Whitman - Part Two

Introduction: Pure Consciousness Mysticism
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Krishna, Whitman, Nietzsche, Sartre

We turn now to Bucke, Burroughs and Carpenter for appraisals of Whitman's spiritual side. Bucke introduced Whitman as "the best, most perfect, example the world has so far had of the Cosmic Sense", or cosmic consciousness, as he called it throughout his book of the same name. I think he was perfectly entitled to do so, but has naturally been a little suspect for it ever since. Bucke's analysis of the world's mystics may have been the first serious attempt (just before the end of the nineteenth century), and may have partly inspired and was certainly referred to in William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902, and in Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism, published in 1911, and in many texts on the subject ever since. I think the subject has evolved and reached a maturity where no serious student of it could call any example of the mystic as the best or most perfect: each adds a new perspective, and each will touch some more than others. Bucke was probably more than just a serious student of mysticism however: he was Whitman's disciple, and all the intellectual rigour in the world cannot diminish the natural impulse to see one's teacher as special. (In India it has always been regarded as the greatest possible good fortune to meet such a person in one's lifetime.) A recent re-appraisal of Bucke (long overdue) by Robert May gives a good biography of Bucke and assessment of Whitman's impact on him; it also points out that the dominance of the behaviourist schools of psychology resulted in Bucke's ideas being largely ignored in the twentieth century [35].

Bucke had a system however, and later commentators on mysticism have to a limited degree adopted it and expanded on it. He required that candidates for cosmic consciousness display a sense of immortality, a loss of the sense of sin and fear of death and a range of characteristics that he called a subjective light, a moral elevation, and an intellectual elevation. Moreover he required that all these, which mark what he calls cosmic consciousness, should appear fairly suddenly and in contrast to the previous nature of the person which he characterised as self-consciousness (probably intended more as the German Selbstbewusztsein than the painful sort associated with shyness etc.). He found in his survey that this transition took place in a person's mid-thirties more often than at another time in their life, and he demonstrated that Whitman underwent such a change at around the age of 35 or 36, quoting this passage in support of a transformation experience:

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 valvèd voice.


I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,

How you settled you head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me,

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

And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.


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 promise of my own,

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

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

And that a kelson of creation is love,

('Song of Myself', v. 5)

We should be grateful to Bucke for drawing our attention to this passage, and it has often been quoted by other commentators since Bucke, and usually with the interpretation that it was a moment of grace, or penetration by the divine. Indeed the imagery is erotic, one of penetration, but we find that erotic imagery is widespread in mysticism: the reader is referred to a survey of this in Christian and Jewish mysticism by Bernard McGinn [36]; we shall examine oriental examples of it in the next chapter; and some of my poems in the Appendix have this quality. Certainly, if we only take Leaves as the result, the change from Whitman's previous writings is dramatic, and lends some support to Bucke's idea of a sudden transition or illumination. If we were to accept this idea, and there are many cases to support it including for example Krishnamurti's, then we also have to account for those like Krishna who seem to born with the characteristics that Bucke enumerates, and live their whole life that way.

Bucke writes, in the context of the world's religious books:

Leaves of Grass is such a book. What the Vedas were to Brahmanism, the Law and the Prophets to Judaism, the Avesta and Zend to Zoroastrianism, the Kings to Confucianism and Taoism, the Pitikas to Buddhism, the Gospels and Pauline writings to Christianity, the Quran to Mohameddanism, will Leaves of Grass be to the future of American civilisation. Those were all Gospels, they all brought good news to man, fitting his case at the period, each in its way and degree. They were all "hard sayings" and the rankest heresy at first, just as Leaves of Grass is now. By and by it too will be received, and in the course of a few hundred years, more or less, do its work and become commonplace like the rest. Then new Gospels will be written upon a still higher plane.

In the mean time Leaves of Grass is the bible of Democracy, containing the highest exemplar of life yet furnished, and suited to the present age and America.

John Burroughs found that Whitman was "swayed by two or three great passions, and the chief of these was doubtless his religious passion." He then goes on to say, "Now there is no trace of this [traditional] religion in Whitman, and it does not seem to have left any shadow upon him. Ecclesiaticism is dead; he clears the ground for a new growth. To the priests he says: "Your day is done."" What does Burroughs think that Whitman puts in the place of Ecclesiasticism? He notes that for Whitman, "any glimpse of the farm, the shop, the household any bit of real life, anything that carried the flavour and quality of concrete reality was very welcome to him!" Whitman himself comments in 'Song of Myself':

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,

For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,

(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)


Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,

In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,

I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name,

And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,

Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

Burroughs concluded that "In the past this ideal was found in the supernatural; for us and the future democratic ages, it must be found in the natural, in the now and here." On Whitman's deathbed Burroughs mused that "It is the face of an aged loving child. As I looked, it was with the reflection that, during an acquaintance of thirty-six years, I never heard from those lips a word of irritation, or depreciation of any being. I do not believe that Buddha, of whom he appeared an avatar, was more gentle to all men, women, children, and living things."
Edward Carpenter made direct analogies in the Appendix to Days With Walt Whitman between passages from Leaves of Grass and passages from the Upanishads, Buddhist texts, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Teh Ching, and the New Testament. He presents an interesting comparison between Whitman and an Indian seer, that probably sums up his attitude to both Whitman and Leaves.

I have two portraits photographs which I am fond of comparing with each other. One is of Whitman, taken in 1890; the other, taken about the same time and at the same age (seventy years), is of an Indian Gnani or seer. Both are faces of the highest interest and import; but how different! That of Whitman deeply lined, bearing the marks of life-long passion and emotion; aggressive and determined, yet wistful and tender, full of suffering and full of love, indicating serenity, yet markedly turbid and clouded, ample in brow and frame and flowing hair, as of one touching and mingling with humanity at all points withal of a wonderful majesty and grandeur, as of the great rock (to return always to that simile) whose summit pierces at last the highest domain.

The other portrait, of a man equally aged, shows scarcely a line on the face; you might think for that and for the lithe, active form that he was not more than forty years old; a brow absolutely calm and unruffled, gracious, expressive lips, well-formed features, and eyes the dominant characteristic of his countenance dark and intense, and illuminated by the vision of the seer. In this face you discern command, control, gentleness, and the most absolute inward unity, serenity, and peace; no wandering emotions or passions flit across the crystal mirror of the soul; self-hood in any but the highest sense has vanished the self has, as it were, returned to its birthplace leaving behind the most childlike, single-hearted, uncensorious, fearless character imaginable.
Yet just here one seems to miss something in the last character the touch of human and earthly entanglement. Here is not exactly the great loving heart which goes a few steps on the way with every child of man; here is not the ample-domed brow which tackles each new problem of life and science. Notwithstanding evident signs of culture and experience in the past, notwithstanding vast powers of concentration in any given matter or affair when necessary, the face shows that the heart and intellect have become quiescent, that interest in the actual has passed or is passing away.
(page 49)

This passage is of particular interest to us as we consider the quality of embraciveness peculiar to Whitman, and how it may differ on the whole to that shown in Indian mysticism. We will return to this, but first we will look in more detail at Leaves of Grass itself.

2.3 Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass is a collection of poems on a wide range of themes, mostly descriptive of the life around Whitman in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in particular of America at that time. Whitman referred to his poems as songs (as in 'Song of Myself', one of the longer poems), and the whole of Leaves as a song of America. They are about the ordinary life of ordinary people and ordinary nature, in this way different from the Gita, with its conversation between two high-ranking individuals on the eve of a terrible war, and discussing absolutes. Yet, quite near the start Whitman quietly announces his religious intentions, though religious in no sense connected with church and creed. He first sets out the purpose of his songs: to celebrate life, himself, democracy, the female just as much as the male, great wars just as much as peace. He mentions the divine soil underneath, and the sun above, much as the Tao Te Ching talks about 'heaven and earth'. He credits all that has gone before, civilisations that have blossomed and receded, individuals who have lived and died, great masters that he has studied who will now come to study him. He mentions the immortality of the soul, he sets out that material and spiritual are equal to him, talks about the flame within him that must now burst forth, outlines his ideals of manly love, and of comradeship. He is the 'credulous man' one who believes; he is also the poet of evil, though in fact there is no evil. Then, casually, he mentions that he starts a religion.

I too, following many and follow'd by many, inaugurate a religion, I descend into the arena,

(It may be I am destin'd to utter the loudest cries there, the winner's pealing shouts,

Who knows? they may rise from me yet, and soar above every thing.)


Each is not for its own sake,

I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion's sake.

I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,

None has ever yet adored or worship'd half enough,

None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the future is.


I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion,

Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur;

(Nor character nor life worthy the name without religion,

Nor land nor man or woman without religion.)

8

What are you doing young man?

Are you so earnest, so given up to literature, science, art, amours?

These ostensible realties, politics, points?

Your ambition or business whatever it may be?


It is well against such I say not a word, I am their poet also,

But behold! such swiftly subside, burnt up for religion's sake,

For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpable flame, the essential life of the earth,

Any more than such are to religion.

(Starting From Paumanok, vs. 7 and 8)

Whitman entreats you to share with him two greatnesses of his book, Love and Democracy, but there is a third, more important.

My comrade!

For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising inclusive and more resplendent,

The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of Religion.

(Starting From Paumanok, v. 10)

In the rest of this great sprawling text, the word religion itself is hardly mentioned, though Whitman finds the old religions did not go half far enough:

I heard what was said of the universe,

Hear it and heard it of several thousand years;

It is middling well as far as it goes but is that all?

Magnifying and applying come I,

Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,

Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah,

Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson,

Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha,

In my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix engraved,

With Odin and the hideous-faced Mexitli and every idol and image,

Taking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more,

Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days,

(They bore mites as for unfledg'd birds who have now to rise and fly and sing for themselves,)

Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself, bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see,

Discovering as much or more in a framer framing a house,

('Song of Myself', v. 41)

We have seen that many have read Leaves as nothing more than arrogance, and the above passage if widely publicised would be seized upon by the religious fundamentalists as blaspheming every religion that ever existed. Yet, from the perspective of Pure Consciousness Mysticism, Leaves of Grass both justifies all that has gone before and promises a new perspective. Immersing oneself in it, as I have done for some years, does become a religious experience, as Richard Maurice Bucke found: it grew on him slowly, he says, initially leaving no mark, but on subsequent reading displaying small pockets of light, until the whole lit up for him. It is indeed a subtle and elusive thing, by whatever process this book works on an individual: perhaps it is as natural in its construction as a forest, or perhaps Whitman constructed a magic thing by design. Whitman gives us an insight into it in this conversation with Edward Carpenter (Whitman is talking first).

"What lies behind Leaves of Grass is something that few, very few, only one here and there, perhaps oftenest women, are at all in a position to seize. It lies behind almost every line but concealed, studiedly concealed; some passages left purposely obscure. There is something in my nature furtive, like an old hen! You see a hen wandering up and down a hedgerow, looking apparently quite unconcerned, but presently she finds a concealed spot, and furtively lays an egg, and comes away as though nothing had happened! That is how I felt in writing 'Leaves of Grass.' Sloane Kennedy calls me 'artful' which about hits the mark. I think there are truths which it is necessary to envelop or wrap up." I [Carpenter] replied that all through history the old mysteries, or whatever they may have been called, had been held back; and added that probably we had something yet to learn from India in these matters. W.: "I do not myself think there is anything more to come from that source; we must rather look to modern science to open the way. Time alone can absolutely test my poems or any one's. Personally, I think that the 'something' is more present in some of my small later poems than in the 'Song of Myself'. [37]

It is clear that Whitman himself considered Leave to be religious, or to contain the 'old mysteries', and that Bucke, Burroughs and Carpenter found him and his book comparable to any of the great teachers and teachings. To examine it for such under the PCM world-view, we need to explicitly search for the infinite, the immortal, and the embracive, but we do not have to go far into the hedgerows to find Whitman's 'eggs'.

Whitman simply keeps stating that he is this and he is that: just to bring something into his orbit is for Whitman to become it; exactly what D.H.Lawrence objected to. In Pure Consciousness Mysticism we can recognise this expansivity as the losing of personal boundaries, being careful to distinguish between the pathological inversion of this process, leading to madness, and its genuine expression in the mystics. We note already that Whitman appeared not just eminently sane to those who knew him, but a formidable character the expansion that he expresses in Leaves is not at the expense of becoming weak-willed or at the mercy of fools. One of Whitman's simplest statements about his expanded condition is in this verse:

I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contain'd between my hat and boots,

And I peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,

The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.

(Song Of Myself, v. 7)

I am not contained between my hat and boots! This is perhaps one of the clearest and simplest expressions of the infinite to be found in mysticism, summing up the direct experience of the mystics, and at the same time phrasing it in terms of every-day objects. Whitman also hastens to say that he finds that all the things he finds himself to be are good; this is his quality of embraciveness, quite at odds with the Gnostic and Manichean dualist traditions where matter is seen as corrupt, and which have so influenced Christianity; similar reasoning behind Buddhism. He is dualist in the sense of making a distinction between body and soul, but not in the sense of preferring one over the other: they are not in fact separable.

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,

Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,

Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,

Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.

I am satisfied I see, dance, laugh, sing;

As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread,

Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels swelling the house with their plenty,

Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,

That they turn from gazing after and down the road,

And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,

Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?

(Song Of Myself, v.3)

In this extract we are given a clear statement of the equality of body and soul in typical Whitman style (and it is no good pretending that this style will be to everyone's liking; however our job is to look behind the style). Also typical is the veering from the plain statement to the obscure. We are easily with him up to 'I see, dance, laugh, sing;' but in the subsequent lines the scalpel is needed to dissect the meaning. In Jerome Loving's edition he provides a footnote that for 'bed-fellow' we should read God; he does not indicate what the image of baskets covered with white towels would signify in the historical context (new-born babies? fresh bread?), but clearly they are metaphorical gifts of life. Perhaps Whitman experienced the kind of dreamless sleep that Krishnamurti praised:

Sleep is as important as keeping awake, perhaps more so. If during the day time the mind is watchful, self-recollected, observing the inward and outward movement of life, then at night meditation comes as a benediction. The mind wakes up, and out of the depth of silence there is the enchantment of meditation, which no imagination or flight of fancy can ever bring about. It happens without the mind ever inviting it: it comes into being out of the tranquillity of consciousness not within it but outside of it, not in the periphery of thought but beyond the reaches of thought. So there is no memory of it, for remembrance is always of the past, and meditation is not resurrection of the past. It happens out of the fullness of the heart and not out of intellectual brightness and capacity. It may happen night after night, but each time, if you are so blessed, it is new not new in being different from old, but new without the background of the old, new in its diversity and changeless change. [38]

Was Whitman blessed with the same dreamless sleep? Is this the meaning hidden in his baskets? It is quite possible that Whitman woke up with the same freshness that Krishnamurti described in terms of meditation, but that Whitman chose to describe poetically as baskets covered with white towels, that 'swell the house with plenty'. The idea behind the PCM world-view or critique is that, having established the infinite, eternal, and embracive in one author or text, we can make cross-references like this in the hope of illuminating obscurities. Dreamless sleep is an important feature in the lives of mystics, and is consistent with our understanding of their mental states; it is also commented on in another great codification of Indian wisdom: Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. What about the last four lines of the Whitman extract above? It is a major theme in his work, the road down which he gazes, for it represents, particularly in America at that time, the process of life itself; perhaps these stanzas restate the point made countless times in Leaves that he is realized (enlightened); no 'ciphering' or intellectualising is needed, but just to participate in life.

If we return to the expansive and infinite in Leaves of Grass, then it is clearly in the repeated use of the 'cataloguing' (which brought so much criticism) that Whitman wishes to bring our attention to this part of his nature, and by example to this part of our own nature. The following is a typical passage where Whitman erases himself and sings instead of the existence that fills him, and with which he wishes to erase the reader and fill them too.

The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,

The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,

The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,

The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,

The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,

The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,

The deacons are ordain'd with cross'd hands at the altar,

The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,

The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and looks at the oats and rye,

The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm'd case,

(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's bed-room;)

The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,

He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr the manuscript;

The malform'd limbs are tied to the surgeon's table,

What is removed drops horribly in a pail;

The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove,

The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass,

The young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do not know him;)

Whitman intrudes briefly in the last stanza, and then goes on for several pages listing scenes of American life, finishing the verse with the following:

And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,

And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,

And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

(Song Of Myself, v. 15)

A large part, but by no means the bulk, of Leaves consists of Whitman claiming identity in one way or another with the manifest and manifold life of America, though also correcting us if we think him this narrow in his focus, by also introducing other peoples, continents, and eras. In other passages he dwells on the perfection of things, small and large:

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'oeuvre 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,

And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,

And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.


I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots,

And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over,

And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,

But call any thing back when I desire it.

(Song of Myself, v. 31)

And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over! What an extraordinary image! But what follows is subtle and open to interpretation. For reasons that will become clearer when we examine the work of Douglas Harding, there exists an interpretation of the last two lines of the above passage that is very important: the manifold, that is the prolific and exuberant nature of existence, could easily overwhelm, and it is possible that Whitman is hinting here how this is dealt with. If one is stuccoed all over with birds and animals, one also needs to be unstuck of them, and so he has distanced what is behind him for good reasons, though able to bring anything back when required.

In PCM the concept of the infinite covers the type of expansiveness painted by Whitman, but also looks for its corollary, an emptiness or nothingness, or perhaps silence. However, we do not find much of this in Leaves, other perhaps than in the distancing just mentioned. The nearest we have is an acceptance and welcoming of death as the necessary substrate to life, but not an explicit engagement with any aspect of reality related to the Indian concept of nirvana. Whitman's bliss, as expressed in his songs, is of the manifest, while he reserves his silence for his private life.

That Whitman finds himself deathless is also beyond doubt: he touches on this again and again in Leaves. There are even many passages that suggest an understanding of reincarnation, though he does not use the word or spell it out as Krishna does. Perhaps he knows, perhaps he doesn't, but Whitman's philosophy doesn't need it, and certainly doesn't need one of its major sub-texts: karma. There is no sin or guilt with Whitman, and no need for a theory of punishment.

Let us look at some passages that are quite explicit about the eternal:

The soul,

Forever and forever longer than soil is brown and solid longer than water ebbs and flows.

I will make poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most spiritual poems,

And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,

For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul and of immortality.

(Starting from Paumanok, v. 6)

This passage hints at the immortality of the soul, and also repeats another great Whitman theme: the material is the basis for his songs of immortality; the ground and the fuel. In the next extract he talks of that which is not taken from one on the death of the body, and also, like Socrates, says that death is beautiful:

I will make the true poem of riches,

To earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres and goes forward and is not dropt by death,

I will effuse egotism and show it underlying all, and I will be the bard of personality,

And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other,

And sexual organs and acts! do you concentrate in me, for I am determin'd to tell you with courageous clear voice to prove you illustrious,

And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future,

And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn'd to beautiful results,

And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death,

(Starting from Paumanok, v. 12)

In the above extract Whitman also expands on the sexual themes that shocked some of his 19th century audience; at the same time he extols egotism and personality; also he throws in, as he does at almost every opportunity, his immense satisfaction in the equality of male and female, the satisfaction of the existence of both one and the other. The next extract reminds one again of Socrates:

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?

I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

(Song Of Myself, v. 7)

In the next extract Whitman is talking about animals and how he recognises tokens of himself in them I take it to hint at previous lives as animals (as mentioned before, I have my own dim recollections of lives as animals):

So they show their relations to me and I accept them,

They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.

I wonder where they get those tokens,

Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?

(Song Of Myself, v. 32)

In the next passage Whitman extends his deathlessness to even the least of his fellow-human beings (whom he calls manikins), putting to shame all the religious teachers who make a privilege of it:

The little plentiful manikins skipping around in collars and tail's coats,

I am aware who they are, (they are positively not worms or fleas,)

I acknowledge the duplicates of myself, the weakest and shallowest is deathless with me,

What I do and say the same waits for them,

Every thought that flounders in me the same flounders in them.

(Song Of Myself, v. 42)

(Whitman knows his own greatness, but at the same time knows he is no more than the weakest and shallowest person.) In the next passage he says he will come again, though we know he will do it not out of duty or for any purpose (as Krishna does) but for the joy of it:

I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,

My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,

Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern,

Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years,

(Song Of Myself, v. 43)

In the longer passage that follows Whitman shrugs off death again as he does countless times in Leaves, hints again at reincarnation, and also invites us to the event of birth through 'the sills of the exquisite flexible doors' (note that an accoucheur is a male midwife):

And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try and alarm me.

To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes,

I see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting,

I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,

And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.


And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me,

I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,

I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish'd breasts of melons.

And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,

(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)

In the following complete poem Whitman is talking about his periodic incarnation, and one has to contrast the joyous prospect for him of birth with the Buddhist preoccupation with the cessation of the wheel of birth and death (note also that Whitman simply cannot leave women out of even the shortest celebration):

TO THE GARDEN OF THE WORLD

To the garden of the world anew descending,

Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding,

The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and being,

Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber,

The revolving cycles in their wide sweep having brought me again,

Amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all wondrous,

My limbs and the quivering fire that ever plays through them, for reasons, most wondrous,

Existing I peer and penetrate still,

Content with the present, content with the past,

By my side or back of me Eve following,

Or in front, and I following her just the same.

One more passage on Whitman and the eternal:

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.

I know I am august,

I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,

I see that the elementary laws never apologize,

(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)


I exist as I am, that is enough,

If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

And if each and all be aware I sit content.


One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,

And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,

I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.


My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite,

I laugh at what you call dissolution,

And I know the amplitude of time.

(Song Of Myself, v. 20)

As usual, when we examine a Whitman passage for one thing, we find many others, such are the density and interrelatedness of ideas. We find references to immortality in two places in this passage: 'I know I am deathless,' and 'I laugh at what you call dissolution'. He also throws in a reference to the infinite in denying that his orbit can be defined by any circle, and spells out for us that he makes no apologies for his nature, radically different as it is to what would be conventionally supposed (we shall see that Douglas Harding has an interesting perspective on our natures being different to what is supposed). He also seems to be commenting on the paradox of being at the centre of the universe when others must also clearly be so, by raising the issue of whether others are aware or not (though the passage could just be interpreted as asking whether others are aware of him). We shall look into this issue in more depth later, but it is worth pointing out that in one way or another the question has troubled many thinkers, and is sometimes referred to in philosophy as the 'other minds' problem. Typically for Whitman, he observes the problem, but does not make it a problem: the world is constructed this way, and he is content with it. It is worth noting, for future reference however, the line 'One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,' as the concept of existence as aware is important to PCM.

We have seen that Leaves contains an expression of the infinite confined mainly to the expansive, with little or none of its complementary half: nothingness. In Whitman's expressions of the eternal, we find however nearly all the references common amongst the great mystics: the sense of immortality, the loss of the fear of death, the celebration of the present moment, and even evidence of reincarnation. We don't find any reference to silence of the mind, though in his life Whitman was often alone and silent, or even silent in company. There is easily enough evidence however to conclude that Whitman should be considered a mystic of the first rank. From this position we can examine his particular embraciveness, remembering that in this term resides much of what differentiates mystics from each other.
Whitman's embraciveness is clearly monumental; possibly the most celebratory and inclusive statement of oneness with the world to be found in any literature from any continent or era. What precisely characterises it though? We can see that it differs from the embracivity of the Gita in an explicit acceptance of the evils of the world. Before we can go further into this question however, we should examine the negative sides of Whitman. He suffered in his life, physically and emotionally, but the presence of suffering did not diminish existence for him, as it did for the Buddha: Whitman's compassion is no less than the Buddha's either:

Agonies are one of my changes of garments,

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,

My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.

(Song of Myself, v. 33)

Whitman's compassion is no less (he uses the word 'compassionater' many times in Leaves) but the image of him leaning on his cane and observing agony may seem rather remote. The detachment this conjures up reminds us of his flat narration of the massacre of four hundred and twelve soldiers in Texas but, to really grasp Whitman, we also have to have his courage; the courage which faces suffering: the disease, old age and death which so shocked the young Gautama into finding an end to them. Whitman may strike the tender mind as callous, but I am offering the view that he is nothing of the sort: he is mature in comparison to the Buddha, a maturity we find in many seasoned livers of life.

Scattered through Leaves we find references to bad things as well as good things, but accommodated as part of the order of things in his broad sweep across life. Clearly excrement is a part of nourishment, injury and illness part of health, natural disaster part of nature, and death part of life. What of man's wickedness however? How does Whitman avoid the perception, common, it seems, to many 'intelligent' people, that others are generally deficient? How does he manage to love people on such a vast scale, and not in fantasy, but in reality, as all accounts of his life bear out? As we have seen he had little tolerance for fools, but seems to find very few of them. Is this simply a form of optimism?

The answer to this must be no. Whitman sees far too clearly to be superficially optimistic, and the very thrust of his work goes against any kind of utopia; his labours are to show us the perfect now (though he also loves the future). But this is not the perfection of the simple-minded, and he is well aware of the anguish and horror that the human condition can encompass. The following verses give us a glimpse of his keen eye for the worst, a striking contrast to the bulk of Leaves, that derives from a keen eye for the best:

Whoever you are, come forth! or man or woman come forth!

You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house though you built it, or though it has been built for you.

Out of the dark confinement! out from behind the screen!

It is useless to protest, I know all and expose it.

We could take the reference to a house literally, but, with a background in mysticism, we are alert to the metaphor of the house: in Buddhism it is the body, and usually on fire the awakened ones are urging you to leave it. Here it is more likely to refer to the cocooned safety of artifice and manners, whether those protections are slavishly inherited from society, or are more unique to the individual, as will be clear as the passage continues:

Behold through you as bad as the rest,

Through the laughter, dancing, dining, supping, of people,

Inside of dresses and ornaments, inside of those wash'd and trimm'd faces,

Behold a secret silent loathing and despair.


No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear the confession,

Another self, a duplicate of every one, skulking and hiding it goes,

Formless and wordless through the streets of the cities, polite and bland in the parlors,

In the cars of railroads, in steamboats, in the public assembly,

Home to the houses of men and women, at the table, in the bedroom, everywhere,

Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright, death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones,

Under the broadcloth and gloves, under the ribbons and artificial flowers,

Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a syllable of itself,

Speaking of any thing else but never of itself.

(Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, v. 13)

Death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones! Whitman has known it and seen it, perhaps in one phrase summed up the coming alienation of the 20th century intellectual, but, as suddenly as he takes the gloves of to dissect with razor-sharp instruments the cancer in men's souls (the secret silent loathing and despair), he leaves the theme again and returns to sunnier vistas. Whitman takes another pot-shot at the poverty of man's spirit, again out of the blue, in this passage:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,

I stand and look at them long and long.


They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

(Song Of Myself, v. 32)

There is no doubt that, when in the mood, Whitman could be devastating in his criticism of his contemporaries, but it is important to realize that such passages are very rare in Leaves, and provide only a trace of salt in the dish. They are important however, because they dispel the notion that his positive embraciveness arises from a simple-mindedness, far from it. Whitman chooses to emphasise the positive and wholesome.

If the reader wishes to find a complete poem written as an inversion of Whitman's usual proportion of wholesome to critical, then turn to Respondez!, found in earlier versions of Leaves, but later edited out by Whitman. [39] It is almost wholly negative, and, out of respect to Whitman's intentions, it is not reproduced here. We must not ignore the negative in Whitman's life though; his later biographers often focus on his declining years as evidence of his fallibility, and it may well be that from the point of his first stroke that Whitman's spirits were lowered, and indeed some of the photographs taken as he became progressively less mobile indicate a melancholy. The temptation to use this to refute the message of Leaves is misguided, I think, and ignores the inevitable vulnerability of a mystic so uniquely involved in the world. We can imagine Carpenter's Indian sage weathering ill-health serenely (as Ramakrishna and Maharshi did with their terminal cancers), but, as Carpenter's insight shows, Whitman was possibly the greater for his lack of aloofness.

If we accept the orientation of Whitman to infinite and eternal (leaving for the moment his unique embraciveness), we can examine now his pedagogy. That Whitman in an undramatic way saw himself as a teacher has been hinted at by the comment he let slip to Carpenter about being a 'furtive old hen', and the passage quoted by Burroughs where Whitman has to be wrestled with for the 'solid prizes of the universe'. Whitman is in best humour in this passage, and represents an unusual standpoint here: the aspirant has to fight him for realisation, perhaps reminiscent of Gurdjieff or some Zen Masters; all of which is at odds with his frequent lament (and the lament of all the mystics) that they cannot find ears to hear them. This poem, which could be read only in sexual terms, touches on a common theme in Leaves: the continual search for a receptive spirit:

AMONG THE MULTITUDE

Among the men and women the multitude,

I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,

Acknowledging none else, not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any nearer than I am,

Some are baffled, but that one is not that one knows me.


Ah lover and perfect equal,

I meant that you should discover me so by faint indirections,

And when I meet you mean to discover you by the like in you.


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References for Whitman, part Two
[35] May, Robert M., Cosmic Consciousness Revisited, Element, 1991
[36] McGinn, Bernard, 'The Language of Love in Christian and Jewish Mysticism' in Katz, Steven (Ed.) Mysticism and Language, Oxford University Press 1992, pp 202 - 235
[37] Carpenter, Edward, Days with Walt Whitman, London: George Allen, 1906, p. 43
[38] Krishanmurti, J. The Only Revolution, New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1970, p.97
[39] Abrams, Sam, The Neglected Walt Whitman: Vital Texts, New York, London: Four Walls Eight Windows 1993, p. 59

Introduction: Pure Consciousness Mysticism
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