Bob Dylan in Denver

I grew up in the 1960's listening to Bob Dylan's music, but I first saw him perform live in the old Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh Pa. It must have been '79 or '80--'81 at the latest. It was the "Slow Train" tour and Dylan was on fire for the Lord (or a Lord), inspired, defiant, and brilliant. I've seen him repeatedly since then, in various parts of North America, and through thick and thin. During the 1980's, there was a lot of thin. But towards the end of that decade, there were faint glimmers of light--a song here, an album there. And in the early '90's, Dylan decided he had either to quit or go down swinging. Thankfully, he chose the latter and, ever since, he has been honing his sound and (with the stable anchorage of bassist Tony Garnier) perfecting his live performance. Last night's set in Denver was ferocious with songs like “Cold Irons Bound” and “Ballad of a Thin Man” among the big guns booming. The amazing guitar work of Austin's Charlie Sexton (recently returned to the line-up) was an added treat. If you haven't seen Dylan live in the last decade or so, or if you’ve never seen him live, you must go see him now. He is a force of nature. Go and hear the old lion roar.

From the back cover of Isaac Gewirtz's I Am With You: Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: 1855-2005

"...the golden thread of Whitman’s intention: that a new American man and woman might join him on a 'perpetual journey' of self-realization, discovering along the way that 'All truths wait in all things.'"

This "golden thread" is the deep charter of the Invisible Whitmanian Republic--not what Mr. Springsteen has termed the "Badlands" (i.e., the country we live in), but what he has termed the "Promised land" (i.e., the "America we hold in our hearts"). The country we must continually struggle to "achieve," as Richard Rorty so sagely expressed it (alluding to James Baldwin).

The perpetual journey of self-realization is the soul-craft that will continually re-invent the American experiment. The two journeys are, as a practical matter, intimately inter-related. And as we continue to limp along with an out-dated 18th century Federal Constitution and a self-defeating two-party system that is securely in the hands of the Plutocratic War Party, determined (as it is) to "naturalize" the permanent war economy, we must heed N. O. Brown's call to abandon politics (as usual) in favor of "metapolitics"--the Whitmanian road to soul-craft, and soul-craft to nationhood.

With each passing year I become more and more convinced that Leaves of Grass is the reason for America (USA). I am teaching myself how to live Whitman. How to cultivate a large sense of life. How to reach out to others--to be expansive as it were. To achieve "love's body" hoping for the day when that body becomes the body-politic.

And whoever has been blind in this life, will be blind in the next (Q 17:72). Whoever is incapable of finding their way clear of the culture of fear induced by the governmental and corporate purveyors of "soft" terror shall wander endlessly in the wilderness and be barred from entering the longed-for Canaan-land.

Why Lawrence?

Because D. H. Lawrence, in his Studies in Classic American Literature, wrote what may be the single most insightful essay on Walt Whitman yet composed. Next to Lawrence, I place Roger Asselineau's 2 volume study, The Evolution of Walt Whitman, and next to Asselineau, Henry Miller's brief essay "Walt Whitman," collected in Stand Still Like the Hummingbird.

Mirabile dictu, it took an Englishman to appreciate Whitman's great struggle to read Emerson aright and, in the process, to re-invent the American experiment as "soul-craft"--where "soul" is none other than the body "accomplishing herself" as what Norman O. Brown would later term "love's body."

Of Whitman, Miller would write: "He is worldly through and through, yet serene, detached, the enemy of no man, the friend of all. He possesses a magic armor against wanton intrusion, against violation of his being. In many ways he reminds one of the 'resurrected' Christ" (Miller, 108).

And so he does. He is Lawrence's "escaped cock," the "man who died," and "the Risen Lord." And he is pre-figured in the Qur'an as ibn as-sabilah, the "son of the road," the "wayfarer," the "passer-by," and in all Gnostic speculation that claims the resurrection has already occurred for those who have eyes to see.

The African-American Muslim intellectual Sherman A. Jackson offered a very interesting twist on these themes in his book Islam and the Blackamerican (see his notion of "immanent spirituality" in that book).

By collecting these broken threads, one can begin to imagine a way forward for an original American religiosity that looks beyond the present impasse of sect and creed. But we are a long way from that.

The Invisible Whitmanian Republic Recognizes 9/11 as an International Holiday

David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 at what is now 8a Victoria Street, Eastwood, near Nottingham, the fourth of the five children of Arthur John Lawrence (1846-1924) and his wife Lydia (1851-1910).

Architects of Native Radicalism

In addition to its "founding fathers," the Invisible Whitmanian Republic stands on the shoulders of intellectual giants whose writings inform the critical tradition that Professor Rick Tilman has termed "native radicalism" (see Tilman's 1984 intellectual biography of Wright Mills published by Penn State University Press: C. Wright Mills: A Native Radical and his American Intellectual Roots). The IWR looks to a broader (and more eclectic) group of thinkers than Tilman includes in his "school," but the Whitmanian republic is not a sect: it is an intellectually promiscuous and robust attempt to revitalize the tradition of native dissent under the present American regime of a perpetual war economy and the world empire it seeks to establish.

Pictured from top left: Thorstein Veblen, Economist; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Historian; G. H. Mead, Philosophical psychologist; Emma Goldman, Essayist and activist; Richard Rorty, Public intellectual; John Dewey, Educator and public intellectual; C. Wright Mills, Sociologist and theoretician.

Founding Fathers of the Invisible Whitmanian Republic

From top to bottom: Walt Whitman, Bard; Martin Van Buren, Jacksonian democrat; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wise man; Norman O. Brown, Psychologist; Seymour Melman, Economist; George S. McGovern, Jacksonian democrat; Thomas Jefferson, Enlightened aristocrat; Andrew Jackson, Flawed giant; Noam Chomsky, Linguist.

Norman Oliver Brown

"I am Defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born" --Ralph Waldo Emerson

I spent a couple of weeks in June 2009 reading the unpublished archived notes and typescripts pertaining to all things Islamic of the late, great Norman O. Brown.

In my view, Brown belongs to the intellectual tradition that Professor Timothy Marr has termed "American Cultural Islamicism" (ACI). For Marr, ACI "is ultimately a complex configuration of cultural ideologies that reveals more about the constitution of American imaginations than it does the character of Muslim beliefs" (Marr, 7).

Marr discerns three trends of thought (he calls them "valences") operating within the ambit of ACI: domestic, comparative, and romantic (ibid, 10) and finds all three deeply problematic. I tend to agree with Marr on this score (and here I should disclose that I was a colleague of Marr's at the University of North Carolina, that I admire his work, and that I consider him a friend); that said, I would also say that I have read my Kant and Schleiermacher and, consequently, affirm that every attempt at interpretation, of coming to terms with the "Other," necessarily proceeds by way of misunderstanding. Of the three misunderstandings of Islam on offer under the rubric of ACI, the romantic is the least troubling to my conscience--so long as by "romantic" one understands the Islamicism of Ralph Waldo Emerson's love affair with Sufi poetry and not the variety of romanticism that exoticises Islam and caricatures Muslims as the passive objects of over-heated Orientalist sexual fantasies. See Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Brown, in my view, belongs to the Emersonian "school" of ACI. In his engagement with Islamic materials, he found much food for thought, much inspiration, much to love. Indeed, he found in Ismaili political thought and life a counterpart to the project he initiated with his book Life Against Death and continued in Love's Body. Centuries before Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche diagnosed the worminess in the apple of Western civilization, Muslims experimented with a pre-modern version of what Brown would admiringly describe as "a subterranean counter-culture of protean polymorphous complexity"--an apt description of what I have advocated in these pages as the "invisible Whitmanian republic" (Brown, "Shi'ite Islam"--a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the AAR in Dallas, TX, December 21, 1983).

In Brown's notes and in the recently published volume Norman O. Brown, The Challenge of Islam: The Prophetic Tradition, ed. Jerome Neu (Santa Cruz, CA: North Pacific Press, 2009), one witnesses NOB thrill to the discovery that--despite his friend Herbert Marcuse's trenchant critique--the cultural revolution he had called for in the 1960's had not only historical precedents but had experienced some (short-lived) historical successes.

The conclusion Brown drew from his studies of Islam is that more study was needed--of Islam as, in Marr's words, a "horizon for expanding the global repertoire of domestic expression" (Marr, 14). In other words, 20th (now 21st) century Americans should stop demonizing Islam and Muslims and, instead, sit at the feet of the history of Islamic thought and culture and learn how we might best re-invent our own.