“The love of money is the root of all evil.” – Paul the Apostle

“A good column makes you want to argue with it.” – Charlie Rose

“Yes!” – Norman Mailer

(All images provided by the Drifter)

The idea and outline for this column arrived in what I can only call a night vision as I lay in bed half dreaming and half waking or in some other similar liminal state. Each little section of this essay/column appeared fully formed in my mind as if it were being placed there by the gentle hand of someone not myself who had suddenly appeared in the room (where I was alone), someone far outside of me who had arrived from another side of an unseen universe on an errand only to bring this little thing my way. After this messenger’s job was done, after all the pieces had been indicated and almost as if “written down” in my mind, the being who’d brought the goods vanished into air, into thin air, as utterly silently as s/he had come. When I awoke, I did nothing else but write down what I was told to write down. Following is the result. (It’s the message of this piece, and not the quality of the writing in this piece, which is the most important thing. And any quality the writing has, has been created by the pressure of the message. The being also told me how to write this first paragraph…)

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There’s something called “kick-in time.” It’s the amount of time it takes for a work of art to truly reach the honest reader, viewer, or hearer after one’s first contact with it. Different things kick in differently for different people. The greatest works of art, like Shakespeare’s best plays, kick in repeatedly over decades throughout one’s life and never stop kicking in every time they are returned to. Other things kick in and stay with you for a while and later they begin to fade away. Some pieces of art, like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, do not kick in immediately. Almost everyone on the Planet who sees the Mona Lisa for the first time as a young person CANNOT TELL, at all, what the hell is so great about it. It looks so unassuming, so ordinary, so “normal,” so utterly boring even, that very few young people understand this painting (reproductions of it) when they see it at first. They’re told it’s great and they might even believe that on some level since the authorities are ordering them to believe it, but they have absolutely no idea WHY that is so. Yes indeed. It takes many, many years for the Mona Lisa to “kick in.” After that, it will keep on kicking in for the rest of your life, once you understand it, every time you return to it (vast stretches of time away from it are also key to fully grasping some of its mysteries).

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I was nineteen years of age the first time my favorite poet (other than Emily Dickinson) kicked in for the first time. I’d been trying to read his various works for at least five years by that point. I had already read and understood much of Melville’s novel MOBY DICK by that point, and while I knew Whitman was great, and was utterly fascinated by the photographs of him for some reason (as with those of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass), none of his writing had quite kicked in with me yet.

Suddenly “Song of Myself” swept me away in such an uncanny way that I literally felt like I was lifted out of my body while reading the poem. I was literally stunned by the time I finished. Forty years later, this memory is still one of the most vivid memories I have from all life, and it was one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever experienced.

This long, self-published poem by Whitman has repeatedly been called the single greatest American poem of all time, and it’s hard to think of another poem that could even come close to knocking it off that pedestal, not even “The Wasteland.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Harold Bloom called “the mind of America” because of Waldo’s profound impact on American thought, life, writing, politics, and religion, said of Whitman’s poem that it was “the greatest piece of wit and wisdom America has yet produced.” Emerson was including everything, including items by Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin. No one has surpassed Whitman since then (in poetry), and it’s hard to see how anyone ever will.

About a year later, while I was reading “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” I found these lines:

“Closer yet I approach you, / What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you, I laid in my stores in advance – I considered long and seriously of you before you were born. / Who was to know what should come home to me? / Who knows but I am enjoying this? / Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me? / …Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.”

Twenty-five years later, I read those lines aloud at my mother’s funeral.

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Whitman is capable of entering anywhere in “Song of Myself.” From a speck of sand to the farthest star, from the lowliest peasant, pauper or slave to the highest queen and king or the rest of the “nobility,” and everyone in between, from the most orgiastic experiences (including orgasm, masturbation and every kind of sex you can think of) to the most horrible death throes, from the most serene feelings of peace to the most turbulent out-pourings of distress or violence, the most beautiful physical form and the most deformed (which he makes seem beautiful), everything and anything, all that is, was or ever will be (seemingly) human and non-, old Walt easily, clearly, grippingly catalogues it all, somehow, in 1,333 lines broken into 52 short sections.

The term FREE VERSE does not just mean that he eschews rhyme and meter. It means he is FREE to do anything in his poem. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson’s friend, said of Walt’s poem, “It is not a great shame that he wrote it – only that he didn’t burn it afterward.” Higginson was one of the more liberal readers of his time. Another famous writer of the time actually threw his copy of the poem into the fire. To say that Whitman had a “bad reputation” (kind of like the Charles Bukowski of his day) is understatement.

Whitman’s ultimate theme is UNITY. Everything is connected. The most up-to-date physics in the beginning of the twenty-first century have only confirmed the insights old Walt had (surging through his body and brain) a hundred and seventy years ago.

In his prose book DEMOCRATIC VISTAS Walt also predicted that the love of money above all else (not money itself) would be the downfall of America.

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Minnesota poet, scholar, editor, translator, prose writer, pacifist, activist, and shaman/teacher Robert Bly was someone whose genius could compete with Walt Whitman’s, even if he couldn’t beat him.

Bly thought the following lines were the most beautiful lines in American Literature:

“I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, / And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. / What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? /

They are alive and well somewhere, / The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, / And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, / And ceased the moment life appeared. /

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.”

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Gripping DRIFTER PHOTO NOTES, MUSICAL NOTES, HISTORICAL NOTES, and More (What the Core of the Message Is):

Walt the Wanderer was also a New York bar hound in the middle part of the journey.

One of these four photos shows one of the Drifter’s old watering holes in Al Capone’s old hometown of Cicero. Still joyously serving customers after all these years, now with bars on the windows.

The street photo is on the campus of the Drifter’s kids’ current college, Triton. They also attended Hem’s high school. The mascot of that school is the Siberian Husky. The yearbook cover for the Drifter’s kids’ senior year showed a Siberian Husky wearing a stocking cap and asking, “Where’s Hemmie?”

Harold Bloom has an utterly brilliant essay in which he proves that Whitman’s line, “I am the man, I suffered, I was there” (about the Civil War and all life) is the source not just for Hemingway’s writing style but for his whole life.

(The essay is so brilliant that Bloom wrote it again across decades at least ten times (changing little)).

Whitman had a stroke at the age of 53, never married, and lived from 1819 until 1892, almost all of it except for a few months in the New York area and then Washington, D.C. during the Civil War. Like Lincoln, his hero, he never traveled abroad.

He was a volunteer nurse during the Civil War. He worked, for free, in Washington, D.C. with both Union and Confederate soldiers. He did things like hold the soldiers while they were dying and sit by their bedsides trying to give as much aid and comfort as possible while they struggled to get through the most hideous wounds imaginable. He also helped them write letters home, and he wrote the letters home to the families after his patients had passed on. Most of the people dying or missing limbs (or recognizable faces) were 25 years old or less, often much less.

Hemingway was never a soldier. He was an ambulance driver who got blown up at the age of eighteen (200 shrapnel wounds in the legs) while saving someone else’s life by dragging them out of the line of fire.

Bob Dylan’s eight-minute-long song “’Cross the Green Mountain” is Walt Whitman on the Civil War brought to music. No one will ever be able to do it better, but all American musicians should try something with Whitman, whether Civil War-related or not.

Lana Del Rey has succeeded in capturing a different aspect of Walt in her song, “I Sing the Body Electric” (title and chorus by Walt, brilliant lyrics by Lana). (“Elvis is my daddy, Marilyn’s my mother, Jesus is my bestest friend…”)

FINALE Note (For Now); or, the Crux of the Message:

President Obama recently gave the best advice I can think of in a crisis, Whitmanic advice: “Don’t sit around waiting for someone to come and save you.” Jesus said the same: “The kingdom is within you.” The essential advice is: “SAVE YOURSELF (look inside).” Beyond that, exactly what saving yourself means will be very different for every single human on the Planet (and it might drastically effect what happens after we are no longer on this Planet in physical form).

Dostoevsky and Bonhoeffer both proved that saving yourself can be done even in front of a firing squad – even when imprisoned by the Nazis.

“Nero can kill me but he can’t harm me.” – anonymous Stoic philosopher

The Drifter