AN AROMATIC TONGUE
In 1955 Katherine Tyler’s Junior English class had “Leaves of Grass” read to us by a substitute because “Miss Tyler” — who was too tiny and fragile to seem like the married lady she was — was in surgery for something never disclosed to us. Neither was much about “Leaves of Grass” and Whitman ever disclosed. Miss Tyler had marked for the sub which pages NOT to read to us. The sub would stop and say, “Oh, I’m not supposed to read this to you,” and we’d all scurry through the pages to find the place. Not that we understood what it meant.
There’s no doubt that Miss Tyler loved Walt Whitman and his poetry, so obviously a girl can “be” the poet in that sense but he was not so hot or morbid as Poe, so the boys preferred Poe to Whitman.
Here are two samples of what grownups have said over the years since:
“Leaves of Grass is notable for its discussion of delight in sensual pleasures during a time when such candid displays were considered immoral. Accordingly, the book was highly controversial during its time for its explicit sexual imagery, and Whitman was subject to derision by many contemporary critics.”
“Whitman is perhaps America’s first democratic poet. The free verse he adopts in his work reflects a newly naturalized and accessible poetic language. His overarching themes — the individual, the nation, the body, the soul, and everyday life and work — mirror the primary values of America’s founding.”
It seems like Whitman is telling you everything he knows, every detail of radical inclusion in his love of the world and all the people in it. The first openly passionate and embracing poet in a world of Emerson’s stately reserve and Bronson Alcott’s goofy theories. But then later one reflects that one knows almost nothing specific and factual. In one place Whitman claims he was the father of six babies and in another it’s clear he never married and did love a man, but it’s not clear whether “love” included physical sex.
No one was as involved in attachments and arousal as Whitman. Yet he was more of a confronter of death than any of the others since he had attended the deathbeds of the soldiers in the Civil War. Not bawling with indignation, but woman-like attending cleanliness of wounds and word from home. So why can’t a woman be Walt Whitman?
The trope of intimacy as a necessity — and therefore an entitlement that suspends all rules against modesty and keeping one’s distance — is always played out in war stories. It was a key to emotional response for me like many others, like nuns in wartime or white men captured by Indians. And yet the threat constantly present is the permanent withdrawal through death when the passport body disintegrates, no longer needed, entirely private. Despite all memories, one’s identity belongs only to one’s self.
The fact that sexual intercourse is a matter of certain private parts that enjoy heightened pleasure in certain circumstances is often opposed in our framings of things to the sensory life of the rest of the body. For most mammals the part overwhelms the whole only occasionally and survival the rest of the time is about food and shelter, with less emphasis on violence. But for Whitman the dawn was ecstatic, the bug was an intricate amazement, the responding smile of a person was a warm embrace. It was an intense life with hardly room for much else.
The binary theory of sex in the “Western” world, meaning the Atlantic side of Eurasia, was cleverly composed to squeeze out any other variations besides S and M. This is against nature, which likes broad possibilities and experiments, so the S’s tried to claim they (male) were the key to power, entitlement, and ownership. It wasn’t just a matter of the color of one’s skin but the size of one’s injector. The storm of little wigglers carrying one short chromosome that unlocked conception were a mess barely acknowledged, hampered by shortcomings. They could never spontaneously create a new being because all baggage was discarded for the sake of the trip.
In the world of mammals and previous rough-drafted creatures, the conceiving half of the birth bargain didn’t travel. At least not far. The Ovum with her household rested in the pink ruffles of the Fallopian tubes until moving gracefully to the cradle of new life. MUCH bigger than a sperm, the egg needed only the punctuation mark of the dot of a sperm to begin the rocking replication.
Whitman had the knack of seeing mystery and science both in the common domestic lives we all share, quite apart from education or importance. Sun across a windowsill, interrupted by a passing bird, was noted by him and cited later as proof of life. This is the level of observation and image that our brains used to think, to manage language, and to tell others through story. To Whitman all sex is global and fertile.
The S and M theories make it much easier to sell accoutrements like fancy painted glue-on fingernails to make one more attractive. It’s a form of cultural hypnosis. As soon as “marriage” SM style in terms of sexual apparatus got a little shopworn, the idea moved to all sorts of relationships. Lately one has “fur babies” and the gimcracks are endless. Every move a mammal or bird makes is interpreted anthropologically as having human motives. But sex is discouraged as a form of pedophilia. Bestiality.
In contrast, Whitman style, sex is everywhere innocent, sensory, and making an escape. Following is a sample from “Cadamus”, a poem accepted as gay if that’s the way you think of humans.
“In paths untrodden,
In the growth by margins of pond-waters,
Escaped from the life that exhibits itself,
From all the standards hitherto published — from
the pleasures, profits, conformities,
Which too long I was offering to feed to my Soul
Clear to me now, standards not yet published —
clear to me that my Soul,
That the Soul of the man I speak for, feeds, rejoices
only in comrades;
Here, by myself, away from the clank of the world,
Tallying and talked to here by tongues aromatic,
No longer abashed — for in this secluded spot I can
respond as I would not dare elsewhere,
Strong upon me the life that does not exhibit itself,
yet contains all the rest,
Resolved to sing no songs to-day but those of manly
attachment,
Projecting them along that substantial life,
Bequeathing, hence, types of athletic love . . .”
But I am old now and never was athletic. My tongue remains aromatic.
