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By Root 831 0

—not the answers but the quitting of doubt. It is an ancient wisdom that questioning itself postpones or prohibits faith. In a Buddhist sutra a monk comes to the Buddha saying he shall abandon the religious life unless the master can answer his questions. Is the world eternal, or isn’t it? Does the saint exist after death or doesn’t he? Are the soul and the body identical or are they two things? The Buddha says he does not hold to either side of any of these questions, for they are “questions which tend not to edification.” Two lines from Kabir, the fifteenth-century mystic poet, make the same point:

The flavor of floating through the ocean of deathless

life has quieted all my questions.

Just as the tree is inside of the seed, so all our diseases

are in the asking of these questions.

Several times in Leaves of Grass Whitman tells us of periods in his own life when he could not feel his perfect faith. “I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,” he confides to the reader in one poem, “I too knitted the old knot of contrariety.” One of the love poems suggests the content of Whitman’s questions—and tells how they were quieted. The poems gathered under the heading Calamus address themselves, in Whitman’s terms, to “the passion of friendship for men,” to “adhesiveness, manly love.” They are quite clearly the record, sometimes frank and sometimes veiled, of Whitman’s frustrated love affair with a man in the late 1850s. A poem called “Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances” lists the doubts he suffers when he cannot feel “the equanimity of things”:

… That we may be deluded,

That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations

after all,

That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful

fable only,

May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men,

hills, shining and flowing waters,

… are … only apparitions …

But, like Kabir, Whitman found something to dissolve his doubt:

When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long

while holding me by the hand,

… Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom,

I am silent, I require nothing further,

I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of

identity beyond the grave,

But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied, He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.

We have now seen three situations in which Whitman falls into a gifted state. Reckoning and dividing, talking and doubt, all leave him when his lover holds his hand, when the god-lover shares his bed and gives him the baskets of rising dough, and when the soul plunges its tongue into his breast. Note that in each of these cases Whitman’s body is the instrument of his conversion. The intercourse that leads him to the gifted state is a carnal commerce, one of bread and tongues, hands and hearts. Whitman is what has traditionally been known as an enthusiast. To be “enthusiastic” originally meant to be possessed by a god or inspired by a divine afflatus. The bacchants and maenads were enthusiasts, as were the prophets of the Old Testament, the apostles of the New, or, more recently, Shakers and Pentecostal Christians. Enthusiasts, having received a spirit into the body, have never been hesitant to describe their spiritual knowledge in terms of the flesh, to speak of “a sweet burning in the heart” or of a “ravished soul.” Whitman is no exception, as all our examples so far illustrate. He takes his own body to be the font of his religion:

If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the

spread of my own body, or any part of it,

Translucent mould of me it shall be you!

Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!

Firm masculine colter it shall be you!

You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings

of my life! …

My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!

Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you!

This is the enthusiastic voice, both its subject and its breathlessness.*

Enthusiasm has recurrently fallen into disrepute because there