Manning the Democratic voter registration booth at our local Buffalo Crossing BBQ Festival. People seem beat down. They sure weren’t buying anything from the vendors. In between conversations,  I randomly opened up my copy of Leaves of Grass and began reading”I Sing the Body Electric”

1

I SING the body electric,

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the
soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal
themselves?

And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile
the dead?

And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

I was confounded by the contrast before me of downtrodden, introverted, COVID19-inspired sociality. Whitman would not recognize this humanity divine as divine.

Consider the future that Whitman assured us was emerging with the American peoples of his time and life and the ones I considered before me. Fear. Distortion. Anger. Distrust. Division. Chaos. Even hate.

One story worthy moment: an elderly woman, a total stranger, looked at our table and tent and she snarled like an angry dog, “I ain’t gonna vote for no Democrat. Ima Republican.” The remark was unbidden except for our “threatening” presence. How wrong was Whitman?

Another moment, a middle-aged woman leans forward, glancing from side-to-side and says, “I am so ashamed to admit this.”  Despite my assurances she whispers, “I am a registered Republican. Can you help me change my registration?”  I helped her.

Perhaps it is time for the poets of the world to embrace the ‘suck’ of the world as it is.  Whitman spends all of his poem embracing the unalloyed magnificence of humankind.  He saw something in the chaos of young America.  Maybe the poets and lyricists need to embrace this emerging maelstrom,  holding chaos to our heart, transforming it through arts of all kinds.

Robert Fritz once asserted that you can’t invest your life in a compromise.  I think Walt Whitman understood that, but he also showed us that you have “waste” your life on something, you gotta serve something or somebody. Maybe we need to hear what  sublime thing is emerging via the poets.  I think it will be a mix of solidarity and individuality that might arise anywhere and move anywhere.  Permit it. Invite it. Let it. Let us make it.