Editor’s note: Not long ago I was in a meeting in which a local businessman said, matter-of-factly, “Las Vegas has no soul.” I think he really meant mercy, which is certainly true, but his comment got me wondering about the more arguable proposition of soul: Does Vegas have one? How would you know? Where would you look?
So we’ve asked these writers to take a stab at the question. Two are locals, and two are outsiders who come here often, this being the rare city in which a visitor’s thoughts on the matter of its soul are as valid as a resident’s. So, does the city have a soul? Read these pieces, then log on to www.lasvegasweekly.com and tell us where you stand. –Scott Dickensheets
If there are no secrets then there is no heart
By Tom Chiarella
I have to start with this: I’ve banked my entire life on the hope that the survival of the soul would be the key to my salvation. Feel enough, sense enough, know enough, you might just be saved. But now I’m 46, I drink too much, I take pills; I go weeks without noticing the natural world. Gin takes the edge off expanded consciousness. Some mornings I wake up—bleary, hung over, stiff in the neck—throw my feet on the floor and wonder, before I even stand up, if I even have a soul anymore. I have to wake up and look for it.
But that is my mistake. We all experience moments of soullessness. And the mistake of people who write off Vegas for not having a soul is that they forget that. Sometimes the soul recedes, but it does not wither out. Any bonehead can stand in the middle of the Strip, stare at all the cement and the signage, at buildings designed to rise and fall in the lifetime of one very unhealthy man, and whine about the absence of soul, the transience of the population, the relative newness of the city. Yeah, yeah, we hear you. There’s not a lot of soul right there, in that particular spot. It is the geographic metaphor of me waking up with my gin hangover. So turn around, go buy a huge fluorescent drink, spend your money and shut your cake hole with the cheap cultural truisms.
You can’t measure the soul of a city on a single Mapquest pinprick of soullessness. We forgive ourselves our weaknesses. We must. The same applies to a city, even—especially maybe—one like Las Vegas.
You find the soul of a city in strong places, in secret places and in the places where people work. It resides in the intangible demands we make on that place. Can you get a great plate of eggs at an uncrowded diner? Does the light change as it falls between the buildings as the day closes down? Do the backstreets offer shortcuts and secrets? Can you know a reliable locksmith by his first name? Can you walk a city street and be surprised by what you see in the shops’ windows? Is there a good bowl of rice pudding to be had? Or a plate of hash browns you can’t get anywhere else? Are there real neighborhoods? Are there secret parks where you can walk your dog at night?
People live here. It may be that it is built so that visitors will forget that very fact, but that is just the muscle of illusion. The people who built this place—this generation and the one before it—are still here. Two generations, maybe three. And if there is no soul in the practice of building a city, then living there for better or worse, then the idea of the soul of a city must be disqualified from existence.
You might ask me the same questions I asked above. You might want to know, do I have the answers? The rice pudding? The reliable locksmith? Do I know? Will I tell you? Can I prove it?
Sure I know. But I won’t say. Except the hash browns: The Omelet House Garden Room (2160 W. Charleston Blvd.). The soul of a city resides in the way each of us understands it. We can’t each know everything. If there are no secrets then there is no heart. Mere blocks from the soullessness of the Strip or the empty heart of a deserted strip mall, there is the mutual practice of urban living. It’s not perfect. Some of it is ugly. But that’s the spot, where the soul of Las Vegas sits. Just wake up and start looking.
Tom Chiarella is writer at large for Esquire magazine and teaches part-time at DePauw University. His book The Proposition: The Memoir of my Future Self is due out in 2009.
Genius loco Vegas
By William L. Fox
Asking a writer to respond to the issue of whether or not Las Vegas has a soul is tantamount to asking a beauty-pageant contestant what she would do about world peace. Which is to say, you’re being asked to mix religion, sex and politics. That’s at least one term too many in the equation for me, and it is thus with some relief that I can report I am an atheist. Let me talk instead about a more secular term, genius loci, which means the inherent spirit of a place. “Spirit” as in the defining characteristics of a place, not the wispy lights floating over the marshes of the imagination.
Place starts with space, which is to say the character of Las Vegas is defined by the local geology and geomorphology. Those aren’t going away, the underground and the aboveground, no matter how many bulldozers shove dirt around in the Valley. So, yes, the genius loci of Las Vegas is very much present. I’d argue, in fact, that the city looks and functions the way it does precisely because of being in the desert, and this very specific desert.
Las Vegas exists because artesian water bursts forth at what is now the Springs Preserve, which attracted everyone from neolithic hunter-gatherers to Mormons to the Union Pacific Railroad. And it has grown because there’s enough vertical relief in a nearby canyon that the waters could be dammed in order to generate power, which in most cities would be used to power streetlights. Here it’s used to beam a laser at the moon in order to attract tourists from around the galaxy. Both water and power stem from matters of geology, of nature, which humans have diverted to their own purposes. We call that culture.
Because the soils and climate of the Mojave limit the size, amount and diversity of its vegetation (matters above the ground), the Valley offers a large and open viewscape ideal for promoting the idea that we can rule a grid over it, thus be tempted into thinking we can overrule local environmental limitations on growth. This is a historical problem familiar to deserts everywhere. Baghdad, Cairo and Phoenix are all grids sprawling toward terminal thirst.
Then there’s the business about objective correlative. Humans evolved with a visual system that functions better in forests and wooded grasslands than in deserts. If you have trees around, you sort of have an idea of scale and proportion in landscape as it relates to your species. Tree limbs to your limbs. Without a sense of how our size relates to the land, common sense falls out of reach. There’s little familiar reality to contradict the world as you imagine it, hence gigantism on the Strip, volcanos amidst tropical fountains, golf courses. Dubai has something of the same problem, thus its indoor ski slope.
The genius loci of Las Vegas is a stern and commanding presence. Reference Red Rock west of town and the Black Canyon of the Colorado River to the southeast. But paradoxically it offers few defenses in the face of a juvenile society without in loco parentis. Ain’t no adults around to supervise the construction of the playground, which means libertarian tax policies fostering ever more sybaritic hotels to cater to our inner child—sex and politics manifested as architecture. On the domestic side, an inscrutable yet vulnerable genius loci, sometimes called the fragile desert, led to a real-estate bubble that expanded across the Valley seemingly faster than the blast front of an atomic test.
Las Vegas, as with any other city, doesn’t have an identity separate from the collision of nature and culture that it embodies. This doesn’t have to be a tragedy, however, but can be an opportunity to participate in an experiment, which is certainly the spirit in which I approach the place in the absence of religion.
William L. Fox writes frequently about Las Vegas, notably in such books as In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle; Driving by Memory; and others.
The doomsday machine
By Stacy J. Willis
Does Las Vegas have a soul?
For several years, I reported on religion here—so you’d think maybe I’d have some reportorial evidence of this matter. Perhaps I would own a recording of a soul’s whale-song, or a notebook in which I’d scribbled, Tues—intvw w/Vegas’ soul. I recently searched my files for such a shortcut; in essence, I was trying to cheat on my essay about soul. So it’s all the more cosmically justified that I now find myself without material, writing about a confounding city and an ethereal concept.
Nevertheless, I must argue that Vegas has a soul, because evidence to the contrary is so plentiful it makes me suspicious.
So:
Everyone knows that souls are what evil forces steal from unsuspecting dolts and use to fuel doomsday weapons. And the world is littered with empty carcasses who allege that Vegas stole their souls. And deep, soulful media ritually publish sky-is-falling squeals about Vegas being a beacon of cultural doom, the aforementioned weapon against humanity. Thus, the city passes this test. Soul.
The next certainty about a soul is that it weighs 21 grams and is a spirit that departs the body upon death. Dr. Duncan MacDouggall—an apparently odd, but logical man—proved this in 1907 when he weighed six people alive, and then dead, and found a difference of 21 grams. So it stands to reason—!?— that in order to know definitively that Vegas does not have a soul, we’d have to weigh it, kill it and weigh it again. I, for one, am willing to shove the city onto the scales. However, it refuses to die.
Next: Dictionary.com defines “soul” as “an immaterial, animating energy in humans; the spark that causes emotion, thought and action.” This one is cake. From people who hoist their lifetime savings onto poker tables, to those who ditch their discretion chasing little people and sexual acrobats, Vegas inspires emotion, thought and action more than most cities. Again, soul. I’m wondering why we raised the question.
A fourth, fond belief is that a soul is an entity’s moral center. Contrary to rushed judgment, it turns out that Vegas is in a sublime position to address morality, as it is host to more moral quandaries per second than The Bachelor. A city whose economy is loosely based on rotting livers and runaway/captive teen prostitutes is uniquely nimble at negotiating the nuances of right and wrong. A city so enamored with the gullibility of senior citizens and the recklessness of young tourists has advanced beyond a simple good/bad dichotomy; it has masterfully managed to balance 2 million workaday lives against a billion base urges. It takes real assuredness of one’s moral center to shortchange the many for the benefit of a few. This is not a city of moral relativists, but a city that is sound in its beliefs.
Finally, it’s said that a soul is the root, or integral part, of a being. The soul of a city, then, usually takes the form of a certain neighborhood, or a certain history, a personality, a secret handshake, something that vitalizes the city and distinguishes it from others.
Obviously, we don’t have a handshake. Or else we do, and I’m ostracized. And if we don’t, perhaps we should get one. Until then, the Las Vegas Strip is what distinguishes this city from others, what provides vitality. But in one of the oddest leaps of widely accepted logic (next to the existence of a city’s soul), this is routinely deemed not to count in this argument. The Strip has no character, people yammer. It’s so commercial. It’s superficial.
This represents an error in premise. It’s mistaken to assume that a city’s soul has to be snaggle-toothed and home-cooked, or acid-washed and vintage-destroyed. Like it or not, the hypershiny Strip is the city’s vital, distinguishing, historic, colorful, unkillable, animating, 21-gram force.
If Vegas had an overflowing Downtown arts scene, as it surely someday will, and more cherished historical neighborhoods and scads of unemployed, university-educated poets who communed on independent café patios with old men who played harmonicas and told heartrending stories of overcoming adversity—and no Strip—would naysayers then believe in the existence of its soul? Or would they believe our city had stolen the soul of Durham, North Carolina, and was preparing to jam it in the wood chipper to make fuel for the return of the Las Vegas Strip, doomsday machine? (Dooom!)
Vegas has a soul, huge and glamorous, dark and ridiculous, and it lives on the Las Vegas Strip. We derive our character from it as a city whether we embrace it or run from it; it is the center of our little country hamlet.
Stacy J. Willis is the executive editor of Las Vegas Weekly.
The devil came to Vegas
By T.R. Witcher
Does Las Vegas have a soul? You haven’t heard the story? No. Look here—city sold its soul to the devil back around 1925. No lie. The devil came in off the train from Salt Lake, for a few drinks and a little fornication. Not a lot here then, but the devil appreciated the heat, which baked the dust into his skin, and he loved the red rocks.
The city was brash—most American cities were back then. The devil knew the type. Ambitious. Visionary. Las Vegas thought it was unique in this, but the devil knew better. It was the same confluence of drive and greed that made Chicago and New York and LA.
They had a couple of drinks, then played poker for hours. The devil won some and lost some, but even when he lost, he was a cool customer. Never seemed bothered. The city was aggressive, determined to win, to please. So the devil, when it was late and both were smashed, made his move. “Listen, I’d like to take your soul ...”
You see, the devil was interested in souls. People, of course, but places, too. He’s interested in ways he can blanch the soul of our civilization right out of our bones—or get us to do it for him. Technology shows a lot of promise in this regard.
The city, they say, felt a slightly damp breeze come in over the Spring Mountains. “Why do you want it?”
The devil managed to make himself nonthreatening. “I collect them,” he began. “Yours isn’t much at this point, and that’s the reason I ask. I assumed you wouldn’t miss it. I would keep good care of it.”
The city was unimpressed. “You have to do better than that.”
The devil kept his gaze. “How about this, then. Forget about soul. You’re not really interested in it. Let’s talk power. Let’s talk fame. Give me what I want, and millions will come here. You’ll wrestle down that mighty river so you’ll have vast water and power. You’ll make fiery explosions in the sky that’ll wake up God himself. You’ll beam lights into space. You’ll build the largest buildings in the world. Your name will be understood, without equivocation, everywhere.”
Las Vegas considered, nodded. They shook hands. It was done. Vegas goes on to greatness. No need to rehash all that. The devil is impressed with what the city has become, but he isn’t happy we’re all still talking about “soul,” like it matters. Soul is at the root of almost all our discussions about our cities: where and how it resides, and with whom. It’s the spirit in our ever-expanding machine-world.
This is critical stuff—basically it’s our only shot at salvation—and the devil’s working like hell to persuade us to forget. In one town after another. Instead, he wants us to consider convenience. Expedience. Spectacle. You can see why he’s so interested in this town—its strategic importance in the bigger scheme. He’s tireless, you know. I hear he’s having success with a new plan—convincing us to turn soul into just another commodity.
I know it sounds nuts. I had the same look the first time I heard it, too. But the soul of a place is bound up in the soul of its people, right? And what is that? That’s just the degree to which those people feel themselves passionately bound to that place, forged by that place. Places with soul feel real and essential, and so make the people there feel that they are real and essential, that they have meaning. That’s it. The rest is material, yes—dazzling brick and mortar (yes, the Strip)—but the material is only the identity, or part of the personality, of a city. It is not soul. It is thus immaterial.
I could be wrong. People only sell their soul to the devil because they believe they can work out another deal later, they’re certain the devil can be beaten at his own game, bargained with, bested. It’s the same with cities. The devil seldom obliges, mind you, but Las Vegas, to its credit, still believes it can win its soul back. We’ll see.
T.R. Witcher is the associate editor of Las Vegas Life magazine.