1 Quoted in the entry “Bob Dylan,” in Gary Graff, ed., The Ties that Bind: Bruce Springsteen A to E to Z (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 2005), 117.
2 Cornel West, Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism, Volume 1: Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times (Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1993), p. 5.
3 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 268.
4 Shindell also notes that his own song isn’t directly about the irony but is a love song about a young woman wearing the shirt. Yet, the young man who cannot resist the woman ends up in prison for pursuing her because he is an illegal immigrant to the U.S.; so at another level the irony does appear.
5 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 252.
10 I wonder how many people know that the Bible is simply filled with poetry. Pick up a Bible. Now turn to Genesis 3:14, where God is pronouncing the curses on the serpent, the man, the woman, and the earth. You’ll notice that the indentations and line breaks are different here. That usually means you’re reading poetry. God’s curse is a poem. Now thumb through the book. You’ll see this pattern a lot. Almost the whole book of Isaiah and about half of Jeremiah, for example, are written in verse. The New Testament has less poetry, but it is not exempt. See Revelation, Chapters 18 and 19, for a couple of long poems.
11 For an example, take a look at Stanley Rosen’s essay “The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry,” in The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient Thought (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 1–26. Rosen belongs to a school of philosophers called the “Straussians,” who are students and followers of a Plato scholar named Leo Strauss (1899–1973). This bunch is elitist in the extreme, and to my thinking, a collection of crypto-totalitarians.
12 Do yourself a favor. Google these songs. Don’t just read the words, listen to them, and add these three songwriters to your iTunes inventory. I’m not kidding. You don’t know what you’re missing.
13 Since the middle of the nineteenth century, archaeologists have increasingly been unable to avoid the conclusion that human civilization is about ten thousand years older than recorded history. The archaeological record also increasingly indicates a widespread likelihood that women were the leaders of these complex civilizations. To learn about this, I recommend that you begin with the writings of the Swiss classicist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887), and move from there to the Cambridge classicist Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928). Their writings are easily available. The best recent writer is, in my opinion, the Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994), who was a better archeologist than an interpreter of what she found, but she is still a very responsible interpreter. Unfortunately, there is a lot of total crap out there about this “pre-history,” like Riane Eisler’s popular book The Chalice and the Blade. She has the audacity to call the careful, qualified language of responsible scholars “quaint,” but Riane, sweetie, it is that careful language that separates women like Harrison and Gimbutas from girls like you.
14 If you are intrigued, I told the story in my own way in “Chef, Socrates, and the Sage of Love,” in South Park and Philosophy: Bigger, Longer, and More Penetrating, edited by Richard Hanley (Chicago: Open Court, 2007).
15 I suppose you’re all well aware that Bob Dylan’s name used to be “Zimmerman.”
16 If you want to hear the purest deliverance of Thalia in the “ha-ha” category, download “Title of the Song” by the group Da Vinci’s Notebook, from their album The Life and Times of Mike Fanning.
17 Actually, the event really did occur, sort of. Check out the CD Steve Earle, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark: Together at the Bluebird Cafe. It sounded like Steve and Townes were so very intoxicated that night that they could barely perform at all, but it is such an amazing gathering of true Texas poets that it is worth a listen. Guy Clark was, as far as I could tell, more or less sober, but it’s not like he was unfamiliar with the rule requiring strong drink. Nobody won that night, however, because Calliope didn’t show up at all—the Muses have a pact, ever since the whole Dixie Chicks debacle: they don’t cross the city line in Nashville any more, although they will visit some of the more depressing towns on the outskirts. As Guy Clark wryly observed, alluding to Townes Van Zandt as “William Butler Yeats in jeans”: “There ain’t no money in poetry / That’s what sets the poet free / And I’ve had all the freedom I can stand.” (See Clark’s “Cold Dog Soup.”)
18 A certain
type of Catholic, that is—Springsteen calls himself “lapsed,” but as Stan Friedman notes in a recent review, although Springsteen’s “words certainly are not scripture, many of us have used their dense layers of meaning to help reflect on our own faith. No one should be surprised. Springsteen’s theology has been the subject of numerous magazine articles, books, and even seminars. Churches work his songs into their liturgies. Biblical allusions populate all his albums, with some cuts being influenced by authors such as Flannery O’Connor.” Springsteen is indeed a Flannery O’Connor sort of Catholic. And Friedman’s entire review of
Magic is very perceptive, and right on the money in my view. See it at
http://www.christianitytoday.com/music/glimpses/2007/magic.html.
19 Stan Friedman thinks this may be a veiled reference to Leviticus 16:19. That looks right to me, and is reinforced by an earlier verse: “The dust of civilizations . . . Slip off of your fingers / And come driftin’ down like rain.” See Friedman’s review cited above. I don’t know what Bruce reads, but he certainly once read the Bible and the Lives of the Saints. It’s all over his music.
20 I am not alluding to the infamous “booing” incident at Newport when Bob pulled out the electric guitar. Not only is that all blown out of proportion, but Bob was right. Folk music had become maudlin. It was definitely time for a little electricity.
21 If you don’t know what I’m talking about, listen to the tune Jackson Browne put on his live album Running on Empty, called “Rosie.” If you still don’t understand the nature of this lament, I can’t help you.
22 I will say that Dylan’s last release, Modern Times, is pretty good. I don’t think the Muses are coming back, but they threw him a bone or two on that one.
23 I was at an Arlo Guthrie show once, in Oklahoma, and he was telling tales on Dylan. Among many very funny stories he had, one was about a “vacation” he had taken with Dylan and some third songwriter—I think it was Ian Tyson—and they all rented a cabin off in the woods upstate to write songs. Arlo compared it to fishing for songs, and complained that he had been fishing downstream from Dylan all his life, and the trouble is that Dylan catches them all, and he never even throws the little ones back. And Arlo actually can call Woody Guthrie “daddy.” I share this anecdote because I have been hard on Dylan here, and it must be obvious to all of you psychologist types that I know good and well he’s the best. Writing tribute songs in the basic style of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” has become something of a sport among his admirers. I recommend that you check out Dave Carter’s “Don’t Tread on Me,” and Jonathan Byrd’s “Cocaine Kid.” Tonight was just Bruce’s night, and he had the home field advantage. Across the East River, the story would have been otherwise. The audience really does matter.
24 Bruce Springsteen Complete (New York: Columbia Pictures Publications, 1986), p. 463.
25 Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 594.
26 Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 12.
27 See, for example, “Love, Care, and Women’s Dignity: The Family as Privileged Community,” in P. Alperson, ed., Diversity and Community (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
30 In Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader, edited by June Skinner Sawyers (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 196–210.
31 I don’t advise you to take this ride alone. There is a nice English translation of The New Science by Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), but I recommend that you first consult a slightly tamer guidebook. Get Donald Phillip Verene’s Vico’s Science of Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). Think of it as a safety net when you’re walking the wire.
32 If you’re saying to yourself “wait a minute, the old cemetery is downtown,” you are showing your lack of historical sense. We don’t do things that way, and you know it. The cemetery was on the edge of town, until later the town grew up around it, which is why the houses around the cemetery are newer than the cemetery. It’s true that the burial ground is often the churchyard itself. This requires a longer story than I can tell here, but it’s an interesting one for another time.
33 This comes from Descartes’s “Sixth Meditation,” in Meditations on First Philosophy.
34 Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), pp. 19–20.
35 Jaspers, Philosophie (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1932), p. 469.
36 Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, Volume II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 199.
37 Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Files (San Francisco: Rolling Stone Press, 1996), p. 75.
38 John McDermott, “The Aesthetic Drama of the Ordinary,” in Streams of Experience (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), p. 139.
39 Bad faith refers to the concept developed by the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. It’s often described as the counterpart to “authenticity,” the willingness and ability to act freely in a fragile world that is outlined by the “nothingness” of human finitude. One acting out “bad faith” refuses to face the terminality of their situation in a personal and resolute matter. See Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 86–112.
40 Robert Putman, Bowling Alone (New York: Touchstone, 2000).
41 Gary Snyder, “The Place, the Region, and the Commons,” in At Home on the Earth, edited by David Landis Barnhill (Berkeley: University California Press, 1999), p. 94.
42 Bill McKibben, “A Special Moment in History: The Challenge of Overpopulation and Overconsumption,” in Environmental Ethics, edited by Louis Pojman (Stamford: Wadsworth, 2001), p. 305.
43 Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1992), p. 155.
44 Here in Vermont, “flatlander” basically means “from somewhere outside of the state.” Even Colorado or other non-flat places. Quaint, isn’t it?
45 Eric Zencey, Virgin Forest (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1998), p. 62.
46 George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), p. 135.
47 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, in The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 2 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), p. 250.
48 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine, 1966).
49 Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), p. 338. You might also try Michael Pollen’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma (New York: Penguin, 2007).
50 J.A. Piliavin, “Doing Well by Doing Good: Benefits for the Benefactor,” in Keyes and Haidt, Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived, (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2003).
51 Samuel Levine, “Portraits of Criminal on Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska: The Enigmatic Criminal, The Sympathetic Criminal, and the Criminal as Brother,” Widener Law Journal XIV, p. 775.
52 The basic idea of this paragraph, without the philosophical context, is Abbe Smith’s. See Abbe Smith “The Dignity and Humanity of Bruce Springsteen’s Criminals,” Widener Law Journal XIV, pp. 787–835. My thanks to Justina Betro for her help with this and other resources.
53 Plato. The Symposium (203, c5–d7) in Plato’s Erotic Dialogues (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993).
54 I’m not using the word “concept” as philosophers normally use it. Philosophers mean something like “a reflective ordering function, a category subsuming particulars.” I mean something earthier and more concrete, a vague image or idea drawn from past experience that brings other images together.
55 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 21.
56 If you don’t believe Charlie, go ahead, do a Google image search and see for yourself. The expressive nature of consciousness doesn’t have to work very hard at all to smell snails and cigarettes on his breath.
57 It’s not necessary songwriters come up with the concept and then fill in the rest of the lyrics. The order in which the creative components of a song are generated can vary. Sometimes they just tinker with song ideas and wait to see if a concept will emerge. Sometimes they have just a hook to create the concept and then fish around for associated song ideas.
58 We’ve discussed how Springsteen used images to lead us to his concept and how we were led. The most mysterious question (that I will not attempt to answer here) is how does Springsteen spontaneously come up with the images and lyrics that he does? Are there any rules to the spontaneity of the imagination that could explain how his concepts and lyrics strike him from the void? How does the Muse work?
59 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Random House, 1983), p. 1.
60 Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? (Oxford University Press, 1938; originally published in 1898).
61 I know Bruce often does research for his albums, and some of his songs invoke actual people, places and happenings. But I don’t think most fans would say we can only learn from those songs. The puzzle that interests me is, how (and what) we can learn from the rest of his repertoire.
62 They might be wrong, of course, but then we’d have to ask an equally difficult question: Why are so many Springsteen fans so deeply confused about what’s happening to them when they think they’re learning stuff and they aren’t?
63 Although in these examples I talk about knowing how something smells or tastes, this “how” is different from the how-to knowledge exemplified in knowing how to ride a bike, play the harmonica, or speak Spanish.
64 June Skinner Sawyers, in her introduction to Racing in the Streets: The Bruce Springsteen Reader (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 15. She elaborates that “In songs such as ‘Meeting Across the River’, ‘Born to Run’, ‘Stolen Car’, ‘Johnny 99’, ‘State Trooper’, ‘Highway 29’, and ‘Straight Time’, he creates strong characters and vividly rendered scenes in a matter of minutes.”
65 The song is based on actual events. It is Bruce’s “retelling of the Charles Starkweather-Caril Fugate 1950s murder spree.” He calls it “the record’s center.” Bruce Springsteen, Songs (New York: Avon, 1998), p.138.
66 The cool, unemotional, detached way Springsteen characterizes Starkwell in “Nebraska” reminds me of Meursault in Albert Camus’s 1942 novel The Stranger, where a convicted and emotionally lifeless killer also faces death. If Nebraska is one of your favorite Springsteen albums, as it is one of mine, I highly recommend The Stranger to those who’ve never read it.
67 Rolling Stone 1038 (November 1st, 2007), p. 52.
68 Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism”, reprinted in Walter Kaufmann, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (Meridian, NY 1975) p.362
69 I know many of Bruce’s songs also bring a ray of light and hope—even romance—to the honestly acknowledged struggle of his working-class heroes. But not all his songs are like this. I don’t see a lot of latent optimism in songs like “You’re Missing,” “Gypsy Biker,” “My Best Was Never Good Enough,” or “Devils and Dust.”
70 Aristotle, Poetics. Reprinted in Art and Its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory, edited by Stephen David Ross (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), p. 71.
71 Poetics, p. 77. According to Aristotle art can also be cathartic. It provides a release from the pressures of life by allowing us to live out our violent or sexual fantasies without actually injuring ourselves or others. Because music can help us know what it’s like to live through imagined experiences, we don’t actually need to abandon our wives and families. We can safely have the experience through vicarious identification with the subject of songs like “Hungary Heart” instead.
72 We’re following the translation of the Republic by Paul Shorey, in the widely used anthology Plato: The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon, 1961). But if the edition on your shelf is different (surely you have one somewhere), you will notice little numbers in the margins. We don’t actually know what edition of Plato those margin numbers come from, but everyone uses them, so they must be important. We will use the little margin numbers too, because we don’t want to offend the authorities, no matter how dead they surely are by now.
73 See Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, History of Political Philosophy, third edi-
tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 43, 68.
74 The legislature of South Carolina demanded, of all things, a free show of the Dixie Chicks for the soldiers stationed there, after that group of singers dared to criticize the president for fighting an unconstitutional war.
http://www.scsenate.org/sess115_2003-2004/bills/3818.htm. Most curious! Should they sing “Not Ready to Make Nice”? Hopefully, in the spirit of Socrates’s
Apology, someday they will provide just such a free concert in South Carolina, but without the Hemlock afterwards, and not under coercion.
75 And my parents wanted me to study law, of all the boring practical things. I’ll bet they’re glad now, with all this money in philosophy, that I went my own way . . . and a note for the IRS: I am reporting all of this, I swear, or at least I promise to, at some point.
76 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. xvii.
78 Heidegger’s book, Sein und Zeit, first appeared in 1927. The two-part introduction to this work sets out Heidegger’s phenomenological method and raises the Question of Being. For a recent translation, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), Sections 1–8, 12–36.
79 In my college dorm I lived across the hall from a guy who became a famous Hollywood director and screen writer. If he is reading this, and you know who you are, why don’t we reconnect and discuss this movie about Elvis’s gun? I already know what music we can use . . .
80 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. xv.
81 Walt Disney explained the principle of “the plausible impossible” in Episode 55 of The Wonderful World of Disney, originally aired on ABC, 31st October 1956 (the series moved to NBC in 1961); it is part two of a trilogy called “The Art of Animation,” and is currently available as part of the Walt Disney Treasures DVD set called Behind the Scenes at the Walt Disney Studios (directed by A.L. Werker and J. Handley, December 2002), ASIN B00006II6P. For the phenomenological basis of Disney’s principle, see Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (New York: Humanities, 1931), §23, pp. 90–92.
82 For an explanation of the method of imaginative variation, see Husserl, Ideas, §§68–70, 195–201. For an explanation of the explanation (trust me, you’ll need it), see Erazim Kohák, Idea and Experience: Edmund Husserl’s Project of Phenomenology in Ideas I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 143–47.
83 Since I know he won’t cite himself, let me direct you to a very different take on almost exactly the same subjects, see the essay by my co-editor, Douglas R. Anderson, “Born to Run: Male Mysticism on the Road,” in his excellent book Philosophy Americana (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006).