The Gift (25 page)

This is the enthusiastic voice, both its subject and its breathlessness.
*

Enthusiasm has recurrently fallen into disrepute because there have always been those who claim they are filled with the spirit when they are only full of hot air (or worse, full of malice, self-will, or the Devil). And where the enthusiast, sensing a spirit is near, might invoke its powers, the critics of enthusiasm proceed with caution and forbearance. “Enthusiastic wildness has slain its thousands,” they rightly warn. The passions of the flesh, even if inspired by the gods, are prone to
error. Those who are wary of enthusiastic religion prefer their spiritual knowing to be purified by the cooler light of reason.

In the summer of 1742 a Massachusetts clergyman, Charles Chauncy, preached “A Caveat Against Enthusiasm.” The text is instructive in our approach to Whitman, for it bears an uncanny resemblance to the caveats that were later to be published, or at least spoken, against Whitman. In Chauncy’s day, a wild-eyed Christian, James Davenport, had emerged from the woods of western Massachusetts and started to stir up the Boston faithful, accusing the local deists, like Chauncy, of not
really
knowing the Word of God. Chauncy’s sermon warns his congregation against the dangers of enthusiasm in general and Davenport in particular. His critique returns again and again to the question of how we are to know the true meaning of Scripture. When two men differ in their sense of the Word, how are we to settle on the truth? Chauncy would submit divergent views to reasonable debate. “Nay,” he declares, “if no reasoning is made use of, are not all the senses that can be put on scripture equally proper?” (The enthusiast would reply that it is reason itself which leads us to differing conclusions—that in matters of the spirit we must be guided by an inner light. The enthusiast waits for a
sensation
of truth.)

Chauncy gives his flock instruction on how to recognize the enthusiasts in their midst. That you can’t reason with them is the first sign, but, interestingly enough, all the others have to do with their bodies: “it may be seen in their countenance,” “a certain wildness … in their general look,” “it strangely loosens their tongues,” “throws them … into quakings and tremblings,” they are “really beside themselves, acting … by the blind impetus of a wild fancy.” It is precisely the feeling that one’s body has been entered by some “other” that Chauncy wishes to warn against.

With this dichotomy between spirits that move the body and a prophylactic “reasoning,” we come to an issue we touched on in the last chapter, the destruction of the esemplastic powers by an overvaluation of analytic cognition and the related destruction of gift exchange by the hegemony of the market. The deist’s attachment to reasonable discourse and his caution before the trembling body place the spirit of his religion closer to the spirit of trade than to the spirit of the gift. In gift exchange no symbol of worth need be detached from the body of the gift as it is given away. Cash exchange, on the other hand,
depends
upon the abstraction of symbols of value from the substances of value. The farmer doesn’t move his produce until he’s paid, and if he’s paid in dollar bills (or checks or credit at the store), then he has exchanged embodied worth—wheat and oats—for symbolically valuable but substantially worthless paper. When the system is working, of course, the symbols are negotiable and he can convert them back into substances at any time. Both market exchange and abstract thought require this alienation of the symbol from the object. Mathematics, that highly abstract form of cognition, could not proceed if we did not replace the “real” objects of analysis with ciphers, just as the cash market could not operate if we could not convert apples and oranges into symbolic wealth and the symbols back into apples and oranges.

This affinity between abstract thought and market exchange seems to me the reason why Chauncy’s “reasonable” deism (or its immediate heirs, Unitarianism and transcendentalism) has historically been associated with the upper-middle class and with intellectuals. Cash exchange is to gift exchange what reason is to enthusiasm. In the old joke, a Unitarian comes to a fork in the road; one sign points to Heaven and the other to a Discussion About Heaven. The Unitarian goes to the discussion. The enthusiast, of course, knows his spiritual knowledge cannot be
discussed because it cannot be received intellectually. Like Whitman, he testifies, he does not argue. And the ceremonies of enthusiastic religions tend to include the body, rather than talk. The celebrants dance and sing, they quake and tremble. But no one dances ecstatic dances in the churches of the rich. Nor do they speak in tongues or raise their hands in the gesture of epiphany the way the Christian enthusiasts do. The rich would seem to sense that the more you feel the spirit move in the physical body on Sunday, the harder it will be to trade in cash on Monday. Better to sit in one’s pew and listen to a talk. The Unitarianism that men like Chauncy developed called for no enthusiastic flights of fancy; it was, as others have pointed out, a religion with which the merchants of Boston could be at ease.

I have offered these remarks about enthusiasm partly to introduce the element of “bodily knowing” into my description of Whitman’s gifted state, but also to help us place Whitman in the spirit of his times. We might say that Whitman was Emerson’s enthusiast, Emerson with a body. The sage of Concord stands midway between the crew-cut deist and the hairy-necked Whitman. Emerson left the Unitarian Church, to be sure, but he remained a curious mix of Chauncy’s caution and the passion he prefigured for Whitman. In his own well-known epiphany, Emerson felt himself to be a “transparent eyeball… I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God.” And not Charles Chauncy, then. But still, the lens of the eye is our only bloodless organ of sense. “I was born cold,” Emerson confided in his journal. “My bodily habit is cold. I shiver in and out; don’t heat to the good purposes called enthusiasm a quarter so quick and kindly as my neighbors.”

It was for Whitman to read Emerson’s “Nature” and take it to heart, to feel the soul’s tongue move in his breast, an epiphany of animal heat. Emerson was moved by his first reading
of
Leaves of Grass
, but in 1860 he walked Whitman around Boston trying to persuade him not to speak so frankly about the body in his poems—reading him, that is, a caveat against enthusiasm.
*
Apparently, Whitman found Emerson’s reasoning sound and compelling. “Each point… was unanswerable,” he wrote in his memoir of their talk, “no judge’s charge ever more complete and convincing.” Emerson was the greater intellectual and the greater critic. But Whitman was the greater poet, and faithful to his genius. He did not debate the master’s caution, but when Emerson asked in conclusion, “What have you to say to such things?” Whitman replied, “Only that while I can’t answer them at all I feel more settled than ever to adhere to my own theory and exemplify it.” Or, as he used to tell the story in old age, “I only answer’d Emerson’s vehement arguments with silence, under the old elms of Boston Common.”

Whitman begins “Song of Myself” with a description of the delight of the passage of “stuff” through his body: “my respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs.” (Or later, sounding like a true enthusiast: “Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and the index.”) The “self” that Whitman’s song presents to us is a sort of lung, inhaling and exhaling the world. Almost everything in the poem happens as a breathing, an incarnate give-and-take, which filters the world through the body. Whitman says of a long list of people and occupations, “these tend inward to me, and I tend
outward to them … / And of these … I weave the song of myself.” Upon hearing a noise, he says, “I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen, / And accrue what I hear into myself…,” and he then presents us with a long catalog of sounds. When he describes this material respiration in the language of gifts, Whitman speaks of his inhalation as “accepting” the bounty of the world, his exhalation as “bequeathing” or “bestowing” (himself, his work).

The initial event of the poem, and of Whitman’s aesthetic, is the gratuitous, commanding, strange, and satisfying entry into the self of something that was previously separate and distinct. The corresponding gesture on Whitman’s part is to give himself away. “Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me.” He “bequeath[s] Poems and Essays as nutriment” to the nation just as, at the end of his song, he bequeaths himself “to the dirt to grow from the grass [he] love [s].” These gestures—the inhalation and exhalation, the reception and the bestowal—are the structuring elements of the poem, the passive and active phases of the self in the gifted state.

In the preface to the first edition of
Leaves of Grass
, Whitman calls the two phases of the artist’s labor “sympathy” and “pride”:

In sympathy the poet receives (inhales, absorbs) the embodied presences of creation into the self; in pride he asserts (exhales,
emanates) his being out toward others. As with any respiration, this activity keeps him alive:

If either pole of the breath was interrupted, he would cease to exist. “Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his funeral, drest in his shroud.” The human being
is
the give-and-take of sympathy and pride:

Between the poles of sympathy and pride lie the “secrets of art,” the poet tells us, and if we are to gaze upon those secrets, we must follow the passage of these “objects” through the body, follow the poet’s breath from the sympathetic inhalation through to the out-breath, the pride “out of which,” says Whitman, “I utter poems.”

A poem called “There Was a Child Went Forth” offers a typical description of Whitman’s receptive sympathy. A young boy walks out of doors:

And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became …

In his sympathetic phase, Whitman preserves the participatory sensuality of childhood. The boy who became the lilac when he saw the lilac survives in the older man. In the poems at least, Whitman seems to feel no distance between his senses and their objects, as if perception in the gifted state were mediated not by air or skin but by some wholly conductive element that permits immediate contact with the palpable substance of things. We believe the poems because he has drawn the scenes with such sharp detail. He spots the runaway slave “through the swung half-door of the kitchen”; he sees how “the young sister holds out the skein while the elder sister winds it off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots.” Imagining himself floating over the nation, he sees below “the sharp-peak’d farm house, with its scallop’d scum and slender shoots from the gutters.” We have all had moments of such contact: lost in the grays of snow blown sideways across the clapboards, or daydreaming in the rain pock-marking the tops of cars, the ants gathered where wisteria leans against the stucco. And we accept that Whitman knew, and wrote out of, such contact because he noticed that half-door, the knots in the yarn, the shoots of green in the gutter dirt.

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:

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.

The poet studies inside of objects the way the rest of us might study in the library.