Whitman, and the Light at the End of the Tunnel

I can’t believe that this is my final blog post!  Honestly, I’m a little sad about it because I really loved this class and all the great conversations it started.  For now, all I can do is wrap it all up and hope that next quarter I can find a class that I like as much as I liked this one.  Let’s kick this pig!

I’m of the opinion that life needs to be lived as Walt Whitman would have lived it: wildly, intellectually, self aware, fearlessly, poetically, physically, spiritually, and theatrically, just to name a few key points.  I always knew here were the ways I wanted to live my life, but had no title for them.  When people asked me what I was doing with my life, I just told them I was doing IT.  Now, I can say I’m trying to live like Whitman.  Let’s face it, who hasn’t wanted to shout a “barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world” (Whitman 85).

For me, I was a little shocked when Suzanne said that people in his time found ‘Song of Myself’ vulgar.  Yes, there are some elements that in his time period must have been daring.  But to call them vulgar?  Maybe I lack the ability to see with a closed mind.  For me, I felt that Whitman was trying to do the same thing that one of the monologues in ‘The Vagina Monologues’ was trying to do: to reclaim what’s been deemed vulgar.  For Whitman, it was being able to be comfortable with our bodies and ourselves; for ‘The Vagina Monologues’, one wanted to reclaim the word ‘cunt’.  Whitman’s very first line makes this very clear when he outright says “I celebrate myself” (Whitman 25).

I absolutely loved the story about Whitman and his intense groupie, Anne.  The entire time all I could think about was Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.  I read somewhere that in high school; Katie had posters of Tom all over her room and told all her friends she was going to marry him.  And then she did.  Next to Ginny in Harry Potter, she’s one of the only fan-girls to ever actually get her man.

This, to me, is one of the sheer powers of fanaticism.  Fans are willing to “witness and wait” for their chosen stars to do anything, whether that be waiting in line for hours for a book signing or standing in the pit of a concert before the show starts to guarantee they’ll be closest to the stage (Whitman 28).  Fans can often take inside themselves “the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth” for the love of their favorite band, writer, or celebrity (Whitman 29).  For a fan, fiction can become reality, and celebrities can become something they can aspire to reach so much that this obsession can become a part of their identity.  For some fans, like Anne and Katie Holmes, this enjoyment of a celebrity can go beyond appreciating and breech into the territory of love.  Take for example the 1983 Syrian Defence Minister General Musafa Tlass.  His crush on an Italian actress, Gina Lollobrigida, pushed him so far as to demand his troops not to attack Italien solilders.  He told them "Do whatever you want with the US, British and other forces, but I do not want a single tear falling from the eyes of Gina Lollobrigida" (Shaw141)*.

After reading the things we’ve read in class before this, Whitman is a breath of fresh air.  I’m not saying I liked him better than everything else (though I did like him more than certain things) but that the change of atmosphere was exhilarating and soothing.  After all, he is “the poet of the body” and “of the soul” (Whitman 44).  What’s not to love about that?  One you’ve gotten through the dark underbelly of pieces like Moby Dick, Transformations, On Witchcraft, and The Shining, your soul CRAVES something as poetic and triumphant as ‘Song of Myself’.  I needed something lovely, some sugar coating for what I’ve learned from the man who says he could “behold the picturesque giant and love him” because who doesn’t want someone like that in their life (Whitman 35).  We all want someone who can love what might be termed vulgar, because if they can, they can love anything – including the parts of ourselves we see as being ugly. 

When Whitman says he’s “the poet of the body” he wasn’t kidding (Whitman 44).  Paralleled with ‘Kinsey’, ‘Song of Myself’ seems incredibly free with its ability to discuss and find beauty in physical bodies.  Culture hasn’t, in my opinion, evolved much on this front since 1855.  Yeah, we can be vulgar about nudity and talk about that freely, but who really talks about their body or someone else’s publically with respect?  We’re still ignorant of our own bodies and remain alienated from them because our culture teaches us to live this way.  I won’t lie – I hate my body, but more than that, I don’t want to talk about it or let anyone else see it.  There’s something incredibly vulnerable in sharing your soul with someone, and for me it’s the same way with the body.  Maybe this is one of the reasons I can’t comprehend sex and never want to have it – I don’t want to share my body with anyone when even I don’t want anything to do with it.  Without getting into the finer points, here’s how I feel – I don’t ever want to have sex.  It sounds disgusting, and I don’t want to do it.  I don’t mind taking about bigger concepts or someone else’s sex life or body, but I don’t want to talk about mine.  Sex to me is “the password primeval” (Whitman 48).  It’s old as human kind, and something most people guard and keep secretive.  It’s something intimate, or at the very least can be.  Whitman hits the nail on the head for me when he says “we hurt each other as the bridegroom and the bride hurt each other” (Whitman 45).  I feel like sex is highly overrated, and yet, in situations like after a wedding where two people have intertwined their lives so intricately and want to share a deep and resounding bond, sex can be intimate.  But, that doesn’t mean it is for everyone.  I consider it to be highly intimate, because that was how I was raised to view sex.  While it’s not something I want, I see the merit of it, and what it could mean to committed couples, married or otherwise committed to one another. 

“Clear and sweet is my soul” and that’s something that needs to be embraced, also taking into account that “clear and sweet is all that is not my soul” (Whitman 27).  In this way, Whitman reminds me of a reverse image of Poe.  In Poe’s writing, the narrators in stories such as ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Black Cat’ show that there is horror and darkness not only in the world but in us as well, the same as other authors have this quarter such as Stephen King.  In The Shining, Jack contains darkness and angry inside of him, both because of his drinking and after he’s possessed by the house.  Transformation by Anne Sexton as a motif shows the magic of fairytales covering up the horrors of reality, such as in ‘Briar Rose’ where I took the slumber to be metaphorical as her way to cope with her Father’s torments on her body.  Emily Dickenson shows us both the beauty and pain inside love, loneliness, and longing.  Cotton Matters tries to show us the logic inside what the Puritans did, and instead shows us the horror inside over-zealous religions mobs. 

This quarter we’ve talked about a multitude of different subjects residing in the darkness of literary underbellies.  Why is it that, as a culture, we look for the darkness in things just as much if not more as we look for the light?  Think about the things we primarily talked about this quarter:  witchcraft, wilderness, monsters, conquest, revolution, survival, the undead, possession, obsession.  With the exceptions of self-reliance and liberation, we’ve focused heavily on the dark side of literature and what’s to be gained from the study of it. 

Some people, such as one of my roommates, believe that good cannot exist in the world without evil.  Is it then the same way with everything in life?  Can we have beauty and light without the ugliness or the darkness?  Does everything in life have to have a foil to counteract it?  My personal philosophy is that though light and dark can play off one another, most of the time we’re living in the in-between grey in the twilight of light and dark – and no, I don’t mean the shitty Stephanie Meyer kind.  I feel as though, even though there are lights and darks to life, no one is purely evil or purely good.  We’re all a tint of both, our very own shade of grey.  I know personally I have my good moments where I’m practically angelic (they’re very far in between, I’ll admit) and there are time (more often than not) that I’m so demonic you don’t need a pitchfork and horns to know I’ll breath fire at you.  I’m neither up nor down in reality though.  I’m a balance of good and evil, of light and dark.  I’m living in the grey area of both, just like almost everyone else.  I think Whitman understood that people have to have a balance of both, that “the tasteless water of soul” and our “true sustenance” needed to be both (Whitman 41).  Do I wish I was more one direction or that other?  Do I wish that I was totally pure and innocent like a Saint, or black as the darkest devil that ever lived?  I think Whitman said it best when he said “I exist as I am, that is enough” (Whitman 44).  I agree wholeheartedly. 

I do however believe that some people are more strongly turned towards one direction or another.  Poe’s narrators lean into the dark and embrace it with open arms, almost welcoming the perversity that they inhabit.  Jack in The Shining certainly had his good points, like how he was trying to turn things around and control his temper, but ultimately was easily seduced by the darkness inside him and embraced the hotel’s influences over him.  The Puritan townspeople in The Scarlet Letter and in On Witchcraft think they’re being righteous and pure, when in fact they’ve turned their backs on one of the best (in my opinions) things religion has to offer: repentance, acceptance, and forgiveness.  In being so harsh to the suspected witches during the hysteria in Salem and to the fictional Hester, the Puritans were turning their backs on the light and embracing a very human form of darkness by pointing fingers and ostracizing their neighbors.  Mary Rowlandson I actually see as turned towards the light with her intense faith during her ordeal.  All conquistadors seem sadistic and dark to me, to be frank.  How else can you murder an entire sect of people just for greed?  And yet, they thought they were doing God’s work, just like the Christians did with the Crusades with their Holy Wars claimed to be found for God*.  Sanford in The Coquette always embodied one of the lighter of the dark qualities I’ve seen firsthand in his inability to understand what he wants might not be best for everyone else, and that damaging a girl’s reputation isn’t worth the pleasure it brings him.  Anne Sexton’s poetry not only shows us the darkness in childhood tales but also the darkness, the duality, the “doppelganger” that might be living inside each of us waiting to break free (Sexton 17).  We all exist in a place where darkness or light can overtake us and rule our lives.  We have the free will in our lives to make the choices that lean in either direction.  I know a lot of people who talk about death and dying, of Heaven and what might happen when we die, but I try not to think about that.  Like Whitman, “I have heard what the talkers were talking… the talk of the beginning and the end/But I do not talk of the beginning or the end” (Whitman 26).  I don’t know what’s going to happen when I finally stop existing on the earthly plane, and not being religious, I’m not sure how I feel about the Heaven concept.  All I know if I don’t want to wait time talking about ‘ifs’ and ‘what could happen’ when I expire.  Until I do, I’d rather be learning and experiencing the things I can know and do for sure.  That’s all I feel anyone can really ask for out of life – a chance to really head out and live it on their own terms.

For me, one of the things that carried most heavily throughout the entire class was something we talked about towards the very beginning of the quarter: monsters.  Personally, I feel monsters can go beyond science fiction or comics, that the word can have human meaning and implications.  For example, before my senior year of high school, I attended the Kenyon Review Young Writers Summer Workshop.  For two weeks, we were broken up into groups where one of the instructors taught us about writing and gave us a wide range of exercises and prompts to write through.  Then, in the second week, we were told to pick an additional workshop class to take.  Instead of choosing poetry like I’d originally planned, I took the workshop on Monsters.  At our first meeting, our instructor asked us to make a list of monsters on the board.  You know the first thing I wrote on the board was?  Hitler.  I rest my case.

In our texts this quarter we’ve read about countless characters that could be seen as monsters for various reasons.  In On Witchcraft, I don’t so much see those accused of being a member in “a dreadful knot of Witches in the Country” as being monsters – but I certainly see their accusers that way (Mather 16).  Those that “testifi’d” in “the tryal of Bridget Bishop” and others like hers were monstrous in their accounts of the “spectre” they said haunted them (Mathers 106).  What that group of young Puritan girls did was horrible, inciting hysteria in Salem and giving false testimony thus sentencing innocent victims to death for witchcraft. Moving on to the next work we read, there’s no doubt in my mind that the Puritans in Hester Prynne’s village are monstrous in very human ways.  They treated her horribly for a very human weakness and in an equally human way treat her with a lack of compassion that seems monstrous to me.

In a similar show of apathy to the feelings or needs of others, we have Sanford in The Coquette.  Lucy said “a man of a vicious character cannot be a good member of society” and I agree with her wholeheartedly (Foster 31).  He’s just the kind of man I try and keep away from my friends – a man who’s only looking for the next conquest but nothing lasting.  The way he goes through women is monstrous, and the worst part is, Eliza lets him take advantage of her.  I know her fate wasn’t entirely her fault, but I feel as though she should have had more self respect than to let Sanford swoop in and steamroller her.  She says to Lucy at one point that she is “perplexed and embarrassed, my friend, by the assiduous attentions of This Major Sanford” (Foster 48).  And yet she continues to let him be in her presence where he continues to try and break up her affection for Boyer.  In this same way, the conquistadors were monstrous, taking everything they wanted and justifying it by saying their mission was from God. 

It might just be me, but there’s a certain level of monstrosity in the ideals of self-reliance and survival in the way that they both insist upon themselves unfalteringly.  One of the things that makes us human is our ability to reason and to think.  But in situations like the sailors of In the Heart of the Sea encounters where cannibalism becomes the only way to survive, reason seems to take a back seat roll.  Self-Reliance­ demands we be totally independent at any and all costs, a phrase which in itself has insidious connotations.  ‘Any and all costs’ can be used to justify almost anything, and can be skewed in the same ways that ‘for the greater good’ can be.

Obsession and possession narratives we’ve read this quarter all have their own brand of monsters in them.  Ahab in Moby Dick is so gung-ho in his pursuit of the white whale that he disregards the severity of his chase until it’s too late for both him and his crew.  The whale is less of a monster to me than Ahab, because Ahab seems to have lost the human quality of being able to reason both what’s right and wrong, but also what lengths count as going too far.  I feel that jeopardizing the life of his crew shows an astonishing lack of regard for human life, which can be viewed as monstrous.  Most mythical and cult monsters like Dracula and the Wolf Man show no remorse or regret in taking a human life in the same way that Ahab offers up his own and the crew’s lives in pursuit of the white whale.

This same disregard and disrespect of the sanctity of human life is also shown in Poe’s narrators in ‘The Black Cat’, ‘The House of Usher’, and ‘The Tell Tale Heart’.  All three narrators feel minimal to no grief over taking another human being’s life, and yet seem perfectly reasonable as they tell us about them.  The monstrous “disease” all these narrators have is a lack of remorse, and a madness I can only marvel at in horror (Poe 199).  In ‘Ligeia’, ‘Morella’, and ‘Berenice’ have a monstrous need to possess their women like mythical dragons were said to hoard jewels and gold in their caves.  The ability of these three narrators to try to collect their women, to be so possessive they seem them more like objects than as living and breathing souls, disgusts me to the point that I would rather be murdered by Dracula than spend five minutes in a room with them.  At least Dracula is straightforward and wouldn’t pretend to love me before destroying me.

Life is messy.  Life is painful.  Life is full of many contradictions.  After this course, I know this and much more.  I’m not saying I didn’t know these things before this course, but it did reaffirm some things for me.  This course taught me in a roundabout that even when life is full of darkness and the horrible things that live in it, there can still be light and good somewhere if you just remember to look for it.  Not everything is as it seems. 

Darkness and the horrors within it haunt each and every one of us in some fashion.  For some, it’s in trauma from past events, for others it’s in memories they’d rather forget or otherwise regret.  Whether your darkness is big or little, whether it’s full of horrors no one else can comprehend or in everyday travesties, all underbellies are equal in the fact that they show who we are.  Without our darkness, we couldn’t be who we are in the light.  Without the things that scare us, we can’t show how brave we are.  Without hopelessness, there can be no need for hope.  In this way, we all need our personal darkness as much as we need light, hope, and love.  Without one, you can’t have the other.  Personally, I’m okay with my darkness and the things inside it.  I said at the beginning of the quarter that we all have skeletons in our closets, and that still rings true.  Even when you’re trapped, for me it helps to remember that everyone feels pain at points in their lives for different reasons, whether it be an abusive relationship like Wendy in The Shining or depressions like those felt by Emily Dickinson or Anne Sexton, having to put aside your moral to survive like the sailors of the Essex within In the Heart of the Sea or being accused of things you can’t prove you didn’t do like the accused witches in On Witchcraft.  Take heart in the fact that you’re not totally alone.  I hope this can be a light for you in your darkness as it has been for me after taking this class.  Always remember, as reading Whitman at the end of class was, to look for the light at the end of the tunnel.

* Quote taken from the Qiant Bathroom Reader by Karl Shaw
**The Crusades: A Short History by Jonathan Simon Christopher Riley-Smith