TWO

NOTHING THAT HAS CEASED TO ARRIVE

The fountaining outpouring of Leaves of Grass was fed by five sources, five streams. These currents, which can’t entirely be separated from one another, give the book its remarkable freshness; its best pages breathe an air perennially new. They fired Whitman’s confidence and his daring; they were the fuel that allowed his work to rocket forward, and enabled him to reinvent himself as something the world had not yet seen: a truly American poet.

The first of these—and here I mean “first” in terms of primacy, not of sequence—was an experience, or more likely a set of them, of transforming character, loosening the doors from their jambs and demanding that the poet approach what it was to be “myself” in an entirely new light. We don’t have a good vocabulary for these experiences. They come in variations and degrees, from a slight apprehension of the strangeness of being to the ravishing dissolution of boundaries called enlightenment. A mystical experience, a peak experience, a blurring or merge between self and other, a liberation from the limits of space and time. When Whitman wrote of the poet working on that extremest verge, surely this is what he meant.

I make a claim no historian can validate; how could we prove anyone’s experience of heightened consciousness? Inferring from the work back to the life is suspect; it underestimates the power of artifice, suggesting that only someone who had this particular sort of experience could write about it. As Philip Levine once said, Shakespeare was neither a king nor a Roman, but somehow he got it right.

But what makes those kings and Romans matter to us is neither their crowns nor their empires; they touch and captivate because they are, in different costume, us. What you can know about Shakespeare from those plays is that he had a rich subjective understanding of the will to power, of ambition and its consequences, and of the thirst for justice. Walt Whitman’s great poems embody two essential human experiences as fully as any poems I know: the joyous and burning fact of being a desiring body among other bodies, and the sense that, at its core, the self is without boundary. I am not contained between by hat and my bootsoles, he tells us. If this is so, then where am I contained?

There are radiant moments in Blake, Rilke, Proust, and Flaubert in which the division between subject and object dissolves away, resulting in a barely communicable joy. You can find luminous traces of this state in the ecstatic poetry of many traditions, but who ever held this light up as long and as steadily as Whitman did, or made it seem so ordinary and human? He left no account of the sort of experiences I suggest, no letters or prose journal, and needless to say no one observed them. The evidence lies in the way the poems radiate an experience of the unbounded. In Section 5 of “Song of Myself,” he offers this narration:

I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,

Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best.

Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

You can feel the hand of Whitman the printer here; his lines proceed in a calm, measured fashion, and he places his stanza breaks with clear purpose: in those white spaces or moments of silence he is thinking, allowing subtle shifts in time, in placement in the physical world, in the pitch and tone of his voice, even in his choice of addressee.

That first stanza, with its direct address to the soul, is of a piece with much of what’s come before in the poem so far—effusive, and not grounded in any particular moment or place. We’ve been listening to a rhetorical performance, more oration than narrative. But Loafe with me on the grass begins to shift things; whose voice does the speaker want to hear? As the next stanza begins, “you” now seems to be someone in particular, a lover:

I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning,

How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,

And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.

This is the first story told in “Song of Myself,” the seed from which all the rest springs. What was an invitation has shifted to a memory; we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning complicates the pronouns considerably: is that we the speaker and his soul still? Or is “my soul” suddenly revealed to be an endearment, a term of love for a beloved other? Or a term of identification? Any time a poet uses the pronoun you, the word to some degree attaches itself to the reader, and certainly Whitman addresses his readers directly over and over again in “Song of Myself.” Does he really mean to say that once he lay beside whoever holds this book now, that he has been beside us, in some warm transparent morning? Transparent is such a perfect adjective here I’m almost convinced.

You and I will blur into one another so many times in the pages to come that the question of just who lay on the grass beside whom will become entirely moot. You is no phantom but firmly embodied, and positioned, in a startlingly direct passage, to kiss the speaker’s bare chest. If one hand holds the feet and the other the beard, it’s pretty clear where the head must be—right in the middle of the body, positioned nicely for oral sex. Which lends a whole new dimension to Loose the stop from your throat; the valves of the voice will open, it may be, in more ways than one.

Now comes another stanza break loaded with event. What happens in that silent white space? Tender sex, presumably, and the bliss that ushers the speaker into a remarkable experience of elevation and identification with all things.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,

And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love,

And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,

And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,

And mossy scabs of the worm fence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed.

That is one of the most beautiful sentences in American poetry, and one of the most confident sentences in any poem in English. The mere fact that it is a single sentence conveys authority: it never hesitates. Whitman begins in the past tense (Swiftly arose and spread around me . . .) but the knowledge this experience conveys resides firmly in the now, continuing and ongoing. He includes the phrase “I know” twice, and every single thing named is an instance of something the speaker knows, with certainty, from the heightened perspective that has been granted him. He moves swiftly from sex to knowledge to a kinship with God, and from there to all men and women, and from there to all of creation. Elderhand, a compounding of Whitman’s invention with a note of awe in it, might be the loveliest neologism I know. A kelson is the long central beam in a wooden ship, holding the ribs in place; the image suggests not only that the creation is ordered and unified by love, but that, like a ship, it’s going somewhere, and carries us all forward in a common direction.

Had this passage ended grandly, I wouldn’t be half as inclined to believe it. But after Whitman’s announcement that love is a structural element of the universe comes an unlikely diminuendo, as he turns from that height to the tiniest things: drooping leaves and ants and mossy scabs. These too are illuminated by the compassionate knowledge that has flooded the poet’s body, as he arrives at a kinship not only with the divine, and with other people; heaped stones and elder and mullen and pokeweed are all swept up in that same love.

IN SOME WAYS, the gender of the lovers in this glorious passage truly doesn’t matter; out of this tender coupling, out of this bodily pleasure arises an experience out of the body, a profound felt connection to all of creation, which seems to shine with an orderly coherence, to possess the deep strength of a vessel structured by love. In that light the speaker can understand that his own hand is an embodiment of the divine, a co-instrument of creation, and that even the least of the world’s elements is to be seen in the full measure of its reality, understood as limitless.

But suppose this visionary, undeniably Edenic state arose from a sexual experience one had been taught was at best unmentionable, perhaps nonexistent, at worst reviled, condemned as sick or evil, a twisted expression of wounded souls which was by its nature offensive to God? How same-sex desire was understood in Whitman’s day, and how that understanding shifted in Whitman’s lifetime, is a complex, sometimes vexing subject I’ll come to later on. Here I simply want to suggest that the most profound sense of peace, of compassion and of affirmation, has appeared in a place where one did not expect to find it, and this surprise must be an aspect of the speaker’s unmistakable joy.

MY CLASSES CENTER ON POETRY, but since poems show us again and again that form and content can’t really be separated, we find ourselves talking about language and technique and about every kind of experience a poem may represent. Poetry exists to find words for what resists easy naming; we are most often driven to write it or read it when any other sort of language seems incapable of the work required.

When I mention experiences of boundlessness, or a sense that “I” is not the singular me cordoned off from the world by my own edges, I find that my students tend to nod appreciatively. They often express degrees of recognition, as opposed to the sort of silence likely to indicate that they think I’ve lost my mind. Such experiences appear in or flicker around the edges of every life; we are mysterious to ourselves, and often sense that there are depths we can’t easily sound, or that the origins or destiny of the human reside somewhere in a silence we carry within us. Wallace Stevens honored no deity but the human imagination, but he asserts at the end of “The Idea of Order at Key West” that it is in poetry we might find

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins . . .

Visions are not as far from ordinary life as we sometimes think, and artists need to live as if revelation is never finished.

I have sometimes slipped the familiar bonds of myself. Or, to say it differently, I’ve felt myself a participant in the limitless, as though I’d set down, for a little while, the bound-in-his-skin biographical self I think I am. The most powerful of these experiences happened in 1970, when I was seventeen. I’d been trying on various kinds of spiritual practice, both because I had a hunger for them and because such interests were in the cultural air I breathed. I was eager, too, to escape from a difficult family scene, and some stubborn part of me was refusing to be held down or diminished by the grief and damage that marked the household where I sometimes lived. But I can’t see the experience I had in the mountains above Tucson that year in psychological terms; it wasn’t a symptom of anything. I’m as certain as Walt Whitman in the three stanzas above that what I experienced came from what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the dearest freshness deep down things.”

Ruth and I had driven up into the Santa Catalinas, the mountains north of Tucson, to escape the heat. We’d stopped maybe two-thirds of the way up, at a picnic site by the roadside, high enough up the mountain that manzanita and dry thickets had given way to cooler air and evergreens. There were picnic tables among the firs, and open areas where one might spread a blanket and lie down under branches and glimpses of open sky with a few big shining clouds, and not a soul there but us. We were easy in our relationship at that moment; I was trying on heterosexuality, and doing better at it than I’d thought I could; and she was liking having a young boyfriend, we enjoyed each other’s company. (Of course I knew she was older than me, but she was always vague as to how much, and in those days I understood her vagueness to be an aspect of her charm.) We’d brought a cooler with sandwiches and a jug of ice tea or lemonade, maybe we had a beer; I think I remember an embroidered Mexican blouse she wore, in a sort of peasant style. She was reading, as always in those days, for her graduate exams, and perhaps she read something to me. After eating and talking, and maybe making out a little, she went back to reading silently, and I lay on my back on the blanket, resting, my eyes half open.

In a little while I became aware of a young tree, a shapely fir a few yards from the edge of the blanket, perhaps my height or a bit taller. As I took it in I began to sense it had a kind of substantiality about it; it was there, a being in the world, if that makes any sense. I mean that in myself I felt its presence, and in some interior fashion that involved a gesture of consciousness, I acknowledged its presence.

Then the tree acknowledged me back. How could I have ever expected that? It felt precisely as if the wave of interest and regard I had sent to the tree was returned to me, easily, simply. I was more delighted than startled. We were alive in the world together, the young tree and I; I was young too; we were kin; we were centers of energetic awareness in an energetic field . . . the sense of it begins to slip away as I try to say what happened and the words multiply. Well, not the sense, the sensation.

I felt simply that we two were alive at once, and that we took pleasure in being aware of one another.

Part of that pleasure was a kind of delighted laughter, on my part. Because what I had taken to be not alive, or at least not conscious, and not a part of myself, was in fact intently awake, and looking at me as I did at it, in friendship, in greeting. Then I realized that every tree I could see in the pine grove was equally alive, and equally not inert to me or apart from me as I had believed. We were here together, as were the clouds overhead, and the late sunlight slanting through the rims of them, and the pitchy cones resting on the pine-scented floor of shed needles . . . mullen and pokeweed.

And then a roaring began, in the treetops, as of wind, as if everything were stirring in a mounting storm that wasn’t there, and a great energy was stirring in me, an opening out, and I must have moved or made some sound, because Ruth said something then, and I began to come back down into myself. Though not without a sense of shine to all things—a feeling that persisted for hours—and a fresh, inexplicable happiness.

I feel no embarrassment or discomfort in telling you this, save for this last part. Back in the car, driving down the mountain, Ruth said, I keep smelling incense. And I knew what she meant, because for me the air was perfumed with it too, the lovely ancient scent of sandalwood. Why should that detail embarrass me? I suppose because it seems to claim some external validation—we both smelled it—as though that were the point, to offer some proof of my joyous hour of grace. There’s no proving such things; they reside in subjective awareness, part of the way we know for a few minutes or an hour, whatever length of time some door seems to stand open. I have no idea how long that experience and its afterglow lasted. I don’t want the gift of sandalwood to seem like some special claim. I believe such experiences are available and not uncommon, though we pave over the way to them with so much distraction and tension and desire. It was something that happened to me; it came out of nowhere, and never returned in just that way again. For all I know the odor of sandalwood may be latent everywhere, waiting to be noticed.

IN EVIDENCE, THIS PHOTOGRAPH. It was taken by a Brooklyn photographer, probably Gabriel Harrison. It’s a daguerreotype, which means that the subject would have needed to hold this position for two minutes, in order to avoid blurring. Look at this face, and imagine that length of holding still, holding this expression. Or imagine, perhaps, this expression on your own face at all. We know instinctively how to convey all sorts of emotion through facial expression, but this one—what can it mean, how do you read it?

I would say first of all that this gaze is not directed toward the photographer, nor contained within its moment of exposure. This face looks far beyond the minutes in which the picture was taken; it arrives in the present from a considerable distance. Its power to hold our attention rests in the eyes, which are clear and magnetic and look through us to something beyond the viewer. As I look from the eyes to the slight smile and then back to the eyes again, it seems the distance between this face and the world is lit up by love. It’s a look that pours out compassion, and if it betrays a certain weariness or impatience, that quality is softened by tenderness. Often nineteenth-century portrait photographs have a feeling of absence about them, the subject sealed off from us, entombed by the image, a captive of time lost. Not this one. There is nothing over about this face, nothing that has ceased to arrive in the present.