A View From the California Grass

Reflections on Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy

Can you live it?
—Mark Edmundson

As a serious reader and teacher of Mark Edmundson’s work, I have grappled now for at least a decade with the central question Edmundson poses about how one might approach a work of literature: “Can you live it?” Why Read?, Why Write?, Why Teach?, The Heart of the Humanities, and Self and Soul have all reinforced the argument that great books present a vision of existence that an individual can enact in his or her own life, and Edmundson’s writing has provided real answers to how one might fuse lived experience and its representations in imaginative literature. Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy seems the fullest expression of this theme. Edmundson’s rendering of Whitman’s life and art reveals the latent promise of an original American ideal, enacted by an “American bard” himself. As Professor Edmundson’s Medford High philosophy teacher once did for him, so has Edmundson “kicked open a door” for us, one which, if Whitman and Edmundson are correct, leads to many other doors we have not yet even begun to dream exist. As Edmundson concludes, Whitman is still “up ahead waiting for us,” and thus an ideal which remains for us to discover and, ultimately, “live out.”

Edmundson has championed brilliant works of “human art and intellect” as ideals on which we might “model our lives.” Whether it be William Blake or Jesus Christ, Bob Dylan or Muddy Waters, (for the record, I say a hard yes to “the blues tradition”) those visions have emphasized self-knowledge as a “necessity quest,” one which can lead to individual and collective progress. Since Whitman wishes to stand neither above nor in obeisance to any man or god, Edmundson’s reading of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass advances a durable, cohesive vision of American identity and culture, one which citizens can proudly embrace and take a “just pride” in.

Billy Joel once said that when we die, “we go into other people’s hearts.” This seems to me an apt paraphrase of Whitman’s notion that there is “no death” and offers a viable means to Edmundson’s vision of secular democracy, a “spiritualization” of the Constitution’s egalitarian promise. Edmundson’s Whitman is available to us all. Whitman is indeed the poet who gives “a passionate dimension to the legalistic brilliance” of that original document. Americans have lived out its letters to varying degrees of freedom since 1776. Edmundson reminds us that we are, each of us, “works in progress,” and our lives are never complete. Our “Emersonian circles” must expand to meet the demands of an imperfect document, words we test on the streets and in the “ordinary hours of human life,” as Tim O’Brien says.

In Song of Ourselves Edmundson presents an original American poet who is both excellent and ordinary, a visionary who is also “one of the roughs.” We see the grass as the “grand metaphor” for America: each blade singular in promise and collective in its obligations. What can possibly unite a country whose elements and factions were and remain so disparate and often violently opposed to each another? We once again find history coming to a “perilous moment,” as Gary Hart said of the brutal beatings and clubbings on the streets of Chicago at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. (One of only two times Hunter S. Thompson is said to have wept in his life was at Woody Creek, immediately after his coverage of the violence.) The republic is waning in global influence and credibility; it has been represented in its highest office by a sociopath who built a Paper Mache empire on the backs of ordinary people’s dreams, anger, and credulity. As Kurt Vonnegut said, “We were hornswoggled by supersalesmen” into believing that our seminal American conflict had already been fought out and settled. We forgot to ask ourselves Edmundson’s potent questions about “our common future.” As Edmundson writes in a 2008 essay, “The struggle over whether America’s future will be sacred or secular is vital.” Indeed, this drama is now playing out on every street and screen in the land.

An answer seems to lie in Edmundson’s suggestion that Whitman’s poetry has given us a blueprint for a national character. The blueprint, if lived, will not reconcile our differences but perhaps mitigate acrimony among citizens and make for a more peaceful and perhaps even joyous coexistence with what are often radically opposed values. Edmundson calls such values “final narratives,” a revision of Richard Rorty’s phrase, “final vocabulary,” to describe the terms by which we “define and attach meaning to experience.” To be alive in twenty-first century America is to bear immediate witness to and participation in a test of the original experiment. The future is indeed uncertain. Will we witness the transformation of fundamental human drives into a series of deterministic algorithms? Will a “cartel” of tech companies (cf. Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive) be the creators of a new modus vivendi? One can only imagine the obscene convenience of middle-class American life if innovation continues at its current pace. As Nicholas Carr warned us in 2008, it is not difficult to imagine a future merger of flesh and machine, human brain and Google chip. As Peter Gabriel sings, “All of the buildings, all of the cars, were once just a dream in somebody’s head.” So it will be with the intangible digital future. If one were to take a pessimistic view of such dreams, he would find support in Gore Vidal’s sardonic, incisive assessment of the American character: “Whenever I want to know what the United States is up to, I look into my own black heart.”

In Edmundson’s portrait of the Whitmanian ideal, however, we find much room for hope. As Edmundson makes clear, Whitman’s path is not an easy one. It requires not only humane kindness and empathy but also a tenacious body and mind. This is not a vision of the poet merely “leaning and loafing” on the grass like an insouciant American lotus eater. The ideal is earned by exercise of egalitarian humility and a deep recognition of one’s individual talents. As Edmundson reminds us in an essay on Emerson, we are composed of “circles” of “words” which create the individual we have come to understand as our Self and Soul. Edmundson’s reminder that Whitman repudiates abasement in any form—be it the sun, Yahweh, or any figure of authority before which he is expected to bow—connects Whitman to the “thymotic” world of “Homeric heroes.” Whitman struggles and fights and wants to be recognized for his talents. (a self-proclaimed “American bard at last” certainly suggests such a drive in Whitman)

This American ideal, however, is not an end; rather, it is a vital component of the struggle toward a “more perfect union” of “Self and Soul.” As Edmundson suggests in his 2006 Convocation Address at the University of Virginia, an identity quest is not merely an understanding and creation of an original Self: the American Self must profit his own lot and his expansive community of fellow citizens. We learn from Edmundson’s portrait that such profits have already been enacted, or “lived out,” by the “greatest poet America has ever seen.” Whitman affirms our originality and demands recognition of individuality and a larger collective identity, a “final narrative” of sorts for Americans. Leaves of Grass is a poem not of propaganda but an affirmation of those values around which we can gather and through which we can attempt to understand each other. It is hard work, and not necessarily pleasant, and many days just too “damned hard,” as David Foster Wallace suggests, to make real.

But this is the work of being an American, and this ideal is what makes the experiment unique, for it addresses the obstinate binaries which have plagued human beings since they have walked the earth: “Who shall rule? Who obey?” In Whitman’s America, these distinctions become less stark, less opposed, and more unified, for we do indeed return, not to dust, but as grass, the “uncut hair of graves,” each blade part of a larger field which, looked on from afar, not only “dances and with pleasure fills” but forces a recognition of shared and individual identity, the beauty of each blade and the green mosaic the blades collectively create. This is an American ideal worth fighting and dying for.

And we do. How many already incarnate the ideal and live and die for it every day? We shall never know everyone’s individual burdens, triumphs, and contributions, but Edmundson’s Whitman gives them voice and due recognition. They are part of an experiment that is indeed, always a “work in progress,” striving toward the ideal but “never quite reaching it.” We strive not to be gods or God but individuals of a “secular faith,” something by which we can individually abide and in which we can collectively believe. As Edmundson writes in 2006, “the most inspired and inspiring Americans have always done so.” Edmundson reckons that Whitman is among them, and the poet’s vision encompasses all that has been and remains “unsung.”

Poetry, as Edmundson reminds us in many of his essays, was Matthew Arnold’s vision of the “next source of meaning in a world without strong religious faith.” Whitman is an exemplar of such an existence without its aristocratic baggage. We look to the past but never confuse it with the potential of the present; we consider the “best lives” as they have been depicted, but we also must realize that we can create such lives in our everyday experience. Whitman’s power is to depict and live out his poetic ideal. He is an “American Jesus,” as Edmundson writes.

Whitman does not call on the powers of groups or governments or churches to confirm the American ideal, a clear break from “feudalism and aristocracy” in both thought and action. Whitman suggests “multiple paths, multiple ways of seeing the world, multiple truths”—in 1855.

Today we might abhor our political enemies’ echo chambers, we may find no dissonance in our own, but as Whitman affirms, his armpits are holier than any church on the globe. Tyrants, Kings, Queens, and Emperors: Beware! All have a chance at Whitman’s ideal, and this point seems at the heart of Edmundson’s work on Song of Ourselves: “the expansion and health of democracy” is at stake. This is the project in which conscientious Americans, from the country’s beginnings, have been engaged. How do we remain both distinct and ordinary, inspired by humane decency, vigor, and resilience? How do we “continue the game?” (as Edmundson says of Plato’s advancement of Socrates’ wisdom, self-knowledge for which Socrates was willing to die.)

The freedom to ask hard questions and speak one’s mind, “however imperfectly,” we see advanced in Whitman, for he is, as Edmundson notes, unabashed in his vision of everyday American existence. Whether one works with her hands or mind, his strength or intellect, all are ultimately, if Whitman is right, participating in the unfolding drama of American life. Its tests are always real, clear, and present, although often obscured by powerful entertainments. Edmundson notes that such “inducements” come more and more to define and often determine who we take ourselves to be. Whitman is not entertainment. He is the “stronger, more nurturing stuff” that we need now perhaps more than at any point since we were two.

“Union.” Edmundson emphasizes the term as Whitman and Lincoln saw it: an ideal too consequential to abandon in its infancy, a promise still an inaccurate reflection of the nation’s founding document. This pragmatic idealism acknowledges that the Union is never perfect, and working toward it gets us somewhere close to true democratic existence. That is something to celebrate, for such an ethos heals and challenges. We are all at any given moment engaged in Vonnegut’s “Duty-Dance.” Sometimes it is a dance of love, at others, hate. In its darkest moments, the dance is indeed with death. Thus both our present and “common future” are always “at stake.” Edmundson reveals that we have a guide for how to live in such a state of contradiction.

In this way, Edmundson has laid out the means for anyone to incarnate the “legalistic brilliance” of our founding document, which allows for the perpetual pursuit of “full franchise” with full understanding of and respect for each citizen’s integrity. We can define ourselves and yet not be limited by those definitions. We may, in a sense, live out the irony, as Richard Rorty observes, of what it means to have a “final” set of terms to describe ourselves, both who we are and who we might become. We need not be victims of circumstance at the “intersection of many potentially evaluative and determining discourses.” We can, that is, create the meaning in our lives necessary for the survival of democratic existence.

These are perilous times, indeed; everywhere one looks, he sees conflagration, disruption, brutality, and the remaking of the United States into a bi-polar nation whose citizens bow to absolute power, regressing to a state of fealty and obligation. We need not be a country fractured by megalomaniacal visions and infantile slogans, a puerile view of the human condition in which decent Americans of all codes and cohorts are deceived by what Gore Vidal claims is “the only art form [the United States] has ever created: the television commercial.”

We should never abase ourselves before one another in the throes of everyday American life. This ideal moves beyond what John Jeremiah Sullivan calls the “narcissism of minor difference” and urges us to seek something new, to “see the world afresh.” To be in and see the world in the present, Whitman affirms, is vital to the conduct of a meaningful life. We do not become dinosaurs who rest on Jurassic laurels, and we are never content. (“Only fools are satisfied,” Billy Joel reminds us in “Vienna,” a song about his reunion with his father in Austria. While he was there in the mid-1970s, Joel saw an old woman sweeping the cobblestone and exclaimed, “What is she doing?! Why is this poor lady sweeping the street?” His father replied, “She has a purpose, and she feels useful.”) Whitman shucks off classical or medieval antecedents to inform our present or future. He strolls through and quests toward a life which is evergreen, blades of grass which live on despite wildfire, clearcutting, and lawnmowers. The grass keeps coming back.

“I do not despise you priests,” Whitman writes. “My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths, and all between ancient and modern . . . I know every one of you, and know the spoken interrogatories, By experience I know them.”

Edmundson’s reading of Whitman’s work and life shows a future which has always existed. We are a country of potential. That is, after all, the promise we are guaranteed: perpetual movement toward a more perfect union. Whitman wants the world, and he wants it now, for as Edmundson reminds us, the only bumper sticker that has ever worked for him reads: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” We gain valuable wisdom from our individual and collective pasts, but ultimately, we keep moving forward, or as close to forward motion as one can get. This ideal is no Horatio Alger yarn, nor is it the story of a few individuals who shone the way to a better life. It is the story of those who have lived out the poet’s vision. Edmundson suggests in Song of Ourselves that the grass has already been cut, and we are now perhaps more aware of our chance at “democratic humanism, and the promise it can unfold.” As Robert Frost reminds us, “way leads to way,” and that path in the woods is now as verdant and fraught since most of us can remember, young and old. Whatever illusions we might have been under before, we are fully aware of the fight at hand. I can think of no better guide than Whitman to catalog the ways we might tread that path, and no better teacher than Edmundson to steer us toward the better angels of the American spirit.