It’s All In the Eyes
Written January 14th, 2018
I will ask that you look deeply into these eyes, for they are the eyes of no mere mortal. Nietzsche once wrote, “Alas, there are so many things between heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed,” and in Walt Whitman, those words found a poignant home to rest.
Indulge me for a moment and look again, look intently and sense the “volumes of worlds” speaking from behind those soft blue eyes. I want to call attention to their gentleness because during the Civil War, Whitman volunteered to help care for the wounded soldiers, so he was acutely familiar with man’s immense capacity for carnage, yet his mind remained committed to beauty and wonder. To complete the quoted words above, Whitman had written, “My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach, with the twirl of my tongue, I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.” And that is precisely what I see in those eyes; worlds of depth, compassion and wonder.
Whitman was the first proper poet that I ever concerned myself with, and certainly the first that I read with genuine interest. The fragrant, intoxicating air that I was breathing in those early years after my Lennon induced awakening, led directly to both Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, along with their intellectual patriarch, Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was these three men who made up what I consider to be the ‘Holy Trinity’ of American Transcendentalism.
Emerson, it should be said, was the founding father and intellectual force that seeded much of our current idealism toward nature. His essay’s and lectures on the subject forcefully argued that a love and appreciation for the natural world was not simply a pastime for idealist and dreamers, but an intellectual imperative; a call to our higher values.
In that call to inspire, I believe that Emerson envisioned himself as being America’s version of Goethe, the brilliant German writer, Scientist, Philosopher, Poet and Statesman who Emerson greatly admired. Goethe’s writings touched off a profound culture shift in German thought and I believe Emerson wanted to duplicate that in America. Although he certainly had the cerebral bandwidth for the task, his weakness, I believe, was a lack of verbal artistry. The prose that made him famous worked well within the boundaries of his polemic essays, but when it came to poetry, his words simply didn’t sing…. and he knew it, as he made several mentions of the fact in his private journal.
I wanted to quickly frame Emerson’s role in the Transcendentalist movement because it is especially relevant to Whitman, for he quickly responded to Emerson’s call for ‘a new language’, a new mode of thinking for the young American ethos. And in Whitman, Emerson found his poetic mouthpiece. Later in his life, Whitman said this of Emerson’s influence on him;
“I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.”
When Whitman published the first edition of ‘Leaves of Grass’ in 1855, he sent a copy to Emerson, who he idolized and hoped to receive a favorable critique or possibly even an endorsement. Upon his first reading, Emerson showed every sign of having his mind sufficiently blown, for he wrote the following reply back to Whitman.
“DEAR SIR–I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “LEAVES OF GRASS.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed…. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be…… I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty.”
When I first began working my way through the full edition of ‘Leaves of Grass’, which had ballooned to nearly 400 poems, as opposed to the 12 in that first edition, it still took little time before being confronted with his piercing insights, which were so uniquely phrased and aesthetically evocative that I was spellbound right from the start. All through his writings, I found an expansive awareness and exaltation of the natural world, as well as our own human nature. Through his poetic voice, a simple blade of grass was something to be exalted as an unequaled miracle and the animals he observed in the woods were a sublime respite from the neurotic chatter of those around him who were hopelessly bound to the trappings of culture. Here are a few quick bursts of his thoughts on nature.
“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”
_______________
“A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.”
_______________
“Let your soul stand cool and composed
before a million universes.”
______________
“A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.”
What is hinted at within those few brief examples, and indeed what is effectively shouting from most of his writing is the elevation and sanctity of nature, in all its endless variety of expressions, from the mundane to the sublime. In fact, Whitman often used the mundane as the provocation to witness its very sublimity. The verse below, which I remarked on in a previous journal entry titled “Aware” in 2006, beautifully infers that very principle by transforming the benign and often overlooked articles of our attention into piercing revelations.
“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And a cow crunching with depressed head surpasses any statue.
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels,
And I could come every afternoon of my life to look at the farmer’s girl
Boiling her iron teakettle and baking shortcake”
Because of his exalted status in our culture today, it would likely surprise more than a few that Whitman was considered a controversial poet in his day. Due of his commitment to honestly express the full range of his interior life, and by extension our own, he occasionally pushed beyond the strict taboos of his day by mentioning the body and even sexuality in positive terms, which were scandalous topics to the Puritan sensibilities of the 19th century. Of course, reading them today, a century and a half later, it all seems quite tame by comparison. By simply using the word “flesh”, for instance, Whitman was scandalized by some critics as a pornographic poet.
Yet his lasting genius rises far above such petty quibbles, for he not only held firm to his convictions, but his intuitions ran surprisingly deep. As a result, he did not shy away from aiming his formidable ‘tongue’ across a wide spectrum of cultural issues. He didn’t simply remain within the comfortable profundities of nature, but in the far more restrictive culture of his day, he expressed his honest thoughts on God, War, Love, Affection, Relationships and Death.
Below are a few isolated lines where Whitman lays out his thoughts on several of these topics.
War
“I was in the midst of it all – saw war where war is worst – no on the battlefields, no – in the hospitals….there I mixed with it: and now I say God damn the wars – all wars: God damn every war: God damn ’em! God damn ’em!”
“The real war will never get in the books.”
Science
“I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess.”
Inspiration
“Why are there trees I never walk under, but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me”
“To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.”
“Oh, to be alive in such an age, when miracles are everywhere, and every inch of common air throbs a tremendous prophecy, of greater marvels yet to be.”
Mindfulness
“Happiness, not in another place but this place…not for another hour, but this hour.”
“I am not contain’d between my hat and my boots.”
“Do anything, but let it produce joy.”
“I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.”
Love
“What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”
“We were together. I forget the rest.”
“Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you/ That you may be my poem/ I whisper with my lips close to your ear/ I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.”
The Body
“I believe in the flesh and the appetites;
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from;
The scent of these arm-pits, aroma finer than prayer;
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.”
God/Religion
“Argue not concerning God,…re-examine all that you have been told at church or school or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your soul”
“Pointing to another world will never stop vice among us; shedding light over this world can alone help us.”
“Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are,
for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever.”
“There is no God any more divine than Yourself.”
“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”
Self-Expression
“I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.”
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large – I contain multitudes”
Each of those lines showcase Whitman’s uniquely positive, life affirming voice; centered squarely on the experience of the individual, as only it can be. That is perhaps his greatest gift to us, his future readers; his enthusiasm for seeing the world with clear-eyed awareness and wonder. For a generation about to fall headlong into the Industrial Revolution, with its disregard and subsequent exploitation of both nature and individual, I believe Whitman’s words can work as a tether, a link back to a blueprint for a life lived with civility and grace.
I’d like to end this little essay with a poem that I consider to be the most profoundly conceived and angelically phrased to ever reach my eyes. I first heard of this poem, not from reading Whitman, sadly enough, but from the movie, ‘Dead Poet’s Society’. In one of the more memorable scenes ever committed to celluloid, Robin Williams, playing a Freshman High School poetry teacher, gathered his young impressionable students together in a tight huddle, as if to bequeath the wisdom from the God’s, and recited this poem from ‘Uncle Walt’.
In this meditation on the apparent futility of life, Whitman throws down a semantic gauntlet at those who fail to see the true gift that we have been given and to challenge each of us to reconsider a single unavoidable fact; that regardless of what we may think of life, it is emphatically here, with a final imperative to answer the call.
| O ME! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; |
| Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish; |
| Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) |
| Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d; |
| Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me; |
| Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined; |
| The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? |
| Answer. That you are here—that life exists, and identity; |
| That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse. |
Years ago, I came across an interview with the great Joseph Campbell, who phrased a reply to Whitman’s sentiment as succinctly as any that I’ve ever seen by stating; “Being who you are is the privilege of a lifetime”. Well those words immediately became my lifelong mantra, my armor against the corrosion of pessimism, and its toxic parent, nihilism. So, with that wind at my back and my destination firmly set, I accept Whitman’s challenge and embrace the provocations of his language, to prove myself fit; to write my own verse into the ‘powerful play’, one worthy of what I carry inside.
Several years ago I traveled to Huntington, Long Island, for work, which happened to be where Whitman grew up as a boy. Knowing that meant that I was not about to miss the opportunity, so on my day off I visited his home, now a museum, and as I left a few hours later, I noticed several Maple trees surrounding the house. With absolute clarity, I walked over, bent down and picked up a recently fallen leaf and to this day use that leaf as my bookmark to his epic treatise on nature, “Leaves of Grass’.