Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (54 page)

kraark awfullygladaseeragain hellohello amarawf kopthsth" (114). Faulkner and Joyce, however different their tonalities, are both drawn to the noise coming from the coffin, and even though each of them can render the suffering, musing, and meditations of the living, they are both stonewalled when it comes actually to eavesdropping on the dead.

That discourse of the living who only interpret death is all we have to go on. I have argued, especially in connection with Proust, that death's so-called finality may be deceptive, essentially because those living interpreters continue to live, continue to process the deaths they encounter and survive. In claiming that Proust exposes many of our casual assumptions as "snapshots," I meant to contrast the instantaneity of our normal thinking with the more sinuous, evolving, dimensional performance that literature produces. Indeed, art deserves our consideration partly for this reason: it is a complex, orderly, layered arrangement, displaying not only a structure but also a sequence and pattern which are hospitable to the play of time. When we scratch our heads and emit "thoughts," they are often of the one-liner variety, and even if they are possessed of profundity, they are rarely strung together or intricately orchestrated. The reasons for this are many: no one cares to listen; life is rushed; we have miles to go before we sleep.

Proust's labyrinthine account of mourning, forgetting, and "healing" derives much of its power from the narrative packaging that the author has concocted. Reading about the young man's return to Balbec, we too have forgotten the dead grandmother, and hence we too are struck by her remarkable return, by the way that this death is not over. What I am saying is that art possesses trumps of exactly this nature: a repertory of strategies and devices for representing experience in such a way as to do justice to its unfurling and destabilizing character. The novel as a form seems particularly well suited to convey the play of time, that "forking path" along which meaning actually travels. Mourning would seem absolutely to require narrative as a way of mapping its peculiar evolution.

Yet, we know that poetry can do this job too, as we saw with Pastan's poem on grieving. But poetry has, I think, obstacles to face, obstacles

rarely acknowledged as such in the academy, namely, that poetry is considered rarefied, esoteric, bound by formal and metric conventions, often excruciatingly private and opaque. These are serious liabilities when it comes to my claim that literature provides basic kinds of resources for people in pain, or people pondering finalities such as death and dying. Whereas many are prepared to regard novels as "slices of life," few would approach poetry in the same vein.

Yet, poetry has advantages of its own which endow its testimony about pain, sickness, and death with unique authority. First and foremost, poetry offers us language in its most heightened and thickened form. Unlike the relatively straightforward ciphers that most of us employ when we answer questions or give directions, the words of poetry are frequently cunning, larded with ambiguity or multiple meanings, laid out with considerable savvy as to their impact, and uncommonly empowered: possessed of resonance, of aural and visual effects, chosen and used with frightening precision, out there doing a job. Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain, his unforgettable
"bourgeois gentilhomme,''
is stunned to learn that he speaks, and has been speaking all his life
,prose.
Now I have nothing against prose, am even a great admirer of it, but for special effects, for a demonstration of how meanings are made, for the closest possible representation of how the mind encounters experience, for an illustration of how language and life inseminate each other, poetry must be our handbook.

WHITMAN: FROM GRAVE TO CRADLE

Consider, as a first and perhaps surprising example, the manifold ways in which death obsesses even a vital, lusty poet such as Walt Whitman. We rightly imagine Whitman as a kind of titanic promoter of life in all its guises, but he has also left us with some of our most memorable reflections on death, seen from both a personal and a national angle. One of Whitman's most poignant poems, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rock-

ing," has a Wordsworthian flavor of retrieved childhood and bucolic reflection, but it unmistakably posits death as the great catalyst for both coming-of-age and artistic vocation. This, in itself, is amazing, since we usually construe death to be the obsession of old age, to be mercifully distant from the reflections and experiences of children.

Of course, Whitman the child has not been heard from, but it is instructive that the mature poet positioned death squarely in his childhood as the determining event. His recollection of wandering on the beach as a child focuses on his encounter with "Two feather'd guests from Alabama," and the ensuing story of the she-bird's death and the subsequent mourning of the he-bird constitutes at once the Ur-saga of grieving and the birth of poetry. At considerable length the poet weaves together the bittersweet call of the solitary bird along with the voices of wind, spray, and water, yielding something melodious and polyphonic, for we understand this spectacle of primal loss to be inseparable from the child's initiation into language: "The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering / The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying, / To the boy's soul's questions sullenly timing, some drown'd secret hissing, / To the outsetting bard." The child senses that he is in the presence of revelation, that some defining and definitive utterance is coming into being: "A word then, (for I shall conquer it,) / The word final, superior to all, / Subtle, sent up—what is it?—I listen; / Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves? / Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?" (202-203).

Whitman's fable is properly mythic: the child questions the savage sea-mother; the child witnesses death's routine decimation of love; the child seems to grasp that death is the condition of both self and song, that individuation results from the dismantled family, that the experience of loss and grief is what poetry speaks, is why we have poetry. Very little in the Whitman corpus matches the lyrical and haunting beauty of this final illumination that fuses child and bird and sea in a moment of pure baptismal power:

Whereto answering, the sea,

Delaying not, hurrying not,

Whisper'd me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,

Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death,

And again death, death, death, death,

Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous'd child's

heart, But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet, Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over, Death, death, death, death, death.
(203)

In Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner we saw the elemental interrogation: how to speak the dead? how to apprehend the voice from the coffin? Whitman reverses the procedure, shows us that death is speaking incessandy, that the rhythms of birth and death are a kind of systolic-diastolic that structures all human doing, most especially all loving, as if loving came into its own as pathos and richness only through death's intervention. This moment is the poet's liminal experience of vocation, his encounter with a sphinx, from which he emerges with song.

One feels awed by Whitman's poem; it is tempting to see it as a kind of window onto his own formation, and it matters little whether events actually happened this way or that Whitman produced this version of his genesis for the purposes of this particular poem. But there is food for thought here that goes beyond the contours of Walt Whitman. In a culture that is acutely aware of teenage suicide, that increasingly medicates its young against a wide variety of ills, what do we make of this poem's claim that our central apprehension of death may come in childhood? To be sure, Whitman's nineteenth-century Long Island childhood differs considerably from that of young people today in industrialized societies. Yet, the child's encounter with death seems
uncanny,
in the sense that Freud gave the term: a displacement of time and space, whereby one event is telescoped onto, or coded into, another. The older poet looks backward, in search of his origins, and he finds them in this

bucolic event that broadcasts aloneness as the condition of both life and song. The child stores information that requires years before it can be decoded or unpacked. The child stumbles on to Nature's "passion play," the cycle of death, separation, and response that structures all reality. The child sees individuation as the product of death and the source of mourning/song.

Whitman himself is a strange case: larger than life, imbued with an aura that all who met him felt, at once utterly available and utterly unavailable, irresistible in his siren song of personal embrace but elusive as a shadow in his roving and restless life, a mystery then and a mystery now. May we not see in this poem about death what might be called a "theory of desire"? The poem depicts a sundering (among the birds) that is inseparable from a weaning (in the child), and from this islanded state comes poetry. Poetry as hunger for connection and knowledge of loss. Poetry as death's child.

The theme of death is frequently sounded in
Leaves of Grass,
occasionally as elegiac plaint, more often with cheerleading pomp and circumstance: "I beat and pound for the dead, / I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them" (38). For years I believed that such lines were awful, gave poetry a bad name, since who (in his right mind) could endorse such a view? I now think that we see the capaciousness of poetry here (Whitman himself is famously on record for registering his contentedness at being contradictory), poetry as a "what if" exercise, poetry as a kind of affective and imaginative elasticity, a way of "pushing the envelope," as they say today. Nowhere is Whitman more
democratic
than in his championing of death, his confidence that it is not to be valued less than life, that it too needs a singer who can sound its virtues. This is very much the same poet who champions prostitutes and slaves, finds voices for those who were never heard. Could death not be thought of as one of those voices? The poet's hunger for experience and his capacity for empathy and projection (even for ventriloquism, some would say) seem boundless.

But then came the great reckoning. The Civil War tested Whitman's

voracious appetites and his emotional elasticity with great severity. This swaggering poet, who seemed to many a kind of portable project of desire, met his match during this bloody chapter in American history, and his experience as a nurse in Washington appears to have exhausted and aged the titan by presenting him with an amount of human suffering and atrocious need that even he could not assuage. A poem like "The Wound-Dresser," with its sober and unvarnished account of maimed and dying soldiers—three out of four operations were amputations— suggests that the encounter with physical suffering and death on a grand scale (no longer that of a lost she-bird) inflicts incalculable damage on the perceiver.

It does not seem too much to say that Whitman the poet was born, as "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" tells us, in the knowledge of death, but also that Whitman the poet, through his wartime experience, died through the encounter with death. Whitman's gift for journalistic detail and symbolic resonance—so evident in the many unforgettable "lists" that make up "Song of Myself"—serves him also in the depiction of dying soldiers, as we see in "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim." This brief piece begins with the poet encountering three forms lying outside the hospital tent, covered by blankets. We feel a weird mix of tenderness, curiosity, and hunger as he lifts the blanket from each corpse—we see the journalist here, but also the invasive and exploitative energies of poetry itself—and we sense as well that this sequence of bodies is going to be allegorical. First comes the elderly man "so gaunt and grim," then the boy, "my child and darling," and one wonders how this countdown will close. Whitman does not disappoint us:

Then to the third—a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful

yellow-white ivory; Young man I think I know you
—
I think this face is the face of the

Christ himself, Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.
(243)

One feels very close to the primal office of poetry in these lines, as the male nurse opens up the scene, shows us that it extends to infinity, that it is rehearsing one of the oldest dramas on record. At the edge of sensationalism, Whitman yet controls his material, invests this realistic account of dead bodies with an aura of both carnage—the old man and the boy are struck down—and spirituality. Perhaps the finest touch is that word
again
which signals that the routine slaughter of war is not routine at all, that the bloody, tedious, daily business of war awaits the poet who can see in it the story of the Crucifixion. It is tempting to posit that wars might end more quickly if more of us could see through Whitman's eyes; the more sobering thought is how could you continue to be a nurse at this time, experience carnage on this scale day in and day out, if you saw Calvary in it? We measure the horror if we project such circumstances into our time, and imagine today's nurses and doctors outfitted with Whitman's sensibilities, translating routine suffering into epiphanic sacrifice.

WHITMAN'S ELEGY TO LINCOLN

If Civil War casualties could be troped in the death of Jesus, Whitman can also work the other way around. One of his most profound poems, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," is dedicated to the death of America's great leader Abraham Lincoln, yet Whitman never names Lincoln in this account of a coffin traveling across the country toward its final place of rest. In electing not to elevate Lincoln but rather to tell a wider story of what his death means—how his death might cap and heal the mighty sundering brought about by the war—Whitman offers a vision that is as epic (reminiscent of Homer's
Iliad)
as it is elegiac. It is here that Whitman reaches furthest, it seems to me, in his exploration of death itself. I want to emphasize the dimensionality and resonance of this poem, for he helps us to a view of death as peace, of a single death as the site of a national healing. Our earlier notion of mourning as private transaction is now expanded into something