When Whitman came to fight his great opposite and fate,
These States, like some happier Ahab taking on the Whale, in Democratic Vistas,
he issued a caution:
“Bear in mind, too, that they [these pages] are not the
result of studying up in political economy, but of the ordinary sense,
observing, wandering among men, These States, these stirring years of war and
peace. I will not gloss over the appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the
United States. In fact, it is to admit and face these dangers I am writing. To
him or her within whose thought rages the battle, advancing, retreating, between
Democracy's convictions, aspirations, and the People's crudeness, vice,
caprices, I mainly write this book.”
The ordinary sense is your most democratic organ. A
transparent eyeball for some, for others a nose for tabloidery, but always
wandering – that is, refusing to settle in one circle or clique. And this is
why, for Whitman, democracy is not a constitution, or an election, or a set of
politicians – it is based on the ordinary sense writ large and small:
literature. In “feudalism” – Whitman’s name for all that is past and
undemocratic – literature is ultimately the reflection of a system of patronage
and elevated and elegant subservience. It turns away from the ordinary sense. Whitman sums up his credo in a one of those
wonderful outbreathings that no other poet can do:
“It is curious to me that while
so many voices, pens, minds, in the press, lecture-rooms, in our Congress, &c.,
are discussing intellectual topics, pecuniary dangers, legislative problems,
the suffrage, tariff and labor questions, and the various business and
benevolent needs of America, with propositions, remedies, often worth deep
attention, there is one need, a hiatus, and the profoundest, that no eye seems
to perceive, no voice to state. Our fundamental want to-day in the United
States, with closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the
future, is of a class, and the clear
idea of a class, of native Authors, Literatuses, far different, far higher in
grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands,
permeating the whole- mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into
it a new breath of life, giving it decision, affecting politics far more than the
popular superficial suffrage, with results inside and underneath the elections
of Presidents or Congresses, radiating, begetting appropriate teachers and schools,
manners, costumes, and, as its grandest result, accomplishing, (what neither
the schools nor the churches and their clergy have hitherto accomplished, and
without which this nation will no more stand, permanently, soundly, than a
house will stand without a substratum,) a religious and moral character beneath
the political and productive and intellectual bases of The States.”
I’m moved by this declaration of faith. It is to what is inside
and underneath elections that, I think, democracy goes on. The allergy to “wokeness”
seems to me an allergy to the ferment within and underneath, the ferment that
has opened the doors in this Bluebeard’s castle of a civilization and seen the
bloodshed and the butchery, and is trying to cope with it as it can. The first
impulse, trained in us, is to throw down rules. But Moses went up to the mountain
a long time ago, and came back with rules, and the democratic terror consists
of the suspecting and more than suspecting, acting upon the perception that
rules must be subordinate to sympathy, and that sympathy does not exist without
a wandering with ordinary sense. It doesn’t get to fly, to unfold its wings, in
coiled up rooms and relations.
And maybe we don’t want democratic flights all of the time,
and want our rooms and relations.
But don’t want them too much. This, it seems to me, is where
Whitman’s Democratic Vistas come in.
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