Walt Whitman's "Great New Doctrine" (Part 4)

A parable on the abandonment of "salvation" or "lifeboat" religion. In chapter 18 of the Qur'an, Moses meets up with a mysterious traveling companion and the two set out on a journey together. Along the way, they have a number of strange adventures. At one point, they board a ship; Moses' companion punches a hole in the bottom of the boat. Moses remonstrates with him: "You will destroy us all!" His companion simply observes that Moses does not understand. At the conclusion of the story, the mysterious traveler offers Moses an explanation for his actions. There is a logic to them that makes sense from one perspective, but does not clear up the mystery altogether--unless you accept Henry Miller's assertion that there is no place of safety, really. There are tests demanding faith. Moses' companion was a great-souled one met upon the road. This is a tale that may illuminate these Qur'anic stipulations:

Piety does not lie in turning your face to the east or west; piety lies in having faith in God, the Last Day and the angels, the Scriptures and the prophets, and giving of your wealth out of love for God to kin and orphans, to those less fortunate, to the son of the road and mendicants and in [ manumission] of slaves, in establishing the prayer-rite and paying the tithe. Those who fulfill their pledges and are patient in hardship, adversity, and danger—they are the true [souls], conscious of God (Qur'an 2:177).

Special dispensation is granted to the "son of the road." Why? Why are the pious challenged to see to the welfare of the wayfarer? Consider these lines from the NT's Letter to the Hebrews: "Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares" (Heb. 13:1-2).

Walt Whitman's "Great New Doctrine" (Part 3)

As an undergraduate in the late 1970's, early 1980's, I began to take control of my own religious education. Put another way, I began to develop a syllabus of works that I found personally instructive, redemptive, transformative ..."religious" in a broad and not particularly sectarian sense. I was reading "outside the box" of the usual suspects of "religious" literature and finding as much (and sometimes more) of value there than in the Bible and related writings. D. H. Lawrence's late essay "The Risen Lord" achieved scriptural significance for me, as did Henry Miller's essay, "The Wisdom of the Heart." In the latter work, Miller makes a Whitmanian remark that helped to wean me from an education in Christianity that had convinced me that I was a moral reprobate in need of salvation:

"...salvation, like fear or death, when it is accepted and experienced, is no longer 'salvation.' There is no salvation, really, only infinite realms of experience providing more and more tests, demanding more and more faith..."

These words struck me with their plainness and matter-of-fact acceptance of the death of "salvation religion"--at least where I was concerned. For I had become convinced, long before I had read these words, of the bankruptcy of such an understanding of religion. What I needed was someone to intervene and tell me, "Yes, of course, living for salvation is living for oneself and living for oneself is a pathetically impoverished way to go through life. And besides, it doesn't work--for there is no salvation, really..." Getting "saved" saves one from nothing--for life carries on and what it takes to get through life is, in the immortal words of Lou Reed, "a busload of faith."

As I have grown older, I have increasingly begun to understand that "faith" in Whitmanian terms: as a fully embodied engagement with the world, its problems and possibilities. Rather than looking for a way "out" (through salvation), I keep trying to find my way "in"--into the path of the great souled ones who follow their own genius, the wisdom of their hearts and blood, as it leads them towards an ever receding horizon that they chase relentlessly like Ahab his Leviathan--only not to slay the beast in an orgy of vengeance, but to pay their respects, in an act of sympathetic witness.

And no sanctimoniousness either. There is no room for sanctimony in the life of the great souled ones. The burden they bear is the burden of sympathetic witness (see Qur'an 25: 63).

Walt Whitman's Great New Doctrine (Part 2)

In Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence offered a hint of what he had in mind when he advocated "a morality which changes the blood":

It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of our life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening. [Modern Library Paperback edition, 2001, p. 107].

Lawrence was not alone in his regard for the novel's role as a moral tutor: "For both Tolstoy and Bakhtin, novels, the most prosaic of forms, occupy a special place in ethical education. For good or ill, they are powerful tools for enriching our moral sense of particular situations. They locate obligation in eventness..." Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, 1990, p. 27).

I do not imagine that what Lawrence was reaching for was quite the same as what Tolstoy or Bakhtin were attempting to articulate. Nevertheless, what Lawrence invoked as "the spirit of place" (Chapter 1 of SCAL) seems to resonate with at least Bakhtin's notion of "eventness."

In any case, "blood" for Lawrence may be a metaphor for Whitmanian "sympathy."And the "flow" of one's sympathy may well be context sensitive--indeed, hyper-sensitive. And it may be in this sense that Whitman's "great new doctrine" is, as Lawrence asserted, "A doctrine of life. A new great morality. A morality of actual living, not of salvation" (SCAL, p. 181).

Which calls to mind a remark of another disciple of Whitman's: Henry Miller. But that will have to wait until the next installment.

Walt Whitman's "Great New Doctrine" (Part 1)

Any hope for realizing a Whitmanian Republic in the midst of these Benighted States of Leviathan must be founded upon a critical understanding of, and appreciation for, Whitman's visionary achievement. For a visionary reading of a visionary poetic legacy--vision must call to vision--we turn to the 12th chapter of D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature.

You will notice immediately that chapter 12 (Whitman) follows immediately upon the heels of Lawrence's chapter on Melville's Moby Dick. It would not hurt to be conversant with Lawrence, chapter 11, but it is not absolutely necessary. Understanding Melville's Gnostic masterpiece--or at least exposure to its genius--will do quite well.

Read and re-read the linked chapter and consider what a "morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind" might look like.