Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas

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Hermetic America: Transformational America
Presentation 2 of 13

Whitman’s Democratic Vistas
A Vision of Wholeness Reforged
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, July 11, 1985

Transcript:

The day is July the 11th 1985. This is the second lecture by Roger Weir on a new series called Transformational America. Tonight's lecture is entitled Whitman's Democratic Vistas: A Vision of Wholeness Reforged.

I guess we should have some Beethoven's ninth. We are in the second lecture of the second half of a sequence. And this sequence is going to be a book. And its title is Hermetic America, and that will be published next year. It's difficult to understand the United States. It's difficult to understand the United States metaphysically because it's not a metaphysical happening. There's a spiritual happening and its different. And in order to get the spiritual perception of America and not a metaphysical impression of America is a trick. It's a knack. And the mind in our time rebels against the spirit. It thinks that the spirit is just boring, fresh water and boring sunlight and not interesting at all. It doesn't have the neon highlights of the metaphysical systems. They are so gorgeous. The gurus are so high power. And the American tradition, I mean, who wants to read it? Benjamin Franklin. Walt Whitman. I mean after all who are these guys. But the fact is, is these guys are the heroes. And these are the champions. These are the people who strode forth and made an incredible situation, which we still have today. Which still hangs together even after being abused for 200 years. That's unbelievable. Any artist would be glad to make a work of art that sustains the abuse of hundreds of millions of people for hundreds of years. And still have it there for those few who were able to appreciate it so that they say in understanding, this is really worth it. This is worth keeping track of. Passing it on.

We saw in the first two lecture series, the first half of this sequence, the development of the United States based upon two here to four incommensurate based upon the individual. The individual human being, who as Franklin said is always improvable that he may not be such hot stuff to start off with. That's all right, none of us are, but we can improve. There are ways to grow. There are ways to, to come into more wholesomeness and fullness. And the second is the people referred to too often in the past and history as the masses. The stupid masses. The people what do they know? They're boorish. They're uninteresting. That they're just, they get in the way. They're mean. They're selfish. But the confidence was that the people can transform. And that, that transformation of the people is linked to the development of the individual. And these two things are very precious when they're brought together. And that those two things brought together, make a new world that never was on this planet yet. No matter how sophisticated any past civilizations they never managed to do that. Not even in your vaunted Atlantis. What did Plato's say? They went down out of arrogance, most likely.

But the United States still has that magical combination of the growth of the individual able to better himself and the transformation of the people out of a rival into a community. Into a community that's not only a group of like-minded people. As in a congregation of a church. As in a businessmen's club. But a community of unlike minded people who are able to transcend their differences and able to come together on a higher level. That kind of a community. That is really big magic to be able to do that. And to bring together hundreds of millions of people and make a unity out of that while they are still individuals that's showmanship. That's incredible that you can bring that off in this kind of world. Franklin, Jefferson, Whitman. These are the champions. These are the people. These are the forgotten individuals who happened to be very real. They really did do this. And it's still really there.

So, we're looking at transformational America in this series. And we saw last time at the beginning that the core of Walt Whitman's growth as an individual was his experience of the reality of certain human beings being different from other people. Remember how, when he was six years old, he was taken by his father at this great celebration, 50 years of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The 50th anniversary, 1825-1826. And they brought the Marquis de Lafayette, the old man, over from France. Took them all over the U.S. And Whitman happened to be there with his dad and saw Lafayette the little six-year-old boy. And remarkably Lafayette went over and picked up. And there was some kind of a contact there. It's like a mother who knows her child. It's like a child who knows her mother. There was a contact there. And Whitman never forgot that.

And later in his life, a young man involved with newspapers and editorials and being a reporter. And being a roust about around Brooklyn and being a tough young man in New York. And being a teacher in long Island. And involved in the election of 1860. And he happened to be in New York City with 30 or 40,000 other people who hated the fact that some Western bozo named Lincoln was going to be president. And they were there at the railroad station to jeer at him. And Lincoln got off the train. There was no jeering. There was a pregnant hushed silence. And what men saw in Lincoln the same quality that he saw in Lafayette. A cosmic man who stepped right out of the archetypal levels beneath reality into this world.

Those ascended masters are puppets compared to the real individual who is able to come into this world and do some good. Those are the great spirits. Those are the individuals who are the helpers. That's the bodhisattva. Whitman couldn't forget that he had seen that as a little boy. And he remembered. And more than anything, he promised himself because I can see that I must be that kind of a person myself, and I'm going to do whatever I can to bring that out in me. To grow towards that.

And so, from that moment on, from 1860 Whitman committed himself to bringing the cosmic out of himself. He didn't know how to do it. He didn't have any gurus. But he had this American confidence earned from Benjamin Franklin that we can find some way in our living process. If it's so esoteric that we can't do it in our living process, then it was Phantasmal. There must be some way. And what's required is attentiveness. And completeness is a quality of attentiveness.

And so, Whitman opened himself up to all life. He had to train himself to begin with not to be repulsed by anything in human nature. He trained himself again and again to go places and just be with human nature as it was. And try to see the other person. Try to be with them. And all of this happened at the end of 1860, the beginning of 1861. And almost as if the cosmic stage wanted this actor to have the hardest test possible, the Civil War broke out and everybody that he knew was swept up in this archetypal madness. This ultimate polarity kill thy brother for he lies. And Whitman found himself very hard press to stay in New York City and deal with this because there was the overwhelming suspicion that maybe he's being a patsy. Maybe it's easy in New York City to love all mankind. What would it be like on the battlefield?

And so, he traveled there. And he got there the day after one of the worst battles of the Civil War, Fredericksburg. You know, the American Civil War was the first time that precision artillery was used in any human warfare. And at Fredericksburg, the precision artillery shattered the bodies of 30-40,000 men. Shattered them. There were fragments of bodies on the field. And Whitman got there and was exposed to this and was absolutely crucified by the pathos. Because here he was training himself to open himself up and all there was, was this incredible nightmare. The mountain of amputations of arms and legs. And he couldn't leave.

And so, he shifted his center from New York City to Washington D.C. because all the battles were within a day or two ride of Washington. All Civil War, the bloodiest things are all flat in that area. And he stayed there for the rest of the war, working on his vision. Understanding that compassion is a really hard word to pronounce when you're choked up. It's hard to say that word. You can want to say it and want to mean it. It's really hard. The bitterness. The, the fearfulness gets in the way, and you have to do something with that. You have to transform it. That's the only thing you can do with it. And Whitman learned the time-honored lesson that if you're not going to forget it, if you're going to live with it, you can't live with it in its raw state because it'll kill you. You'll die of a broken heart. Or you electrocute yourself with the madness. You have to transform it.
And Whitman becomes the really first great American transformer. The first to understand that we have to take what is there and convert it through ourselves so that it comes out differently. And that by reprocessing all of this, we order it. And the better, our sense of the cosmos is the better the transformation is. Until one becomes almost prismatic. And one takes the rainbow hue of life and all of its variation. And through oneself, one comes out with a clear light of a unified vision of divine wholesomeness. This was important.

And in Whitman's background along with the vision of Lafayette and Lincoln, he remembered about the same time that he was taken to Lafayette, of being taken to a church service by his father again. And this is from the biography of Walt Whitman solitary, The Solitary Singer [The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman]. And here's what the author Allen has to say about this.
Anyway, with the care of the children arranged Walt and his parents start for the meeting. They arrive at a large cheerful, gay colored room with glass chandeliers bearing myriads of sparkling pendants. Plenty of settees and chairs. Sort of a velvet [inaudible] running all around the side walls. The rooms fill rapidly, including many fashionables who have come out of curiosity. And the principal dignitaries of the town.
Allen is quoting Whitman's own writing here. This is why I'm reading it.
Many young folks too. Some richly dressed women. One group accompanied by officers in uniform, possibly from the Navy yard. On a slightly elevated platform sit a dozen or more friends. Friends. Most of them elderly. Grim. With their broad brimmed hats on their heads. Three or four women too, in their characteristic Quaker costumes and bonnets all still as a grave.

Whitman's remembering this as an old man kind of indelible image like Coleridge talking about handed ship upon a painted sea. It was a numinous image. It wasn't the human memory. It was the human recognition of a transpersonal memory. And he saw it and the boy from Tillery street where they lived is obviously dazzled by the splendor, the novelty and the solemnity. Not so much of the occasion, but of that transpersonal numinous. He knew it was going on. This is it. This is what it is real.

So, the preacher Hicks himself is an impressive figure. Though over 80 years of age. He is tall, straight dressed in plain clothes. Face cleanly shaven with broad forehead, black eyes, long white hair covered by a Quaker hat. Then slowly and dramatically, he begins in a resonant gray melodious voice. And he says, what is the chief end of man. And little Walt Whitman, just eyes so open, to glorify God and seek him forever. And the old man sat down and that was at Rutland, took it in. To glorify God and seek him forever.

After the Civil War was over in 1865, Whitman who had spent the entire duration of the war as sort of like an, a male nurse, an orderly, but not really paid. Not a male nurse. Not an orderly. He wrote for newspapers to earn a little money so that he could have food and a place to stay. And he worked two or three hours a day at this. All the rest of his time he spent going around from hospital to hospital to hospital. Army barracks to army barracks. Because the wounded were hundreds of thousands. As many Americans were killed in the Civil War as in World War Two and the population was only a sixth of it. So, you can imagine the devastation.

And Whitman was the self-appointed guardian angel of the wounded American people on both sides. It didn't matter to him. And he went around and was there when they died, attended them, for four years every day, without fail. He put his time in. Can you imagine the white-hot pressure in which the American spirit has been made? It's not a private thing. It didn't just happen to Whitman. This is a resonance that's put out in this country. It's in the landscape. The geology has the imprint of it as it should. We, as people, have the imprint of that. We have some of that. If we can only tune into it. It's there. It's more there than anything else.

When the Civil War was over this monstrous long nightmare brought to a close, which Whitman all the time had transformed. His karmic situation put him in the most exact right place. He got a job in the American Indian Bureau in Washington, D.C. Wow. 1865 with the country finally staggering back into unity all of the American Indian tribes were sending delegates to Washington D.C. They were sending their best chiefs, their best men. The creme of the American Indian nation was coming to Washington D.C. and went through the office that Walt Whitman was in. He was busily revising Leaves of Grass. And the great 1865 edition of Leaves of Grass caused Whitman to be fired from the American Indian Bureau. I mean, he was seen as a madman. Pantheist. A pagan. A wild man.

But before he was fired, Whitman got to see the American Indian in his pristine excellence. Just like Franklin had seen it. Just like Jefferson had seen it. And he realized that there is a nobility here, which is almost unapproached by anyone else. And that the wholesomeness of the United States is somehow tied in, dependent on getting back to that recognition that the people who live in this landscape have an interchange with the landscape. And that we cannot efface that by bulldozing the forests. There are still a resonance there that cries out for a response from man. And this is what he saw.
Along this time there came to see their great father an usual number of Aboriginal visitors. Delegations per treaty, settlements for lands. Nature produced these wonderful proofs of fit individuals. And as if to show how the Earth and woods, the attrition of storms and elements, the exigencies of life at firsthand can train in fashion men, indeed chiefs, in heroic massiveness in imperturbability muscle. And that last and highest beauty consisting of strength. The full exploitation and fruitage of a human identity. Not from the culmination points of culture and artificial civilization but tallying our race as it were with giant vital gnarled enduring trees. Monolithic. Of separate heartiest rocks and humanity holding its own with the best of the trees and the rocks and even out doing them.

He saw them in this way. That they were natural products. They were natural products because spirit and nature, a unity. They're not separate at all. Only in the mind are they separate. Spirit and nature or unity into solvable. Hermetically sealed. And he saw in these individuals the kind of cosmic man that he was trying to be. And they just were. All of them were. There were hundreds of them and Whitman was unbelievably impressed by the quality of what this country produces in terms of human beings if we open ourselves up full bore in the spirit to the nature that's here. And so, Whitman began to change and transform.

END OF SIDE ONE

Allen in his book, The Solitary Singer [The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman] page 394 writes, “He had never had any faith in the value of laws or artificial restraints to reform society.” Whitman was just to pure to see you cannot reform, man. That's the wrong way to go about it. It's an endless cycle. It's spinning one's wheel in the cosmos to try and reform. One has to bring the polarities into complementation and then the unity is there. There's no reform necessary. All reforms are political. All [inaudible] politics are illusionary instead of a politics. One has something else. One has an art. The artist is not some decoration to civilization. He is the salvation of that civilization because only the artist brings expressive form into reality for the individual. And only then can the individual deepen himself to an ethical understanding that because this is so for him, it is so for any human being that he meets. They have to have their individuality for oneself to be free. And understanding that allows for religion to rise. And the religious consciousness rises unbidden. It rises like the mist from the fields when there are many free individuals recognizing each other in this way. And from that comes the people, which is a religious event. A religious phenomenon and not a political phenomenon. Any politics produces the illusion that the unity was manmade. The unity is of the universes undifferentiated self is an unalterable truth that can only be recognized in the doing.
So, Whitman did not believe in the value of laws and artificial restraints and reforms. However, good one’s reasons are these are justifications without any basis. There's no vision in that. There was no real vision in that. He wrote, “Illustrating how the interdependence between human beings is perfectly in analogy by the way, in which the States come together and make the union,” the American union.
But the union is not a political phenomenon. It was a spiritual recognition. And that that's what Lincoln was talking about and used that mantra, the government is up for people, for the people by the people. The only reality in that whole sentence is all is the people. All of the prepositional obliques and vectors are only movements, sinuous movements, of one reality, which is undifferentiated. And Whitman says in Democratic Vistas, “We always have the blessing of that fine man at the moment needed who could tell the truth to the people, plainly, so that they could hear it. And that was his greatness.”
Quotation. “This idea,” wrote Whitman,
Of perfect individualism. It is indeed that deepest tinges and gives character to the idea of the aggregate. For it is mainly or all together to serve independent separatism that we favor a strong generalization. Consolidation. As it is to give the best vitality and freedom to the rights of the states every bit as important as the right of nationality, the union. That we must insist on the identity of the union at all hazards.
And this is a quotation from Democratic Vistas.
Now, as usual, I have outlined the whole 50 some pages of it and I don't have time to do it. But I'll give you some quotations from it and go and find a copy of Democratic Vistas. Read it for yourself. It's the heritage that is real. It's really exactly what we need. Still is.
But preluding no longer let me strike the keynote of the following string. First, premising that through the passage though the passage of it may have been written at widely different times. This is in fact, a collection of memoranda. Perhaps for future designers. Comprehenders.
Not politicians. Designers. Comprehenders. That there is a real America, which is archetypally been brought into existence. It actually does exist now, and it occurs. And it lives whenever there are free people who live that life. They now have all this amperage behind them. That this was made Hermetically and now as operative. If they spend all their time consulting the newspaper to see what's going to happen to them today because of the sun sign, they're not going to be attentive to this Hermetic sinuous unity, which is there between them and this American reality called the people. Not the government. Something else.
So, it requires this attentiveness and this hundred percent compassion to be in tune with. And when one is then the language is no longer normal. It has what Homer used to call winged words. And those winged words raises to the visionary level, and we soar like that American Eagle soars. And wherever it looks, like Black Elk said, there the comprehension is there. And the longer we look the better the comprehension is. Whatever we wish to understand it's there like that.
For whom was it there like that? First for the American Indian people. They understood that. They lived that life. Isn't it amazing that the first program to reduce the American Indians effectively was in the administration of Andrew Jackson, the origins of the Bureau of Indian affairs. And Whitman thinking isn't it amazing that this primal layer of the people should be put into a political Bureau of affairs. Aside junket of a political structure. This was the major flaw. This was the beginning of not being able to believe in the people or the individuals. It was the first madness. And when you're forbidden to be yourself and your forbidden to be a part of the people, then everybody is suspect, and you don't know who you are. And you team up to get what you can, as fast as you can from whoever you can. And Whitman says, this is what happened on a massive scale for a quarter of a century leading up to the Civil War.

And the remedy was Leaves of Grass to say, you are real. The vision is real. There is a people. Even if there is only one there's still is that people and it can grow. It can spread. People can learn. So, he writes in here, he says,
Few are aware how the great literature penetrates all. Gives hue to all. Shapes, aggregates and individuals, and after subtle ways with irresistible power constructs sustains or demolishes at will. Why tower in reminiscence above all the nations of the Earth to special lands petty and themselves. Yet inexpressively, gigantic beautiful columnar. You have mortal Judah lives and Greece immortal lives in a couple of poems.

And Whitman's trying to make his point that great literature, great poetry, like great art penetrates. It has a resonance because it is spiritual. And because spirit in nature, indissoluble nature response. That the artist is the primal magician and consciousness, and nature responds to that artist. And in this response, the very context, the practical context of life, the trees, the rocks, the skies, the Earth, begins to shape itself to meet that person. Or to meet those people. And those people become more and more attuned and conscious that the land is turning to them. It's reaching to them, and they do the land. And that's the mysterio. That's the Mysterium Coniunctionis. That's the alchemical meeting. And when people are at home with that [inaudible] there's no need for metaphysics whatsoever. There's no need for politics whatsoever. They lived there for 20-30,000 years so that when others come there, they think it's a wilderness. Or they think these people are naive because they have no political structures. They never needed them. They never needed any metaphysics. They never needed any laws. All of these are constructs of illusion. They're signs of mental breakdown is what they are.

So, Whitman then tells us,
Nearer than this it is not generally realized, but it is true as the genius of Greece and all the sociology, personality, politics, and religion of those wonderful states resided in their literature or aesthetics. That was afterwards the main support of European chivalry, the feudal ecclesiastical dynamic dynastic world over there forming its [inaudible] structure, holding it together for a hundred thousand years. Preserving its flesh and bloom. Giving it form, decision. Rounding it out. And so, saturating it in the conscious and unconscious blood bread belief and institutions of men that it still prevails powerful to this day in defiance of the mighty charges of time. It's literature permeating to the very marrow, especially that major part it's enchanting songs, ballads, the poems. To the ostent sense and eyes I know the influences, which staffed the world's history are wars, uprisings, or downfalls of dynasties. Changeful movements of trade important inventions navigation. These of course play their part. Yet it may be a single new thought imagination, abstract principle, even literary style fit for the time, put in shape by some great artists and projected it on mankind. May duly cause changes, growth, removals greater than the longest and bloodiest war. Or the most stupendous merely political dynastic or commercial overture.
Whitman here is say he realizes his holy task to deliver in a new poetic form, somewhat akin. If one reads Whitman's language out loud, the poetic form that he came to is almost like the natural oration of the American Indian. Using that oratorial speaking stance. No notes. What notes? Is it the mind that needs to remember what they say? The heart doesn't need to remember. The heart presents exactly what is there. Where are the notes? Where is the need for notes?

In the American Indian oratorial style was the very substance and fabric of Whitman's poetic aesthetic. And presents because he was looking at all and noble American Indians coming to Washington D.C. when he was making his aesthetic. And then like Valmiki, he was seeing, these are incredible people. These are not savages. These are not beaten people. These are the noblest human beings he's ever seen. And they're all well-spoken. He said it was amazing. You see a man half naked with a red bright blanket wrapped around him and he looks noble. You know that he's noble. There's nothing ridiculous about him. That certainty. He'd seen it in Lafayette as a little boy. He'd seen it in Lincoln as a, as a man at the beginning of the war. And he saw it in the American Indian chiefs who came to speak straightly in Washington so that truth could be heard. And Whitman was there. He was like the recording angel who saw it exactly and reported it in the best way that he could. He put it into a poetic form that would amplify it and put it out throughout the land. He worked on it all his life. Even as an old man, he was glad he had done it. He never regretted having done it.

“Before proceeding further at where perhaps well to discriminate on certain points,” writes Whitman in Democratic Vistas,
Literature, chills its crops in many fields and some may flourish while others lag. What I say in these vistas has its main bearing on imaginative literature, especially poetry, the stock of all. In the department of science and in the specialty of journalism there appear in these states promises. Perhaps fulfillments of highest earnestness reality and life. These of course are modern. But in the region of the imaginative spinal and essential attributes, something equivalent to creation is for our age and lands imperatively demanded. For not only is it not enough that the new blood, new frame of democracy, shall be vivified and held together merely by political means superficial suffrage legislation, et cetera. But it is clear to me that unless it goes deeper, gets at least as firm and as warm a hold in men's hearts emotions in belief as in their day’s feudalism or ecclesiasticism, and inaugurates its own perennial sources welling from the center forever, its strength will be defective. It's growth doubtful. And its main charm wanting. I suggest therefore the possibility should some two or three really original American poets or perhaps artists or lecturers arise mounting the horizon,
Just like in ancient Egypt. Horace rises above the horizon. That's why the eye of Horus is the all-seeing.
mounts, the horizon like planets stars of the first magnitude. That from their eminence, fusing contributions, races, far localities together they would give more compaction and more and more identity to these states then it's constitution or its legislative and judicial ties and all that tethered to political warlike or merchant materialistic experiences.
In other words, the materialistic world can't hold anything together. It's paper mâché for human beings are spiritual. We walked through this material world. The only way that we contort ourselves through this labyrinth is we convinced ourselves that then this must be real. And we have to convince ourselves every day because it just doesn't stick. It doesn't make sense. Hermetic America.

So, he writes, the purpose of democracy, supplanting old belief and the necessary absoluteness of established dynastic, rulership, temporal, or ecclesiastical or Scholastic. That believing that these were the only protections against chaos. And that's why people convinced themselves. I think this is a protection against chaos. Without this we're going to, we're going to be in a mess. We've got to have a political system. We've got to have a theology. We need to have a metaphysics. It's cold out there. Whitman says the purpose of democracy is to sub plant this whole mentality. Gently, if we can dump it if we have to. Move on to something else.

Through many trans migrations and amid endless ridicules, arguments and ostensible failures to illustrate at all hazards, this doctrine or theory that man properly trained [inaudible] highest freedom may and must become a law and series of laws unto himself. Surrounding and providing for not only his own personal control, but all of his relations to other individuals and to the state. And that while other theories in the past histories of nations have proved wise enough and indispensable perhaps for their conditions. This as matters now stand in our civilized world is the only scheme worth working from. As warranting results like those of nature's laws reliable when once established to carry on themselves.
They generate their own veracity. And Whitman says, the problem is that we don't have a democracy yet. Because the indispensable lacking ingredient is for individuals to see that they and the people are the same. No difference. No difference at all. Never could be.

This takes vision though. This takes a transformative vision because we're carrying all the bad habits over with us all the time. Everything that we do. And not only what we do, but all the cultural filaments are all carried over. It's like being buried in an avalanche of hype. And you have to get away to see through it. It has to become translucent.

And so, he says, “The people. The people have their own choice fighting and dying for their own idea.” He says, I have spent years with the dying of that Civil War, and I report to you that there is no ability in the human soul, not in a few exceptional individuals, but almost without exception. That he saw a hundred thousand men of all kinds die. And that they all were noble. They all had dignity. All of them.

And so, in Democratic Vistas he opens it up.
What we have here, if not towering above all talk and argument. The plentifully supplied last needed proof of democracy in its personalities curiously enough to the proof on this point comes, I should say every bit as much from the South as from the North. Although I have spoken only at the ladder yet, I deliberately include all. Grand common stock to me, the accomplished and convincing growth, prophetic of the future. Proof undeniable to sharpest sense of perfect beauty, tenderness, and pluck. That never feudal Lord, nor Greek, nor Roman bread yet rivaled. Let no tongue ever speak in disparagement of the American races, North or South to one who has been through that war in the great army hospitals.
And he goes on for another 40 pages.

And Whitman gives us air fisted, open handed, a chance to regroup. To say, look what actually happened on a scale that was continental. And that if there's any indication at all, from the way this has been going at some time in the near future is going to be worldwide. It started in the minds of a few individuals with almost within the lifetime of certain living individuals. And now it's continent wide. And before another lifetime is lived down, it's going to be worldwide. The spirit of the whole Earth is going to be crying out to man to be a [inaudible] for each human being to be real. And it will have nothing less. How could it accept anything less? And so planetary man to be born needs a cosmic vision, not a politics of any persuasion whatsoever, but a cosmic vision.

Well, we'll see you next week. I'm a little bit more about these old fashioned Americans.