The Gift (26 page)

But the objects cannot be read as a book is read. They are hieroglyphs, sacred signs that reveal their meanings only to that host who is gracious enough to receive them into the body. The leaf of grass is “a uniform hieroglyphic,” as are the oxen or those soggy clods, and perception, in the gifted state, is a constant hierophany. The ducks scared up in the woods reveal their “wing’d purposes.” Objects are “dumb, beautiful ministers” which articulate their ministration when they are accepted by the self.

Whitman calls on us to leave the “distillation” or “perfume” gathered in books and to come out of doors to breathe the thinner “atmosphere,” the original hieroglyphs, not the commentary of the scribes. As we inhale this atmosphere of primary objects, they exhale gnosis, a prolific, carnal science, not an intellectual knowing. “I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.” As his body and its senses are the font of Whitman’s religion, so the perception of natural objects is his sacrament. “The bull and the bug never worshipp’d half enough, / Dung and dirt more admirable than was dream’d.” Whitman lists the gods of old and then says he learns more from watching “the framer framing a house”; “a curl of smoke or a hair on the back of my hand [is] just as curious as any revelation.”

What is the knowledge that the hieroglyphs reveal? It is in part a thing we cannot “talk” about (the poem, like the eyes of the oxen, is to be received into the self, read with the breath). One or two things are clear, however. As with the first epiphany, Whitman’s constant communion with objects reveals the wholeness of creation. He comes to feel “in place” through this commerce, and knows his own integration with the world. He says the animals

Natural objects—living things in particular—are like a language we only faintly remember. It is as if creation had been dismembered sometime in the past and all things are limbs we have lost that will make us whole if only we can recall them. Whitman’s sympathetic perception of objects is a remembrance of the wholeness of things.

Secondly, and here we come around to the beginning again, the reception of objects reveals that the gifted self is a thing that breathes. Their entrance is
itself the
lesson. We are not sealed in calcium like the clam. Identity is neither “yours” nor “mine,” but comes of a communion with the world. “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Whitman makes a distinction between the self and the narrower identity. Toward the beginning of “Song of Myself” he offers a compendium of personal history:

But these, he says, “are not the Me myself.”

Identity forms and disperses inside the container of the self. Recurrently in the work we find a curious image, that of a sea alive with countless particles which occasionally cohere into more complex bodies, and then dissolve again. To be born, to take on life in a particular form, is to be drawn into “a knit of identity” out of the “pallid float” of this sea. Whitman says that he, like the rest of us, was “struck from the float forever held in solution” and “receiv’d identity by [his] body …” Identity is specific, sexed, time-bound, mortal. It is transitory, drawn together and then dispersed. The self is more enduring, standing apart from “the pulling and hauling.” In terms of our argument so far, the self takes on identity through its reception of objects—be they perceived lilac leaves or the atoms of the physical body—and the self gives up identity as it abandons these objects. The self is not the reception, not the dispersal, not the objects. It is the process (the breathing) or the container (the lung) in which the process occurs.

Whitman is not logically rigorous in his use of “self” and “identity,” but these generalizations offer an approximate beginning. I introduce them because there is a middle phase in the process of the gifted self: between sympathy and pride, between the reception and the bestowal, lies a moment in which new identity comes to life as old identity perishes. A sequence of three of these moments marks the center of “Song of Myself.” In each, Whitman calls on some outer object or person to enter or merge with him, beginning with the sea:

Here is the first hint of the death that lies in Whitman’s sympathy. The water of contact is a soporific, the amorous wet is full of graves. A line in the first edition speaks of a pain accompanying the fusion: “We hurt each other as the bride groom and the bride hurt each other.” Old identity breaks to receive the new. The new may simply replace the old or, as in this figure, old identity may fuse with the outer object, a marriage, new flesh.

The fear, pain, and confusion of this integration is more marked in the next of these three moments. This time Whitman invokes sound; the catalog of what he hears ends with a woman singing in the opera:

The outer object is definitely sexual now, and if only because sexual identity is so deeply felt (especially for one who claims to have “receiv’d identity by [his] body”), both the attraction and the fear are heightened—the singing voice is both honey
and poison. He must choose: will he risk admitting what is clearly foreign into the self or will he erect a protective armor and close himself off? Is this woman’s song a gift to be refused? It is at this point in the poem that Whitman pauses to define “being”; the entrance of the soprano’s voice is followed immediately by the lines, already quoted, which equate being alive with allowing the objects of the world to pass through the self. The living self accepts the frailty of sympathy. “To be in any form, what is that? / … Mine is no callous shell …” Whitman does not deny his hesitancy and fear, but in the end he opens the skin, accepting what is a poison to particular identity so as to receive a higher sweetness for the durable self.

The scene with the opera singer is quickly followed by the strongest of the three moments of tension between the old and the new identity. Whitman has been drawn to the sea and to a woman heard from a distance. Now he says, “To touch my person to someone else’s is about as much as I can stand.” Again, something fearful but inviting overtakes him. He describes the entry in terms of a betrayal by his senses: normally, it seems, his senses act as guards protecting the borders of the self—they let some things enter, they stop others. But when he touches this person, “touch” takes over and he is possessed, both by his own desire and by the lover.

As before, there is something threatening to the particular identity in this fusion with what is foreign to the self. But a new and necessary detail is now added: this time the sensual reception of the other leads toward new life. He is “quiver[ed]… to a new identity”; the panicky union leads to these calmer declarations:

There is a cycle: new identity follows the old. With these “sprouts” we have arrived at Whitman’s central image, the leaves of grass, a form of life that perishes but rises again and again out of its own decay.

•••

Whitman’s grass almost always appears over a grave. His invocation is not “O grass” but “O grass of graves.” The two are constantly connected, from the beginning of the poem where a child asks, “What is grass?” and Whitman’s associations soon lead him to death (“And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves”), to the end of the poem where he describes his own eventual grave with its “leafy lips.”

This distinctive vein of Whitman’s poetry comes, I imagine, out of a meditation on the following brief sentence recorded in his earliest journal: “I know that my body will decay.” No fixed identity can relax in the face of this knowledge. Once it has entered our consciousness, that part of us which takes identity seriously will begin to search for a way of being which could include the fact of death and decay. In the same notebook, Whitman wrote a fragmentary phrase: “Different objects which decay, and by the chemistry of nature, their bodies are [changed?] into spears of grass.” “Song of Myself” is an attempt to replicate this chemistry. In the poem the grass usually appears after something has entered, and altered, the self. The scenes we have just reviewed, the “sprouts” that follow touch, are a good example (or, earlier, Whitman sees the grass for the first time, its “leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,” immediately following his epiphany). Whitman wishes to demonstrate that the self replicates or participates in that chemistry of nature which changes decayed bodies into spears of grass.

At one point in
Leaves of Grass
Whitman speaks of the compost of decay: “It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.” In “Song of Myself” the grass itself speaks: “Growing among black folks as among white, / … I give them the same, I receive them the same.” As the grass is food for animal life, so we animals, with the death
of the body, become food for the grass. It accepts what we bestow upon it, then gives itself away. But this, of course, is also how Whitman pictures the gifted self. When it identifies with “the grass over graves,” therefore, the self assumes an identity harmonious with its own process in the gifted state. The self that identifies with a cycle of gifts takes its own activity as its identity—not the reception of objects, not the bestowal of particular contents, but the entire process, the respiration, the give-and-take of sympathy and pride. And “the grass over graves” therefore comes to stand for more than enduring life in Whitman’s cosmology. It stands for the creative self, the singing self. Not only does the grass sprout from the grave, but it speaks; it is “so many uttering tongues” emerging from “the faint red roofs” of the mouths of the dead.

In accepting the decay of the body, the impermanence of identity, and the permeability of the self, Whitman finds his voice. His tongue comes to life in the grave and begins its song. Or perhaps we should not say “grave,” but “threshold,” for at the moment of change we cannot well distinguish between birth and death:

The “accoucheur” is a midwife or obstetrician, so these “doors” are both an entrance to the grave and an exit from the womb. “The new-born emerging from gates and the dying emerging from gates,” says another poem. Whitman addresses us from this gate or doorway: “From the cinderstrew’d threshold I follow their movements …”; “I wait on
the door-slab.” The poems appear in the frame of the flexible doors, and they themselves are the leaves of grass, threshold gifts uttered from the still-point where life both rises and falls, where identity forms and perishes.

The grass over graves is a very old image, of course; Whitman did not invent it. Vegetation has always been taken as a sign of indestructible life, and the vegetable gods of antiquity were its personification. I discussed Dionysos in an earlier chapter; Osiris is the other good example, the one with which Whitman seems to have been acquainted. A friend of his once recounted that Whitman as a young man living in New York “paraded on Broadway with a red shirt on, open in front …, and compared himself with Christ and Osiris.” Later, in the 1850s, visitors to Whitman’s room in his mother’s house would find a group of unframed pictures pasted on the wall—Hercules, Dionysos or Bacchus, and a satyr. Whitman apparently used to meditate on images of the gods, trying to imagine them present in himself, or trying to speak with their voices. In “Song of Myself” we read: