close to that benumbed, unimagined condition, but even they must have some intellectual imagination, even if it doesn’t extend so far as going to war with an exit strategy.
But you know that you feel what you think because sometimes just thinking about something or someone makes you happy or sad or anxious, and you can feel your body change as the idea comes up. The image that accompanies your thought is the medium by which you feel what you think. Change the image, and it’ll change how you feel about what you’re thinking. For instance, think of Bruce. That should be a pleasant thought. Now think of someone mistreating or hurting Bruce, someone like Bill O’Reilly. That should give you a different feeling. It does that to me, for sure. According to the neuroscientists, the way our brains generate images is by initiating an action in the back of the brain and then inhibiting the action in the front of the brain. We do that and up pops the image as a sort of substitute for a bodily movement. When the image appears, we feel and think simultaneously. It’s hard to know what it would mean to “think” without images—it would be like a “pure idea” with no image at all, an utterly static thought, with no future, no past, and existing in an eternal present that had no consequences, no history, and no concrete meaning. Can we do that? I doubt it, but I can’t say it’s impossible.
Now, ontologies enable you to have some control over how this touching of thinking by imagining occurs. You’re doing this all the time anyway, but there is a discipline and an art, a sort of Tai Chi of intellectual imagining, that you can learn, with practice. Welcome to my Dojo. You are Kwai Chang Caine, and let me be your Master Po, for a few pages, and when you can snatch the pebble from my brain, you’ll know it’s time to go wandering through the list that follows the essay.
“What It Is?!?”
I have always thought that this colloquial greeting pretty well says it all. Is it a question? Yes and no. It’s an expression that rivals “Namaste” for acknowledging the divine in everyone you meet. And it is also a fair translation of the Ancient Greek to ontos on, from which we get the term “ontology.” The (untranslatable) Greek phrase means “What it is that is,” or something like that. Another interesting translation of the idea is the name God gave to Himself when Moses impertinently asked for His proper name from the burning bush. God said “I am that I am,” except He apparently said it in Hebrew, and it is best not to write or speak that word in the sacred language. In Hebrew, the expression is first person, while the Greek is impersonal and infinitive—and there in a nutshell you have the difference between Greek and Hebrew ideas about God. In Hebrew you can say, “What it is, man!” to God, if you have the nerve, but it wouldn’t make sense in Greek. In Greek God is like, on some serious Novacaine, thought thinking itself.
So ontology is about “what it
is, dude.” But as Aristotle pointed out, “
Being is said in many senses,” and he went on to enumerate ten properly distinct ways of saying “is,” called “categories”—substance, relation, quality, quantity, action, position, and a few others I can’t recall. Never mind. It isn’t important for us right now. And then there are a few
bad ways of saying “is,” according to Aristotle, as Bill Clinton’s attorneys once argued (I don’t know if they cited Aristotle, but it would have helped their case). We’ll avoid the bad ways of saying “is.” But the word “ontology” is a more recent invention, based on the Greek root. It started appearing in European languages towards the end of the eighteenth century, and then really became popular at the end of the nineteenth. Now it’s a cottage industry.
77 See, there
is profit in this.
The Famous Ontologies
This would be a good name for a band. They could open for Springsteen, except that no one opens for Springsteen. Every philosopher has an ontology or two, or several, that is, ways of imaginatively arranging whatever exists so as to reveal some connections and relations that will be discussed. For example, in this volume, Gary Herstein works with an “events” ontology that he adapted from Alfred North Whitehead. James Couch is using an approach he adapted from Hans-Georg Gadamer called “regional ontology.” Doug and Russell Anderson are entertaining (and rejecting) the ontology of dialectical materialism, in which reality is treated as a history of material human needs in competition with economic institutions and practices. All of these are ways of imagining reality, the “is” of things, in order to think about it. So, perhaps reality is temporal “events” in relation (Whitehead), or maybe reality is the way that horizons of “meaning” fuse at the edges of whole regions of lived experience (Gadamer). Or maybe reality is just the story of human beings trying to survive in the face of the impersonal juggernaut of history that is driven by alienation and economic practices (Marx).
But there are so many other ways to imagine reality. It is common for famous philosophers to
get famous by coming up with a way to carve up The Real, and then to claim that their way of doing it is either the
best, or the
only way to do it—that somehow they’ve finally “touched bottom” on the issue of how reality
has to be thought about, because that’s how reality
is (or at least how it
has to be experienced by beings such as we). Among those who thought highly enough of their ideas to make so grandiose a claim, none was more full of himself than Martin Heidegger (1889–1977). He began his ontology with what is called “the Question.”
78 “The Question” is a way of launching a sneak attack on what we already vaguely understand, namely “Being,” but have failed to make explicit. When we have slunk quietly behind our quarry (our own vague awareness), we pop up, say “boo!” and then wait to see what we’ve flushed from hiding. But there are lots of ways to sneak and slink, lots of ways to say “boo!” and still more ways to list and count the things we may glimpse.
In the case of the splendid Dr. Heidegger, he did something he called “fundamental ontology,” which outlines the bare essentials one must assume in approaching the Question of Being. He transforms that venerable question from “why is there something rather than nothing?” into the slightly less obvious “what sort of being asks such an impossible question?” It turns out, after much hand wringing, that the answer is, “well, the sort of being who asks that question is one that has a problem with its own being—and that would be me, and maybe also you, but definitely me.” But according to Heidegger’s zealous and numerous followers, none but the Master himself is deep enough or smart enough to carry out the weighty task of Fundamental Ontology (the capital letters are my own, but I think I can hear them in their tone of voice when I am in the presence of such self-importance). Let the snobs have their Fundamental Ontologies. I’m after something more suited to their estimation of my depth, or lack thereof. I want a slice of the Springsteen worldview, not the existential structure of all possible worldviews. I’m sure that would be too mundane for Heidegger.
Elvis and the .44 Magnum: The Poetic and Aesthetic Use of Proper Names
Among other things, ontologies help us sort out levels of generality and make us aware when we have hopped from what is more general (more abstract), to what is more concrete (less abstract). An ontology provides a kind of schema to remind us of which slice of reality we are considering, and which we are not. To give an example, let’s look at some Springsteen lyrics.
Sometimes a character simply has a “gun,” as in “Johnny 99.” That “gun” could be anything from an AK-47, to a deer rifle, to a Saturday night special. The picture your imagination forms will depend on context. Since Johnny 99 (aka Ralph) uses it to shoot a store clerk, and later waves it around, most of us will picture a small gun, but that’s up to us. The word “gun” is very general, covers a lot of possible things. One can wave a deer rifle around. But sometimes Springsteen is more specific, like when he describes that heart-breaker gal who walks down the street with her boot heels clicking like “the barrel of a pistol spinnin’ ’round” in “Livin’ in the Future.” Now I don’t actually know what sound the barrel of a pistol makes when it’s spinning, but I do know that this isn’t just a “gun,” it’s a pistol, and since it has a barrel, I’m not picturing a snub nose .32. I have a long barrel pistol in my imagination, spinning on the pavement where the boot heels should be. But I don’t know if it’s a Colt .45 or a Luger. “Pistol” is more specific than “gun,” but it’s still quite general.
But in “57 Channels and Nothin’ On,” Springsteen tells us that he got a .44 Magnum and shot his TV. He was doing what Elvis did one day (and what I want to do, and probably you too). Now, historically, the .44 Magnum was apparently Elvis’s weapon of choice in the famous incident. But notice that our hero (or he’s my hero at least) in “57 Channels” gets a .44 Magnum. A lot of those have been made. But in fact there is also the .44 Magnum Elvis actually used. Now we are approaching something that we might give a proper name—let’s call Elvis’s .44 “Betsy.”
Now, a question. Isn’t it interesting to consider whether the .44 Magnum, Betsy, is the gun to imagine in all three songs? It would connect them, in an odd sort of way—not only to imagine that it was the same kind of gun, but the same individual gun. I am not suggesting Springsteen intended this or anything of the kind; rather, I am pointing out a way of imagining a path through three songs. With such an ontology as this (and this is an ontology), you could actually write a movie script: three vignettes, the story of Elvis’s gun that ends up, ironically, being used to shoot a second TV years later, bought by a frustrated viewer at a pawn shop, who had no idea he was courting Betsy. And how did Betsy get to the pawn shop? Well, there was a corrupt guy at the evidence room (apparently Betsy really did disappear), and then a fencer, and an accidental switch of two .44’s he had, and a twist or two, and Johnny 99 buys Betsy at a pawn shop. Then a hold-up, and an incompetent police officer . . . and a hooker in boots with the same name as the pistol . . . you get the idea, finish the story any way you want, so long as the guy with the satellite dish and the Japanese car ends up shooting his own TV with Betsy—and the gun needs to find its way back to the evidence room in Las Vegas, because that’s how stories work.
Now, how did I do that? Am I an imaginative genius? Hardly. I used a
very simple ontology.
79 Recognizing four levels of generality, I imagined the same individual gun as fulfilling all four levels. It fit, basically. Then I took all three song stories, added them to the historical event with Elvis, took it all down to that very specific level of concrete thinking, and started telling the story. The
idea, “this is Elvis’s .44 Magnum,” was filling itself out with an imagined possibility, bringing to life an otherwise inert thought with something I could have
feelings about. I mean, why
not?
You can look at the list of proper names after this essay and do the same thing. Some of those Johnnys and Billys and Marys could be the same person, couldn’t they? In the case of Mary, I’m pretty sure it is the same person in a couple of songs. And who knows how many other names the actual Mary has had in Springsteen’s lyrics? Is she also Wendy? And Rosalita? She might be. And it doesn’t, in the end, matter all that much what Bruce intended, since this is your imagination (and mine) at work. Bruce gave us a template, a schema, a context, and that is his catalogue of songs. Of course, you don’t have to use Bruce’s songs; anything that offers a specific context will suffice. But Bruce’s songs are so much fun.
You can go another direction with this simple ontology. You can look at a Springsteen song and find a general noun—like gun, and work your way down to something individual, by asking “what gun is this?”—or you can start with something that is very specific and search for general ideas that might describe it. I could have just as easily started with Betsy and imagined my way from “57 Channels” to the spinning pistol, to Johnny 99’s “gun,” as to move the other direction. But the list of proper names I compiled is far more interesting than a list of general nouns and verbs from the same songs. Why is that?
Shaniqua’s Coffee and Theresa’s Backbone
Even proper names display various levels of generality. For example, I know a bunch of people named Johnny, Bobby, Mary. The more common the name, the more people we know. When Springsteen calls such a name, we immediately try to form an image so as to follow and feel and think the story of that person, but my Johnny is different from your Johnny, as Springsteen knows very well. He’s giving us imaginative space and something to do. Sometimes the image comes in clearer, sometimes it’s as Hazy as Davy. But when Springsteen wants more control over what we picture, he can choose a less common name, or add a nickname.
For example, in “Girls in their Summer Clothes,” some gal named “Shaniqua” serves the coffee. I have never known anyone with that name, but I know she is African American. Bruce made sure I would picture her that way, didn’t he? Another more exotic instance is “Theresa” in “I’ll Work for Your Love.” Here, because of my own background, I have no choice but to picture two things: a bartender, whose name I never knew, in Oklahoma City, who was definitely the woman Bruce is singing to, and also Bernini’s famous sculpture of “The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa.” If you don’t know this artwork, you need to Google it. Bruce spelled the name Theresa with an “h,” leaving me no choice, although I heard the silent “h” in my imagination and I knew that was how he spelled it before I ever saw the lyrics. I just knew. I have met several Teresas in my life, maybe even a Theresa or two, but Bruce littered the song with a dozen allusions to Catholic mysticism, and perhaps even drew directly from the writings of Saint Theresa. He took more control of the imaginative space and left less to me. The bartender was mine, but St. Theresa is common property.
And that is how proper names function in poetry and stories. They tap into the past experience and context of the reader and generate images, and the images then become the animators of the ideas. In “I’ll Work for Your Love,” the idea is something like erotic and intimate reciprocation, whether in love-making or in building a life. Yes, yes, a very nice idea. But frankly, it’s obvious and uninteresting until Theresa shows up, with her irresistible backbones, like stations of the cross–and I assure you that Bruce is counting them from the top down, not from the bottom up, because Theresa apparently has a nice ass, and redemption is down there, in this song at least. Bruce is so naughty.
We learn how much control Bruce wants over us by noticing the level of generality. The more concrete the image, the more control he has. But these proper names are also ways of engaging the listener’s active imaginations and conveying ideas. At the same time they reveal a cross-section of Bruce’s imagination –how he concretizes, how he specifies, and what is important to him. Recurring themes show up. For example, consider immigrants. They show up all over the place in Bruce’s songs—Mexicans, Vietnamese, Europeans of all sorts. In the song “American Land,” we get a list of family names of immigrants, and on the list is the Zerillis. The Zerillis? For heaven’s sake, why not the Rosminis or the Corleones? Well, Zerilli is the name of Springsteen’s mother’s family. That’s not just trivia, that’s a message in this song. Springsteen feels his own immigrant roots, and they are crucial to his self-understanding. He sees his own family in the story of the Brothers Rosales in “Sinaloa Cowboys,” and perhaps also the historical Brothers Heaton in “Youngstown.” He builds it into the song and reveals something of his world.
Perrineville
Another example is “Perrineville” in “Highway Patrolman.” There is a Perrineville, New Jersey, and I’m sure that’s where Bruce got the name. But the song is set in Ohio, so that a car chase can cross the Michigan line, ending in an escape to Canada. Now, not even Springsteen can make us imagine an escape to Canada from New Jersey—or at least it would have to be an epic chase. Imagination has rules and limits. And “Highway Patrolman” is a Rust Belt kind of song, so a town on the Mexican border isn’t right. So, I know that Perrineville, Ohio, in Bruce’s imagination is somewhere near Toledo, but of course, it doesn’t exist—and neither do Joe Roberts and his no good brother Frank.
But this isn’t pure fiction either. In this case, I think the narrative requirements of the song dictated the place. Bruce chose the escape to Canada as the outcome of the narrative tension in the song. He also decided he needed a proper name for the town, not just the phrase “rust belt town,” or something similar. He wanted more control. He pictured Perrineville, NJ, placed it outside Toledo, and told the story. Would the song work if he didn’t use a proper name? Maybe, but not in the same way. I mean, we all know Perrineville, we’ve all seen such a town, and we know what sorts of people live there. I have an in-law who just is Joe Roberts, a good guy, and he would have done exactly what Joe did—let his no good brother escape. But my people don’t come from the “rust belt,” and I don’t identify with that name—I push it away from my imagination. But I’m neutral on Perrineville—where the hell is that? Well, I don’t know because I’m not supposed to know. It needed to be some podunk town I’ve never heard of, and it doesn’t matter whether it really exists, which is why it is better if it doesn’t. Perrineville exists everywhere. And a podunk town by any other name stinks just as bad.
At the same time, these characters, places, and things (like Frank’s Buick with Ohio plates), can just as easily be masks behind which Springsteen (or any writer) conceals himself. For example, is it true that Bad Scooter in “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” is a self-reference: BS = Bad Scooter, Bruce Springsteen? Is that you Bruce, or just a brilliant disguise? I don’t know, but I do know that Bruce is the primary decider of what we do and don’t know about him in his songs. Yet, the full slate of proper names, when turned over in our imaginations with the tools of ontology tells us a lot about him, a lot about ourselves, and a lot about our world.
And Try to Stay Awake
One reason, then, why songs are interesting and philosophy is usually boring is that songs and stories can move fluidly through levels of generality, whereas philosophy usually tries to deal with everything at a very general level, to make ideas stand still instead of setting them in motion, and moving from one level of generality to another with great deliberateness—there’s just no responsible way to move fluidly in philosophy. In the hands of a philosopher, there’s also a certain carelessness about individual, concrete existences. When a philosopher invents an example to help with thinking about something, it’s usually as innocuous as possible—sure, they’ll use proper names sometimes, even historical names or places, but the whole point is not to think about the individual, but about the type of idea it indicates. So, in philosophy “Paris” is not the vibrant place you can visit, it’s “Paris or a city like Paris, or any relevantly similar city, in some specific sense.” And “John” is not Spanish Johnny or Johnny 99, it’s any one specific individual at all. And that is boring.
Now, what we have done here is a very simple ontology. You have finished the introductory course. I am afraid I will now have to blow your mind. Sorry.
A Brief Stab at Advanced Ontology
You can get college credit for this. Michel Foucault (1926–1984), a somewhat notoriously odd French philosopher, began his most famous book,
The Order of Things, with a passage he copped from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), who cited a certain “Chinese dictionary” he had supposedly “found” (it is difficult to know when to
believe what Borges says, and that is how he wanted it). This extract from the Chinese dictionary has become famous. It goes like this:
Animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, and (n) that from a long way off look like flies.
80Oh really? Are those the real classifications of types of animals? This is dizzying. Let’s get a bit more specific, like, how many of these categories would apply to, say, dogs. By my count, dogs could show up in every category except (d) and (e), and I am uncertain about whether there might be a way to get them into (e), if the howl is seductive enough to other dogs. Of course, the same dog may show up in several categories at once—for example, a tame dog belonging to the Emperor, viewed from a long way off. Or at different times, the same dog may belong to contrary categories—for example, a stray dog, later adopted by the Emperor, which then broke the water pitcher in a frenzy, and ended up embalmed. The lesson here is: don’t decide too quickly what kinds of dogs there are—or anything else for that matter. You may miss some types, and it is best to remember that there are lots of ways of looking at “order.”
Foucault built his book from noticing just how much we assume about how to “order” things in a given culture or historical period, and how much this may differ in other places and times. There are rules (or common “practices”) in every period about how to imagine order, but there are no permanent rules that reach across all places and times, according to Foucault. What I did above is a highly conventional Western ontology of how to get from the general to the specific ideas and back again. But ontology is not limited by such conventions. It is a highly flexible philosophical tool, just as the human imagination is a highly flexible finger for touching the jaws of an idea. Now you’re on your own.
Suicide Machines
My imagination was captured by the words “suicide machines” in “Born to Run.” Let me explain. That’s a motorcycle, right? A “cage” is a car, and we are sprung from them. I could follow the path I used earlier by asking what sort of motorcycle, and then looking for it in other Springsteen songs. But we are ready for more. Let’s steal a lick from Heidegger, if we can risk offending his cheerleaders. Whenever you find a question that you sort of know the answer to, but you don’t know why you are so sure of yourself, you have the makings of a kind of ontology. But there are so many questions and so little time. We should choose our questions carefully. This is a book on Bruce Springsteen. I have a question, and I know the answer, but I don’t why I’m so sure of myself. I think most people will quickly see that this question has a lot of torque; it is indirect, but it might spring us from our cages.
My guiding question is: “Would Bruce Springsteen ride a Honda?”
First off, I don’t mean “Has Bruce ever ridden a Honda?” Maybe he has, but ours is not a factual question about Springsteen’s biography, it is about two cultural icons, Springsteen and Honda, icons that press upon us an immediate
contrast. Our imaginations try to place Bruce on the Honda, and we have a sense of what Walt Disney called the “plausible impossible.”
81 We feel we’re imagining a fiction when we try to place Bruce on the Honda. We all know Bruce would not “ride a Honda” in the intended iconic sense, even if curiosity or circumstance might have led him actually to try one out at some point.
But how do we know the answer to this question with such confidence? I want you to think of the question itself as a vehicle, a motorcycle. Let’s collect our insights like needed parts, and one by one install them. Eventually we will have a question that purrs, and later we may take it out for a ride.
The Passion of the Boss
Would Bruce ride a Honda? No. Consult the list. One reference to Honda, and it’s a car, and it isn’t an endorsement. But before we can get to the stuff that is so very boss about the answer, we need to spend some time tinkering with the question while we’re still in the ontological living room (yes, we work on this bike in the living room, not in the garage; if you are worried about the mess, go read a different chapter). Put on some old clothes in case you get substances on yourself.
We learn much about the value of the question when we imagine variations. Ontologists always imagine variations.
82 I think the question needs to be formulated just as it is, and not, for example, “would Bruce ride a Harley?” to which the answer is “duh.” That question leads us nowhere we have not already been, many times, although maybe we could have an interesting chat about what
model Harley Bruce
should ride, but that would be a pretty technical discussion; it’s a spare part. The question also cannot be “would Woody Guthrie ride a Honda?” which is a jarring enough question, but I fear it is too great a project for any but Heidegger and his most profound followers . . . and maybe Bruce and Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan and Arlo. It’s too much for us.
A much more predictable conversation could be had if we asked “Would Jesus ride a Honda or a Harley?” To this one, we can all agree he wouldn’t ride a Honda (see below), but I fear we would be split over the Harley question, with a small minority insisting not only that Jesus would ride a Harley, but that he actually did enter Jerusalem on such a Hog (which may explain why things soon started looking like Glen Hanson’s demise in Easy Rider—am I the only one who has noticed the similarity between that scene and Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ ?). This is my own view, in fact; not that Jesus would ride a Harley, but that he actually did. But let’s keep it light. I think we can easily agree on the Bruce part of the question. Maybe Jesus on a Harley, definitely Bruce, no Honda for either one.
The “Honda” part of the question is equally crucial. It’s an uncomfortable truth that there are two manufacturers of real motorcycles in the world today. One is Harley-Davidson, the other is Honda. The rest are wanna-be’s. I am not saying Suzuki and Yamaha have made no real bikes. They made and make inferior Hondas. I’m not saying BSA, Triumph, Norton, and Indian never made real bikes. They made and make inferior Harleys. Here is another uncomfortable truth: Honda knows how to make a great motorcycle. Hondas are fast, they are efficient, they last forever, they require very little maintenance, and yes, they even look good (to the middle-class, suburban eye). But they are McMortocycles. After some initial experiments, Harley-Davidson made the decision soon after Hondas appeared in the US market not even to compete, and Honda reciprocated (initially at least). Our first needed parts in this rebuild project: most battles are won or lost in the choosing, and there is no dishonor in letting someone else make a buck you never needed anyway. How different corporate America would be if it grasped this lesson! Bruce gets it.
Thus, I claim, we ask “would Springsteen ride a Honda?” precisely because it is the most informative contrast available to us. Honda makes an outstanding bike and they always did. The question is about a profound relation between, on one side, very defensible, conservative, thrifty middle-class values and on the other side, well, a somewhat impractical craving for freedom from those same values (not to reject them wholesale, but to take or leave them, as conscience and the sense of self may demand).
So what does Honda mean? Again, we seek contrast. By way of illustration, for instance, we intuitively recognize the ridiculousness of a Honda with extended forks. There are some things that just ought not be tricked out, like June Clever in a thong and pasties or a Honda 750 with extended forks (the 750 is still the “manliest” bike Honda ever made, but even it is something that could be respectably featured in an article for Redbook). The Honda as an icon helps us understand that this is a contrast not just of values, but of fundamental (even existential) relations. The truth is that Bruce could never love a Honda with all the madness in his soul, and the reason can be summed up in this phrase: Honda cannot make a suicide machine.
Honda cannot make a suicide machine because that would contradict every value they have poured into their bikes from the first. In fact, this is part of the reason we all know Jesus wouldn’t have ridden a Honda. He had no use for middle-class values of this sort. What we may disagree on is whether he went into Jerusalem in a final act of defiance and there committed suicide willingly by the hands of others. But if he did that, he did it on a Harley, because a Harley is not first and foremost a bike or even a machine. A Harley is a decision about life and what makes it valuable, and how it needs to lived. When that decision comes to be embodied and epitomized in a machine, we call it a Harley. Here we have another needful part: Harley-Davidson, as cultural icon, represents not a machine first or foremost, but an existential decision and the life that follows upon it. We have seen, or so I claim, that “it’s not just a bike, it’s a choice,” but have we understood it?
But I Digress
I will return to my question about Bruce in a moment, but we have a bolt stuck here and we need an impact wrench. Peter Fonda’s bike “Captain America” seems to have clinched the iconic standing of the Harley, which had long been associated with a certain conception of freedom and individualism, but in the wake of Easy Rider, the popular imagination had crystallized around this idea. Part of the genius of Captain America was its symbolic insistence upon the association of patriotism with this very notion of freedom and individualism—this bike gave us permission to think for ourselves about what devotion and loyalty to the ideals of America really means, and the irony that this bike conveyed its rider towards making a drug deal (outside of the current laws) is also a source of creative tension. Brilliant. This reminds me of what happened with the song “Born in the U.S.A.” I welcome you to picture the album cover in one half of your mind and Peter Fonda sitting astride Captain America in the other side.
It’s worth pausing to consider how Dennis Hopper’s film and its impact would have been different if Fonda had ridden any other bike (not just a non-Harley, but even any Harley other than Captain America—and you see our earlier method of ontology at work here, I hope). It’s dangerous to make assertions about “might-have-beens,” because no evidence can exist that fully demonstrates the falseness of such assertions. But with that disclaimer noted, I want to suggest that the film becomes close to meaningless, and numb, without the rolling American flag. That bike is the iconic key to the kingdom, not only of that one film, but to the America in which “Born in the U.S.A.” can be received as a patriotic song by people who can’t understand the words and never bother to read them (see the chapters in this volume by John Shook and Michael Patton).
Well, the song is patriotic, in a totally subversive way, just like Captain America. It is not an accident that our celluloid sacrificial lamb, Glen Hanson, is a rogue lawyer incognito, and that, symbolically, it is precisely the law that suffers a brutal death at the hands of those who believe themselves to be defending it and its ideals, because, after all, the letter kills the spirit, according to Jesus, just as surely as the rednecks kill Glen Hanson. I think both Jesus and Glen were only sons.
The Story of the Moral
Well, complicated ontologies can unfold as slow as Christmas (another notion we wouldn’t have without Jesus, not so much Christmas, but the idea that it is slow—he sure took his sweet time showing up, what with Babylonians and Assyrians running amuck, and all those depressing lamentations, I mean, incarnate already, would ya?).
Some people choose to serve appearances in making decisions about what products to buy, some chasing after what they believe others will see as “cool,” while others are attempting to please the expectations of a conventional society. Such persons will have more complicated journeys to self-understanding than those who confront the decision for what it truly is. The ones who choose their rides based on appearances have been consumed in what Heidegger calls the “they self,” or in German (since all ideas sound deeper in German, and this is a very ominous idea) das Man, which is the self that conceals its own fundamental modes of existing in order to live “inauthentically,” caught up in the world of images and slogans and RVs. John Kaag has discussed this in Chapter 11 of this volume. But bikers have more straightforward terms for such people, such as “assholes,” but the nomenclature isn’t crucial here. We will leave such persons to the things they believe are important.
In the domain of those who confront existential issues more directly, Robert Frost would have appreciated the depth of the choice between a Harley and a Honda and would have been able to summarize it better. I confess, that I have always chosen Hondas, for reasons of my own. I am not much like Bruce, which explains why I’m writing philosophy and he is playing sold out concerts. Whether a person can actually sell his own authenticity, is, of course, an intriguing question. Doug and Russell Anderson have addressed that matter in their essay for this volume. But that’s another spare part.
My own confession about riding Hondas, however, seems to be the essential part we needed to get our question running. I might be too lazy to mix gas and oil in a two-stroke engine, but there is more than one kind of laziness. We haven’t been lazy about our question. Let’s check it over, see if this beast will start. We asked: would Bruce ride a Honda? We knew he would not. We considered variations on the question. We discovered that Bruce and Jesus have something in common, which can be summarized as: “live free or die,” as they say in New Hampshire. Both Jesus and Bruce have a
passion, meaning they are open to the world, a certain intense ontological longing, they “want to know if love is wild” and “want to know if love is real.” That mode of existing, the “passion of the Boss,” is compatible with mounting a suicide machine, whether it takes one to the “mansions of glory,” or Highway 9, or Sturgis, or Golgotha. The cultural ontology of the suicide machine shows us something about identity and the moment of decision. It has shown us something about America and the ambiguous relationship between freedom and authenticity.
83 And it turns out that I am conventional and boring, not a risk-taker, and a stodgy middle-aged professor who wishes he was Springsteen, which is why I’m writing this. I’m not exactly living free or dying, here.
Yet, it was my choice, after all. The key to living free, if there really is one, is knowing who you are, and the path to learning who you are is your own responsibility. Respect the people who respect themselves, guard your own honor, and follow your own daimon, the voice that comes in through the back of your mind in the quiet moments, and you can probably learn what you need to know. Another important commonality among free spirits like Bruce is an intuitive awareness that happiness is fleeting, uncommon, not to be expected, and always to be celebrated wherever it alights for a time, as Kaag points out in his essay. You might call this pagan fatalism, but I don’t see that naming it something so ominous gets you any closer to understanding it, especially since it is really all about freedom. Courage is also indispensable for a life that strives to be free, which involves a willingness to face and accept the consequences of your choices, even the consequences that are yours by bad luck.
Straight Time
With this much said, it might now be safe to say that our ontology of contrast rests on an uncommon willingness to put embodied practice and action ahead of reflection and hypothesizing. Springsteen’s imagination doesn’t proceed according to reflective hypotheses, it moves on the highway of existential possibilities, as several of our authors have said, in different ways. People like Bruce are really post-industrial, post-modern mystics, making of our world whatever remains to them to make of it. It is difficult to look upon what we have done to this world and not be moved to complete silence. And there is a very great silence that surrounds the culture of the post-modern mystics. This silence speaks volumes however, saying to the whole world of, well, the technical term is assholes: “if I fight your wars, I do it for my own honor, not for your gain; if I obey your laws, I do it because I choose them for myself; if I break your laws, I accept my punishment not at your hand but as the consequence of my own decision to live as I choose; and above all, do not ask me to believe your bullshit.”
That’s what I find when I survey the list of characters and their values, their places, and their things. I know Bruce would not ride a Honda, and now, surveying the whole cross-section of his imagination on the list, his masks and his revelations, I can see why I know the answer. Springsteen’s imaginative world, and probably his actual world, is animated by a kind of philosophical practicalism that refuses to divorce body from spirit. The conventional life does divorce body and spirit. That seems like a shame, and it is at the root of our ingratitude about life. But there is an alternative, and we feel it and think it when we hear Bruce’s songs. I recall another song about being “born” in John Kay’s lines “Here and God are gonna make it happen, take the world in a love embrace, fire all of your guns at once and explode into space.” Perhaps readers will recall the scene of Jesus’s ascension. There is a certain sense of striving to love the world that informs this deep-seated quest for freedom and self-identity.
Plenty of suburbanites or conformists may be able to find this experience of being at home in the world without leaving the comfort of their living rooms, but as Bruce puts it, his love is bigger than a Honda, bigger than a Subaru. For people who have and need Big Love, the Harley recommends itself. So we see that Bruce wouldn’t ride a Honda, not just because it isn’t a suicide machine, but because there just isn’t enough love in it. How can you really love a Honda? Does anyone want to die on a Honda? The Honda conserves itself, and those who ride them do not give themselves to the world in a reckless quest to love life and be loved in the midst of it. Hondas bespeak good sense, but Harleys are for people who can understand that he who would save his life must be willing to lose it. That is where the free love is, which is to say, this ride ain’t free.
Epilogue
I am not certain I believe what I just wrote–it’s a problem for philosophers. It sounds right, basically. But it really is just a way of following a road through a territory. The question suggested my ontology, and once I had the question defined, I knew what I had to say, or at least I knew the options that the question pointed to–and this is what Heidegger says about formulating questions. The answer is already in the question, and that’s why we have to spend so much time with the questions. My question suggested that I needed to examine some relations among freedom, authenticity, and self-knowledge. I had to depict myself as conventional in order to praise Springsteen. But in plenty of ways, he’s conventional and I’m a free spirit. So are you—both, I mean. Fortunately, the questions are infinite, and nobody forces you to ask ontological questions in just one way. I hope you can now have some fun with the list, and with this book in light of the list. I did.