The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [110]
… O the winter shall not freeze you delicate leaves,
Every year shall you bloom again, out from where you retired you shall emerge again … *
The self becomes gifted when it identifies with a commerce of gifts and the gifted self is prolific. In nature the Osiris-force is the resurrection of the wheat; in a commerce of gifts it is the increase; in the gifted self it is creativity, and for a poet, in particular, it is original speech.
Whitman says that “the inmost secrets of art” sleep between sympathy and pride. We have so far addressed him primarily by the first of these terms, sympathy, the receptive phase of his imagination. Objects approach and enter the permeable self, giving it identity—or, rather, a sequence of identities, for the old perishes as the new enters. Particular identity is dismembered, the particular body decays. But the self is not lost, new “sprouts take and accumulate.” With them we come to the second pole of Whitman’s art, the assertion of an active, autonomous, and idiosyncratic being. By “pride” Whitman means not haughtiness but something closer to self-confidence. Animals are proud in this sense, “so placid and self-contained …, / They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins …” The proud are those who accept their being as sufficient and justified. The proud man, in Whitman’s constantly repeated image, is he who will not remove his hat for any person, institution, or custom. Whitman himself used to wear his hat in the house.
Pride is not antithetical to sympathy, but it is selective. “Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” counsels Whitman in the voice of pride. When pride is active, Whitman’s sympathy has only what the mystics call a “selective surrender.” Some things must be denied admission to the core of his being. Earlier we saw his senses surrender him to a lover; they reappear later as the agents of pride, and the result is different:
You laggards there on guard! look to your arms!
In at the conquer’d doors they crowd! I am possess’d!
Embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering …
“To arms!”—this is an unusual note of quahaug-consciousness in “Song of Myself.” Whitman wants to harden himself. Why? Because at this moment in the poem sympathy has drawn him toward the dying and the empty. They enter his body: he is a convict handcuffed in prison, he is a child arrested for stealing:
Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at
the last gasp,
My face is ash-color’d, my sinews gnarl, away from me
people retreat.
Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in
them,
I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.
This is dangerous. It is one thing to sympathize with the sick, but quite another to be infected with cholera. It is one thing to accept the perishing that leads to rebirth, and quite another to suffer the dead-end death in which the soul is lost. As D. H. Lawrence pointed out in his essay on Whitman, the leper hates his leprosy: to sympathize with him means to join in his hatred, not to identify with the disease. Here pride demands the assertion of the self against the outer object. Or better, it calls for a bestowal, an out-breathing, of the contents of the self, not a new infusion. The beggar holding out his hat has nothing to offer the self. It is he who needs to be filled—with food, matter, flux, a shot of the spirit. In short, the terms of the poem must change. Sympathy is insufficient. The next lines are unique in Whitman:
Enough! enough! enough!
Somehow I have been stunn’d. Stand back! …
I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.
That I could forget the mockers and insults!
That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of
the bludgeons and hammers!
That I could look with a separate look on my own
crucifixion and bloody crowning.
I remember now,
I resume the overstaid fraction,
The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to
it, or to any graves,
Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.
I troop forth replenish