Specimen Days: Home-Made Music

        In this entry, Whitman speaks not of an event, but of an experience. The setting of his journal entry is one where he is spending the night among the wounded soldiers. He hears singing, and decides to leave the side of the soldier he was accompanying for a moment, as he was asleep anyway. He gets closer to the music, and takes a seat by another wounded soldier, a Brooklyn friend. As he sits there watching the singers, and making sure his wounded friend can also see the singers, he has a beautiful experience. He realizes that even though these singers don't sing as great as the pro singers in the New York opera house, and weren't performing complex musical compositions, he enjoyed himself as much as if he were in the opera house watching the most grand of performances. He notices the way the wounded soldiers watched in silence, and how their attitudes changed upon witnessing the performance, and that the whole thing "was a sight to look around upon again and again."
        Whitman knows what he's talking about. Life is about experience. It's not about how much money you spend for the experience or where the experience is. What matters is what you take from the experiences life gives you. Lots of times, the experiences we remember most are not remembered solely for an event, but everything that accompanied the event, like the smells, sights, emotions, and company. Not every single thing has to be perfect for everything to be perfect... if that makes sense.
        Whitman could hang with the high-culture cats and the low-culture cats. Here, he is down with the low-culture, enjoying some pure entertainment in good company. He could have paid little attention to the whole experience though. A lot of times, the experience you have can just depend on your attitude towards things. I could listen to a CD of my favorite music and get lost in the sounds, but in the same way, I can also listen to my favorite vinyl records and get lost in the music as well. Beyond the hiss, cracks, and static you hear on a vinyl record, a very beautiful experience is to be had. Once, I was making some music, sampling off an old record, and my old roommate told me that he liked what I was making, but that I should get rid of "all the static" because he didn't think it sounded good. I realized he had a completely different perception of that static than me. Whenever I hear static on a record, I never hear imperfections, I hear history. And to me, it is as important of a piece of the experience as any other.
        When Whitman writes about the people, places, and experiences in Leaves of Grass, he often lifts them up from their perceived normality into a state of beauty. He can write about a farmer and treat the subject as if he were majestic. Like I said. Whitman knows what he's talking about. Whitman could pierce into the souls of things and find the beauty underneath any rough surface. Even in my music tastes, my favorite singers all have the roughest voices. I still think Eric Burdon from The Animals is one of the best singers ever. He laid some beautiful soul on those tracks. Doesn't matter how rough the voice was, it was beautiful. I can't even listen to the radio. Everything sounds too clean. I'm stuck on singers from the 60s. There's realness in the rough. Whitman saw that. I love to look for it. It's finding lessons in mistakes. It's finding character in scars. It's knowing that the girl with some imperfections is actually way more attractive than the one that looks like a supermodel. It's knowing that the wrinkles in your clothes just means you actually did some shit while you were wearing them. It's knowing that an amateur musical performance in a room full of wounded soldiers can actually be the most breathtaking experience. You know.

beautiful.

Specimen Days: Sunday With The Insane

        What a title. I'll name a song I make "Sunday With The Insane" one of these days.
        Whitman writes about his visit to an Insane Asylum, and specifically the religious services that were held on the premises. He says about 300 people were in attendance for the services, and that most of them were patients. He was mostly surprised by the audience, comprised of many “insane” persons, and how calm and focused they seemed to be.
        Whitman doesn’t say it, but he expected the patients to be acting a little more… insane. He looks at them in a sort of amazement. He feels that it may be the “peace of god” that transcends different levels of understanding different people may have of the world (I.e. transcending whatever abnormalities these people had in their minds). He reminds himself that humanity is common among all, with the quote “The same old blood -- the same red, running blood;”… Though Walt wrote of the common humanity in many of his poems, here he shows how his own preconceived notions about the differences in humans superseded his openness to seeing that common humanity in everyone. He shows his amazement that he may, in fact, be right about our common humanity.

Specimen Days: Through Eight Years

        Whitman takes us (quickly and briefly) through a recap of the last eight years of his life, with this entry written in 1856/1957. This was a year or two after the publishing of Leaves of Grass, which he marks as an important milestone. The first half of his travels I found particularly important in terms of understanding Whitman a little more in the context of Song of Myself. He mentions traveling (with his brother Jeff) through the nation, traveling through Ohio, Mississippi, New Orleans, Michigan, parts of Canada, and some lands in between.
        Though the way he presents his travels is very factual and almost list-like, it does add to what he wrote in Song of Myself, simply because it adds a little experience to what Whitman wrote about. Now, knowing he traveled through the United States, his poetry of the different human subjects he covers becomes a little more real and personal. Whitman already has a gift for taking on the role of other in his writing, but this adds another dimension to it. The lands and people Whitman wrote about may actually be people he spent time with during his life.

Specimen Days: Opening of the Secession War

        Here, Walt Whitman writes about his memory upon hearing news of the start of the American Civil War, or as he referred to it, the Secession War. He talks of the feeling he had after enjoying a seemingly normal day, leaving the opera, walking at night, and overall just chillin. All of a sudden the newsboys start shouting out about the news of war, and Walt buys one of the newspapers being sold. He makes his way to some nearby lamps, where him and a crowd of other people read the news, and they all stand in silence, realizing that shit just got real.
        This entry to me is fascinating. Why? Because I straight up cannot even imagine war on my home country. I can’t imagine living in a country where war on your street is a reality, as it is in some places in the Middle East, South America, and Africa. Even more abstract to me is the idea of war right here in the streets of San Francisco. I’ve just been raised in an era where that has never been a reality in my lifetime, and therefore, it is something that is hard to imagine as real.
        Still, I try my best to empathize.
        Picture you are Walt Whitman. Lover of many things under the sun. Lover of poetry, lover of humanity, and lover of love. You love your country. You’re chillin at the opera, comfortable, and enjoying a dope performance from some great singers. After the opera, your day is wrapping up, and it’s time to head home and pass out. Next thing you know, you realize that your day just begun. Or, at least, everything that happened before in the day will now be considered as of such minor importance compared to what you have just heard that your day might as well have just begun. Your country has just entered a war within itself. Who knows how far the war will extend its reaches to? Will it make it to your doorstep? Who knows. All you do know though is that Americans will be killing Americans. Because that’s what war is: Killing. Which side can kill the most, and which side can take the most losses before giving up and saying “Hey, you guys win. You killed a bunch of our dudes, and we still got some dudes left, but the fact is we’re not gonna be able to kill all your dudes with the dudes we got left, so we’ll admit defeat if you stop killing us.” For a lover of humanity, such as yourself, you are torn by this idea. Not only do you not like the idea of humans killing humans, but these instances of humans killing humans will hit close to home, and they will hit hard. Your mind is racing with thoughts. You go home to lie down on your bed, but you won‘t be sleeping much tonight. You think to yourself about all the good things abut the people in your country, and ask yourself how people can overlook such things and start a war. You are a gifted writer, so eventually, you might write a poem. It might have something to do with humanity, the beauty of the world, and the beauty of life and diversity.

The violence breaks bodies... with the capability to break the heart as well.

Specimen Days: Two Brothers, One South, One North

        In this entry, Whitman writes briefly of his visits with a wounded soldier. The soldier is 19 years old, missing his right leg, and dying. He says they loved each other very much, the wounded soldier being lonely and hurt, and Whitman being his only companion during that painful last chapter of his life. The soldier reveals himself to be a rebel soldier fighting for the Confederates, as if it might change the way Whitman would look upon the wounded soldier, but Whitman tells him that his allegiance makes no difference to him. Whitman continues his visits, and ends up finding his brother, also wounded and dying, in another ward of the hospital. This brother, though, died fighting for the Union.
        This entry puts in very literal terms an idea of equality which Whitman emphasizes in "Song of Myself." While he tries to convey in his poetry that we are all one, regardless of our birthplace or skin color, he shows these two soldiers, brother, cut from the same cloth, and both dying over differences. The humanity shared between two brothers would seem to be strong, but here Whitman shows us an example of that humanity being overlooked because of differences, and the results of allowing those differences turn into violence. Whitman, though, does not compromise his shared humanity with the wounded soldier, letting him know that no matter what side the young man was fighting for, he would stay by his side.

Cold War Kids - Hospital Beds

"I got one friend, layin across from me. I did not choose him, he did not choose me. 

We got no chance of recovery, sharin hospital joy and misery."

Whitman's entry reminded me of this song. Good song. I linked the song rather than the music video, cuz the music video is weak.