The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [100]
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 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) …
Whitman puts hierarchy to sleep. He attends to life wherever it moves. He would be useless in that ethic’s-class dilemma mentioned earlier in this book: deciding which member of the family to throw from the sinking lifeboat. All things carry equivalent worth simply by virtue of their existence, be they presidents or beetles rolling balls of dung. The contending and reckoning under which most of us suffer most of the time—in which this thing or that thing is sufficient or insufficient, this lover, that lover, this wine, that movie, this pair of pants—is laid aside. You may relax,
The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,
The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are
in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.
Having fallen into this state, Whitman resists being drawn back into that part of the mind which reckons value or splits things apart. He refuses commerce with what we might call “the brain that divides” or with any spirit which might divorce him from his newly wedded soul, or which might—to fill out the list with Whitman’s typical unities—divide men from women, human beings from animals, the rich from the poor, the smart from the dumb, or the present from the past and the future. In a striking passage toward the beginning of “Song of Myself,” Whitman declares his satisfaction with his awakening and asks rhetorically:
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?
In the first edition of the poem it is God who shares the poet’s bed and leaves the baskets of rising dough. In an early notebook, Whitman, thinking of various heroes (Homer, Columbus, Washington), writes that “after none of them … does my stomach say enough and satisfied.—Except Christ; he alone brings the perfumed bread, ever vivifying to me, ever fresh and plenty, ever welcome and to spare.” Each of these breads, like that of the hunger fantasy, is a gift (from the god-lover, to the soul), and Whitman senses he would lose that gift were he to “turn from gazing after” his lover and reckon its value or peek to see if the baskets hold whole wheat or rye.
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.
In abandoning the brain that divides, Whitman quits as well all questioning and argument (what he calls “talk”). I do not mean he is silent—he affirms and celebrates—but his mouth is sealed before the sleepless, pestering questions of the dividing mind. “Master,” Whitman wrote in a preface addressed to Emerson, “I am a man who has perfect faith.” Faith does not question. Or, to give the matter its proper shading, faith is the aftermath of questioning