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By Root 844 0

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:

… The effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation, …

My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,

The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman

I love,

The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doings or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations …

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

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary …

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:

I behold from the beach your crooked inviting

fingers, …

We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,

Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse, Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you … Sea beating broad and convulsive breaths,

Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves, …

I am integral with you …

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:

I hear the trained soprano … she convulses me like the

climax of my love-grip;

The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,

It wrenches unnamable ardors from my breast,

It throbs me to gulps of the farthest down horror,

It sails me … I dab with bare feet … they are licked by

the indolent waves,

I am exposed … cut by bitter and poisoned hail,

Steeped amid honeyed morphine … my windpipe

squeezed in the fakes of death,

Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,

And what we call Being.

The outer