The Nothing Man
In 2002 Bruce Springsteen released a wonderful album, The Rising, with a wonderful song on it, “The Nothing Man,” that illustrates exactly the idea of heroism I talked about in my last post.
The album is a response to the events of 9/11, each song directly or indirectly in the voice of someone affected by what happened. In “The Nothing Man” the speaker is a first-responder who went into the fire and smoke to rescue those who could be rescued and who comes back to see his name in the paper describing him as hero in a way that he knows is sentimental and simplistic. The paper uses clichés talking about his “brave young life” and his great sacrifice, but the speaker knows that what he experienced was too terrible and chaotic to fit into the easy and reassuring stories we try to tell ourselves. “You can call me Joe,” he says—not a hero—and you can buy me a drink, but really what he knows is that he is “the nothing man.” He is nobody.
Darlin’ give me your kiss
only understand
I am nothing man
We are all nothing men and nothing women, we all nobodies, and we have to accept that, even though we don’t want to. Everyone “acts the same,” the speaker says, as if nothing has happened—down at “Al’s barbeque” on Friday nights, people are eating and drinking just like the suitors eating and drinking in Odysseus’s home, in Ithaca, when he returns disguised as a beggar. “The sky is the same unbelievable blue”—a wonderful, wonderful line.
It’s not that the speaker’s act of sacrifice is meaningless or unimportant. Again and again in the songs on this album Springsteen celebrates the selfless acts of the police and the fire department and all those who put the lives of others before their own. It’s that this courage and this virtue and this self-sacrifice exist in the face of the smoke and the fire and don’t cancel it out. The darkness and the light exist in tension with each other, the horror and the virtue, as does what may be the speaker’s suicidal thoughts in the final ambiguous lines and his earlier self-control in the face of danger. “I pray that I’m able,” he says, thinking about the pistol on his night table—able to kill himself, or able to resist the urge to kill himself? The song doesn’t say, and that’s its greatness. That’s the greatness of all great poetry: that it describes the way things really are.
This the hero’s journey. It’s circular. The hero is called out of his or her ordinary life, the way both the speaker in the song and Odysseus are, and he or she experiences something hard and frightening and overwhelming, and then comes back to try to tell everyone they need to know this and so be humble and compassionate.
This is the story of Jesus, who is called out into the wilderness for forty days, and then returns, and is killed for saying that we, too, must go out into the unknown, we all must leave behind what we thought we knew.
There’s another interesting little connection to the Odyssey. Early in the story, when Odysseus and his men encounter the Cyclops and are trapped in his cave, Odysseus tricks him and blinds him in his one eye and he and his men escape. When the Cyclops asks him what his name is, Odysseus says, “I’m nobody”—I’m the nothing man. But there’s a pun here, and it shows that Odysseus isn’t really ready to accept what he later comes to accept. He’s foreshadowing his final awareness but he’s not there yet, because the word for “nobody” in Greek is outis, which means not just “nothing” or “no one” but also, depending on the emphasis, “crafty” or “clever,” and that’s exactly what Odysseus is being here. He’s being crafty. He’s setting the giant up. When he later asks the giant who blinded him, as he and his men are escaping, the giant has to cry out “nobody blinded me! nobody blinded me!” Odysseus is taunting him, it’s a grand gotcha, a joke, and it almost swamps their ship as they pull away, it almost kills them, as Cyclops in his frustration and his rage throws huge boulders after them and they crash in the water around the ship. Even in his blindness, he almost smashes the ship to pieces.
Odysseus’s pride, his hubris, has almost gotten his men killed. And later it does. He loses them all.
It’s only at the end, when like the Springsteen hero he goes into the fire and goes into the smoke and sees face-to-face the chaos and the horror, it’s only then that Odysseus becomes a hero. When he knows he’s not.
Whoever loses his life will save it, Jesus teaches us, and whoever holds onto his life will lose it. We have to face the fire. We have to go into the fire. We have to realize that the great buildings that have fallen down around us, the great temples, will not be rebuilt without enormous sacrifice and creativity and even then we will never be completely safe. We will never understand: why some people died and some people didn’t, what all this finally means.
And there’s joy in this, when we accept this, when we acknowledge this, a joy deeper than sadness and pain, underneath and all around us and greater than us, the joy that Jesus talks about in his “Farewell Discourse” in the Gospel of John, on the night before the crucifixion. Jesus is the ultimate Nothing Man, the Man Who Emptied Himself Out, the Man Who Did Not Come Down from the Cross, and then Who Rose. Who Rose. In the great Farewell Discourse he is talking with his disciples on the eve of his death, he is about to be killed by the Romans and Jews, and everyone knows it, they can feel it, they’re terrified, and yet Jesus says: “I have told you this so that my joy will be in you and my joy may be complete” (John 15:11).
This is why we must acknowledge that we are nothing. This is what comes of it: a joy that doesn’t deny the crucifixion but that at the same time looks beyond it, looks through it, to the resurrection—a resurrection that we don’t always see, a resurrection that we don’t always feel, a resurrection that we will only fully enjoy when we too rise into the enduring life and joy of Jesus, but a resurrection that we can glimpse every day, even in the fire, even through the smoke: in a word, a smile, a memory. A cup of coffee. A crossword. The single yellow rose.
“Nothing Man”
I don’t remember how I felt
I never thought I’d live
To read about myself
In my hometown paper
How my brave young life
Was forever changed
In a misty cloud of pink vapor
Darlin’ give me your kiss
Only understand
I am the nothing man
Around here everybody acts the same
Around here everybody acts like nothing’s changed
Friday night club meets at Al’s Barbecue
The sky is still the same unbelievable blue
Darlin’ give me your kiss
Come and take my hand
I am the nothing man
You can call me Joe
Buy me a drink and shake my hand
You want courage
I’ll show you courage you can understand
Pearl and silver
Restin’ on my night table
It’s just me Lord, pray I’m able
Darlin’ with this kiss
Say you understand
I am the nothing man
I am the nothing man