A Pilgrim’s Digression

As I sat in Pete’s having lunch today, I thought of some lines from Walt Whitman:

Washes and razors for foofoos …. for me freckles and a bristling beard
….The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer.

I like sitting at the counter at Pete’s as long as no one sits down next to me. I hate the feeling of someone at my elbow. Today, not only did someone sit down on the stool next to me, but he smelled like he’d been sleeping with the bums down under the Metro underpass at Rhode Island Avenue. The stink was breath-stopping.

At first scent, I glanced at him, and he looked normal enough. He was dressed in a UPS uniform, but his smell was beefy body odor, unadulterated with any hint of soap.

Walt Whitman, I love you, but I am a foofoo.

For lunch, I had the grilled chicken breast with Tahini ginger sauce, soba noodles, and honey-roasted walnut salad. It was quite delicious, and as I ate, I finished reading the copy of Leaves of Grass I’ve been reading.

About three weeks ago, while browsing in the Trover book store on Pennsylvania Ave. S.E., behind the Capitol, I picked up a 150th Anniversary Edition of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Harold Bloom wrote a lengthy introduction to the volume, which I skipped.

Originally, I intended to read the Bloom piece. Bloom is no Frederick Jameson, and his criticism is intelligible by laypersons such as myself, but what I discovered about myself as I read a few pages was that I really have no tolerance whatsoever for non-biographical literary criticism, these days.

I’d rather have a good fuck than read one page about Gnostic adumbrations in Whitman’s poetry, as discerned by Harold Bloom. And I also state, for the record, that the word “trope” is just as annoyingly pretentious when written by Harold Bloom as when written by Jacques Derrida.

So fuck Harold Bloom, and fuck literary criticism. You want my personal literary-critical theory? Here’s my theory: poetry that makes me happy is good poetry.

Walt Whitman makes me happier than any other poet I’ve ever read. He has made me happy for many, many years, now.

Ah, so I am of the Romantic Reader Response school of literary criticism, you say. The reader’s feelings about the poetry are all that matters. Sure. Whatever.

Walt Whitman makes me happy. I may not sound happy, right now. But when I read his poetry, I feel like he is communicating directly to me, over the span of the century that lies between us. In some cases, he does address himself directly to me.

In one of my favorite passages, he writes:

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place, search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

I don’t know why, but each time I read that last line my heart thumps a little harder. I think to myself, as he believed, no one ever really dies. Every atom of us remains. Walt Whitman is alive and speaking to me this day, as I sit at a lunch counter snuffing the human stench of the stranger beside me.

Walt says it’s wonderful. That smell of stale sweat is wonderful. All is wonderful. Think a moment on how once we were not, but are now. Think about the day you were born and how you passed from infancy to childhood to adulthood. Isn’t that wonderful to think of? Whitman writes,

And that I can think such thoughts as these is just as wonderful,
And that I can remind you, and you think them and know them to be true is just as wonderful…
Come I should like to hear you tell me what there is in yourself that is not just as wonderful…

Walt Whitman makes me extremely happy. He is a feel good poet. I admit, I am not a likely Whitman devotee. I am not a kindly advocate for the human race. I have not sounded a barbaric yawp since I was an infant, and even in my infancy my mother tells me I was an extraordinarily quiet child.

Yet for all my personal quirks and failings, Walt Whitman loves me nonetheless, and I find that love every bit as humbling as the love my wife and child have for me, or the love Jesus Christ has for me. Look at me: I sit here almost crying, as I type this. I am an emotional person, and perhaps this is why I feel Whitman’s poetry so greatly.

When I dwell on my mortality, as I often do, Whitman both sympathizes and warns me that death is coming, nevertheless. In one place, he writes a few lines that really could have been written to me personally:

To think how eager we are in building our houses,
To think others shall be just as eager .. and we quite indifferent.
I see one building the house that will serve him a few years …. or seventy or eighty years at most…
Slow-moving and black lines creep over the whole earth….they never cease….they are the burial lines ….
He that was President is buried, and he that is now President shall surely be buried.

In another place following these lines, Whitman offers comfort:

I swear I see now that every thing has an eternal soul!
The trees have, rooted in the ground….the weeds of the sea have….the animals.
I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!

Whitman provides us comfort in our connection with others; yet not just connection with other people but all things; he comforts us with the sameness of human experience. Perhaps some readers find his long chronicles of people doing things, or having things done to them, to be tedious (”The lunatic is at last carried to the asylum a confirmed case, / He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bedroom”), yet the point of these pages and pages of overly simplistic passages (”The machinist rolls up his sleeves….”) is to connect the human experience and show that, despite our sense of ourselves living out our own private drama, the people around us, too, are going through much the same kinds of things.

Not only that, but to use a favorite word of Whitman’s, decillions of years ago humans were experiencing the same things. And these people are with us today, as well, as is Walt Whitman. There is a terrible, beautiful unity between the living and dead.

The living sleep for their time …. the dead sleep for their time,
The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife.

This connection between life and death and heterosexual union is no coincident of poetic structure. Modern critics have probably made too much of Whitman’s homoerotic passages. The heterosexual Whitman speaks loudest, and the straight Whitman was probably more shocking in his day than the gay Whitman who writes passages such as “The men sleep lovingly side by side in [their bed].” In one respect I agree with Harold Bloom: Whitman is “pan-erotic,” a category beyond straight and gay or even bi-sexual, since it includes an eroto-fixation on the natural world.

Yet I admit to a fascination with Whitman’s “straight” eroticism. A passage meant to shock his contemporaries is “On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes, / This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant Republics.” It is surprising the number of times Whitman mentions or alludes to semen in his poetry.

Whitman does a lot of jetting of “stuff”, in his poetry, as if in counteraction to his meditations on death and immortality. Bloom goes so far as to compare Whitman to the Egyptian god Osiris, who masturbated the world into existence. So Whitman masturbated American literature as we know it into existence. Even in his prose introduction to his book of poems, Whitman spoke of how “the sinewy races of bards” are begotten by “the fatherstuff” of sailors, travellers, chemists, astronomers, etc., apparently without a female partner. This is a really startling reversal of the Immaculate Conception, with men as virgin fathers.

“Copulation is no more rank to me than death is,” Whitman says, thus making the oddest, but perhaps most profound statement by a poet of any era. I thought about that line a long time, after reading it. I’ve read Whitman in many different years of my life. I read him sitting in a snowy wood while my Dad thought I was deer hunting. I’ve read him in my teenage bedroom, in a house now owned by others, having lived there not even close to the seventy years Whitman suggests as a lifespan. I’ve read him on the train. I’ve read him in a car. I’ve read him sitting at a lunch counter in a noisy diner.

Always, I find new passages that previously I passed over with not a thought. That passage really stuck out, this time: “Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.” What does he mean?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s the key to everything, or nothing.  I’ve tried to rationalize it, but somehow to rationalize only succeeds in minimizing its value. I feel that I know what the line means in some unconscious way, but if I try to explain it, it’s meaning evaporates. It sits there on the counter, between me and the stinking guy beside me, defying rational meaning.

Oh, I am sure someone has explained it, maybe even Harold Bloom explains it in the preface I did not finish reading; just as I am sure that a botany textbook breaks down the beauty of a flower into its component parts and explains it all very scientifically. I shrug at such explanations. Scientific explanations mean less to me than a fart.

I am content just to let it be. I don’t need to know what it means. Whitman’s poetry “convulses me like the climax of my love-grip.” That is all I ask from a poet.