Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass

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Hermetic America: Transformational America
Presentation 3 of 13

Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
The Cosmic Man of Universal Vision
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, July 18, 1985

Transcript:

The date is July 18th, 1985. This is the third lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir. on Transformational America. Tonight's lecture is entitled Whitman's Leaves of Grass The Cosmic Man of Universal Vision.

We are, we are trying to understand something that's very difficult to understand, because it requires an appreciation for something which we assume that we do know already. But this country is very difficult to understand. And part of the reason that is difficult is that this country was made on purpose to represent a culmination of all times and all peoples. It was not allowed by design from the beginning to be a separate entity like a nationality. It was planned, it was designed, it was Hermetically sealed against being coherent in any other way than being a universal humanity. And the problems that we have run into again and again in our history is trying to forget that heritage. Trying to make just some little comfortable niche in the world. Rather than making the only thing that this country can make, a beacon for a future humanity.

And this was not only a rational, conscious plan, but it was also an occult, hidden spiritual expectation. The spiritual expectation was always in jeopardy of being considered merely a metaphysical system. And so, Benjamin Franklin, especially, whose mind but more whose character was responsible for the nascent development of the idea of a United States, created the kind of character which grows continuously. The kind of character which can be educated. And particularly the kind of character which is at home in self-education. And so, the American character from the beginning, from Benjamin Franklin's example more than anyone else, sought to express in life terms, in life situations, the kind of context that was adequate for people to teach themselves what they needed to learn, whatever it was. And Franklin experimented with himself from an early teenager until he was in his mid 80’s with self-development in this way, this fashion.

There were very few people in his lifetime that he had confidence in. Who were able to take over from him. Who were able to be self-starters. Who were able to have the confidence that they could educate themselves. And of course, the problem there is having a willingness and a confidence to face the unknown. To explore in life. To explore in one's sense of purpose. And to not try to base one's future plans exclusively on a past, but rather to base one's future plans on the developing interrelational dynamic as it turns out. This eventually, in the late 19th century, 150 years after, Franklin would become pragmatism.

And we will see in this lecture series what a sophisticated, excellent mode pragmatism is. And it is the American philosophy. It is peculiarly American. And it has a psychological as well as a philosophical foundation. But its primary motivation is spiritual and neither psychological nor philosophical. And this, of course, has laid it open to criticism from philosophers and from psychologists. Neither group of which in our time are particularly spiritual.

The difficulty in all this is that the movement between Franklin and the pragmatist was a long gap filled by only a few individuals. Franklin, when he was 70 years of age, finally found someone that he had confidence in that could learn in the way in which he had learned. And it was a young Thomas Jefferson. And Thomas Jefferson was a miracle to Benjamin Franklin. He was 70 years old when he first came in contact with him. And the character of Jefferson impressed him. It wasn't the capability of the man, but it was the ability to self-learn from a real-life situation. And not to depend upon the accurate mind, which he had, in any other fashion, except using it as a tool. That the élan of Thomas Jefferson was not a plotting mind, as his critics pointed out time and time again. He was not a plotter. He was someone for whom vision and design were inseparable.

And so, from 1776 until the 1780’s, Thomas Jefferson grew in the United States, and Benjamin Franklin handled this country's Revolutionary War period in its most critical battlefield of all, the diplomatic circles of Paris. And it was because of Franklin's unending dedication that the Revolutionary War was won at all. We did not win it on the battlefields. Franklin sent many individuals, including Lafayette, including many other Generals. And we've gone through this at the origins of this lecture series earlier this year. But we saw that after Jefferson, there was a hiatus. It was almost as if the nascent American tradition stopped and ended. Because Jefferson was so convinced that the way in which he had learned from Franklin was the only way in which it could be passed on. But the proteges of Jefferson, especially Madison and Monroe, all died within a few years of Jefferson.

And so, the United States faced a crisis, a spiritual crisis in the 1830’s. It was, in terms of external traditions, leaderless. There was a power vacuum, seemingly. And it was then that machine politics was born with the election of Andrew Jackson. And the, if you recall, the inaugural parade of Andrew Jackson was not an ordered thing at all. It was a rabble. That marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, and people rode their horses into the white House. This rabble inherited the tremendous potential and dynamic that had been built up. And the country became an economic free for all. A political free for all.

There were individuals who were still remembering the tradition, and we've covered several of those major individuals. There were people like Thoreau, Henry David Thoreau, who seemingly had no contact whatsoever. Seemingly picked out of the air the new self-development spirit and proceeded to develop himself almost without any kind of a tradition around him in isolation. There were individuals like James Fenimore Cooper, who had been born in Jeffersonian America. Who had gone to Europe and had spent 7 or 8 years there and when he came back, he couldn't believe that the country had changed that radically. It was no longer the United States that he knew. It was a free for all. An economic industrial free for all.

And we have seen in the series before this that in the 19th century, most of the thinking individuals in the United States went through a critical phase of trying to figure out what has happened. And we went through not only James Fenimore Cooper, but two of the great American critical minds. Henry Adams, whose great grandfather had been the second president and whose grandfather had been the sixth president. And whose father had been the American ambassador to England during the Civil War. He came from the most illustrious political family in the United States. And he tried to make heads and tails out of the situation. What is happening to us? And Adams finally pieced together and wrote a nine-volume history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison [History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson]. And no one read it. He said, look at the vision that was there that we had that made all this potential possible. And now there's nothing but a free for all to grab what you can in temporary concert with people who are not friends or neighbors at all, but associates.

And then we looked at Mark Twain and saw the tremendous development of Mark Twain's artistry and his Western humor. And how the experience of the United States, in its betrayal of itself, turned Twain into a sour, bitter old man writing mystical science fiction towards the end of his life.

But now in this series, we come back, and we pick up a thread which we had only time to put a couple of lectures in. And the thread is the, was the character of Abraham Lincoln. Because Abraham Lincoln, in some real way was the spirit of the United States. Emphasis on United. United States. He was called in his time the great Westerner. He was the Backwoodsman, the Jeffersonian Ben Franklin man from the wilderness who had managed to develop himself. And one of the great characteristics of Lincoln, which is why he is one of the world's great figures. He never stopped growing. His growth goes off the graph. And when he's assassinated he is a world class figure. He is easily on a par with the great Generals of history who make history like Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or Napoleon. Lincoln is easily in that category. But he began from absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing.

It was the character of Lincoln, which in a way, which we have to learn to understand again, was a spiritual beacon. And the person who picked that up, we have seen in the first two lectures was Walt Whitman. That Walt Whitman had had the kind of mystical contact. You needn't be ashamed to use these terms. Remember when he was six years old, there was the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the United States Congress brought old General Lafayette over to the United States and he toured around the United States. And when he got to New York City, Walt Whitman's daddy took him there, and unbelievably old General Lafayette went over and picked up little Walt Whitman, six years old. And Whitman never forgot that contact. He never forgot the character that was there.

It was just like James Fenimore Cooper when he talked to old General Lafayette. And Lafayette listened to him talk scornfully of Jefferson, and he said, you have never read Mr. Jefferson. Go and read Mr. Jefferson. His works are in the library. He was the long fuse in the French Revolution as well as the American Revolution. Go and read him. And Cooper matured from reading it.

The same thing happened to Whitman. Because when he saw Abraham Lincoln the first time after Lincoln was elected to the presidency, he recognized the same quality of contact that was there. And remember, it was in a hostile crowd of about 40,000 people. Whitman was a newspaper reporter. He had all the facts down. It was a hostile crowd. They wanted to hate Lincoln. And Lincoln didn't say a thing. He displayed himself in his common, plain, ordinary honesty you couldn't mistake. And looked at the crowd, and they turned from a lynch mob into a silent, hushed amphitheater. And in that amphitheater, Whitman's nascent 22-year-old poetic vision picked him out as the hero of the age.

And when the Civil War broke out, it was almost impossible for Whitman to stay away from it. And though he was too old to fight, you recall that he went down and arrived very soon after the Battle of Fredericksburg, which was one of the most bloody battles in world history. It was a bloody battle because precision artillery was used for the first time in history. Not just Napoleonic cannons that made colorful puffs of white smoke that you would decorate Tchaikovsky's Symphony with. Precision artillery that blew people apart so that the battlefields were littered with fragments of human beings as far as the eye could see. And Whitman was captured by the horror of it, and he stayed for the duration of the war for four years. Going around to the hospitals. He worked 2 or 3 hours a day as a reporter to pay for his room and his food, and the other 16 to 18 hours a day. He was tending the sick and the dying, listening to them. And we went into that in extenso.

It was the experience of the Civil War, he said, that changed him around that sensitized him to the fact here you have this mystical person like Lincoln, and here you have this greatest of all historical tragedies, the American Civil War. Something on a universal scale is happening. What is it? And Whitman was in this mood of searching for a divine vision of wholesomeness at the end of the Civil War, and fate or circumstance or synchronicity put him in the most incredible position. Put him in the Department of Interior in the Bureau of American Indian Affairs. And because Whitman was very literate, able to write fast and hear things, Whitman received the depositions from all the American Indian emissaries. All the tribes sent emissaries to Washington, D.C. All of them. Hundreds of them. And Whitman was the man who had to hear that it wasn't just North and South, but there was something primordial in this country that wasn’t tended to. That the Civil War was a symptom of some vast geographical, mystical madness, the dispossession of the original Americans. And this was the kicker.

And Whitman in 1866, transformed from a very great poet into a world class poet. And when he brought out his revised Leaves of Grass in 1867, he wasn't writing anymore as a normal poet. He was writing as a seer. As a sage. In India they call him a Maha yogi. There are books, Walt Whitman Maha yogi [Maha Yogi Walt Whitman: New Light on Yoga]. Because he was writing on the scale of the Rishis of the Rigveda. He was seeing the wholesomeness of life, not in some naive or sentimental way. He'd seen too much horror for that. Year after year. But he had seen the American Indian nobility that had survived not only the Civil War, but for hundreds of years of decimation and they were still noble individuals. Still well-spoken. And it was this fact, more than anything else, that changed Whitman into a great poet.

Towards the end of his life, towards the end of Leaves of Grass. In 1884, as an old man, Whitman went to Buffalo, New York, and they were unveiling a statue to an American Indian there. And Whitman went to see this. There's a very famous Indian. His name was Red Jacket, and he was a great orator, a great speaker in the Iroquois League. And we don't have time to go into all of it, but the Midewiwin Grand Medicine Lodge ceremony was a prototype for the spiritual structure of the American Union. Benjamin Franklin put it into the structure. So, Whitman went there, very cognizant of all this, because by 1884, Whitman had had seen it all as we would say today.
One word in this poem is difficult to associate right away. It's Ossian. He'll use the term Ossian’s ghost. Ossian was a literary subterfuge that was perpetrated in the 18th century. A Scotsman named Macpherson said he discovered an old Icelandic manuscript by someone named Ossian. And it was like Tolkien today, like J.R.R. Tolkien. It was a fabulous fantasy of Icelandic warriors and so forth. And so, he'll use the term like one of Ossian’s ghost.

Here's Red Jacket (From Aloft) from near the end of Leaves of Grass. The people who are unveiling this statue to this great Indian orator are Buffalo, New York businessmen who were just doing it because it's civic duty. And Whitman, like the good gray phantom Rishi standing there seeing it all and writes this poem.
Upon this scene, this show, Yielded to-day by fashion, learning, wealth,
(Nor in caprice alone- some grains of deepest meaning,) Haply, aloft, (who knows?) from distant sky-clouds' blended shapes, As some old tree, or rock or cliff, thrill'd with its soul, Product of Nature's sun, stars, earth direct- a towering human form, In hunting-shirt of film, arm'd with the rifle, a half-ironical smile curving its phantom lips, Like one of Ossian's ghosts looks down.
And of course, the statue is looking down at all these petty political officials who are finagling and bickering over the land that was once the wilderness that Red Jackets people kept in such pristine shape that those who came thought it was a wilderness. It had been kept in pristine shape for 2020 5000 years.

Whitman was sensitive to the unity of nature and spirit. That nature and spirit are a unity. That nature in its contours as a land, as a geographical land, the valleys, the rivers, the mountains, the forests, the sea. This nature, this contour, is exactly coextensive with the spiritual inscape of the human beings who live there. And that unity of the people and their land is the inviolable trust. That's the Hermetic seal of wholesomeness. And that had been violated. It had been violated by the only thing in the universe that seems to tear them apart. The conniving mind of man. And when it's torn apart, there's a tension that's created between man's spirit and nature. And because this tension is a mental thing, man dreams up ways to bridge this gap. And he makes up legalisms. He makes up politics. He makes up theologies. He makes up metaphysics to fill this gap, to bring it back together. And the more desperately does he attempt to do this, the more spirit and nature are obscured to one another, and the more the land goes barren and lies fallow. and the more the spirit of man becomes aberrant and lost and forgotten.

Whitman saw that the task of putting spirit and nature back together was to make people realize that they have to give up their mental fictions. And Whitman said, the only thing that does this is great art. That the artist is the savior of civilization because he teaches us again the honesty of nature and the honesty of the spirit and the fact that they are contiguous. And so, Whitman in 1866, committed himself for the rest of his life and never looked back to developing himself as that great artist of the United States who would speak to the unity of the land and its people. And all through Leaves of Grass, all through the rest of his life. The imagery that is there is constantly the fact that the land and the rivers, the lakes, the sea, the stars above that the cosmos is a unity and that man's spirit intact with that unity is unshakable in its honesty.

Towards the end of his life, collecting essays together as he would do every so often into book form. In 1888, near the end of his life. He died in 1891. He collected together a series of essays in a volume called November Boughs, Late in Life. November. Late November in a life. And in November Boughs there's a section which is entitled A Backward Glance Over Traveled Roads. And let me give you a few paragraphs of Whitman, 1888 from November Boughs. He writes.
For grounds for Leaves of Grass is a poem I abandoned all of the conventional themes which do not appear in it. None of the stock ornamentation or choice plots of love or war. Or high exceptional personages, personages of old-world song. Nothing, as I may say, for beauty's sake. No legend, no myth or romance. No euphemisms nor rhyme. But the broadest average of humanity and its identities in the now ripening 19th century. And especially in each of their countless examples and practical occupations in the United States today. One main contrast of the ideas behind every page of my verses, compared with established poems, is their different relative attitude towards God. Towards the objective universe. And still more by reflection, confession, assumption, the quite changed attitude of the ego. The one chanting or talking toward himself and towards his fellow humanity. It is certainly time for America above all to begin this readjustment in the scope in basic point of view of verse. For this readjustment in the scope means that everything else is changed.
Everything else has changed.

His friend John Burroughs commenting on Whitman's poetic style wrote, “The trouble with most of us is that we found our taste for poetry upon particular authors, instead of upon literature as a whole. Or better yet, upon life and reality.” And Whitman chose to found his work upon life and reality to transmute himself. Not to be a literature, but to be a poet seer. And Leaves of Grass develops that kind of an elan.

He writes towards the end of Leaves of Grass in Songs of Parting. He writes almost in a prophetic mode. He writes, “To conclude, I announce what comes after me.” And this is very peculiar, because when he wrote this in the 19th century, everyone accused him of hyperbole. Exaggeration. But it's very strange, because recent studies of Whitman from the 70’s and the 80’s point out again and again that really Walt Whitman's vision of the America of individuals seems to be coming true at last. His prophecy,
When America does what was promised. When through these states walk a hundred million superb persons. When the rest part away for superb persons and contribute to them. When breeds of the most perfect mothers denote America, then to me and mine, our due fruition. I have pressed through in my own right. I have sung the body and the soul. War and peace have I sung. And the songs of life and death. And the songs of birth and shown that there are many births. I have offered my style to everyone. I have journeyed with confident step. While my pleasure is yet at the full, I whisper so long. And take the young woman's hand and the young man's hand for the last time I announce natural persons to arise. I announce justice triumphant. I announce uncompromising liberty and equality. I announce the justification of candor and the justification of pride. I announce that the identity of these states is a single identity only. I announce the union more and more compact, indissoluble.
And it was this quality, this character of the indissolubility of the United States that seemed to be, to him, the most important touchstone.
We talked last week about his great essay on freedom called Democratic Vistas. The horizons upon horizons of possible visions for the United States. How why is it that there needs to be bickering when there are huge horizons of possibility everywhere? Whatever we would wish to make, we can make. But we have to recognize that we have to work together to make any of it. And it's only that belief, that recognition, that confidence that allows for Hermetic America to really operate and really come into play. The individual egotistically can only carve out for himself, but a community working together produces more possibility. And from that possibility there are yet newer communities and more possibilities. And that freedom is a flight to the real.

In the British edition of Democratic Vistas, he wrote an introduction. And he said in there that he felt that with the establishment of the United States, that the dry land of a new genesis had appeared. That at least there was the possibility. There was a landscape. There was a beachhead made upon a new kind of humanity. A new evolution in man. That man would change physiologically. That he would change sociologically. And all of this would be incumbent upon him, understanding that he was a cosmic being. He was a cosmic person. And that the term cosmic person does not imply a confusion or a contradiction. Cosmic as in all, person as in individual, that they work together. They flow together.

And he wrote, “America is really the great test or trial case for all the problems and promises and speculations of humanity, of the past and of the present.” And in this he wished to also say,
To my mind America, vast and fruitful as it appears today, is even yet for its most important results entirely in the tentative state. It's very formation, stir and whirling trials and essays, more splendid and picturesque to my thinking than the accomplished growths and shows of other lands.

And he says the essential element is to create a unified vision for the people, which was what was lost in the Civil War. And then, of course, we talked about how Whitman said the causes for the Civil War were not power group against power group, but the fact that the American character went to seed. That almost every political office or representational office in the country was filled with land grabbing, money grabbing individuals. He went on to list the qualities, the cut throat adjectives that described. He said, I was there. I was alive. I saw it. I was a newspaper reporter, I covered it. There was no honesty anywhere in public office. The entire country, North and South, was riddled with this hypocrisy. And that was the cause of the Civil War. It was a disease. It was a boil that came out of a sick individual.

It was the duty of a poet seer to create a new literary vision, a new artistic vision, which would reinstate them, the capacity to see the horizons of possibilities in human beings, in individuals.

In Leaves of Grass he has a wonderful poem, To the Sunset Breeze, which he wrote very, very late in life. Almost one of the last poems that he wrote. In the section of Leaves of Grass entitled Goodbye My Fancy. And this is To the Sunset Breeze. We'll read this, and then we'll have a break, and then we'll have some slides.
Ah whispering something again unseen. Where late this heated day thou interest at my window door. Thou leaving, tempering all cool, freshening gently vitalizing. Me old alone, sick, weak down, melted down with sweat. Thou nestling, folding close and firm yet soft companion. Better than talk, art or book. Thou hast own nature elements. Utterance to my heart beyond the rest. And this is of them. So sweet thy primitive taste to breathe within. Thy soothing fingers on my face and hands. Thou messenger, magical, strange bringer to body and spirit of me. Distances balked. Occult medicines penetrating me from head to foot. I feel the sky. The prairies vast. I feel the great Northern lakes. I feel the ocean and the forest. Somehow I feel the globe itself. Swift swimming in space. Thou blown from lips so loved now gone happily from endless door. God sent. Thou art spiritual. Godly. Most of all known to my sense.
It's an old man, poet, seer, communing and finally learning that when you commune with the whole country, it's a continent. You commune with the globe to the Earth round. As easily and gently, as if you're feeling the breeze. Effortlessness, the sign of comprehension.

So, let's take a break, and then we'll come back and have a few more things in some slides.

I want to just give you an insight about the overall structure of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Some of you will go and find it. And as this lecture series goes on I know that you go and try to find these things, as you should. Towards the end of his life, Jacob Bronowski poignantly said, unless this civilization centers itself in our living rooms in the next generation, we won't have it anymore. And those are my sentiments. So, all this is not for the departments in the universities. I could care less. It's not for any fame or glory for any individuals. It's just to remind us that it's real. It's ours if we just claim it. And it works. Always has.

Whitman, when he wrote, did not just sit down and write on the paper. He wrote scraps. Maybe a sentence here or there. Maybe a couple of sentences. And then he would rearrange these scraps constantly. So that almost each line. And he loved long lines like 16 to 25 syllable lines. He loved long lines. They were like the filaments that if you spin them together make a strong thread. And he wove Leaves of Grass out of these kinds of chords of twisted filaments together. But he left it all very articulate and very loose, because he liked to change his mind. He liked to see what happens if you move this around in a different arrangement.

So, Leaves of Grass is a poetic esthetic. It is very democratic. Every line is equally weighed with any other line. You can move them around. This allowed him to have form, but it also allowed for mysticism to permeate his art. Because the rearrangement was not on the basis of chance, but on the visionary response to that new arrangement. And so, one had spontaneity and form. And he had this to say about future poets. He said the people, especially the young men and women of America, must learn that religion, like poetry, is something far, far different from what they suppose. It is indeed too important to the power and perpetuity of the new world to be consigned any longer to the churches. Old or new. Catholic or Protestant. Saint, this or saint. That it must be consigned henceforth to democracy en masse and to literature. And it must enter the poems of the nation and become the nation. And it was this vision of Lincoln as embodying the nation as an individual that most impressed him. And he was the central figure in Whitman's vision.

And in November Boughs he wrote, “Glad I am to give even the most brief and short testimony of Abraham Lincoln. Everything I heard about him authentically and every time I saw him,”
which he says, it was my good fortune through 1862 to 1865 to actually pass a word with him personally, maybe 20 or 30 times. He said it just annealed my respect and love at the moment. Anneal is a term for metallurgy. It means to alloy something. To bring it together. Seal it. It's a Hermetic term. Whitman got it from Giordano Bruno, who used to use those kinds of terms. Whitman read Bruno a lot.

And as I dwell on what I myself heard or saw of the mighty Westerner and blend it with the history and literature of my age. Or of what I can get of all ages and conclude it with his death, it seems like some tragic play, superior to all else I know. Faster and fierier. More convulsionary. For this America of ours than Aeschylus or Shakespeare ever drew for Athens or England. And then the moral permeating underlying all. The lesson that none so remote, none so illiterate, no age, no class may directly or indirectly read. Abraham Lincoln was really one of those characters, the best of which is the result of long trains of cause and effect needing a certain spaciousness of time and perhaps remoteness, to properly enclose them.
And he says it will only be at some future time from 1880’s when he's writing this, that in retrospect, the shape of events will be able to be seen.

But that retrospection that look for events will not happen without work. It will not happen in a naive sense. He says, Only if we school ourselves to the vision of wholesomeness will we be able to look back and see the shapes of reality and know where we are and know what we have become? And then only then will we see the democratic vistas, the horizons of possibilities of where we might go. And that it takes a very peculiar kind of a person to live in this kind of a freedom, this kind of a liberty. Because if you're all the time thinking that you have to have yourself pasted on to somebody's plan for you or somebody's design for you, you are never going to be free. You're never going to be able to see. Because vision must penetrate through the plans, the systems. All of that are scales before our eyes. But this liberty of vision, this freedom of being, is a quality that belongs to only one thing in the universe, and that is the unity of the universe as a whole. It does not belong to any fragment of it.

In Goodbye My Fancy, towards the end there is a poem called To Soar in Freedom and Fullness of Power. It's only about six lines long. I'd like to give this to you, and then I'll show you some slides.
I have not so much emulated the birds that musically sing. I have abandoned myself to flights. Broad circles. The hawk, the seagull have far more possessed me than the canary or mockingbird. I have not felt to warble and trill, however sweetly. I have felt to soar in freedom and in fullness of power, joy, volition.
So, rather than imitating nature, he is presenting reality in the kind of contours of the spirit That's Hermetic America finally is getting used to.

We'll see in the next lecture that a great contemporary of Whitman will discover this in the negative obverse. That where Whitman soared, Melville, Herman Melville, plummeted into the mysteries of the Earth, into the mysteries of the sea. And what changed him, we'll see, was what he said of the little cabin boy, Pip. Who, after he fell overboard and plunged down into the ocean so far that when they finally fished him back up, the only thing he would do after that was mystically look and play the tambourine. And Melville says he did that because he had gone so deep into the ocean he saw God's foot on the pedal of existence. And nothing anymore interested him except the all. So, we'll see about Melville starting next week.

This is an odd series of slides. And I guess I have a message in here, and I'll try and find out what it is as I look at it. I put this together in vision and sometimes discursively I don't know what I'm doing. We'll see what this is.

I guess we've got it in backwards. That's all right. We'll go. We'll go through them backwards.

This is Whitman as an old man. There's something about his character in this. And I guess what I was trying to start off with, I was going to show you two slides of Twain, two slides of Henry Adams, and then two slides of Whitman to show you what they look like when they were young men in their prime and what they look like in old age. And there's a character to Whitman that's here. Maybe you can remember this, and we'll see the other.

[inaudible] going forward you can use the reverse button on that and just move [inaudible] around to see what the next one is. Yeah, we've got it all reversed. Why don't you push the whole thing forward and I'll come through it backwards? All right. Can you do that? I'm not pushing it. No, you have to push it. Push the forward one time. No, no, you have to go through it all and then work backwards. [inaudible] You can take it out now. I guess this is why I don't plan too much, because it never does work out. For those who are new machines, and I don't get along. It's not temporary. It's a long-standing thing. When I was younger, I used to wonder about it, and I used to analyze it and set up little psychological traps, and it's true. They don't care much for me.

This is Twain as a young man. Not so very young. This is Henry Adams as a young man. Here's Whitman. Now there's a different quality to Whitman, and we're talking about great men. Mark Twain and Henry Adams are tremendous. I mean, they're first-class pillars of culture, as you would say. But Whitman is different. There is a charisma about Whitman. Charisma in Greek means gift. A gift of vision that he had it as a boy. It's not something that you earn so much or develop so much. It comes out. It bursts free.

This is Twain at 70. Mark Twain, 70 years old. In 1905. Very suspicious. Very bitter. Very insightful. But without loving kindness.

This is Henry Adams as an old man. Sealed in by memory. A living mummy packed with the past. Wrapped finally with the protective covering of the Middle Ages, which he retreated into.

And there's the sage as an old man. This is the last year of his life. There is a different quality. Twain and Adams are geniuses of the mind. Whitman is a poet of the spirit. It's different. It's different.

This is Whitman at the time that the Civil War came to an end. He was working in the American Indian Bureau. And he was completely revising the scale and the scope of Leaves of Grass. It had started out to be a poem which was going to be a person. And then he realized that the person that he had really wanted to become was as vast as the stars. And so, the poem also had to be expanded to that length. And here's Whitman used his favorite word about him at this time of his life was jocular. Hat tilted. Spring in his step, ready to go wherever the spirit needed to go. Wherever the guiding star would take him. The cheerful warrior.
[inaudible]. He was about 42.

This is the last great sage of the Fox Indians [inaudible] who I lectured on several years ago, and no tape was made of it and very few people came. He was the last great American Indian who understood the Indian mounds. You know, this country was covered from the coast to the Rocky Mountains with so many mounds that it looked like the land was tattooed. All of them, except a few dozen, were plowed under. Millions of square miles. [inaudible] in the early 19th century showed a man named Walter Pidgeon. Many of the mounds and showed them what they were for and there was a very esoteric and rare book that was done on the Visions of [inaudible]. I have a copy of it. This is the kind of person who would have come to Washington, D.C. at the end of the Civil War, and Whitman would have taken down their petitions and talked to them and enlarged his vision of the land, enlarged his whole conception.

The first edition of Leaves of Grass is written by a New Yorker, somebody who grew up in Brooklyn. Somebody who was familiar with Long Island. The 1867 Leaves of Grass takes in the entire nature of the United States. Totally different concept.

[inaudible] showed an ancient battle mound. This is a decoration and artist likeness of it. He said that in the ancient American civilizations that the tribes had reached a state where there were great wars that were fought. And that in order to ensure that there was peace, all of the tribes got together and tried to find some common ground between them. And they found that all of them recognized the Great Spirit as the ultimate context of life. And so, the peacefulness of the United States was reached in primordial Indian America by the concord of mutual recognition of the same Great Spirit. And of course, the basis of that then became the basis of many of the healing ceremonies. But the notion of a wampum belt was not a money belt, but it was the currency of the Great Spirit, which was peace. And if one carried a wampum belt, one could travel anywhere in the United States, regardless of what tribes or what peoples. And these were some of the outcomes. This was some of the visionary material that Whitman was stewing with after the Civil War. This kind of material.

Sitting backwards. These are just some of the symbolic shapes of the mounds at that time. As you can see, many of them are mandala shapes. All of them had specific purposes. Some of them are quite large. Here on the bottom is a circle of 20 acres and an octagon of 18 acres linked together. And there's an area of 40 acres and 27 acres. The scale 1000 feet to the end. So, you can see that some of them are quite large.

In fact, the largest ceremonial city in primitive Indian America was Cahokia, on the Mississippi River, right in the center of the continent. And it's peculiar, because right across the river from it is the modern metropolis of Saint Louis. And very peculiar, almost synchronistically right across from the straight line of the Cahokia ancient ceremonial center line is the Jefferson Arch. And you can look down the ancient Cahokia line through the Jefferson Arch towards the West. Towards the sunset. In a very mystical way, the United States is recreating itself, recreating the unity of the land and the spirit of the people who have to discover again. As Whitman kept talking about all the time. There's only one universe. There's only one God. We're a part of that.

This is Black Elk as a young man. You can see the quality and character of Indians of the 1860’s. The tremendous vitality. You can read Whitman's description in Specimen Days. He said they looked like God stepping off the pages of ancient manuscripts and walking in with nobility. And he said, it took you a long time to notice that they might just be dressed wrapped in blankets. He said an ordinary blanket and they looked like kings.

This is the [inaudible] battlefield. I took this photo once in a moment of vision. The steel fence seemed to symbolize the partitioning of the land. And because of that, that's why the tombstones instead of the flowers. But you can see the vast spaces. The fence stops. What is it separating with this kind of scale of vista, of landscape? The fence is paltry. So, the next shot I took was something like that. No fence. This is in Wyoming. Northern Wyoming. Yellowstone is up beyond those ridges, about 30 miles.

But you can see with this kind of a vista, with this kind of an interior vision of what is real. It's foolish and childish to be putting fences up. This is a metaphor for life. Even if they're iron fences, it doesn't make any difference. Partitioning reality according to the mind is fools play. For the spirit of nature, it's a unity.

This is the great last really great Navajo medicine man, Hosteen Klah who I lectured on here. I think we have a tape of that. Do we? Yeah. We have a tape of that. I want to give some idea of the nobility of the American Indians. Some of the great figures. Not movie star faces, but the integrity of these fantastic individuals.

A white woman who wrote a biography of Klah at one time they were driving back, driving towards them in New Mexico, driving towards the reservation. And this whirlwind came up, this tornado. The sky was dark, and they were kind of petrified because it seemed to settle on the road and come towards them. So, her husband stopped the car, and it kept on coming, making a beeline down the road and had gotten into a rut. And she said Klah slipped out of the back of the car onto the roadway and went on to the side and started picking a few plants here and there, and he put them in his mouth, and he chewed them. And he walked in front of the car, and he walked towards the whirlwind. And the whirlwind got about 50 feet from him, and he spit out and threw his hands out, and the whirlwind cut in half. The top part went off on one side and the bottom on the other, and he turned around and got back in the car. And she said for a moment he was an elemental spirit, and the next moment he was an old Indian that they had known for all their lives. It's like the really great individuals who unfurl themselves only to fly, but when they're roosted, they're honing their personal. Whitman was that kind of an individual.

Here's a sand painting by [inaudible] Croft. Any engineer will tell you that this is an energy condenser. There's no mistake about that. The form is universal. It's another one of his sand paintings. These are circuits for healing. But they don't work by electromagnetic energy and work by the spirit, which is a different.

Here's Whitman, 1879. He met a man named R.M. Bucke. B-u-c-k-e, the author of Cosmic Consciousness and the next step in the evolution of man. And when he met Whitman, he said to him that he felt that Whitman was the prophet of a new age, of a new humanity. So, he invited Whitman to come and visit him in Canada. He lived in Ontario, Toronto, I believe. And Whitman went out there for about four months, and he helped Bucke to organize and write his book called Cosmic Consciousness. And the theme of that book is that the evolutionary next step in man is for him to learn that his individuality must include a universality. And that for anyone to be whole, we all need to be whole together.

This is another one of Klah’s designs, and you can see the self-symbol in the center. And this is very, very particular American Indian. The center is not a place. The center is only there by virtue of a focus. There's nothing in the center, but the exterior also is permeated. There's always a way in. There's always a way out. There's always articulation. And this double quaternary like this is an ancient hermetic symbol. You probably would recognize it if you saw it written in the Western mystical way, which is an infinity sign. But this is the American Indian version of it. And Klah of course, very, very great man. This is at the center of the healing process.

Another one of his sand paintings. [inaudible]. These happen to be from the first Bollingen volume. Published in the depths of World War II. And it was from a Navajo War Ceremony. We have a copy of it at the Whirling Rainbow Library if you'd like to look at it. So, the preserve as art on paper but they were originally sand [inaudible].

This is a whirling rainbow symbol of the South, from which the name of my school is taken. The bird flies free at the end of the process. It's just like Whitman saying I'm not a songbird. I'm that kind of bird that soars to freedom. [inaudible] And he certainly was that.

Well, we keep getting the impression as we go on with these series that every time we look back with comprehension at our tradition, whether of this country or of this civilization or of this planet, we find nothing but excellence and quality. And we increasingly run out of excuses to lead a good life. We just simply have a massive tradition of excellence. You can pick and choose, and there's more than any ten people could ever digest in the whole of their lives. Maybe when we run out of excuses, we'll just do it.

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