The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [117]
II • Adhesive Riches
Democratic Vistas, Whitman’s long, rambling, postbellum meditation on art and politics, sets democracy on two opposed foundations, the individual and the masses (the “average,” “the all-leveling aggregate”). Whitman gives preference to neither of these poles in the practice of his democracy, but in describing its formation he begins, as the poetry began, with the individual coming to his powers, or hers, in isolation. “The noiseless operation of one’s isolated Self” precedes community. Our actions and character must spring from what is received in the ground of our being, else they will be merely derived behaviors, appliqué personalities. Any political thinker will notice right away, of course, that we are dealing here with a politics of inner light, one in which “man, properly train’d in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and series of laws, unto himself.” The initial event in Whitman’s democracy is not a political event at all. “Alone … —and the interior consciousness, like a hitherto unseen inscription, in magic ink, beams out its wondrous lines to the senses.”
Even Whitman’s emphasis on the masses arises from his desire to nurture the idiosyncratic. Individual identity cannot thrive where some people count and others do not. Just as all are invited to the poetry (“I will not have a single person slighted or left away”), so democracy enfranchises every self— politically and spiritually. Whitman pauses in his Vistas to address the Europeans: “The great word Solidarity has arisen. Of all dangers to a nation as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn—they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.” Hierarchy, any line drawn to separate “the best from the worst” in social life, is the hallmark of what Whitman calls “European chivalry, the feudal, ecclesiastical, dynastic world,” a world whose manners, he felt, still held sway in the New World. He would have them replaced by his universal suffrage of the self—a suffrage not so much of the vote but one in which no man is obliged to take his hat off to any other. He places each citizen on this equal footing not only to protect the idiosyncratic self but to produce it as well. Democracy has a future tense. Enfranchisement “commence[s] the grand experiment of development, whose end (perhaps requiring several generations) may be the forming of a full-grown man or woman …” Whitman begins his democracy with individual identity, but in its action neither the One nor the Many is primary, each exists to produce the other so that the nation might be their union, “a common aggregate of living identities.”
To arrive at this union, Whitman’s democracy needs one last ingredient. A series of realized selves does not automatically become a community. There must be some sort of glue, a cohesive to bind the aggregate together. “The two are contradictory,” says Whitman of the poles of his democracy, “… our task is to reconcile them,” and he does so, first of all, with a political version of the manly love of comrades: “Adhesiveness or love … fuses, ties and aggregates …, fraternizing all.” Whitman borrowed the term “adhesiveness” from phrenology. This nineteenth-century form of pop psychology distinguished between “amative” sexual love and “adhesive” friendship (which, in the phrenologist’s iconography, was symbolized by two women embracing each other). Adhesive love is the second element in Whitman’s politics which is not strictly political, at least insofar as politics has to do with power. Perhaps we