or: Brown smartly appeals to younger voters, GOP entrenches for further in-fighting

The gloves have come off for the holidays; the season of pomp and cheer being replaced with an air of accusation and jeering. It seems that the three major candidates are already dealing with crises, the GOP candidates especially seem to still be trying to separate themselves from one another and, by smearing the next guy, trying to make it a vote that consists of just ‘not voting’ for the greater of the evils. Brown has had few PR issues and is now making some smart moves appearing at a fundraiser recently to get out and damage control the ‘recording scandal’ while Whitman and Poizner and both dealing with yet another round of unflattering facts coming out under scrutiny of the platforms and merit badges they point at to show their qualifications. So early in the campaign these candidates are already doing more repairs than improvements to their campaigns as this shapes up to be less of a ‘race to the Governor’s office’ and more of a pushing and shoving match to grab the last slice of pizza at a frat party.

Steve Poizner, third place GOP candidate with essentially no chance of winning even a ‘participant’ trophy at this point, has been cut down in some of his claims that, under his leadership as Insurance Commissioner, the state has seen a reduction to insurance costs to the tune of nearly $2 billion. Analysts at Consumer Watchdog seem to conclude that this figure really is inflated by $800 million since these cuts were set forth by Garamendi, Poizner’s predecessor. The Mercury News goes further to explain that Poizner, in fact, made some changes in May of 2008 to actually make it easier for insurance companies to hike up rates in certain sectors totaling $282 million in price increases. Poizner’s people, of course, defend his actions by saying that necessary changes were made and cite that the decreases of overall cost are factual, and no matter who initiated the changes, Poizner approved them and set them in motion.

Here is where you need to question the facts. There are facts that contradict one another under Poizner’s actual effect in his position. You could argue that he has simply been a custodian of the Garamendi legacy as insurance commissioner while doing little of his own work. It seems that Poizner’s people, as with all other candidates, cite facts, and they are facts, that paint him in a good light. They aren’t all out lies, what is more closely related to the reality of the situation is that the facts have been shaped and are stated as vague enough that you can’t call him a liar or a lame fish because he gets to tote the accomplishments of the office he hold and does not have to state what he has actually done. This creative manipulation of stats and facts shows up again when he beats the drum of cutting department cost by 15% overall and cutting staff by some 200 or so. Those numbers are a bit inflated and it seems that he should not be claiming this as his accomplishment being that the mandate for those cuts came down from legislature and the Governor due to the state deficit. So Poizner really should be claiming that he was able to operate within the constraints of a failing economy in California; he’s a good ‘Yes Man’.

Jerry Brown has faced a similar issue in the ‘recording scandal’ that was never really a scandal per say. Like Poizner’s claims being ambiguously inaccurate but not entirely a lie Brown has faced the same scrutiny in his poorly handled internal investigation of the incident that saw one of his senior aides resign. But Brown has chosen a very clever strategy of finally taking the offensive in fundraising and doing something that is entirely necessary in his campaign, he is reaching out to those that don’t remember ‘Brown’s California’…the young people. In a stroke of genius, in my opinion, the 71 year old Brown spoke at a club on the Sunset Strip to a group of 20, 30, and 40-somethings, called the Generation for Change. This is who he needed to reach out to, those that either were not alive or have no real recollection of what he did as Governor so long ago. This is a group of progressive professionals that may only be able to recall Brown in his ’92 bid for President, which failed, so it is vital that he reach out to this voting base and either change the impression they have of him, or give them an impression at all.

Brown, in ’92, ran on a campaign finance reform idea that he would accept a maximum of only $100 dollars from individuals and organizations; smartly he has abandoned this platform commenting that it is impossible to do this today in a state race and that if Whitman was willing to return the contributions to her campaign and take back the nearly $20 million of her own dollars she has spent then he would agree to a $100 maximum contribution rule for this election…unlikely though. Brown was able to get the group to laugh, he very creatively explained away claims that he changes all the time, “Well, if you are alive and if you are listening and you are growing, you will change, because the world is changing, and if you still were where you were before, you are dead.” He was able to outline the problems we face in California with a deficit, but he spoke to the fact we all seem to forget, that California has a state wealth of $1.6 trillion…it’s not all bad since our deficit is only about 1% of our overall wealth, this can be fixed.

I have to say here that I have a growing respect for the ‘campaigning Brown’. He is making a lot of good decisions thus far in so many different areas. The fact that he let Newsom burn himself out was a savvy decision on his part, to say the least. Brown has also now started to reach out to the younger voters with an air of charisma and has handled the recording scandal very well hushing it down to mere whispers. He is positioning himself with his record as a man of age, a career politician, that has changed with the times and is human in his maturing and changing over the years. It has to be said that he has also done a great job in highlighting issues of the election in a light of optimism and speaking in more constructive and positive terms, also avoiding name calling and negative ads, which can’t be said for his opponents. Brown is on a roll with great poll numbers and alliances with powerful players to get through the primaries unopposed and unscathed. When the debates start is when he may be tested, but by then there will be so much negative press for his opponents that it seems he will have no problem cutting them down as inexperienced opportunists with very negative, short histories in his beloved state.

Now we come to Meg Whitman…wow, this woman is running an insane campaign right now that seems to keep springing leaks that money can’t plug. Most recently she has had to contend with tax returns that only further highlight her inabilities as a recent conservative convert and business woman. Recent tax returns show that a foundation she is a director of contributed $200,000 dollars to the Environmental Defense Agency in the struggling delta of California. This is the same group that, since running for Governor, she has criticized and come out against as an opponent of development and farming jobs. She gave the group she is campaigning against money to support them, odd to say the least. Being that she only recently started voting, and the fact the only more recently she registered republican, in addition to he funding of projects she now opposes shows she is trying to pander to the conservative right to get in to office without regard for what she really believes.

If this weren’t enough two other facts have come out to destroy her claim of being a savvy business woman. I have written before of her poor record of running Ebay in the last few years at the company, nearly ruining Skype, and now there is more facts to support this claim. As with many different foundations in 2008 it took a bit of a hit with the failing markets, but her foundation took it particularly hard, at the rate of nearly 50% loss of equity. This might have something to do, though, with the fact that about 79% of the company’s value was represented in Ebay stock at the start of 2008, by the end the number was closer to 15%. This coincides oddly with her sitting on the board of directors at Ebay until late 2008. at the start of the year stock value was at about $33 a share, when she left they sat at under $15, since she left Ebay entirely they have seen an increase of stock value to nearly $24 a share under the direction of new acting CEO Donahue. A weird coincidence to say the least; though some losses were inevitable in 2008, under her direction in the last few years, during a national crisis, she has not performed well to stop financial blood letting in ventures she participates in. Anyone can succeed in a good times, but we need someone who can succeed during crisis, her record speaks for itself on this front.

Where we find ourselves is at a point when the three big names in the campaign are at very different points of decision. I feel that Meg’s projected $150-million dollar campaign will get her to the general election, but that is simply because her GOP rivals just cannot compete with her name recognition and propaganda team. Brown will skate to the general election with ease and he has yet to officially be in the race. Poizner has some serious soul searching to do as he is not closing the lead Whitman has and has no chance against Brown if he made it to the general election. Poizner should try to save face, dropping out soon, and reload for a position in the state people give a crap about before he jumps in to the Governor’s race. The primaries will embarrass Poizner as Campbell and Whitman enjoy very large leads over him now, and Campbell has done less than anyone!

I think that the opportunistic, flawed politics of the GOP candidates is going to fail, it is not genuine and they will not be able to contend with Brown’s views and record as things like immigration, reform, and a history of service in California come in to play. Poizner and Whitman will lose some of the conservative base with their history and their position on abortion that pandering and flip flopping on other views won’t make up for. The hubris of the rich elitists will not sway the people of California when matched against the life of service Brown has tucked up his sleeve; this is the Achilles Heel that will become apparent as middle american California hits the voting booths.

Proof, as if needed, that we absorb Whitman (still) as much as he absorbed his culture. With thanks to Mark Nowak for passing along this blog post On the Twittification of Whitman.

Speaking of Twitter–in reference to Democractic Vistas. Is ‘twitter’ the problem of the flatulent culture and literature he criticizes, or possibly part of its democratic future? Whitman uses the term ‘idiocracy’; do we have that now, only call it ‘mediacracy’?

I want to use this blog about movies to rant a little bit about things that are kind of unrelated to movies, but kind of totally related because movies, if you think about it, are related to everything. So lets get this shit underway:

Lately I’ve been really disappointed by my tendency towards self-censorship. I’m sitting here eating canned beets, writing a semi-crazy  anti-Mormon rant when I say to myself “this is the internet. People will read this,” and delete the whole thing. Sure, it was pretty offensive and I don’t want to make my dad cry, but it was also pretty funny and totally relevant. Because who cares that I’m eating beets? Aren’t you more interested in what I have to say about the ERA? I am!

Maybe self-censoring isn’t the problem. Maybe what you don’t say is far more interesting than what you can say, and maybe hurting peoples’ feelings just isn’t all that great. Maybe the problem is that I do it badly. Because Whitman self-censored all the time, but he still got to talk about blow jobs all he wanted (they were just hidden blow jobs!). But without all the potential literal imagery and swears, Whitman isn’t very funny.

I don’t expect Dear Jesus’s readers to be the biggest Kevin Smith fans, but you have to hand it to someone that can be so candid. Not only with his fans in Q&As and SmodCast, but in the films he’s willing to make. Can you imagine taking your mom to go see Dogma? It’s only a million times worse when you made the thing, I’m sure. There are cruder movies out there, but Smith’s films don’t pretend to be anything they aren’t. Sure, Chasing Amy’s on Criterion, but it wasn’t made with the intention of ever getting to that level of critical appeal. These movies are comedies, with poop jokes, and Smith is as honestly crude as he feels like being. I think that openness of purpose is nice. Maybe I could make something that looked as good as Clerks, but I could never be that open with it, and I respect the View Askew people for that attitude.

Marrying someone that recently left the Mormon church puts me in an interesting position. On the one hand, I have to be the mediator that calms him down when he’s screaming “burn the temple!!!” on Main Street. On the other hand, he gets me thinking about all this stuff again and it makes me angrier and angrier. And all I want to do is be candid about it with people that matter to me. Never going to happen. Not even on a blog that I’m pretty sure is safe territory as far as my immediate family is concerned. And that makes me sad…or angrier. I don’t know.

Something startles me when I thought I was safest. This opening line from Whitman’s “This Compost” (originally published in the 1856 edition) comes to mind when I try to make sense of “Democratic Vistas.” Whitman seems startled by where he finds himself in post-Civil War, reconstruction America. (Remember Emerson’s opening line in his great essay “Experience”: Where do we find ourselves?) It is and isn’t the America and the democracy he had been envisioning in his writing since 1855. It is strange and familiar. And I feel startled by the essay: interested in where it wants to go, familiar with some of its echoes of the Whitman of Leaves of Grass, and startled by its inability to get there. You thought Emerson’s essays were strange? Folsom and Price in chapter 6 of Re-Scripting Walt Whitman provide helpful social and historical context for Whitman’s essay and for the problem of reconstruction in his writing. I copy below two relevant paragraphs. Should you be interested in doing more with this strange but important text in Whitman, or with Whitman and race and reconstruction, I invite you to read further in the chapter.

If “Passage to India” and “After All Not to Create Only” were celebratory (perhaps at times naively so), Democratic Vistas mounted sustained criticism of Reconstruction-era failures. Based in part on essays that had appeared in the New York journal the Galaxy in 1867 and 1868, Democratic Vistas responds most immediately to a racist diatribe by the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle, “Shooting Niagara: And After?” Carlyle’s “great man” view of history left him impatient with democracy and opposed to efforts to expand the franchise in either the US or Britain. For him, the folly of giving the vote to blacks was akin to going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Whitman grants Carlyle some general points, acknowledging, for example, the “appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the U.S.” because of the “people’s crudeness, vices, caprices.” In fact, Whitman gazes piercingly at a society “canker’d, crude, superstitious and rotten,” in which the “depravity of our business classes . . . is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater.” Yet he contrasts these current problems with “democracy’s convictions [and] aspirations” and ultimately provides a ringing endorsement of democracy as the safest and only legitimate course for the US. His thought on the intertwined fates of the US and democracy—his “convertible terms”—is future-oriented. He preceded the philosopher and educator John Dewey in arguing that the United States was not yet made and thus could not be categorically assessed, just as the history of democracy was yet to be written because “that history has yet to be enacted.” “We have frequently printed the word Democracy,” Whitman wrote in Democratic Vistas; “Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken’d” (PW, 2:390). Democracy always remained for Whitman an ideal goal, “resid[ing] altogether in the future” (PW, 2:390), and never a realized practice. The history of America, so he hoped, would eventually define the word for the first time, because in his own day, he believed, democracy was only “in its embryo condition” (PW, 2:392). Crucial to his program for strengthening democracy are what he calls “personalism” (a form of individualism in which every person develops uniquely but always remains aware of his or her interconnectedness with the larger social body) and the nurturance of an appropriate “New World literature” that would demand more aggressive reading habits, literature that would awaken the populace and make them argue with the author instead of lull them to sleep and have them passively accept whatever the author professed.

For all of the idealism of Democratic Vistas, however, the work clearly arose out of Whitman’s struggle with the radical politics of the Reconstruction era, and it raises troubling and perhaps unanswerable questions about his attitudes toward the Radical Republican agenda of quickly securing civil rights and voting rights for freed (male) slaves. If Whitman’s faith in the future of American democracy was clear, his vision of the place of African Americans in that future was blurred. As he was writing Democratic Vistas, the shape of the new nation was uncertain, as malleable as the intense debates and shifting votes of a Congress that was revising the very Constitution and threatening to impeach the president, Andrew Johnson. Whitman, during this time, continued to spend evenings visiting the Civil War hospitals that remained opened, still filled with wounded soldiers two years after the war had ended, but he also devoted some of his time to trips to the Capitol to watch the extraordinary night sessions with their impassioned debates on Reconstruction legislation, including the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. For the Radical Republicans who controlled Congress, the war increasingly seemed to have been fought not just to emancipate the slaves (the Thirteenth Amendment had taken care of that) but to enfranchise them and guarantee them equal rights under the Constitution (this was the arena of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and the amazing debates dealt with the very tricky issue of trying to unwrite the Constitutional provision that slaves counted as only three-fifths of a person, and trying to inscribe just what the black person’s newly granted full humanity meant). Whitman, like many Americans, was unsure about where he stood on these momentous issues.

Whitman refers early in the essay to the People–the promise of America and democracy, but also, always, the problem. The people, we learn, are in need of some learning. But the People are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred. (968)  But who are the people? Who are to be included? How do the people learn or realize this democracy that is not yet fulfilled?

O YOU whom I often and silently come where you are, that I may be with you;

As I walk by your side, or sit near, or remain in the same room with you,

Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.

~ Walt Whitman

I know that I rant and rave about the mass media today and the terrible state it is in. I know that many of you might find my commentary on the 2010 gubernatorial election for Governor in California as bias and crudely thrown together. You might find that my commentary on the social implications that both the media and politics have today are tightly bound by a generally accepted social contract, for good or ill. It is a rare occasion that I get an opportunity to speak on a subject as this one. As few of you know, I am sure, a personal aide to State Att. Gen. Jerry Brown recently ‘resigned’ after a bit of an unfortunate situation with a journalist, recordings, and a lack of candor that proved to be too much for him to overcome, leading to his resignation from his position. What you may not know is the unfortunate timing of this overblown situation of ‘illegal’ tapings and the Att. Gen.’s possible action against the ‘pimp n ho’ ACORN tapes that were released a while back as being illegal and possible entrapment. This all sounds very complicated I am sure to those of you not in the know and not as obsessed and quite possibly addicted to the little ins and outs of the emerging candidates and campaigns in the 2010 election for governor of the most populous state in the union. What has transpired here, and what may transpire is nothing short of a wonderful moment for me to connect Nixon to Reagan to Brown, and I will do so in the most eloquent and demonstrative way possible.

A few weeks back an aide to Jerry Brown named Scott Gerber made a call to the San Francisco Chronicle pleading for changes to a story they did on Brown citing some very extensive quotes from the interview reporter Carla Marinnuci did with Brown. The red flag went up when he was able to quote to an almost impossible length contextual quotations from the interview and what was said. He was present at the interview with Brown, as were others, and it became clear that he could only have recalled such minute details if the conversation had been recorded and he were reading from a transcript. Turns out the conversation was recorded by Gerber without the consent of the reporter, or as they claim, even Brown. Gerber had apparently taken it upon himself to record the interview for posterity and for the express purpose he used it for, to refute inconsistencies or falsehoods in the ensuing article.

Jerry Brown, as any good unofficial candidate would do, claimed no part in the event, claiming no knowledge of the taping at the event. Jerry Brown pulled a classic Reagan and Nixon-esque move with complete deniability in the situation. He had no idea what his aides and subordinates were doing and did not approve the tapings. Just like Iran/Contra incident under Reagan, Brown claimed that he did not have anything to do with the event, and I’m sure, would not have approved such an action without the express consent of the reporter. Just as with Nixon during Watergate, Brown did not know what was going on, and holds Gerber in the highest regard and respect and that the actions taken were taken in the best interest of Brown and the parties involved, though the judgement of Gerber was questionable, his intentions were not.

Old Gerber stepped down under what has turned out to be a bit of an overblown situation calling the taping ‘illegal’ being the state of a very ambiguous statute in California legislation stating that you cannot secretly tape confidential conversations and meeting, without the express consent of all parties involved. The salacious media is picking up on the vague nature of the phrase ‘confidential conversations’ and blowing it out of proportion, as Peter Scheer of the Huffington Post illustrates. This was a conversation with a journalist for the express purpose of providing information that was expressly going to be used in the public sector. This interview was not a confidential conversation, there rarely, if ever, is such a thing as a confidential conversation with a reporter or journalist. Where this incident falls is somewhere under the guise of a broken social contract that reporters don’t secretly tape interviews and vice versa. It is not really ethical and not something done today; reporters are generally very open, honest, and frank in asking permission to record a conversation for accuracy and posterity sake. The real issue was the Gerber did not disclose that it was being recorded, and then he made the mistake of quoting way too much from the conversation for it to just be from memory; poor judgement clearly, but illegal, not at all.

I think the reason that this has become an issue, and it was necessary for Gerber to distance himself is two fold: One is that with a burgeoning campaign and still running unopposed as Brown is for the Democrats in the 2010 election, this kind of ‘scandal’ (which it isn’t) cannot be associated with his current position as the lawman looking to protect the people. Secondly, it is really poor timing as the Att. Gen. is making plans to prosecute the ‘pimp n ho’ filmmakers that ran the sting on ACORN earlier this year, for illegally taping and entrapping the offices that they visited in the state of California.

With this campaign getting seriously close to needing to become official the Jerry Brown camp knew, that if this situation continued is could become an issue to come out officially under this scandal growing, so they needed to nip it in the bud. Jerry Brown didn’t file any charges against Gerber as the internal investigation was scrapped, to the chagrin of proponents and the elation of those critics trying to get anything on Brown. In response Brown has called for n outside investigation in to the situation to cover his ass. This thing needs to disappear quickly if he plans on announcing his candidacy by the end of the year. Brown is currently enjoying great approval numbers and simple name recognition right now without having done a damn thing to campaign, so if this situation festered it would get this team on the defensive the moment they stepped on to the field.

The other issue is his possible prosecution of the whistle blowers that secretly taped meetings with ACORN employees to find a way for the pimp to do his taxes and the prostitute to do hers so as to make their income sound legitimate in the eyes of the government. Now this is a much more slippery slope these filmmakers treaded. They went in to confidential meetings, under assumed identities without disclosing the recording they were doing and lured the ACORN employees under false pretenses to give them legal advice for fake occupations. In essence they could be accused of illegally taping confidential meeting, entrapment, and possibly other charges Brown can drudge up on them. This case, though similar to the Gerber incident lends itself much better to a judicial proceeding in that the meetings, on tax information, are assumed confidential, and the use of those recordings were for public use without the express knowledge of all parties involved; the key word is ‘all’. There is also arguing the entrapment since the parties posed as fake personas and illicitly asked for the advice they wanted, not that they were approached, they asked for specific advice of an illegal kind, under illegal pretenses. I would go as far as to argue that those tapes are not legal evidence in a court case that may try and prosecute ACORN because the means by which they were obtained is on shaky ground to say the least.

The situation and the timing of these two events is cause for a little bit of questioning. Could it be that a secret taping scandal just pops up at the same time Brown is getting ready to attack the filmmakers of the ACORN tapes? I find it a little odd, but I am no conspiracy theorist so I won’t go there, but I do find it interesting that these two issues are coming to bear at a pivotal time in the Brown campaign. With Whitman on the GOP side spending enough money to match the GDP of a small country, and getting some poll numbers to show it is working, a little, Brown is in a precarious spot to either go official or continue to stay out of the limelight to some extent. Is it better for him to get in the ring and start campaigning, getting the fallout of the Nixon-esque recording scandal through Reagan-esque deniability out of the way, dealing with it now and letting the short term memory of the public relegate it to the past as his campaign chugs along? Or should he stay out of the limelight, let this thing go away, never directly addressing it to the public and instead letting it disappear until it comes up in a smear-campaign TV spot put together by Whitman, or possibly his not-yet-decided possible opponent? I think the latter is the way to do it because I think it is going to come up in some debate in the future and it will look fishy to the voting public if it is the first they are hearing about it, as if Brown was trying to hide from it and then looks cornered as a non-secret appears to the public as an all out scandal that we are so far removed from the fact sifting will take to long and cost more to the campaign than getting out ahead of the issue.

The resignation of Scott Gerber was the first, and most important step in letting the Brown campaign distance itself from this little hiccup and in turn gives Brown the option of still going after the ACORN filmmakers all the while giving him deniability, and even the ‘appearance’ of an outside investigation insulates him from allegations of a double standard and hypocrisy, not to mention what may be phrased as an ‘abuse of his power’ and ‘doing favors for his friends’. Now, what the public will hear is ‘secret recordings’, ‘allegedly illegal’, and other terms used to further vilify the actions taken by a single man, and Brown will claim ignorance and be able to say that an outside panel was assembled to investigate and that Gerber resigned after ‘a lapse in judgement’. The fact of the matter is what Brown’s aide did, with or without the consent and knowledge of Brown, was NOT illegal specifically, it is in a gray area at worst, and just a bad call in reality.

The Brown ‘campaign’ should be up and running by the end of the year, it really should, so that it can get out ahead in the democratic voter’s eyes so that they can deter any possible opponents from running. If Brown can get a head of steam now, or at least soon, anyone that might have thought of running would not be able to afford the kind of fight it would take to gain ground AND overtake a man so solidly planted in the state of California. Brown has made a good decision by not running officially yet; he has been able to skirt criticism and early campaign fighting, letting one man, Newsom, defeat himself already. His campaign could use one Republican dropping out though, before he jumps in. How nice it would be for Brown to see Poizner drop out before he got in the race, or Campbell, but I doubt Poizner with all his money is willing to roll over just yet, and Campbell is enjoying some numbers close to or equal to Whitman’s by spending next to nothing, so he will probably stay in for a while, if not to the primaries, though it depends greatly on his funding. Whatever happens one thing is certain, Brown has done a great job with this first ‘scandal’ by copying the best plays from Presidents across the aisle; He sacrificed his close aide as Nixon did with many of his men, and he has total deniability to insulate him from too much criticism as Reagan did. Brown just seems to have done it better than both of those Republicans, and that puts him right up there with one of the great Democrats, ol’ Bill Clinton, a scandalous hall of famer.

BİR KADIN BEKLİYOR BENİ

Bir kadın bekliyor beni, her şeyi içeren bir kadın, hiçbir eksiği olmayan
Gene de her şey eksik olacaktı cinsellik olmasaydı, ya da güçlü erkeğin ıslaklığı olmasaydı.

Cinsellik her şeyi içeriyor, vücutlar, ruhlar,
Anlamlar, saptamalar, lekesizlikler, incelikler, sonuçlar, duyurular
Şarkılar, buyruklar, sağlık, gurur, analık gizi, döl sütü,
Bütün umutlar, iyilikler, armağanlar, bütün tutkular, aşklar, güzellikler, yeryüzü tatları,
Bütün hükümetler, yargıçlar, tanrılar, bütün ardndan gidilen insanları dünyanın,
Bütün bunları içeriyor cinsellik, kendi parçalan olarak, kendi doğrulayıcıları olarak.

Cinselliğinin tadını bilen ve utanmadan söyleyen erkeği severim,
Cinselliğin tadını bilen ve utanmadan söyleyen kadını severim.

Duygusuz kadınlardan uzak tutarım kendimi,
Beni bekleyen kadınla gidip kalacağım, sıcakkanlı kadınlarla, beni doyuran kadınlarla,
Beni onlar anlar, beni geri çevirmez onlar,
Görüyorum, tam bana göreler, onların güçlü kocası olacağım.

Onlar benden bir milim bile aşağı değil,
Yüzleri parlayan güneşle, esen rüzgârlarla yanık,
Etlerinde eski kutsal uysallık var, güç var.
Yüzmeyi, kürek çekmeyi, ata binmeyi, güreşmeyi, ateş etmeyi, koşmayı, vurmayı, geri çekilmeyi, ilerlemeyi, dayanmayı, kendilerini korumayı biliyorlar,
Onlar dürüstlükte en yüce olanlar – sessiz, açık, en iyi davrananlar.

Sizi bağrıma basıyorum, kadınlar. / Sizi bırakamam, size iyilikler getiriyorum,
Ben sizinim, siz benimsiniz, yalnız kendimiz için değil, başkaları için de,
Sizin bedeninizde nice yiğitler, nice şairler uyuyor,
Benden başka hiç kimsenin dokunuşuyla uyanmaz onlar.

Ben geldim, kadınlar ilerliyorum,
Sert, kaba, iri durdurulmaz bir kişiyim, ama sizi. seviyorum,
Gereğinden fazla yakmam canınızı,
Bu Devletler’e uygun oğullar, kızlar yaratacak erkekliğimi boşaltıyorum size, yavaş dolgun kaslarımla bastırıyorum, Yeterince geriyorum kendimi, yalvarıp yakarmalara aldırmam,
Nicedir içimde birikeni size doldurmadan geri çekilemem.

Durgun ırmaklarımı size akıtıyorum,
Sizin içinizde gelecek binlerce yılı kucaklıyorum,
Size kendimin ve Amerika’nın en sevgili aşılarını aşılıyorum,
Size bıraktığım damlalardan ateşli, atletik kızlar gelişecek, yeni sanatçılar, müzikçiler, şarkıcılar,
Sizden olan çocuklarımın da çocukları olacak sırası gelince,
Bol bol verdiğim aşkımın karşılığında kusursuz erkeklerle kadınlar isteyeceğim,
Onların da başkalarıyla birleşmelerini bekleyeceğim, bizim şimdi birleştiğimiz gibi,
Onların boşaltacağı sağanağın meyvelerine de, şimdi kendi boşalttığım sağanağın meyvelerine güvendiğim kadar güveneceğim.
Sevgi dolu ürünlerini alacağım doğumdan, yaşamdan, ölümden, ölümsüzlükten, şimdi böylesine sevgiyle diktiklerimin.

Walt WHİTMAN

(Memet Fuat)

Well I said I would do one and here we are, a little late as it were since my usual ‘weekly’ format stretched out a bit, with an all GOP all the time piece. There is much to discuss on the GOP front with a new poll that came out, as well as spending reports and further sharpening of policies to garner favor in the largely undecided republican voting masses. When I say ‘largely’ I mean it, as I will show, but now it is starting to shape up as we pass the seven month mark in the race to the primaries. As of yet Meg Whitman has taken the lead in advertising with a radio ad campaign, but in a deeper look in to these ads and fact checking they have shown truly vile in their massaged facts as well as outright lies on the topic of debate requests and refusals. Yes the mudslinging and underhanded tactics seems to be in full swing and the  deciding factor thus far seems to come in the form of green, disgusted historical American figures ashamed of their seedy role in all of this.

The most shocking tale of the tape thus far in the GOP camp is the bottom line; the cold hard facts of the cold hard cash. To date Meg Whitman has spent more than 19 million of her own net fortune of 1.2 billion. Some have speculated at a record setting 150 million dollar end budget by elections next year in November.  This is a crushing amount of money in comparison to the moderate spending of Poizner’s camp at 1.07 million and Tom Campbell at a meager $455,000. Meg Whitman is spending boatloads of cash on dozens of advisors on monthly retainers in the six-figure ranges. she has spent over $100,000 on chartered planes, she even spent 11,000 on catering for a fundraiser that saw only 33 attendees. She spent more on planes than Campbell did on his entire campaign from January to June! Whitman has raised over 7 million in campaign funds which crushes the competition by leaps and bounds, including the sole democratic ‘candidate’ Jerry Brown.

What has this insane spending amounted to? Well, according to a recent Probolsky Research Poll she has gained a large lead over her opponents in public opinion. She is the leading candidate, if the primaries were held today, with 34.3% of the  theoretical vote. What is shocking is Campbell, with little to no campaign funds following at 12.5%, and Poizner dragging up the rear with a shameful 5.5%. Now I don’t read too much in to a ‘poll’ that only sampled 750 people. 750 of about 28,000,000 voting eligible residents is a little sparse. Still, Meg Whitman showed marked improvement from their last poll of a similar sample size. What Whitman won’t tell you is that more than 35% of those likely republican voters polled were undecided, and the more shocking results of this poll is that Jerry Brown polled at more than 42% of likely democratic voters while spending only just over $100,000 on his ‘campaign’.

The numbers are staggering in the fundraising sector, and to date Meg has been willing to spend more of her own money, and raised more campaign funds than everyone else combined, and it has gained her 6% of voters polled. These are all well and good, the numbers and leaders in the party; the bigger question at hand is what each candidate is going to bring to the table. What are the platforms that they are standing on and their initial promises that will undoubtedly be thrown by the wayside when they get in that comfy seat in Sacramento?

Meg Whitman is focusing on three thing: Jobs, Education, and Spending. As the CEO of a company, and a woman who wants to reform spending and should be good with numbers, as the following statement disproves, “Let’s do three things at 100% as opposed to trying to do 15 things at 50%.” I want you to think about that a moment…did you get to where I am with that? If we are capable of three things at 100% then how can we do 15 things at 50%. Basic math would tell us that we should only be able to do 15 things at 20%. We should only be able to do 15 things at 20% given that 15 is five times larger than 3 and 20% is 1/5 of 100%. Hey, let’s not get bogged down in the ‘numbers’ or the ‘statistics’, let’s leave that to the sixth grade math students. Despite this glaring inability to do mental math when proving your worth as a possible Governor, she is hell bent on the aforementioned three items. On Jobs Whitman wants to create over two-million private sector jobs, cut taxes (of course), and increase manufacturing and new industries around green jobs. On the very same page of her website under ‘spending she wants to cut 15 billion out of spending, fire 40,000 people, create a commission to regulate relevancy of government departments and regulations, and exercise the veto to reduce government size and regulation. Finally, for education, same website page, she wants to grade every school on a website parents can check, then increase charter schools to give parents and kids a choice, give school control back to schools, but still demand accountability when a school doesn’t meet the government standard.

Is anyone else seeing the trend of Whitman contradicting herself here? I’m guessing the 40,000 workers you want to fire is going to happen faster than the 2-million jobs you will create. Let’s also be real, she won’t create them, she is simply going to facilitate a situation where jobs can be created, which won’t all be her, we can safely say that with or without her specific plan I’m betting at least 750,000 new private sector jobs will be created, but how many will be lost in the fray can’t be seen. Plus, create a commission to regulate departments and regulations…regulating regulations does not sound smaller. In practice it’s like the ‘Bobs’ coming in and you interview for your job…totally redundant. Then she wants smaller government and putting the schools back in to the educators hands, while holding them to her standard. This seems counterintuitive as well as a recipe for failure. Throw in her willingness to rate each school from A to F and then let parents see it, in which they can exercise their new right to charter schools so they can move their kids from poorly graded schools to well graded schools, only to increase class size at the ‘good school’ and cutting the poorly performing school off at the knees. It all seems like when you use a credit card to pay another credit card, you move the debt around, but it never goes anywhere, really.

Steve of course has similar outlooks on some of these things. We all know about his very catchy 10-10-10 plan, which seems too catchy to have been truly researched as to it’s viability as an actual, achievable/reasonable goal. For those that don’t know the 10-10-10 refers to a 10% cut in taxes, 10% cut in government cost, and a 10 billion dollar ‘rainy day fund’, though rainy days are hard to come by in this state and might not be the best turn of phrase for those suffering in the central valley. His position on education is the same as Whitman, turn the schools over to those in them that want to seem then succeed more than anyone else, then hold their feet to the fire when they don’t perform to the government standards. Maybe the most interesting, and one idea I will admit I can get behind, is the idea of ‘part-time legislature’. I love this concept and would like to see it adopted by democratic candidates in the future for local and state elections is the idea that we keep the career ‘fat cats’ out of the fight and let people who know what it is like to earn a decent living be integral in the decisions that effect the people. I can get behind this, I can’t believe I said that, but yes, I support a part-time legislature by republican candidate Steve Poizner.

Mr. Campbell, what have you got? What can you wow us with? Well, he is taking the anti-Whitman approach and taking on 15 things at 50%. When you think about it, by the way, a system of 15 at 50 gets 750% while 3 at 100…you get the picture, 15 at 50 is actually more efficient, and isn’t running a state all about multitasking? I digress. Campbell thinks that funding isn’t necessarily the issue, he wants class sizes of no more than 20 students, period. His outlook is that individual attention will increase test scores, given that we rate last in California, and we spend about middle of the road on schools, despite being the most populous state. This idea is tough to swallow without spending a ton on new faculty and schools. On the budget he feels that it needs to be ‘a stable source of revenue, and a stable limit on expenditure.’ He feels that we need to bring back spending limits in California and not tax businesses to pay for overspending in the government. They guy does know his stuff having served five terms in the congress, working as California state finance director, California senate on the budget committee, etc., so he’s not blowing smoke. Whitman might be able to figure out payroll overhead at ebay, but Campbell knows the books of California, my kind of republican…experienced. On jobs he wants the government to play a temporary role until the private sector can recover in creating facilities and jobs for energy, water, industry, and have the government offer these contracts and have those wanting these facilities to pay for them, not go deep in to debt through bonds to try and pay for it.

All three of these candidates have other ideas, plans, topics, platforms, but these three each has outlined are the most pressing issues in California, and indeed the country. Of all three I have to say the Tom Campbell is the most qualified, though that isn’t a stretch. Sadly as this starts coming down to face time and money, Tom as well as Poizner are going to be chasing little miss sunshine state Meg Whitman with her symbolic poppy and her piles of coke laden 100’s. She is spending her way right in to Sacramento, buying the job as it would seem, with dozens of people guiding her and suckling at her ATM tit. Whitman has proved herself to be the best of puppets with a well compensated team of marionettes.

This has been a tough road for me to trod, given my penchant for wild liberal lunatic candidates like the Mayor of San Fran Gavin Newsom, no longer running, but I have given these guys a bit of a shake out in this piece and examined the dynamic. In the end I think it will come down to Meg’s big endorsements, her big pocket book, and the impotence of either of her opponents that will win her the primary fairly handily. I have a feeling Poizner is going to drop out by March or so. What I have found in the polls is that his contribution to the democratic fundraising for a recount with the whole Gore/hanging chad debacle hurt him extensively in the Republican voters’ view to the tune of 50% being less likely to vote for him based solely on this revelation. He really hurt himself with that one innocent act years ago, which will come up in any debate, public appearance, or town hall any time after Jan. 31, when things start to heat up. Campbell will limp along, but I would be surprised to see him withdraw, a Whitman/Campbell ticket for the primaries seems likely, and I hope it comes to the two of them down to the wire in debates nearing June 8th. Campbell has the record, clout, and plan to make a run at her if he gets some funding and gets some face time. If Campbell gets to shine in the public eye he can undo the possible 150 million dollar budget she has spent to create her legitimacy, watching the vail fall leaving her exposed as nothing more than a CEO shyster and performer trying to use California as a stepping stone to bigger and better things. In the 2010 Kentucky Derby of California election races my horse is Campbell to break late in the last furlong and take Whitman by a nose at the primaries…Poizner is glue by then.

The keyword, the crypt-word, of Whitman’s Civil War prose, so far as I can see, is “convulsiveness.” It comes toward the end of memoranda that he puts at the center of his autobiography, Specimen Days. In the original Memoranda During the War, the section shows up in an introduction, warning the reader of the “convulsive” character and condition of the writing to come. Here is the passage, in total [from the UVA e-text of Memoranda]:

DURING the Union War I commenced at the close of 1862, and continued steadily through ‘63, ‘64 and ‘65, to visit the sick and wounded of the Army, both on the field and in the Hospitals in and around Washington city. From the first I kept little note-books for impromptu jottings in pencil to refresh my memory of names and circumstances, and what was specially wanted, &c. In these I brief’d cases, persons, sights, occurrences in camp, by the bedside, and not seldom by the corpses of the dead. Of the present Volume most of its pages are verbatim renderings from such pencillings on the spot. Some were scratch’d down from narratives I heard and itemized while watching, or waiting, or tending somebody amid those scenes. I have perhaps forty such little note-books left, forming a special history of those years, for myself alone, full of associations never to be possibly said or sung. I wish I could convey to the reader the associations that attach to these soil’d and creas’d little livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fasten’d with a pin. I leave them just as I threw them by during the War, blotch’d here and there with more than one blood-stain, hurriedly written, sometimes at the clinique, not seldom amid the excitement of uncertainty, or defeat, or of action, or getting ready for it, or a march. Even these days, at the lapse of many years, I can never turn their tiny leaves, or even take one in my hand, without the actual army sights and hot emotions of the time rushing like a river in full tide through me. Each line, each scrawl, each memorandum, has its history. Some pang of anguish — some tragedy, profounder than ever poet wrote. Out of them arise active and breathing forms. They summon up, even in this silent and vacant room as I write, not only the sinewy regiments and brigades, marching or in camp, but the countless phantoms of those who fell and were hastily buried by wholesale in the battle-pits, or whose dust and bones have been since removed to the National Cemeteries of the land, especially through Virginia and Tennessee. (Not Northern soldiers only — many indeed the Carolinian, Georgian, Alabamian, Louisianian, Virginian — many a Southern face and form, pale, emaciated, with that strange tie of confidence and love between us, welded by sickness, pain of wounds, and little daily, nightly offices of nursing and friendly words and visits, comes up amid the rest, and does

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not mar, but rounds and gives a finish to the meditation.) Vivid as life, they recall and identify the long Hospital Wards, with their myriad-varied scenes of day or night — the graphic incidents of field or camp — the night before the battle, with many solemn yet cool preparations — the changeful exaltations and depressions of those four years, North and South — the convulsive memories, (let but a word, a broken sentence, serve to recall them) — the clues already quite vanish’d, like some old dream, and yet the list significant enough to soldiers — the scrawl’d, worn slips of paper that came up by bushels from the Southern prisons, Salisbury or Andersonville, by the hands of exchanged prisoners — the clank of crutches on the pavements or floors of Washington, or up and down the stairs of the Paymasters’ offices — the Grand Review of homebound veterans at the close of the War, cheerily marching day after day by the President’s house, one brigade succeeding another until it seem’d as if they would never end — the strange squads of Southern deserters, (escapees, I call’d them;) — that little genre group, unreck’d amid the mighty whirl, I remember passing in a hospital corner, of a dying Irish boy, a Catholic priest, and an improvised altar — Four years compressing centuries of native passion, first-class pictures, tempests of life and death — an inexhaustible mine for the Histories, Drama, Romance and even Philosophy of centuries to come — indeed the Verteber of Poetry and Art, (of personal character too,) for all future America, (far more grand, in my opinion, to the hands capable of it, than Homer’s siege of Troy, or the French wars to Shakspere;) — and looking over all, in my remembrance, the tall form of President Lincoln, with his face of deep-cut lines, with the large, kind, canny eyes, the complexion of dark brown, and the tinge of wierd melancholy saturating all.More and more, in my recollections of that period, and through its varied, multitudinous oceans and murky whirls, appear the central resolution and sternness of the bulk of the average American People, animated in Soul by a definite purpose, though sweeping and fluid as some great storm — the Common People, emblemised in thousands of specimens of first-class Heroism, steadily accumulating, (no regiment, no company, hardly a file of men, North or South, the last three years, without such first-class specimens.)

I know not how it may have been, or may be, to others — to me the main interest of the War, I found, (and still, on recollection, find,) in those specimens, and in the ambulance, the Hospital, and even the dead on the field. To me, the points illustrating the latent Personal Character and eligibilities of These States, in the two or three millions of American young and middle-aged men, North and South, embodied in the armies — and especially the one-third or one-fourth of

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their number, stricken by wounds or disease at some time in the course of the contest — were of more significance even than the Political interests involved. (As so much of a Race depends on what it thinks of death, and how it stands personal anguish and sickness. As, in the glints of emotions under emergencies, and the indirect traits and asides in Plutarch, &c., we get far profounder clues to the antique world than all its more formal history.)Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors, (not the few great battles) of the Secession War; and it is best they should not. In the mushy influences of current times the fervid atmosphere and typical events of those years are in danger of being totally forgotten. I have at night watch’d by the side of a sick man in the hospital, one who could not live many hours. I have seen his eyes flash and burn as he recurr’d to the cruelties on his surrender’d brother, and mutilations of the corpse afterward. [See, in the following pages, the incident at Upperville -- the seventeen, kill'd as in the description, were left there on the ground. After they dropt dead, no one touch'd them -- all were made sure of, however. The carcasses were left for the citizens to bury or not, as they chose.]

Such was the War. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior history will not only never be written, its practicality, minutia of deeds and passions, will never be even suggested. The actual Soldier of 1862-’65, North and South, with all his ways, his incredible dauntlessness, habits, practices, tastes, language, his appetite, rankness, his superb strength and animality, lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and shades of camp — I say, will never be written — perhaps must not and should not be.

The present Memoranda may furnish a few stray glimpses into that life, and into those lurid interiors of the period, never to be fully convey’d to the future. For that purpose, and for what goes along with it, the Hospital part of the drama from ‘61 to ‘65, deserves indeed to be recorded — (I but suggest it.) Of that many-threaded drama, with its sudden and strange surprises, its confounding of prophecies, its moments of despair, the dread of foreign interference, the interminable campaigns, the bloody battles, the mighty and cumbrous and green armies, the drafts and bounties — the immense money expenditure, like a heavy pouring constant rain — with, over the whole land, the last three years of the struggle, an unending, universal mourning-wail of women, parents, orphans — the marrow of the tragedy concentrated in those Hospitals — (it seem’d sometimes as if the whole interest of the land, North and South, was one vast central Hospital, and all the rest of the affair but flanges) — those forming the Untold and Unwritten History of the War — infinitely

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finitely greater (like Life’s) than the few scraps and distortions that are ever told or written. Think how much, and of importance, will be — how much, civic and military, has already been — buried in the grave, in eternal darkness !……. But to my Memoranda.

I key in on this vision of “stray glimpses” and convulsive writing: of representation that not only has limitations, but wants somehow to preserve them. It seems to me it has much to do with what Whitman means by ‘the real war will never get in the books.’ I have also argued that this has something to do with Whitman’s photographic vision of the war that comes through this prose–which can be contrasted with the actual photographs made famous by Brady and Alexander Gardner (image here: Harvest of Death).

Is this a different Whitman–this vision of limitation? Perhaps. But there is also a parallel for us to consider from Emerson. The apparent shift that Emerson seems to make around “Experience.” This too seems to focus more on limitation and suffering–and presumably for good reason. But is the writer’s recognition of that limitation completely foreign to the celebrated singing of “Song of Myself”?Yet again, I think the concept of metonymy holds for us a key. The vision in the war memoranda (as throughout Specimen Days) is thoroughly, sometimes disturbingly, metonymyic. The effects of war represented best (after all) in the “parts of the actual distraction” as Whitman puts it in the “Convulsiveness” chapter of SD. And we know that vision is not new to Whitman–also characterizes the poetry. And it is the same metonymy that shows up in Emerson’s thinking (early and late) and figured in this line from “Experience”: “I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment and this is a fragment of me.”

The difference to consider, rather, is the way Whitman’s Civil War poetry (so it seems to me) is not as thoroughly metonymyic. In fact, seems much more interested in metaphor, and in producing metaphors of war, and war as metaphor.

My first caveat to the above title is that getting self published is easy, as this blog post demonstrates. Finding the readers for what you have written feels a lot like crying in the wilderness. Since I now live in the wilderness (Keweenaw Peninsula…the northernmost point of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula) I’ve decided crying is just not an option. Write I must. Publish I will.

My standard joke about publishing as a poet (or rather, not publishing, which is the more common phenomenon) used to be “posthumous publication worked for Emily Dickinson, maybe it will work for me.” Now I’ve decided to remodel myself on Walt Whitman, self-publisher extraordinaire, and put out in the world some of what I write.

I know how to photograph people. I understand how to light them in flattering ways. I can move hips and elbows and chins to help them look their best. Portraits are what I do.

But how do you make a portrait of a house? You can’t tell the house, “OK, turn your head and put your weight on your back foot.” A house doesn’t respond to jokes. (Not even good ones, of which I have very few.)

Still, like people, houses have stories to tell. There’s a history with a house. It’s more than a foundation and beams and a roof. A house is the people that have lived in it. It’s the memories that were made inside its walls.

Katherine Whitman (Foucher) made quite a few memories in the house pictured above.  The house, which sits in Bennington, Vermont, was built in the 1860s by Cyrus Kellog and Katherine (Cyrus’s relative) was born in the home’s downstairs bedroom in 1916.

“Her mom owned the house,” said Katherine McCarthy, Katherine Whitman’s granddaughter, who hired me to make a portrait of the house this past summer, after her grandmother passed away. “She lived to be 92, and she passed away in the same room she was born in. She lived in the house almost her entire life.”

You read that right – Katherine Whitman was born in, lived in (for most of 92 years) and passed away in the same house. Can you imagine that?

What’s it like to become that familiar with a physical place? How comforting is it to come home to the same place for 20, 30, 40, 90 years?

“August 16th is Bennington Battle Day,” Katherine McCarthy said. “We always went to the house for that weekend. All of my relatives were there. We had a big picnic, we played croquet … Family meant so much to my grandmother. If you were family, she would do anything for you. So, to have this home, this place of continuity – a place where family could always gather – that meant the world to her.”

After Katherine Whitman passed away in February 2009, her granddaughter knew that the family would likely sell the house. So, she hired me to make a portrait of it. “This house has been a part of our family for 150 years. The house, and all of the people who lived in it, deserve at least a picture.”

We drove to Bennington on a bright, sunny morning. While Katherine McCarthy cleaned up the property a little bit, I walked around, taking the scene in, looking at angles, etc. I finally settled on a spot across the street, which allowed me to include some flowers in the foreground. We put the croquet set out on the front lawn (as a tribute to the game the family regularly played during gatherings), and I put flashes inside the house, so I could light up the windows a bit, giving the house some sparkle. (In the image above, I purposely under-exsposed the image a bit, so that the windows would look brighter and so that the entire picture would have a warm, welcoming feel.)

“It looks the same as it did in the 1960s,” Katherine McCarthy said. “But when I stood across the street with you, looking at the house, it looked like such a small house. As a little girl, I thought it was big …”

Shortly after these pictures were made, the house was sold.

“The new owners have kids,” Katherine McCarthy said. “”My uncle said to them, ‘I hope your family is as happy growing up here as ours was.’”

We begin to think about other poets and artists who respond to Whitman. The next Whitman preface/essay takes up this view from your perspective of a writer/figure who talks back to Whitman. Here are two famous cases, to set the stage.

Ezra Pound:

A Pact, by Ezra Pound

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root—
Let there be commerce between us.

 

Allen Ginsberg, A Supermarket in California [posted on Poetry Foundation]

What thoughts I have of you tonight Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Berkeley, 1955

 

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain My Captain
Walt Whitman

Theodore Parker at Age 39

In 1859, no longer able to speak from a pulpit (he had TB), Theodore Parker wrote a long letter to his congregation, in effect an autobiography. It was published as Theodore Parker’s Experience as a Minister, a book precious in its succinct eloquence, and surely one of the earliest retrospects on a revolutionary period.  A premature retrospect, one might say, except that Parker, 49 years old, knew he was dying.

But the letter is not just a retrospect. Parker is also concerned here to set forth theological and political principles. At one point, he slyly notes that these principles often went disguised in literary drag. Only in this disguise, he implies, could his ideas be shared freely in public. Why? Because literature is a sphere apart, valued for its independence from worldly strife. Or rather, it operates under the illusion of that independence.

For Parker, the illusion is intrinsic to literature’s social function, a function he describes in terms Stuart Hall might embrace. An early member of “the party of resentment” (Harold Bloom’s derisive name for those who would reform the world through culture), Parker believed that literature is not simply an expression of social forces, but one of the ways those forces gain legitimacy. He also believed that literature’s ability to do good — which is to say, its ability to question legitimacy and so reshape society — is kept in check by the powers and authorities that control its dissemination.

At Age 42

Parker is explicit on this point. In his letter to his congregation, he enumerates four “great obvious Social Forces in America”: “organized Trading Power,” “organized Political Power,” “organized Ecclesiastical Power,” and “organized Literary Power.” This last he defines as

the endowed colleges, the periodical press, with its triple multitude of journals — commercial, political, theological — and sectarian tracts.

And he continues:

This [Literary Power] has no original ideas, but diffuses the opinion of the other powers whom it represents, whose Will it serves, and whose Kaleidoscope it is.

Given his definition of literature, Parker’s remarks might seem to exclude the loftier forms of expression, but he supplements what he says in other passages, for instance when he speaks of the “scholars’ culture” as having “palsied their natural instincts of humanity.” (“Exceptional men,” he writes,  “only confirm the general rule, that the educated is also a selfish class, morally not in advance of the mass of men.”) Or elsewhere, with regard to pedagogy:

[T]he reading-books of our public and private schools seem to have been compiled by men with only the desire of gain for their motive, who have rejected those pieces of prose or poetry which appeal to what is deepest in human nature, rouse indignation against successful wrong, and fill the child with generous sentiments and great ideas. Sunday-School books seem yet worse, so loaded with the superstitions of the sects. The heroism of this age finds no voice nor language in our Schools.

When I first read that last sentence, I thought right away of Emerson, perhaps because of the word “heroism,” and turning to Emerson’s essay of the same name I found the following passage:

[I]f we explore the literature of Heroism we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its Doctor and historian. … Each of his “Lives” is a refutation to the despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists.

Parker of course knew these words, and perhaps even meant to recall them: his own life, set forth for his congregation, was likewise meant to refute despondency and cowardice.

What makes this grand theory of literature so compelling is the eloquence of its articulation. Parker is a fine writer! And his fineness comes from the very theory he articulates. In style as well as vocation, he is a democrat, embracing all apt forms of speech, whether simple or technical. Like the Whitman of An American Primer, he values words from the workplace and library alike. As he puts it in his letter:

In my preaching I have used plain, simple words, sometimes making what I could not find ready, and counted nothing unclean, because merely common. In philosophic terms, and in all which describes the inner consciousness, our Saxon speech is rather poor, and so I have been compelled to gather from the Greek or Roman stock forms of expression which do not grow on our homely and familiar tree, and hence, perhaps, have sometimes scared you with “words of learned length.” But I have always preferred to use, when fit, the every-day words in which men think and talk, scold, make love, and pray, so that generous-hearted Philosophy, clad in a common dress, might more easily become familiar to plain-clad men. It is with customary tools that we work easiest and best, especially when use has made the handles smooth.

Parker Preaching at Boston Music Hall (image from the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society)

Illustrations I have drawn from most familiar things which are before all men’s eyes, in the fields, the streets, the shop, the kitchen, parlor, nursery or school; and from the literature best known to all, — the Bible, the newspapers, the transient speech of eminent men, the talk of common people in the streets, from popular stories, school-books and nursery rhymes. Some of you have censured me for this freedom and homeliness, alike in illustration and in forms of speech, desiring “more elegant and sonorous language,” “illustrations derived from elevated and conspicuous objects,” “from dignified personalities.” A good man, who was a farmer in fair weather and a shoemaker in foul, could not bear to have a plough or a lap-stone mentioned in my sermon, — to me picturesque and poetic objects, as well as familiar, — but wanted “kings and knights,” which I also quickly pleased him with. But for this I must not only plead the necessity of my nature, delighting in common things, trees, grass, oxen, and stars, moonlight on the water, the falling rain, the ducks and hens at this moment noisy under my window, the gambols and prattle of children, and the common work of blacksmiths, carpenters, wheelwrights, painters, hucksters and traders of all sorts; but I have also on my side the example of all the great masters of speech, — save only the French, who disdain all common things, as their aristocratic but elegant literature was bred in a court, though rudely cradled elsewhere, nay, born of rough loins, — of poets like Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, of Hebrew David, and of Roman Horace; of philosophers like Socrates and Locke; of preachers like Luther, Latimer, Barrow, Butler and South; nay, elegant Jeremy Taylor, “the Shakespeare of divines,” owes half his beauty to these weeds of nature, which are choicest flowers when set in his artistic garden. … [T]o me common life is full of poetry and pictorial loveliness; spontaneously portrayed, its events will fill my mind as one by one the stars come out upon the evening sky, like them each one “a beauty and a mystery.” It is therefore a necessity of my nature that the sermon should publicly reflect to you what privately hangs over it with me, and the waters rained out of my sky when cloudy, should give back its ordinary stars when clear. Yet, for the same reason, I have also fetched illustrations from paths of literature and science, less familiar perhaps to most of you, when they, better than aught else, would clear a troubled thought; so, in my rosary of familiar beads, I have sometimes strung a pearl or two which Science brought from oceanic depths, or fixed thereon the costly gems where ancient or modern Art has wrought devices dearer than the precious stone itself.

I love that last weird allowance of ornateness at the end, itself ornately wrought, allowing into his preaching what the preceding sentences seemed to preclude. For Parker, yes, everything has its place.

He was a great, inspiring figure, from a great, inspiring age. His letter ends:

May you be faithful to your own Souls; train up your Sons and Daughters to lofty character, most fit for humble duty; and to far cathedral heights of excellence, build up the Being that you are, with Feelings, Thoughts and Actions, that become “a glorious Human Creature” …. Bodily absent, though present still with you by the Immortal Part, so hopes and prays

Your Minister and Friend,

THEODORE PARKER.

In the poem that emerges in the 1856 edition, “Poem of You, Whoever You Are,” I hear Emerson, though more in the sense of Whitman responding to him, talking back–perhaps even talking to him. I note that this is the edition where Whitman publishes as an appendix his letter to Emerson, responding to Emerson’s letter (infamously excerpted by Whitman on the book’s spine); the letter where Whitman refers to Emerson as his ‘friend’ and “Master.” Could the ‘master’ of this poem, then, also be Emerson–and Emerson be Whitman’s ‘whoever you are’?

Theoretically, yes, given the capacity of Whitman’s ‘you’ and the logic of ‘whoever.’ But reading this poem tonight, in the context of thinking about Emerson in Whitman, and Whitman’s response to Emerson, I begin to see more in Whitman’s poem that can speak to Emerson more specifically: the focus on the intrinsic (Emerson also says you have slumbered all your life–Whitman just addresses ‘you’ where Emerson uses the more distant ‘we’ in ‘Experience’; the focus on pain and dissolution. Here is the poem. What do you think?

10—Poem of You, Whoever You Are.

WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,

I fear those realities are to melt from under your feet and hands;

Even now, your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,

Your true soul and body appear before me,

They stand forth out of affairs—out of commerce, shops, law, science, work, farms, clothes, the house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, begetting, dying,

They receive these in their places, they find these or the like of these, eternal, for reasons,

They find themselves eternal, they do not find that the water and soil tend to endure forever — and they not endure.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,

I whisper with my lips close to your ear,

I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

O I have been dilatory and dumb,

I should have made my way straight to you long ago,

I should have blabbed nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you.

I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you;

None have understood you, but I understand you,

None have done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself,

None but have found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you,

None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you,

I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, god, beyond what waits intrin- sically in yourself.

Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all,

From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-colored light,

But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-colored light,

From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever.

O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!

You have not known what you are—you have slumbered upon yourself all your life,

Your eye-lids have been as much as closed most of the time,

What you have done returns already in mock- eries,

Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?

The mockeries are not you,

Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk,

I pursue you where none else has pursued you,

Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustomed routine, if these con- ceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me,

The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others, they do not balk me,

The pert apparel, the deformed attitude, drunken- ness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside,

I track through your windings and turnings—I come upon you where you thought eye should never come upon you.

There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you,

There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman but as good is in you,

No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you,

No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal plea- sure waits for you.

As for me, I give nothing to any one, except I give the like carefully to you,

I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you.

Whoever you are, you are to hold your own at any hazard,

These shows of the east and west are tame com- pared to you,

These immense meadows, these interminable riv- ers—you are immense and interminable as they,

These furies, elements, storms, motions of nature, throes of apparent dissolution—you are he or she who is master or mistress over them,

Master or mistress in your own right over nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.

The hopples fall from your ankles! you find an unfailing sufficiency!

Old, young, male, female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself,

Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted,

Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance,
ennui, what you are picks its way.

[from the Whitman Archive]

I realize the transcendental Whitman is turning over in his grave and that the poem is being sort of bastardized by an advertisement for jeans. But this thing moves me. The delivery, the imagery, Whitman’s words. It’s adventure. Levi’s launched a pretty big campaign based on this Go Forth/adventure angle. It’s a treasure hunt. 100,000 bucks. Another $100,000 goes to a “green” charity. You can waste a lot of time at the website.

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