"Vestiges
of Tomorrow:
Whitman as a Conduit of Sacred Literature."
An excerpt from the epistolary work,
Letters from Paris,
by Rob Couteau.
Vestiges
of Tomorrow:
Whitman as a Conduit of Sacred Literature. An
excerpt from the epistolary work, Letters from Paris,
by Rob
Couteau
For many artists, it’s the spirit of Whitman–something that transcends even the poetry–that
touches us in the most profound manner. His gesture and regard are as worthy
of study as his principal labor: his Leaves.
Why so? Whitman touched a transcendental dimension of life, and this touch
resonates in his verse. If we’ve ever experienced a “sacred absolute,” then
we may hear Whitman’s hushed call to us, as well. If we’ve lived a Blakian
moment–wherein a cosmos appears in a grain of sand (or in a Whitmanesque blade
of grass)–then his words ring clear and true.
But minus such epiphanies, the Great Gray Poet may simply appear
as a charming doddering old fool with a long pretentious beard. For this transcendental
view requires a personal touchstone: an intimate experience that the poet
hails in rapture. Without such a direct, immediate experience, it remains
impossible to penetrate the essence of a Whitman, a Blake, or a Lao Tsu.
Whitman’s Leaves
are democratic: free for all to peruse. Yet they remain accessible only to the
initiated. To the pragmatist, rationalist, or confirmed atheist, an invisible
wall–one separating the sacred from the profane–surrounds his burning green
garden.
And perhaps it’s best that way. As we peer over the enclosure
and espy a sickly old man lolling about, Whitman seems inoffensive enough,
and he isn’t perceived as the looming threat that he really is. A rabble-rouser
and revolutionary of the first order, he disguised himself well. It was precisely
in this manner that he succeeded to–in Henry Miller’s words–steer his canoe,
untroubled, through hazardous, tumultuous water.*
But if the poet’s message is taken to heart, then
all is transformed. Whitman is a subversive who doesn’t advocate in
any direct, obvious, or literal manner the demolition of the social structure.
Instead, he accepts all. Yet, with this acceptance, he triggers the greatest
revolt of all.
As he says in his opening, “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to
you.” Here, the equalizing essence is one of spirit:beyond governmental, political, or institutional control–even
beyond the rapacious claws of our so-called religious leaders.
Whitman
realized that while the developmental level of each particular soul remains
unequal and in flux, it’s the transpersonal spirit in man that lends him greatest
value. This is what Whitman is ultimately concerned with and what he ceaselessly
promulgates.
In the course of our material struggles, we move beyond mere
matter. The animating force within us–which propels us through quotidien life–is,
in essence, a feeling, an esprit.
It remains beyond any tangible aspect of reality. Yet it resides in our atoms,
in our material nexus.
So, what is it? Is it matter? Is it energy? Is it both–yet neither?
Whitman’s questioning is penned in such a manner that it transcends such
dualities. And that’s the message of the East, as well. Perhaps, it isn’t
coincidental that certain sacred texts were first translated into English
during Whitman’s time, in the nineteenth century. As others have pointed out,
it was either this Eastern connection or a direct religious experience (one
that Whitman alludes to in his notes) that forms the “missing link” in his
development, and that stirred him to envision the Leaves.*
Leaves
of Grass must be categorized as visionary
literature. It’s woven of the same stuff as the Bible, the I Ching,
or Lao Tsu’s Tao. Thus, when we examine Whitman’s
scripture and read it with an open heart, we experience something unique in
a literary and existential sense. This stuff is more than mere poetry. It
represents a philosophical-spiritual gnosis, rooted in centuries of experience,
meditation, and thought.
Such prose doesn’t originate in the ego, in the conscious level. Whitman’s
verse was dictated from a considerably deeper source: from what we might call
the archetypal or spiritual wellspring of life. But whatever name we lend
to such mystery is of little import. These insights–polished through labor
and love–have their origins elsewhere. They run through the millennia, yet
they sprout in individual artists. And we're drawn to these creators just
as they're drawn to this perennial substrate and center.
As with all visionary literature, the "Leaves" are also embryonic. They point ahead, to
what will come. For the embryo comprises not only vestiges of our evolutionary
past; it carries traces of what will arrive tomorrow–our future forms of development.
Somewhere in Whitman’s regard into
the future–a regard that he called his Leaves–are portends of this as-yet-unrealized tomorrow. With this
tentacular attempt to hail the Bards of Future Time–our poets of today and
of generations henceforth–he was asking us to engender the spirit that animated
his person long ago, and to extend it into the flesh and blood of our own
uncertain era.*
____________________
* See “Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan,” Playboy magazine, February 1966.
* “Whoever has studied Whitman’s life must be amazed at the
skill with which he steered his bark through troubled waters. He never relinquishes
his grasp of the oar, never flinches, never wavers, never compromises.” Henry
Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
(Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1962), p. 108.
* “Supreme
American inheritor of Romanticism, Whitman too believed the poet was the agency
of a transcendent power and created ‘rapt verse’ in an ‘ecstasy of statement,
a trance, yet with all the senses alert ...’ [...] Whitman was being quite
literal when he spoke of ecstasies and illuminations. [...] Like Emerson and
Thoreau, he had studied the Eastern literature of ecstasy ...” Justin Kaplan,
Walt Whitman. A Life (New York: HarperCollins,
2003), pp. 189-191.
* Cf. “Painters
… dead and buried speak to the next generation or to several succeeding generations
through their work.” Van Gogh, as cited in Pascal Bonafoux; Anthony Zielonka,
trans.Van Gogh: The Passionate Eye (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 2001), p. 92.
