Alice Minium

Whitman probably would not have considered himself a teacher, let alone the guru of words and wisdom that the modern world has made him out to be.

In his own time, Whitman was, by all accounts, the simplest of men. He was not stuffy or pretentious, as we are when we sit in our classrooms debating the intellectual finer points of whether or not Whitman might have been gay.

He probably would have laughed had he known entire classrooms of students would spend hours dissecting the meaning of his punctuation and his reasons for ending a line. “Who was the 29^th bather?!” we ask wretchedly, clawing at our eyes and throwing our hands to the sky in exasperation.

The funny thing is that Whitman probably didn’t even know.

Poetry is transmutation, an incarnation of abstraction into the tangible plane of mind and linear ideas, and poetry by its nature does not bend to our linear laws, nor is it defined by them. The laws serve poetry in conveying its purpose, and the way they fall and are constructed so delicately infers to us, like fingerprints, traces of the soul of the poem, but they are not in essence the poem itself- only fragments. A poem is not its words, symbols, punctuation breaks, or any other syntactical components. A poem is an energy above, within, and without all of that.

The poem is what you hear between the lines, that which can only be implied in words — that which speaks directly to the soul, like sacred wind chimes, an ancient siren cry of summoning to our inner self that knows more than world, “Wake up.” That is the part of us that receives poetry, if we are receiving it properly.

 Much like music, which is not simply heard, it is utterly felt and inspires raw physiological and spiritual reactions within us, and draws out emotion endlessly like water from a well. Have you ever heard a song from your childhood, and tried not to feel anything as you listen? It is impossible.

Though we live mostly in mind (thanks to modern life) and to a small extent within the body, most of who and what we are is completely and utterly Soul.

Soul masters all of that, and mind can say, “Feel nothing,” but the Soul will not obey, as it cannot be extracted from its other manifestations. Soul is inherent in all things, the thread which flows within and between all entities, and we cannot escape it, for we are Soul. All of the universe is Soul.

It is to our Souls that Whitman speaks most directly and profoundly. It is our Souls upon which he impresses an indentation of exotic and primal laughter, and it is our Souls to whom Whitman sings. He flirts with our souls, mesmerizes our souls, challenges our souls, calls our souls into our bodies with his words like fast magnets zapping consciousness into our molecules and presence into our nucleotides and irrefutable magic into our moments. It is the Soul within us we find so entranced by the words of Whitman.

Whitman would not have called himself a teacher, for he laughed at the Men of Mind peddling words and playing Jenga with interlocking thoughts and dreams and transmutations endlessly, day after day, forever entranced with analysis and forgetting to live. Whitman would have said that it is better to play in the grass than to read a hundred books, or better to sing a song of joy than to study for hours and master the algorithms of matter and math.

He had this very Christ-like notion of drinking from the raw tap of human experience, a very Taoist ideal of this very moment and all that it contains being the infinite sum total of all things.

Such a mentality is the “Stop” at the end of the telegram; such fullness needs no motion. Yet through motion, and the interplay of opposites, smoke curls, flowers bloom … and the universe comes to know itself.

Every expression, every action, every entity, every tangible and intangible thing are simply the universe laughing, playing with herself, stretching her arms out, writing a poem in a thousand different languages and via a thousand different mediums.

Such is the myriad dimension and delirium of the canvas of life. Its nature cannot be known in mute, fixed laws. It is not mechanistic, dead, or inert. It cannot be known by grammatical structure or the arrangement of words within poetry.

It cannot be dissected by taking apart all the components of a radio, hoping to find music, or disentangling from the thoracic cavity all the organs of the body, hoping to find life. You will find only machines and matter there.

Life cannot be mapped, cannot be defined, cannot be extracted, cannot be indirectly known. You must know it yourself. You must meet it for yourself. You must hear it yourself, drink from its well yourself, and play with it yourself. Life cannot be taught, you must touch it yourself.

It is not earned, or learned, or acquired, and Whitman would have laughed at any who claimed him as teacher of elite sacred spiritual arts. Whitman’s spiritual truth was knowable to every human, and to every nonhuman despite their category, already.

Whitman’s spiritual truth was Being Alive. Whitman was, above all, truly the teacher of that. We can eviscerate and analyze his poetry for years yearning to tap the meaning from its component parts, but that is not where his teaching lies, and that is not how we will know it.

“Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?/ Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems” (section 2: line 18-19).

We have felt so proud of our meanings, but the joke is that there’s nothing to discover or extract from them that we don’t already have — there is nothing we can ever find whose origin is not the same as our very own.

“Stop with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems.” Stop with me, and feel for yourself. Breathe for yourself. Touch for yourself. Drink for yourself. Taste it yourself.

Do you feel that? That is meaning. Do you hear that? That is the poem. And of that, above all, we can be our only teacher.