By invitation a while back, I attended a Zoom reading and discussion of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Considered his masterpiece, the poem fuses the “divine I” with the egocentric “I” in an original and quintessentially American attempt to have things both ways.
There were about 24 attendees, with a dozen women and men reading preassigned sections of “Song of Myself.” It lasted over an hour.
Even then, the organizer and chief Whitman devotee abbreviated the poem, which would take nearly two hours to read aloud unabridged.
The moderator prefaced the reading by saying it was “a very cosmic version of who Whitman is and who we are,” and that “Song of Myself stands with the greatest mystical literature of the world.”
Though so-called mystical experiences began in my late teens and have continued ever since, I’ve never felt much affinity for this poem. The egotistical language puts me off: “Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from.”
The divine, cosmically inflated “I” ignores the self’s existential contradiction with nature’s wholeness. And the line, “Do I contradict myself? … I am large, I contain multitudes,” just doesn’t cut it.
Whitman was perhaps the first American hippie, which is why many aging New Agers have embraced him. He would have agreed with the central idea of New Age philosophy: “Consciousness is that in which everything arises and to which everything returns.”
That’s ultimately true in this mystic’s view, but it conveniently and self-comfortingly skips a crucial step.
Thought, self and conditioning aren’t manifestations of cosmic consciousness and awareness, but the antithesis of them.
How and why did they emerge? We cannot bypass that conundrum but are required, as human beings, to grapple with the contradiction between the seamless wholeness of nature and the destructive fragmentation of humanity.
Whitman’s luxuriating in the senses is bracing, but his credo, “I dote on myself,” and “nothing, not God, nothing is greater than yourself,” evokes the sensation of fingernails on a chalkboard in our violently narcissistic time.
Did he inadvertently promote the self-worshipping individualism and expansionism that are the taproots of the darkness saturating America’s globalized culture today?
All in all, I found myself both soaring and sinking during the readings and comments.
Soaring because the readings were good, and some were excellent, full of feeling and nuance. I had only read Whitman’s epic poem before, never heard it read aloud.
The poem hits many high notes with its vivid descriptions and strikes many chords when read aloud.
However, as the readings proceeded, I found myself sinking with dismay. I wondered what Whitman would say about the parlous condition of America today, when the spiritual health of the nation is lower than it was even before the Civil War.
A few people mentioned children and schools, and there were even children visible at one point, but no one mentioned the elephant in the Zoom room: the school massacres that keep occurring in the United States.
We don’t need to imagine the pain of the world, but we are required, as human beings, to feel it, since we are inextricable from the causes and effects of the world’s suffering.
The great teachers of the past can only speak to us through the liquid glass of the burning present. Our lenses are old and cracked; the heat of the forge is too far removed from our hearts.
Have we become so inured to violence in global society that nothing moves us beyond our comfortable narratives and conclusions?
Have we become so sophisticated in our evasions of feeling, so detached in cunning ideas of misunderstood Buddhist detachment, that we feel no responsibility to radically change?
When the fate of the age, when every living and unborn generation for as far as even the most prescient eye can see hangs in the balance, taking refuge in past wisdom, when spaciousness still characterized a largely unpolluted and unexplored Earth, is no refuge at all, but merely a diversion.
On the eve of the American midterm elections, when mass media fools speak of “the resilience of American democracy,” I listen to the last mournful movement of Dvořák’s “New World.”
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