Eye to Eye
I resist anything better than my own diversity,
And breathe the air and leave plenty after me,
And am not stuck up, and am in my place.
The moth and the fisheggs are in their place,
The suns I see and the suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.
These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This the common air that bathes the globe.
–Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (1855)
I was reading Mary Oliver‘s book of essays, Upstream, and her essay on Walt Whitman really resonated with me. As a young woman, Whitman became a close friend, the caring uncle, and the brother she had never had. He is Uncle Walt to me, a wizened and understanding being who accepts you as you are because he knows that what is in you is in him as well.
Her essay, in which she cites the short section above from his Song of Myself as a guiding light for her own relationship with nature and the world:
The moth and the fisheggs are in their place,
The suns I see and the suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.
Her writing made me pull out my old beat-up copy of Whitman’s work. I needed a fix from Uncle Walt and went to the section from which this passage came just to put it into better context for myself. Glad I did.
Shown above, it says so much about how he saw himself and the world. He proudly claimed his diversity of self, that messy mass of contradictions that is within us all. He also saw clearly that he was in place in the role that he had to play in the grand opera that is life, just as the moths and fisheggs and the sun high up in the sky were. I especially liked that he made mention of the suns he cannot see, given my propensity for sometimes showing multiple suns or moons in my skies.
To Uncle Walt, the natural world, which included him and you and me, was, and still is, just as it should be.
He then goes on to point out that his thoughts are nothing new, that they are simply echoes of thoughts that have come down through time. It is our purpose to ask questions and attempt to find answers of some sort, though our efforts will be forever futile.
Our attempts at solving the riddle that is life often create even more complex riddles.
That, too, is just as it should be. As he writes, This the common air that bathes the globe.
This short section from his grand poem says so much about how I have come to see the world, as well. I imagine much of that comes from having an uncle like Walt. Or a brother or friend or simply an old man with a white beard who says a few words in passing.
Just as it should be.
Here’s a song that I thought I had recently shared here only to find that it has been 16 years. I guess for some of us that is recent. The song is another from Mermaid Avenue, an album featuring unrecorded songs written by Woody Guthrie set to music and performed by Billy Bragg and Wilco. This is Walt Whitman’s Niece.
I think I might have seen her at one of the family reunions.
Or not.
Who knows? It is, after all, a riddle, right?
Redtree Times 