Deliver Me From Nowhere
Springsteen, Architecture, and Incarnation
“In your righteousness deliver me and rescue me; incline your ear to me, a save me.” –Psalm 71
Jim Harrison wrote that poetry was the language that the soul would speak if you could teach the soul to speak. This definition captures a crucial aspect of poetic language; occasionally, you will hear a line, stanza, or lyric that will rattle around in your soul. You can’t explain why. But it gives voice to something that your soul wants to say. It gives words to an unnamed longing, the kind of obscure feeling that defines our “mortal coil.”
Recently, I haven’t been able to shake a lyric: “Delivery me from nowhere”
Many of you all recognize this line from Springsteen’s renowned (deservedly) album, Nebraska. As much as I love that album, this lyric struck indirectly, hitting me on Ryan Adams’ extremely compelling cover. Abandoning the churning rumble of the Boss’ track, Adams’ “Open All Night” delivers the yearning and loneliness that haunts the entire album. At the end of the song, driven by narrator’s desperation, he pleads: “Delivery me from nowhere. Delivery me from nowhere” (3:25).
Driving home at night, I turn the volume up and shout the petition. The lights cross the windshield. I’m tired and ready to be home. The line gives me chills. My soul hears the entirety of our existential position as well as our ultimate hope for a permanent dwelling.
But what is nowhere? The concept is a strange paradox, like the number zero, which exists in conceptual life yet resists substance or definition. Anywhere is technically a somewhere. We cannot even understand a nowhere beceause (as Heidegger might say) ours is always a being–there (Dasein). We are always encountering a world.
Likewise, in Heiddeger’s terms, we find ourselves “thrown.” We don’t choose the world; we find ourselves already in it. As we mature, we recognize this throwness ever more pointedly. At times, especially in modernity, we feel that we are not-at-home.
We are nowhere.
Perhaps whales (of all things) can help illustrate this feeling. In a section of my dissertation, I’m working with McCarthy’s Of Whales and Men. In this unpublished screenplay, one characters starts crying because the whales are alone. What does she mean? Well, consider a trip around town. Everywhere you look there are signs of place, fingerprints of building and place-making. Even the geography speaks of a familiar home. Now, imagine this swept clean. Imagine being adrift on a small dingy, rolling in a great seethe of blue. In every direction water. Only water. For good reason we often compare the ocean to another world; it’s as jarring as drifting through outer space. Now, consider the whale moving in this great expanse, suspended in dark water. Alone.
Yet, we don’t need to be lost in the ocean to encounter this feeling of nowhere. This silence and alienation (from the world and others) can find us wherever we are.
And the nowhere does not remain abstract. It has teeth. Perhaps, this is most pointedly expressed in architecture. Consider a brief example from my home institution, the University of Kentucky:
These two entrances sit less than 30 yards apart. The affect is instant. One of these gives our eyes rest. We are invited into the building by the slow curves of the balustrade. The warmth of the brick and stone make the building repose in place. The other offers only a smooth, textureless, human-less wall. Nothing rests. Our gaze is deflected, thrown back onto ourselves. Whether in Lexington or Berlin, this wall of glass — the so-called “international style”— is a statement of nowhere.
This is why the new design for the Christian Student Fellowship at UK grieves me. Not only does the CSF emerge from the rich architectural traditions of Christendom, but it also represents, as no other building might, the value of dwelling. It ought to be a beautiful bivouac for the lonely and needy. It’s hearth should be warm and texture inviting. And yet, as far as I can tell, it bears more resemblance to an Apple store than anything vaguely ecclesiastical.
I’m not saying they should have built elaborate Byzantium domes, or Gothic spires, or ornate stained glass (though any of these are welcome in my estimation). But the simple forms of classical architecture —which Michael Diamont has rightly noted transcends any one style — would have spoken to a dignified, sacred purpose. It would have made a statement of dwelling.
Its architecture might join the petition of humanity: Deliver me from nowhere.
We might approach this issue theologically. In the Biblical tradition, sin creates exile (both physical and spiritual). Our eyes wander, longing for recognition, but we face a dark and terrible silence. We find ourselves estranged from God and others. The Psalmist described the consequences of sin in this manner: “Their form shall be consumed in Sheol, with no place to dwell” (49:19).
