Back in the day I used to edit Anime Music Videos (AMVs) and
throw them up on YouTube. I liked to cut up the clips and match them to
some dope songs, usually of the Underground Hip-Hop variety, but not
always. Problem was I never watched too much anime and as a result, most
of my videos used the same 3 or 4 anime shows, and I kinda lost
inspiration to keep making videos eventually. Still, I got a nice little
number of online fans from it. It has been a while since I edited
anything, but I decided to edit a video for this assignment, and I also
slid a song I made underneath my recital of the Whitman lines I chose.
Editing this took me way too long, and reminded me of why I don't really edit anymore :P
-The video footage is from a show called Samurai Champloo. It is
directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, who is probably my favorite director
ever.
My username on YouTube is
suckafish80. It comes from a combination of the stupidest idea for a
username I could think of ('suckafish'... a fish that is also a sucka)
and being a fan of Jerry Rice as a kid (#80).
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.
The basic idea of what the Oneida Community was is that it was a community that strove to share damn near everything. It was founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 in Oneida, New York. People who wanted to be a part of the community had to follow certain rules to live peacefully with the group. They believed that the 2nd Coming of Christ had already occurred and that therefore, Heaven on Earth was possible, so they aimed to create a harmonious community. Property and assets were shared. So were romantic partners. Two people were not even allowed to be mutually exclusive... If you could have sex, you hadda get passed around a little bit. Then they also had this rule of male continence/coitus reservatus, and felt that keeping men from climaxing led to deeper connections between sexual partners, and they had other rules about virgins coming into the communities and being "introduced" to the community by older council people who got to pick their virgin, which is kinda nasty and probably even manipulative, but yeah...
So what does this have to do with Walt Whitman? Well the Oneida Community was founded in New York while Walt Whitman was around, that's for sure. But beyond that, from reading Song of Myself, we see Walt writing about how he is everything, and everything is him... just as you are everything, and everything is you. While that may not be possible to achieve in a physical sense (unless we could all be melted and poured into a pot or something) the Oneida Community seems to try to accomplish this in the best way they knew how: By sharing everything. Without the normal ideas of money and the status it brings, the community could try to achieve less degrees of separation between individuals than we may currently experience in our capitalist world. By putting the community first, the idea that you are a part of something bigger than yourself (i.e. the community) becomes engrained in your psyche and would probably lead to stronger connections to the other people in your community. So was the Oneida Community, or other communist communities, a literal interpretation of Song of Myself? Not really. But the Oneida Community is an example of a community that tried to break at least a few barriers that keep us as individuals separate from one another.
Apart from The Village Blacksmith by Henry Wadsworth Youngfellow, the two other poems I read were Fredericksburg by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and An Incident by Elizabeth Oakes Smith. Aside from Whitman, the other three poets try to keep a rhyme scheme. Whitman abandons rhyme for the most part. Still, I see some sort of connection from all three poems to Whitman’s Song of Myself. The Village Blacksmith is about… a village blacksmith (duhhhh), and half of the poem just describes his work and routine, which is not unlike the way in which Whitman describes many of the everyday people he writes about in his poem. An Incident has some formal similarities to Song of Myself in that the writer ponders the thought of how magnificent it would be to be the eagle in her romantic description of it. She humbles herself at the thought, saying that she would not soar as beautifully as the eagle. This resembles Whitman’s description of nature, which usually finds himself standing in awe of nature while simultaneously envisioning himself as one with nature. Fredericksburg is a bit different in the connection I find with Whitman. It describes the battlefield of Fredericksburg. I think the writer is in a time a couple of years after the battles of the Civil War took place there, and he is imagining the battles that took place on those fields just a few years back. Immediately, I think of how the war inspired artists. In the case of poetry, the author of Fredericksburg was inspired to write a poetic snapshot of a battle, and Whitman’s poem was also a response to the war, though he takes it on in a different manner.
All four of the poets use romantic elements to discuss their subjects, though their subjects vary (Whitman has connections to all the subjects as his poem is long and expansive). From reading the other poems, I see connections to nature, war, and the working man in the three different poems, and it works to show what was on the minds of artists at the time, and why it would seem natural for Whitman to include connections to all three aspects of life at the time in his poetry as well.
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.
Barnum’s American Museum was a museum that was open from 1841 to 1865 in New York City. It served as a showcase for animals, artifacts, scientific instruments, and a bunch of weird and odd stuff too. It was a big part of the culture in New York, and tons of people visited the museum until it burned down.
Walt Whitman also lived in New York, and was surely a visitor to this museum. According to PBS’s website, he also interviewed P.T. Barnum for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1946. Knowing Whitman’s fascination with understanding all that lies outside himself, I would think he’d love visiting the museum. Although I’m sure a lot of things in the museum were of a sensationalist nature, I think he’s appreciate the diversity of memorabilia, artifacts, animals, and culture found in the museum. A guy like Walt could write poems for days in a spot like that, real talk.
I am enamored of growing outdoors, Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods
pg. 9 -Walt clearly has a romantic view of those who work in the outdoors in the direct presence of nature, and even seems to be a little jealous. Here, he uses the word ‘ocean’ and not ‘sea,’ but I thought it was close enough, and that this line was important to show since it’s an early romanticism of nature, which is something he does throughout the poem.
----- Vivas to those who have failed, and to those war-vessels sank in the sea, and those themselves who sank in the sea
pg. 13
-I believe that Whitman’s romantic view of nature is rooted equally in the beauty of nature as well as the danger of nature, or at least the vulnerability a human encounters while in nature. The word ‘sea’ seems to have a more exotic danger attached to it than the word ‘ocean,’ and Whitman likes to remind us of both the danger and beauty of the sea.
----- You sea! I resign myself to you also....I guess what you mean, I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers, I believe you refuse to go back without feeling me; We must have a turn together….I undress…. Hurry me out of sight of the land, Cushion me soft….rock me in billowy drowse, Dash me with amorous wet…I can repay you.
Sea of stretched ground-swells! Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths! Sea of brine of life! Sea of unshielded and always-ready graves! Howler and scooper of storms! Capricious and dainty sea! I am integral with you… I too am of one phase and of all phases.
pg. 15
---- I included this whole section since the sea is the focus, and because Whitman gets a little sexy with the sea too. As Whitman gives descriptions of the many different souls in the United States throughout Song of Myself, here he explains his love for the sea and writes about its many phases and states; the beauty and danger it represents. He ends this section saying that just as the sea has many different states of being, so too does Whitman, and everyone else. One of my favorite lines in the whole poem is “I believe you refuse to go back without feeling me,”… It’s just a beautiful line to me that paints a great picture.
----- Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.
pg. 18
----- We sail through the arctic sea….it is plenty light enough
pg. 26
----- Delicate sniffs of the sea breeze….smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore….
pg. 30
----- Inland and by the seacoast and boundary lines…and we pass the boundary lines.
pg. 31
----- Is he from the Mississippi country? Or from Iowa, Oregon or California? Or from the mountains? Or prairie life or bush-life? Or from the sea?
pg. 32
----- The panorama of the sea….but the sea itself?
pg. 35
----- -An image of the sea? Or experience of the sea itself? It seems Whitman here is saying that it is not only important to write, paint, photograph, or talk about events and nature, but that it’s also important that we go out and put ourselves in the position to be a part of the events of our own history and to experience nature directly.
----- To jump off in the midst of the sea, and rise again and nod to me and shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.
pg. 40
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Whitman romanticizes the sea while also giving the sea its props for being a badass because the power and danger it brings. Still, Whitman gives even more credit to those who face the dangerous beauty head on. The sea presents humans with a completely different environment than any other setting because humans are naturally land-dwellers. We are, for the most part, born on land, raised on land, and it is where we spend most of our lives. Not only is the sea a beautiful part of nature, but it is also a territory in which one could say we do not naturally belong in. Regardless of our not belonging, Whitman encourages us to touch the sea and experience it, beyond simply writing about it or looking at it.
It is through experience that we really learn what something or someone is, and to an outsider, anything foreign will always create an attraction as well as present some danger. Whitman shows us the beauty we can find when we go outside our typical boundaries. In the literal sense, he is writing about living on land, and diving into the water. In a metaphorical way though, he may be telling us to explore the lives of others... People of other genders, other colors, other species, other occupations, etc.
Also, Whitman shows that the sea has many forms, like humans and humanity ('I too am of one phase and of all phases'). At times it will rage and destroy, and at times it will dazzle you with its beauty. Sometimes it will sooth and caress, and sometimes, it will just be. Just as it has many shapes and phases, it is one entity. This is the same way Whitman sees humanity. The sea, through its many forms, it is just one large ocean body, connecting all the greater lands to one another, while connecting us as well.
