The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [105]
In this initial phase of his art, Whitman is essentially passive and things beyond the skin are active, “libidinous” and “electric.” Natural objects find him attractive. They approach him of their own accord and push at the edges of the self, like lovers:
Crowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin,
Jostling me through streets and public halls, coming
naked to me at night, …
Calling my name from flower-beds, vines, tangled
under-brush, …
Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and
giving them to be mine.
When the poet is in the gifted state, the world seems generous, exhaling odors and auras toward him. “I believe,” he says, “the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps…” Animals, stones, the people in their daily lives enter into his body. “I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots…” The fishermen packing layers of halibut in the hold, two men arguing over a penny, “the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick … / All this I swallow, it tastes good…”
By taking his nourishment through his senses, Whitman comes to have a carnal knowledge of the world. His participatory sensuality “informs” him in both senses—it fills him up and it instructs.
Oxen …, what is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.
The poet studies inside of objects the way the rest of us might study in the library.
To me the converging objects of the universe
perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing
means.
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
… bring me tokens of myself…
I do not know where they got those tokens,
I must have passed that way untold times ago and
negligently dropt them,
Myself moving forward then and now and forever …
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