Esquimo. And when Walt blandly assumed Allness, including Esquimoness,
unto himself, he was just sucking the wind out of a blown egg-shell, no
more. Esquimos are not minor little Walts. They are something that I am
not, I know that. Outside the egg of my Allness chuckles the greasy
little Esquimo. Outside the egg of Whitman's Allness too.
But Walt wouldn't have it. He was everything and everything was in him.
He drove an automobile with a very fierce headlight, along the track of
a fixed idea, through the darkness of this world. And he saw Everything
that way. Just as a motorist does in the night.
I, who happen to be asleep under the bushes in the dark, hoping a snake
won't crawl into my neck; I, seeing Walt go by in his great fierce
poetic machine, think to myself: What a funny world that fellow sees!
ONE DIRECTION! toots Walt in the car, whizzing along it.
Whereas there are myriads of ways in the dark, not to mention trackless
wildernesses. As anyone will know who cares to come off the road, even
the Open Road.
ONE DIRECTION! whoops America, and sets off also in an automobile.
ALLNESS! shrieks Walt at a cross-road, going whizz over an unwary Red
Indian.
ONE IDENTITY! chants democratic En Masse, pelting behind in motorcars,
oblivious of the corpses under the wheels.
God save me, I feel like creeping down a rabbit-hole, to get away from
all these automobiles rushing down the ONE IDENTITY track to the goal of
ALLNESS.
"A woman waits for me----"
He might as well have said: "The femaleness waits for my maleness." Oh,
beautiful generalization and abstraction! Oh, biological function.
"Athletic mothers of these States----" Muscles and wombs. They needn't
have had faces at all.
"As I see myself reflected in Nature,
As I see through a mist. One with inexpressible completeness,
sanity, beauty.
See the bent head, and arms folded over the breast, the
Female I see."
Everything was female to him: even himself. Nature just one great
function.
"This is the nucleus--after the child is born of woman,
man is born of woman.
This is the bath of birth, the merge of small and large,
and the outlet again----"
"The Female I see----"
If I'd been one of his women, I'd have given him Female. With a flea in
his ear.
Always wanting to merge himself into the womb of something or other.
"The Female I see----"
Anything, so long as he could merge himself.
Just a horror. A sort of white flux.
Post mortem effects.
He found, like all men find, that you can't really merge in a woman,
though you may go a long way. You can't manage the last bit. So you have
to give it up, and try elsewhere. If you _insist_ on merging.
In _Calamus_ he changes his tune. He doesn't shout and thump and exult
any more. He begins to hesitate, reluctant, wistful.
The strange calamus has its pink-tinged root by the pond, and it sends
up its leaves of comradeship, comrades from one root, without the
intervention of woman, the female.
So he sings of the mystery of manly love, the love of comrades. Over and
over he says the same thing: the new world will be built on the love of
comrades, the new great dynamic of life will be manly love. Out of this
manly love will come the inspiration for the future.
Will it though? Will it?
Comradeship! Comrades! This is to be the new Democracy: of Comrades.
This is the new cohering principle in the world: Comradeship.
Is it? Are you sure?
It is the cohering principle of true soldiery, we are told in _Drum
Taps._ It is the cohering principle in the new unison for creative
activity. And it is extreme and alone, touching the confines of death.
Something terrible to bear, terrible to be responsible for. Even Walt
Whitman felt it. The soul's last and most poignant responsibility, the
responsibility of comradeship, of manly love.
"Yet you are beautiful to me, you faint-tinged roots, you
make me think of death.
Death is beautiful from you (what indeed is finally
beautiful except death and love?)
I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of
lovers, I think it must be for death,
For how calm, how solemn it grows to ascend to the
atmosphere of lovers,
Death or life, I am then indifferent, my soul declines to
prefer
(I am not sure but the high soul of lovers welcomes death
most)
Indeed, O death, I think now these leaves mean precisely
the same as you mean----"
This is strange, from the exultant Walt.
Death!
Death is now his chant! Death!
Merging! And Death! Which is the final merge.
The great merge into the womb. Woman.
And after that, the merge of comrades: man-for-man love.
And almost immediately with this, death, the final merge of death.
There you have the progression of merging. For the great mergers, woman
at last becomes inadequate. For those who love to extremes. Woman is
inadequate for the last merging. So the next step is the merging of
man-for-man love. And this is on the brink of death. It slides over into
death.
David and Jonathan. And the death of Jonathan.
It always slides into death.
The love of comrades.
Merging.
So that if the new Democracy is to be based on the love of comrades, it
will be based on death too. It will slip so soon into death.
The last merging. The last Democracy. The last love. The love of
comrades.
Fatality. And fatality.
Whitman would not have been the great poet he is if he had not taken the
last steps and looked over into death. Death, the last merging, that was
the goal of his manhood.
To the mergers, there remains the brief love of comrades, and then
Death.
"Whereto answering, the sea
Delaying not, hurrying not
Whispered me through the night, very plainly before
daybreak,
Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death.
And again death, death, death, death.
Hissing melodions, neither like the bird nor like my
arous'd child's heart,
But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me
softly all over,
Death, death, death, death, death----"
Whitman is a very great poet, of the end of life. A very great post
mortem poet, of the transitions of the soul as it loses its integrity.
The poet of the soul's last shout and shriek, on the confines of death.
_Après moi le déluge._
But we have all got to die, and disintegrate.
We have got to die in life, too, and disintegrate while we live.
But even then the goal is not death.
Something else will come.
"Out of the cradle endlessly rocking."
We've got to die first, anyhow. And disintegrate while we still live.
Only we know this much. Death is not the _goal._ And Love, and merging,
are now only part of the death-process. Comradeship--part of the
death-process. Democracy--part of the death-process. The new
Democracy--the brink of death. One Identity--death itself.
We have died, and we are still disintegrating.
But IT IS FINISHED.
_Consummation est._
Whitman, the great poet, has meant so much to me. Whitman, the one man
breaking a way ahead. Whitman, the one pioneer. And only Whitman. No
English pioneers, no French. No European pioneer-poets. In Europe the
would-be pioneers are mere innovators. The same in America. Ahead of
Whitman, nothing. Ahead of all poets, pioneering into the wilderness of
unopened life, Whitman. Beyond him, none. His wide, strange camp at the
end of the great high-road. And lots of new little poets camping on
Whitman's camping ground now. But none going really beyond. Because
Whitman's camp is at the end of the road, and on the edge of a great
precipice. Over the precipice, blue distances, and the blue hollow of
the future. But there is no way down. It is a dead end.
Pisgah. Pisgah sights. And Death. Whitman like a strange, modern,
American Moses. Fearfully mistaken. And yet the great leader.
The essential function of art is moral. Not æsthetic, not decorative,
not pastime and recreation. But moral. The essential function of art is
moral.
But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which
changes the blood, rather than the mind. Changes the blood first. The
mind follows later, in the wake.
Now Whitman was a great moralist. He was a great leader. He was a great
changer of the blood in the veins of men.
Surely it is especially true of American art, that it is all essentially
moral. Hawthorne, Poe, Longfellow, Emerson, Melville: it is the moral
issue which engages them. They all feel uneasy about the old morality.
Sensuously, passionally, they all attack the old morality. But they know
nothing better, mentally. Therefore they give tight mental allegiance to
a morality which all their passion goes to destroy. Hence the duplicity
which is the fatal flaw in them: most fatal in the most perfect American
work of art, _The Scarlet Letter._ Tight mental allegiance given to a
morality which the passional self repudiates.
Whitman was the first to break the mental allegiance. He was the first
to smash the old moral conception, that the soul of man is something
"superior" and "above" the flesh. Even Emerson still maintained this
tiresome "superiority" of the soul. Even Melville could not get over it.
Whitman was the first heroic seer to seize the soul by the scruff of her
neck and plant her down among the potsherds.
"There!" he said to the soul. "Stay there!"
Stay there. Stay in the flesh. Stay in the limb's and lips and in the
belly. Stay in the breast and womb. Stay there. Oh Soul, where you
belong.
Stay in the dark limbs of negroes. Stay in the body of the prostitute.
Stay in the sick flesh of the syphilitic. Stay in the marsh where the
calamus grows. Stay there, Soul, where you belong.
The Open Road. The great home of the Soul is the open road. Not heaven,
not paradise. Not "above." Not even "within." The soul is neither
"above" nor "within." It is a wayfarer down the open road.
Not by meditating. Not by fasting. Not by exploring heaven after heaven,
inwardly, in the manner of the great mystics. Not by exaltation. Not by
ecstasy. Not by any of these ways does the soul come into her own.
Only by taking the open road.
Not through charity. Not through sacrifice. Not even through love. Not
through good works. Not through these does the soul accomplish herself.
Only through the journey down the open road.
The journey itself, down the open road. Exposed to full contact. On two
slow feet. Meeting whatever comes down the open road. In company with
those that drift in the same measure along the same way. Towards no goal
Always the open road.
Having no known direction, even. Only the soul remaining true to herself
in her going.
Meeting all the other wayfarers along the road. And how? How meet them,
and how pass? With sympathy, says Whitman. Sympathy. He does not say
love. He says sympathy. Feeling with. Feel with them as they feel with
themselves. Catching the vibration of their soul and flesh as we pass.
It is a new great doctrine. A doctrine of life. A new great morality. A
morality of actual living, not of salvation. Europe has never got beyond
the morality of salvation. America to this day is deathly sick with
saviourism. But Whitman, the greatest and the first and the only
American teacher, was no Saviour. His morality was no morality of
salvation. His was a morality of the soul living her life, not saving
herself. Accepting the contact with other souls along the open way, as
they lived their lives. Never trying to save them. As leave try to
arrest them and throw them in gaol. The soul living her life along the
incarnate mystery of the open road.
This was Whitman. And the true rhythm of the American continent speaking
out in him. He is the first white aboriginal.
"In my Father's house are many mansions."
"No," said Whitman. "Keep out of mansions. A mansion may be heaven on
earth, but you might as well be dead. Strictly avoid mansions. The soul
is herself when she is going on foot down the open road."
It is the American heroic message. The soul is not to pile up defences
round herself. She is not to withdraw and seek her heavens inwardly, in
mystical ecstasies. She is not to cry to some God beyond, for salvation.
She is to go down the open road, as the road opens, into the unknown,
keeping company with those whose soul draws them near to her,
accomplishing nothing save the journey, and the works incident to the
journey, in the long life-travel into the unknown, the soul in her
subtle sympathies accomplishing herself by the way.
This is Whitman's essential message. The heroic message of the American
future. It is the inspiration of thousands of Americans today, the best
souls of today, men and women. And it is a message that only in America
can be fully understood, finally accepted.
Then Whitman's mistake. The mistake of his interpretation of his
watchword: Sympathy. The mystery of SYMPATHY. He still confounded it
with Jesus' LOVE, and with Paul's CHARITY. Whitman, like all the rest of
us, was at the end of the great emotional highway of Love. And because
he couldn't help himself, he carried on his Open Road as a prolongation
of the emotional highway of Love, beyond Calvary. The highway of Love
ends at the foot of the Cross. There is no beyond. It was a hopeless
attempt, to prolong the highway of love.
He didn't follow his Sympathy. Try as he might, he kept on automatically
interpreting it as Love, as Charity. Merging!
This merging, en masse. One Identity, Myself monomania was a carry-over
from the old Love idea. It was carrying the idea of Love to its logical
physical conclusion. Like Flaubert and the leper. The decree of
unqualified Charity, as the soul's one means of salvation, still in
force.
Now Whitman wanted his soul to save itself, _he_ didn't want to save it.
Therefore he did not need the great Christian receipt for saving the
soul. He needed to supersede the Christian Charity, the Christian Love,
within himself, in order to give his Soul her last freedom. The highroad
of Love is no Open Road. It is a narrow, tight way, where the soul walks
hemmed in between compulsions.
Whitman wanted to take his Soul down the open road. And he failed in so
far as he failed to get out of the old rut of Salvation. He forced his
Soul to the edge of a cliff, and he looked down into death. And there he
camped, powerless. He had carried out his Sympathy as an extension of
Love and Charity. And it had brought him almost to madness and
soul-death. It gave him his forced, unhealthy, post-mortem quality.
His message was really the opposite of Henley's rant:
"I am the master of my fate.
I am the captain of my soul."
Whitman's essential message was the Open Road. The leaving of the soul
free unto herself, the leaving of his fate to her and to the loom of the
open road. Which is the bravest doctrine man has ever proposed to
himself.
Alas, he didn't quite carry it out. He couldn't quite break the old
maddening bond of the love-compulsion, he couldn't quite get out of the
rut of the charity habit. For Love and Charity have degenerated now into
habit: a bad habit.
Whitman said Sympathy. If only he had stuck to it! Because Sympathy
means feeling with, not feeling for. He kept on having a passionate
feeling for the negro slave, or the prostitute, or the syphilitic. Which
is merging. A sinking of Walt Whitman's soul in the souls of these
others.
He wasn't keeping to his open road. He was forcing his soul down an old
rut. He wasn't leaving her free. He was forcing her into other peoples'
circumstances.
Supposing he had felt true sympathy with the negro slave? He would have
felt with the negro slave. Sympathy--compassion--which is partaking of
the passion which was in the soul of the negro slave.
What was the feeling in the negro's soul?
"Ah, I am a slave! Ah, it is bad to be a slave! I must free myself. My
soul will die unless she frees herself. My soul says I must free
myself."
Whitman came along, and saw the slave, and said to himself: "That negro
slave is a man like myself. We share the same identity. And he is
bleeding with wounds. Oh, oh, is it not myself who am also bleeding with
wounds?"
This was not _sympathy._ It was merging and self-sacrifice. "Bear ye one
another's burdens."--"Love thy neighbour as thyself."--"Whatsoever ye do
unto him, ye do unto me."
If Whitman had truly _sympathised_, he would have said: "That negro
slave suffers from slavery. He wants to free himself. His soul wants to
free him. He has wounds, but they are the price of freedom. The soul has
a long journey from slavery to freedom. If I can help him I will: I will
not take over his wounds and his slavery to myself. But I will help him
fight the power that enslaves him when he wants to be free, if he wants
my help. Since I see in his face that he needs to be free. But even when
he is free, his soul has many journeys down the open road, before it is
a free soul."
And of the prostitute Whitman would have said:
"Look at that prostitute! Her nature has turned evil under her mental
lust for prostitution. She has lost her soul. She knows it herself. She
likes to make men lose their souls. If she tried to make me lose my
soul, I would kill her. I wish she may die."
But of another prostitute he would have said:
"Look! She is fascinated by the Priapic mysteries. Look, she will soon
be worn to death by the Priapic usage. It is the way of her soul. She
wishes it so."
Of the syphilitic he would say:
"Look! She wants to infect all men with syphilis. We ought to kill her."
And of still another syphilitic:
"Look! She has a horror of her syphilis. If she looks my way I will help
her to get cured."
This is sympathy. The soul judging for herself, and preserving her own
integrity.
But when, in Flaubert, the man takes the leper to his naked body; when
Bubi de Montparnasse takes the girl because he knows she's got syphilis;
when Whitman embraces an evil prostitute: that is not sympathy. The evil
prostitute has no desire to be embraced with love; so if you sympathise
with her, you won't try to embrace her with love. The leper loathes his
leprosy, so if you sympathise with him, you'll loathe it too. The evil
woman who wishes to infect all men with her syphilis hates you if you
haven't got syphilis. If you sympathise, you'll feel her hatred, and
you'll hate too, you'll hate her. Her feeling is hate, and you'll share
it. Only your soul will choose the direction of its own hatred.
The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind
doesn't dictate to her. Because the mind says Charity! Charity! you
don't have to force your soul into kissing lepers or embracing
syphilitics. Your lips are the lips of your soul, your body is the body
of your soul; your own single, individual soul. That is Whitman's
message. And your soul hates syphilis and leprosy. Because it is a soul,
it hates these things, which are against the soul. And therefore to
force the body of your soul into contact with uncleanness is a great
violation of your soul. The soul wishes to keep clean and whole. The
soul's deepest will is to preserve its own integrity, against the mind
and the whole mass of disintegrating forces.
Soul sympathises with soul. And that which tries to kill my soul, my
soul hates. My soul and my body are one. Soul and body wish to keep
clean and whole. Only the mind is capable of great perversion. Only the
mind tries to drive my soul and body into uncleanness and
unwholesomeness.
What my soul loves, I love.
What my soul hates, I hate.
When my soul is stirred with compassion, I am compassionate.
What my soul turns away from, I turn away from.
That is the _true_ interpretation of Whitman's creed: the true
revelation of his Sympathy.
And my soul takes the open road. She meets the souls that are passing,
she goes along with the souls that are going her way. And for one and
all, she has sympathy. The sympathy of love, the sympathy of hate, the
sympathy of simple proximity: all the subtle sympathisings of the
incalculable soul, from the bitterest hate to passionate love.
It is not I who guide my soul to heaven. It is I who am guided by my own
soul along the open road, where all men tread. Therefore, I must accept
her deep motions of love, or hate, or compassion, or dislike, or
indifference. And I must go where she takes me. For my feet and my lips
and my body are my soul. It is I who must submit to her.
This is Whitman's message of American democracy.
The true democracy, where soul meets soul, in the open road. Democracy.
American democracy where all journey down the open road. And where a
soul is known at once in its going. Not by its clothes or appearance.
Whitman did away with that. Not by its family name. Not even by its
reputation. Whitman and Melville both discounted that. Not by a
progression of piety, or by works of Charity. Not by works at all. Not
by anything but just itself. The soul passing unenhanced, passing on
foot and being no more than itself. And recognized, and passed by or
greeted according to the soul's dictate. If it be a great soul, it will
be worshipped in the road.
The love of man and woman: a recognition of souls, and a communion of
worship. The love of comrades: a recognition of souls, and a communion
of worship. Democracy: a recognition of souls, all down the open road,
and a great soul seen in its greatness, as it travels on foot among the
rest, down the common way of the living. A glad recognition of souls,
and a gladder worship of great and greater souls, because they are the
only riches.
Love, and Merging, brought Whitman to the Edge of Death! Death! Death!
But the exultance of his message still remains. Purified of MERGING,
purified of MYSELF, the exultant message of American Democracy, of souls
in the Open Road, full of glad recognition, full of fierce readiness,
full of the joy of worship, when one soul sees a greater soul.
The only riches, the great souls.
LOBO, NEW MEXICO.
THE END