FOUR

THE ELDERHAND

At Crane Beach, north of Boston, near Ipswich, I walk miles on a spit of dunes not much changed from the way I’d guess it must have looked for centuries: marsh and beach grass, hummocks of bayberry and beach plum, groves of scrubby juniper and oaks. I have a long walk back, after the rain begins, and duck into the changing shed to shower and get dry and warm a little while.

But once I push open the metal door marked MEN and enter the room in which I’d imagined—what? A few lockers, wooden benches—I seem to step out of the daily world. It’s the same thing poetry does, opening within the ordinary a space where time pools or stills, and something blazes up out of the familiar.

The steaming room smells of warm water, wet flip-flops, bathing suits—everything rubbery and damp, so much moisture that light through the fogged glass in the roof glows through swathes of steam. Scents of lotion, talc, sneakers. Skin.

And so much of it: men sit on benches, stand to change, lean against walls, wait for the showers, wait for the rain to stop. Old men sit on the bench, ropy arms and curving bellies, shoulders bent forward, arms resting between their knees. Boys too small to be still, wriggling bodies brown from the sun. Pale men, shoulders dusted with freckles, cheeks and foreheads pinked by the day; black men so dark their bodies shine blue. Every solid or mottled shade, every girth and height, naked or nearly so, united by their sudden proximity as they wait out the heavy rain drumming the roof.

It feels like a box of pulsing, masculine life. Overwhelming physicality, so much of the flesh in one place it seems to be of the soul. Not erotic exactly, unless it is an aspect of eros to be made aware that you are a quantity of skin in a larger field of skin, as if a brushstroke in a painting might be made aware of itself as one of the uncountable strokes that comprise the whole. A plethora of strokes. The word I want to use here is pleroma, a Gnostic term for the fullness of all that is divine; it means the totality of God, who is darkness and silence, and only knowable through the aspects of divinity that come into the light out of that fecund absence, a “space” that is not a space.

TOWARD THE END of his impossible, magnificent signature poem, Walt Whitman seems to be dissolving into the song of himself, sinking into the ground beneath our feet, becoming part of vapor and dusk, even part of the bodies of his readers: he will filter and fibre your blood, he writes,

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.

Of all the things one might do with one’s own body, to “effuse” seems among the most unlikely. What can he mean? So much flesh, in that steamy crowded room, that somehow the bodies seem more physical, more palpably made of matter—how could one drift one’s flesh there, in lacy jags? Among so much skin that it somehow doesn’t seem individual any more, but a kind of collectivity of skin?

This is crucial to Whitman’s poem—not just the swirling, circular outpouring of “Song of Myself,” but the great structure he seems to be building, his best work all facets of a single whole—this claim for the fluidity and instability of the body and the self.

Do you feel it, your self as a tenuous construct, your body a temporary and unstable outpost of consciousness? I do, without being able to name this perception in a way that feels quite right—or not able to say it easily, anyway. English grammar supposes a stable object, a stable subject to be acted upon: I throw the ball to Ned. At that moment my dog Ned and I are doing something together, engaged in throwing and catching, so my sentence is an attempt to describe a collaborative process, but the structure of my attempt ignores the connection of the two involved, and makes the subject, me, most important, implying that it’s my will, my action that matters most.

If in fact I focus on the “I” that’s doing the throwing, I’m not likely to throw the ball very well. Immersion in the moment puts the verb in the foreground, something more like Throwing/catching ball we. The more engaged you are, the less aware you are of yourself. This is why one sometimes sits down to write, sidling up to the work at hand, and then in a while looks up at the clock to find that hours have passed. Self-consciousness fades as we become completely engaged in the present, in the way that children lose themselves in the boundless materials of sand, water, or clay. Playing is a pale verb for what they are actually doing, which is more like what Elizabeth Bishop called “a perfectly useless, self-forgetful concentration.” It would not be unlikely to find that a child playing alone in beach sand effuses or that her awareness drifts in lacy jags.

I AM NOT CONTAINED between my hat and my bootsoles.

Begin with the body: water, vapor, air. You’re the shore on which an ocean of air is constantly breaking, in waves of breath. “Inside” and “outside” of lungs, permeable boundary of skin, eyes, ears, nose, holes in the body for substance passing in and out, no stable and fixed entity that is you, but a moving set of points through which pass water, air, light, food, parts of the bodies of others: their breath, tongues, genitals, hands.

The summer spinach I bought today at the Iyengar Yoga Market on West Thirteenth Street came from Milford, New York, where it expanded itself from tight dry coded seed with water and light and solar heat, grew and rustled in darkness, responded to the rhythm of day-length and moon, and now, uprooted, has ridden in a truck to New York City, and this evening will become part of the salad that I’ll make for dinner, along with lettuce and arugula from a farm stand in Bridgehampton, and cheese made from almond milk. All this was not part of me and now will be part of me, and so is in some fashion the history and culture of spinach: the long-held knowledge of growth, the history of seed-saving, variety, breeding and naming. The world enters us and departs, just as language and image and idea are imprinted upon our consciousness, considered, forgotten, passed on, released. I make this book out of thinking, feeling, experience, light on my computer screen; as I write the light from the screen enters my body through my eyes, the impulses of my brain move my fingers to push against these keys (a little too firmly, I am told, from my years of working on typewriters). There is no place in the world where that which is “I” firmly, clearly ends, no line of demarcation. The body of a jellyfish is somewhere between 94 and 98 percent water, which means that a body of water is moving in the water. A jellyfish lacks much in the way of separation from its milieu, and might reasonably be said to be something more like a process the water is performing, an activity taking place in water, than a separate being.

This is how the architect Christopher Alexander suggests we learn to think about structure. He uses the example of a whirlpool, which is not a not a thing in itself capable of being separated from its surround but an action in the field, a way the continuous body of the water is behaving. If you try to talk about a whirlpool or a tornado or a waterfall as an object you inevitably distort it; it demands to be understood as a process. Alexander believes we need to apply this same thinking to a house: it’s a part of a field of perception and action, and only able to be whole, pleasing, and beautiful if held in its context instead of treated as something extricable from its surroundings and its use.

This line of thinking accounts for the astonishing beauty of jellyfish, when you’re able to see their unerring grace in photographs or their remarkable fluidity in an aquarium: they are entirely at home in their element, because they mostly are their element. I have never been able to trace the name of the Japanese philosopher who is supposed to have said, “A fish never makes an aesthetic mistake.”

OR BEGIN WITH PHYSICS. The world’s a field of energy; matter and energy are not separate “things” but ways of behaving; the world isn’t substance but motion. In a field of being, I am an intensification of that field; I’m a point where the world opens a pair of eyes to look at itself.

Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Atoms, of course, belong to no one. (Though now that water has been so successfully marketed, some brazen capitalist seems bound to try.) Our atoms came from the furnaces of long-gone stars, and swirled in galactic clouds; they crashed through the limbs of enormous reptiles and fountained up the vascular systems of huge trees, were Xerxes and Catullus, Nefertiti and Mother Ann Lee. Neither is stability to be found in the short run: breathe in, breathe out, drink, sweat, eat, excrete; we’re porous, and, as in the instance of my Iyengar spinach, the boundary lines our preconceptions teach us are real are, with a modest shift of perception, hard to discern.

Whitman’s aim, in his greatest and most characteristic work, is the restructuring of reality. He intends to rewrite our sense of what subjectivity is—or at least wants us to acknowledge that the reality we already experience doesn’t conform to the traditional separation of subject and object, but to something more like the flux of being his poems portray. He is out to rewrite ontology; his assault is a friendly one, but frontal nonetheless.

To be in any form, he asks, what is that?

Whitman’s questions are one of the continuingly startling things about him. Some of my students resist this aspect of his work, and suspect him of posing as a wonderer, asking questions to which he already has a firm answer in mind. True, sometimes he uses a question, as opposed to a statement, in order to disarm us and draw us further into the argument of his poem. When he asks,

What do you think has become of the young and old men?

And what do you think has become of the women and children?

he certainly does have an answer. But Whitman’s greatest questions are provocations of another order. Take What is the grass? What sort of question is that? It’s aflame with implication: that the common word doesn’t help to settle the matter, that there is something fundamentally peculiar or difficult about the phenomenon at hand that requires our attention. Change the noun and you’ll see my point. What is a maple tree, what is a horse? Those are questions we do not ask.

To be in any form, what is that? is this sort of question, and becomes a different one depending on which words are stressed:

To BE in any form

To be IN any form

To be in ANY form.

Maybe it’s the inevitable result of realizing that one isn’t contained between one’s hat and one’s boots. I am not this form, or rather I don’t stop at this form’s apparent limits. But I am in a form, or so the structure of language would posit; that self which is larger than limit is somehow inside a limit.

SUNDAY MORNING IN MENDOCINO, driving rain coming in off the Pacific, scouring the bluffs all night and cascading over the band of moorland before the dreamy little town begins. We’re in a coffee shop reading e-mail when a homeless man enters—or I assume he’s homeless, a late-middle-aged man, with a sun-tightened face, shoulder bags, backpack, and rolled and belted blanket, leading a slow-walking, serious black Lab. He chooses a corner, kneels down, unhitches and unrolls the blanket, spreads it on the floor for her, talks softly to the dog, saying something like, We’ll get warm in here, we’ll dry out in here. He gets her settled, then goes for a cup of coffee and comes back. He goes outside for a minute; she watches the door with a fixed gaze, unwavering eyes the color of wet bark, muzzle lifted. Suddenly I so do not want to be left; I have one companion whom I require; what if he doesn’t come back this time? He’s always come back though sometimes it’s a long wait, and you can’t ever be certain, and who besides me would take care of him if he didn’t come back?

Then I shake my head and there’s a beautiful nervous dog on the floor and I’m sitting on a stool in front of my laptop screen reading my mail.

IF YOU’RE ALREADY EVERYTHING, already complete, then what need could there be to speak, to write a poem?

But “Song of Myself” is in fact suffused with longing, a fervor for the only thing that isn’t me: you. This is why you is the most often repeated word in Whitman’s work. It’s you who must be won over, you the reader whom the writer and his book desire, you the lover whom the soul seeks. The poem wishes to free you from the illusion that you’re separate; it wants you to remember what you know, already, on some level: that you are me. Or, more precisely, we are it.

There’s no real difference between us, seen from the position of heightened, benevolent distance at which the singer of “Song of Myself” stands. But he understands that it’s human not to be in that state, so the poem’s characteristic gesture is one of reaching toward us—the poet’s arm around our shoulders, the poet’s hand in ours, the poet whispering in our ear. I was chilled with the cold type and cylinder and wet paper between us, he writes, wanting not the intermediary of print but the warm congress of voice with ear, skin with skin.

The result is oddly twofold. On the one hand, we’re reminded that we are reading a poem, a made version of a human voice, printed on a page in our hands; books are bound (forgive me) in time and by their physical borders. Poems reside on the page.

Whitman calls this poem “Song of Myself,” and a song after all lives not so much in sheet music as it does when it is performed. Voices are unbound, free-floating, arising when you loose the stop from your throat. The moments when Whitman wants us to be aware that we are “hearing” his voice on a page are often those when he becomes uncannily present. Then it seems his body is behind the words, leaning into the page from the other side, pressurizing his language so we feel the intensity of his longing for us, his huge will to bring us into the company of his poem. Or perhaps to tell us that we are already of that company, though we may not have known it. There is no address to the reader quite like this elsewhere; it is a performance of astonishing intimacy,

This hour I tell things in confidence,

I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

And:

I . . . would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.

And:

Shoulder your duds, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth;

Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

And, of course, the poem’s unforgettable, ineluctable close: I stop somewhere waiting for you. If this is an incarnation of the voice of Being itself, surely it’s the friendliest incarnation ever. Compare it to the cold, magnificent Thunderer speaking out of the whirlwind in Job and you hear immediately the difference between the sublime indifference of the universe and an avatar of human warmth. Whitman is no disembodied spirit, but a man with a whirlwind within him:

I rise extatic through all, and sweep with the true gravitation,

The whirling and whirling is elemental within me.

A FRIENDLY INCARNATION. There’s a central figure in the Buddhist pantheon, a character so beloved you can find his or her name in a dozen forms; Avalokiteśvara or Chenresik or Guan Yin seems to cross lines of culture, language, and gender effortlessly. Whitman read Vedanta, and was aware of the influx of translated religious texts from Asia in the spiritual and cultural hotbed of new ideas that was the Northeast in 1850, but who knows what he knew of Buddhism? What matters, to my mind, is imaginative sympathy, and Whitman would have seen in Avalokiteśvara a kindred inclination. The name means he who looks down on the world, or he who looks down upon sound, hearing the cries of all beings. Perhaps Whitman has something like this archetypal listener in mind when he writes,

I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,

And accrue what I hear unto myself . . . and let sounds contribute toward me

And accrue the sounds of the world do, in Whitman’s poem, from the bravura of birds to the angry base of disjointed friendship to a tenor large and fresh as the creation.

Who was Avalokiteśvara? A monk on the edge of complete enlightenment, the legend goes, who vowed not to enter into that state until all sentient beings had gone before him. Therefore he became a figure of limitless compassion, looking down from his position of understanding onto the struggles of all creatures who have not yet arrived there. Imagine a Buddha who turns to us and says, Shoulder your duds! Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself” is a homespun American Avalokiteśvara; he finds with immeasurable joy his own realization of unity, and that vision leads to a tenderness toward all things: And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own . . . And that a kelson of the creation is love. Surely Avalokiteśvara is the “elderhand” of Walt Whitman; this passage overflows with a universal, swelling tenderness. The material world of the poem is lit up with this sense of splendor, the radiant worth of each element of earth:

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,

And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,

And the tree-toad is a chef-d’ouvre for the highest,

And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,

And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery.

Radiant, and endless: I am all and all never ceases,

And I know I am deathless,

I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,

I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.

When I was a kid I used to love the July evening pleasure of drawing in the air with “sparklers,” wooden sticks dipped in something incendiary. Once lit, they hissed a little fountain of sparks an inch or two from the tip till they burned down to a black stub. You could make a carlacue that would seem to linger in the air for seconds after the source of the light was gone. This is a stunning image for the fleeting nature of the self: a passing figure scribbled on the dark. Stand at a little distance in time, and the individual really is as fleeting as that track of light. But seen from the vantage of the whole, from the larger life that seems, impossibly, to speak to us from this strange poem, we do not pass.

BOTH HUMAN AND SOMEHOW above the human at once, the speaker of “Song of Myself” is poised at a level where individuality is an entertaining spectacle. This is the source of the intricate variety of the world Whitman sets out to chronicle in his famous catalogs. Every part of the world, even an occasion of suffering or scene of degradation, is notable, worthy of attention. But since the self speaking is the great multifarious life of the whole, the loss of any individual doesn’t really matter: there is really no death, and if ever there was it led forward life . . .

Maybe Avalokiteśvara, who became a god after all, lives at that height, but Walt Whitman could experience the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth and then return to a crowded house in Brooklyn, his unpaid bills, his drunken mother, the unemptied chamber pot under the bed he shared with his developmentally disabled younger brother. The gift of an encompassing vision so radical as to crack the foundations of the self does not change entirely the life that goes on after the veil’s been parted. The self that slipped out of the limits of individuality, time, and place dwelled beside a self still bound by limit. The god in him may have seen everything as flashing sparks from the wheel, but the man struggled with ambition, attachment, and desire, a profound longing for connection to comfort body and soul, and understood that the particular is always perishing, and therefore all the more to be cherished.

If I can stand somewhere near the level of “Song of Myself,” I understand that my dog Ned is a glorious incarnation of energy, one of the endless flashing bright points of the universe unfolding itself. Energy takes pleasure in the disguise of matter, in the long adventure of incarnation, disappearing and then discovering him/her/itself again. If I look at the same creature from my more familiar, limited vantage point, he’s purely himself, a set of endearing gestures and characteristics that will never come again. Thus his disappearance is tragic—in the way that all the world is, all its parts forever going away. Time avails not, distance avails not. But without the limits of perceived separateness, without the agency of time, how could the adventure of living have poignance, how could individuality really matter?

Thus Whitman dwells in duality. He knows the vision of the higher self to be real, but he can’t feel it all the time. He was, in the great early poems, working on a verge that was extreme indeed. But years later he would say to his friend John Burroughs that his early poems had been written in a kind of trance, to which he could not will himself to return. So a discrepancy between selves haunts a number of poems:

Trippers and askers surround me

People I meet. . . . . the effect upon me of my early life. . . . of the ward and city I live in. . . . of the nation,

The latest news. . . . discoveries, inventions, societies. . . . authors old and new,

My dinner, dress, associates, looks, business, compliments, dues,

The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,

The sickness of one of my folks . . . or depressions or exaltations,

They come to me days and nights and go from me again,

But they are not the Me myself.

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am . . .

The Me myself. Is that who was sitting in the steamy changing shed?

THE CHILD WRITES with a burnt stick on the night. Whitman writes in pencil and in ink, in his small green notebooks. Then he begins, in Brooklyn Heights, to set his words in type, arranging the stanzas and the lineation on the printing plate, choosing where to “wrap” a line so that the words move continuously on the page, arranging the white space between stanzas so as to reflect the motion of thought. He will not pass like the child’s illuminated scrawl because he has made his poem solid; he has, as the poet Frank Bidart puts it, “fastened” his voice to the page.

ANOTHER WAY TO UNDERSTAND IT: the emanation of all that skin is language; out of our collective physical being comes a voice, and the genius of Whitman’s poem is to incarnate that voice. That is why every line of the poem can be read as spoken by that which is all of us, the collective, pervasive presence that is speech, that is language experiencing us. Language the living thing, living through us.

WHAT I ACTUALLY THOUGHT at the time, in the dim humid light of all those bodies—what I thought, though I can’t say why: This is what it was like before we were born.