Anticipation

I'm really excited about leading my Song of Myself workshop at the FGC Gathering next week. This will be the fourth time I've done it; twice previously at Gathering and once for a group in my monthly meeting. I love reading the poem again--it's like a favorite old movie, I find myself all excited thinking about when we get that that part--and that other part--and then the one part that....

It's also a mystery, doing this. My system is to simply read the poem together; we read it aloud, stopping at the ends of the 52 numbered sections, and then discussing what we've read, asking and answering questions. It's a big poem and the whole world is in there (dinosaurs, even!), and what rises to the top for any group depends on who's there. One year, I had someone very versed in scripture, for instance, and from him we got a lot of insight into scriptural echoes. Or there might be someone who knows a lot of 19th-century or Civil War history, or who is familiar with other poetry written during the same era, or who knows more about Whitman's biography than I do, or who knows very well the Eastern religious texts that had recently been translated for the first time and were lighting Western thinkers on fire.

Much also depends on what happens in the room as we read, which is always unpredictable. One year, my group got to the end of section 45 and was so moved to be at that place that we stopped and re-read the section chorally, in unison, and then just sat there in stunned, emotional, worshipful silence together. Here's some of it:

I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems.

Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward and forever outward.

My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.

There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,
If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces,
were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail the long run,
We should surely bring up again where we now stand,
And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther.

A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient,
They are but parts, any thing is but a part.

See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,
Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.

My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,
The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,
The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.

My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,

The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,

The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.

Gives me shivers.

So the next time I led the workshop, I couldn't wait until we got to this piece! And people would be amazed and moved! I quivered with anticipation.

And the group blew right past it. It just didn't particularly speak to their condition.

That group, on the other hand, went nutso for the sex parts (this was also the group that really went deep into the scriptural references--what a great week that was. My ignorance of scripture is vast, so I learned a lot). They thought section 28, in which the poet's "other senses" abandon their sentry posts and leave him at the mercy of "villain touch" was absolutely the best description of sexual abandon and orgasm they'd ever heard, and they really wanted to talk about it:

The sentries desert every other part of me,
They have left me helpless to a red marauder,
They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.

I am given up by traitors,
I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor,
I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.

You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,
Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.

"Unclench your floodgates," indeed. Walt, you sexy old guy.

There's always a day when we end in the darkest part of the poem, where the poet has let himself get caught up in the contemplation of evil, and feels lost, degraded, hopeless. He sees himself imprisoned, impoverished, ill to the verge of death; he feels himself united in every sufferer:

For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,
It is I let out in the morning and barr'd at night.

Not a mutineer walks handcuff'd to jail but I am handcuff'd to him and walk by his side,

(I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.)

Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced.

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.

I don't plan for us to end a day's session at that point, but somehow we always do. And as the group shuffles out, discouraged, cloud-covered, hag-ridden, I call out after them desperately, "It gets better! We're not stuck here! Trust me!" The next morning, they are impatient to get started, to hear the poet's next words:

Enough! Enough! Enough!

I think it's good to break there; it's only 10 lines from the poet as degraded beggar to the resurrection ("the grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves/ corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me."), and it's possible to come up for air too quickly, to dash past the dark place the poet has led us to. It's good to carry it for an afternoon and evening.

I could go on and on--about 85% of the poem falls into "OMG I love this part!" territory for me. And that's really why I lead the workshop, because it's a chance to inveigle 20 or so people into listening to the poem, to all the parts I love so much, and I get to see them fall in love with it, too (and get angry at it and frustrated at Walt and suffer from bafflement and all the other things that always happen alongside the loving it part), and sometimes--always, at some point during the week--the thing they fall in the love with and the ways they love it illuminate the poem in a new way for me, and it becomes a new poem and I love it even more.

Stop this day and night with me [says our Walt] and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.