The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [113]
Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of slaves,
Voices of prostitutes and of deformed persons,
Voices of the diseased and despairing,
and of thieves
and dwarfs, … Of the trivial and flat and foolish and despised,
Of fog in the air and beetles rolling balls of dung.
Dumb people, dumb objects. Not everything comes into the world with a tongue, it seems. The poet Miriam Levine, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in New Jersey, tells me that her family used to speak of articulate men and women as having been “born with a mouthpiece.” Those who can express themselves in speech have been given that mysterious something, like the mouthpiece of a trumpet or the reed of a wind instrument, through which experience is transmuted into sound. Whitman receives the mute into the self in order to articulate what he calls their “buried speech.” He becomes the mouthpiece of the dumb, and not, I suspect, of these objects and slaves alone but of his family and his lovers. This last in particular: in art as in life Whitman was always attracted to the figure of an inarticulate young man:
… I pick out some low person for my dearest friend,
He shall be lawless, rude, illiterate …,
O you shunn’d persons, I at least do not shun you,
I come forthwith in your midst, I will be your poet …
Peter Doyle was such an illiterate; Whitman taught him to read and write.
Knowing that Whitman’s art begins in speechlessness, we may find a new meaning in his invocation to the soul: “Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, / … Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvéd voice.” It is the soul that has the mouthpiece, the mysterious ability to translate dumb hieroglyphs into speech.* The soul acknowledges and accepts what has entered the self by uttering its name. This responsive speech we call “celebration” or “thanksgiving.” In the fairy tales the spoken “thank you” or the act of gratitude accomplishes the transformation and frees the original gift; so in the poetry, for the soul to give speech to the stuff of experience is to accept it and to pass it along. Moreover, by Whitman’s model, the self does not come to life until the objects flow through it. (The increase does not appear until the gift moves to the third party.) Celebratory speech is the return gift by which what has been received by the self is freed and passed along. To open a poem saying “I celebrate myself” is therefore to announce the reciprocation-by-song which will simultaneously assure the life of the self and the liveliness of what has been bestowed upon it.* Or, to put it another way, by Whitman’s assumptions, we shall lose that life which remains unarticulated. This is why the family prizes the child with the mouthpiece (sometimes—not all families want to live!), or why a nation prizes its poets (sometimes)—and this also is the urgency behind Whitman’s attention to the mute: he would assure their lives by giving them speech. He would be the tongue for the “living and buried speech … always vibrating here, [the] howls restrain’d by decorum …”; he would allow his thoughts to be “the hymns of the praise of things,” so that the spirits which have been bestowed upon him—by the unlettered boy, the wood duck, the eddies of fog—will not perish.†
Before we describe Whitman’s work more fully in these terms, I should pause to clarify where, exactly, the gift lies in the creation of a work of art. In common usage the term covers three different things, unfortunately. And while I have tried to be more precise in my own usage, some confusion still creeps in. The initial gift is what is bestowed upon the self— by perception, experience, intuition, imagination, a dream, a vision, or by another work of art. Occasionally the unrefined materials of experience