There’s something curious in Whitman’s Song of Myself.
Even the title speaks out of two sides. For one, it is a poem about himself, seemingly declaring some type of propositional knowledge about himself. It appears prima facie to be an exposition of and about and on the self; or perhaps of, about, and on the person of Walt Whitman. There is a hubris and a humility in this. The hubris comes in the form of a supposed enlightened self-awareness. “Know thyself” is the directive that motivates this search for self-knowledge. But in that Socratic prodding, there is the implicit assumption that to know oneself is to also care or work on oneself. One’s self is never known in advance; it is not analyzable in a vacuum with the aid of a mathematical equation; the self is not a pure object for inquiry. Self-exploration is both a knowing and a doing. A knowledge-act. A type of self-praxis. Thus, there is also a humility in Whitman’s Song. And this is a humility that attests to the agonistic interconnectedness of Whitman himself within the immanent material networks in which he (quite literally) finds himself (both in his thrownness and also in a journey of discovery).
This humility is what opens up the other side of the poem’s title. For this is not merely a song of oneself, but is also (ironically perhaps) a song of otherness. He sees himself as the singular-universal embodied. He feels the lashes of the slave; he fears the tempest threatening the sailor; he ponders the pious prayers of the Quakeress. They are of him, as hands to a clock. And we must assume that he too is a hand for the Quakeress’ clock; a ticking poet speaking of temporalities and anxieties and expectations that are both familiar and foreign to her.
This causes me to pause and consider the hands revolving around my clockface. Can I sense the otherness of others that composes my mechanics? If I am the clock and they the hands, then there is only abstract distinctions between us; the very type of abstract differentiation that the immanence of touch in Whitman’s Song dispels. A convergence of clock and hands, a convolution of the hierarchy between center and periphery. What emerges is a living self that speaks through others and feels by them; a self re-made in and by their re-makings.
There is no comfort in this. I am less connected to other selves in this frantic and fragmented interconnectivity. The simpler days of carbon copies and parochial commitments offer More. Perhaps with freedom from monotony, monotheism, and monarchy has come a terror of self-sufficiency. This might be a type of development, of Geist suffering through the awkward stirrings of puberty. But it may also just be a wrong turn, or even worse a catastrophe. Instead of suffering a steep incline with the promise of an exhilarating drop just ahead, we have become derailed. And this hope we feel is nothing more than the rush of wind stimulating our senses as we race to an all-but-certain immovable end.
This is why the times are so ex-citing. We are addicted to flashes of thrill while we are being dragged across the black depths. From down here, an iridescent sparkle is felt as a Damascus Event. But all we have are moments. We catch moments of the universal in these sparkles, but they come too far spaced from one another. No patterns. No design. No tapestry. We are but strands loosed from form.
Whitman’s Song is hopeful and tragic. It induces in me a false hope of worldedness. It promises a home at sea. But as much as I might admire the pre-reflective sincerity of the oceans and their occupants, I feel forever trapped with a pomegranate in my right and flint in my left as I stare inward hoping these primitive mythological elements might be my salvation.