Whitman and mysticism

Whitman and mysticism

What is mysticism: Mysticism is not a coherent philosophy of life, but rather a mental temperament. A mystical experience, according to BERTRAND RUSSEL, implies understanding, a sense of unity and the unreality of time and space, and the belief that evil is mere appearance. The vision of a mystic is intuitive; feel the presence of a divine reality behind and within the ordinary world of sense perception. Feel that God and the Supreme Soul that animates all things are identical. He sees an essential identity of being between Man, Nature and God. He believes that “all things in the visible world are forms and manifestations of the one Divine Life, and that these phenomena are changeable and temporary, while the soul that informs them is eternal.” The human soul is also eternal. Transcendentalism is closely related to mysticism, as it emphasizes the unintuitive and spiritual over the empirical.

Whitman’s poetry is full of mystical and transcendental strains: he was deeply influenced by Emerson, the American transcendentalist. His thinking was intuitive and unsystematic like that of a logician. He wrote like a mystic:

Wisdom belongs to the soul, it cannot be tested, it is its own test.

It applies to all stages, objects and qualities, and is content,

It is the certainty of the reality and immorality of things and the excellence of things.

There is something in the floating of the sight of things that causes it outside the Soul.

Whitman believed that the soul was immortal. He identified with all the animate and inanimate things that surrounded him. What is interesting about Whitman’s mysticism is that, as Schyberg observes, “in his book we can find the typical characteristics of absolutely all the various mystical doctrines.”

Whitman is a mystic with a difference: one cannot call him a pure mystic in the sense of Eastern mysticism. He is not a man of prayer. Like all mystics, he believed in the existence of the soul and in the existence of the Divine Spirit, in the immortality of the human soul and in the ability of the human being to establish communication between his spirit and the Divine Spirit. But he differs from the oriental or traditional mystics in that he does not subscribe to their belief that communication with the Divine Spirit is only possible through the denial of the senses and the mortification of the flesh. Whitman declares that he sings from both the body and the soul. Feel that spiritual communication is possible, indeed desirable, without sacrificing the flesh. Therefore, there is a large part of the sexual element in Whitman’s poetry, especially in early poetry. Section 5 of Song of Myself is a case where sexual connotations are inseparable from mystical experience.

The material world is not denigrated: Whitman does not reject the material world. Seek the spiritual through the material. He does not subscribe to the belief that objects are illusory. There is no tendency on the part of the soul to leave this world forever. At Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, we see the soul trying to play an important role in managing this world of scenes, images, sounds, etc. Whitman does not belittle the achievements of science and materialism. In section 23 of Song of Myself, he accepts the reality of materialism and says:

Humans for positive science!

Long live the exact demonstration!

Nature and man will not separate or spread further.

Searching for divine reality: Whitman accepted the Theory of Evolution but could not believe that evolution was a mechanical process. In the slow process of growth, development, and change that science was revealing, Whitman saw God becoming evident and unmistakable to man. The soul of man finds total dissatisfaction only in the search for the reality behind the manifestations. As it says in Passage to India:

Bathe me, oh God, in you, raising you,

I and my soul within reach of you.

At the end of the journey, the soul meets God, or the “Great Camerado”, as it says in Song of Myself.

Whitman’s sense of unity of the whole: his cosmic consciousness. Whitman has shown throughout his poetry his belief in the unity of the whole, or “unity” of everything. This sense of the essential divinity of all created things is an important aspect of mysticism and is also closely related to Whitman’s faith in democracy that calls for equality and brotherhood. Song of Myself is full of verses that proclaim this “unity”. He knows

… that all men who have been born are also my brothers … and all women my sisters and lovers,

And that a keel of creation is love.

Praise, not merely life, but the absolute wrath of each particular and individual person, of each existing real being. Whitman equates all opposites and accepts evil as part of reality.

In Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, the poet has achieved the unity of all humanity: “The simple, compact and well assembled scheme disinterests me but it is part of the scheme.” Time becomes one in Whitman’s poetry. Past, present and future merge in a spiritual continuum. Thus, in Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, it says:

It is not worth, it is not worth the time or the place-distance,

I am with you, men and women of a generation,

Or many generations later.

The mysticism that governs the images and symbolism of Whitman’s poetry: The mystical search for Reality and communion with the Divine easily lends itself to being represented in terms of the image of the journey. The Song of the Open Road is a poem whose theme is a symbolic journey of an exploration of the spiritual and physical universe. Out of the Cradle Endnever Rocking symbolizes the mystical search for reality and the ultimate discovery of the meaning of life. When Lilacs was last in the courtyard, Bloom used symbols and images designed to affirm the importance of Death. Death is seen as a liberator because it leads to a new life, and the poet, having had the mystical experience of this truth, seeks to be a “unifier of here and hereafter.”

As GW Allen points out, the “attempt to point the way between reality and the soul almost sums up the whole of Whitman’s intention in Leaves of Grass.” The mysticism here is obvious. The cosmic “me” in Whitman’s poems is on a perpetual journey. His soul is but a fragment of the soul of the world. The mass of images that run through his poems symbolizes the unity and harmony in him and in all creation. The grass spear acquires a mystical meaning through its symbolic value: the celebration of individuality and the mass, the exclusion of no one, the exception of all. In Song of Myself, Whitman talks about God as her lover and her “bed partner” sleeping next to her through the night. The mystical experience is conveyed in terms of highly charged sexual images.

Whitman rarely lost touch with physical reality, even in the midst of a mystical experience. Physical phenomena for him were symbols of spiritual reality. He believed that “the invisible is proven by what is seen”; therefore, he uses very sensual and concrete images to convey his perception of divine reality. Find a purpose behind natural objects (grass, seabirds, flowers, animals) to,

The smallest outbreak shows that there really is no death …

and

… every blade of grass is no less than star trek work …

In fact, it could be said that mysticism constitutes the very poetic form of Whitman’s poems, he saw the universe as a unit of disparate objects, he unified the Divine Spirit; therefore, his poems are “Leaves of grass” which signify both separation and unity. Whitman’s dominant herb metaphor presents a case of unity and harmony, a basic component of structure.

Song of Myself Mystical Structure: Song of Myself is perhaps the best illustration of Whitman’s mysticism influencing meaning, form, and symbolism. James E. Miller says, “When viewed in terms of the phases of traditional mystical experience, Song of Myself takes on an integral structural form.”

The reader can rediscover what the poet observes by observing his own spear of summer grass and setting out on his own mystical journey. Song of Myself is an “inverted mystical experience” ¬- While the traditional mystic attempted to annihilate himself and mortify his senses in preparation for his union with the divine, Whitman magnifies the self and glorifies the senses in their progress toward union with the Absolute.

Conclusion: Whitman is a mystic as much as a poet of democracy and science, but a “mystic without creed.” He sees the body as the manifestation of the spirit that is “delivered” by death to a higher life. A spear of grass is not for him an inert substance, but the handkerchief of God, “the flag of the disposition”. Often, in their sensitivity, matter dissolves, trees become “liquid” and contours “fluid”. The real is transmuted and has cosmic visions. It becomes a comet that travels around the universe at the speed of light.

I go out like air, I shake my white hair in the sun on the catwalk,

I spill my flesh in whirlpools,

And wander on lace tiptoes.

If Leaves of Grass has been called a “Bible” of America, it has a lot to do with its mystical strain. It is true that Whitman’s type of mysticism cannot be identified with the disinterest of the Christian variety or the passivity of the Oriental. What we can call Whitman’s mysticism is “democratic” mysticism, available to all on equal terms and encompassing contradictory elements. But it is undeniable that mysticism is central to the meaning of Blades of Grass.