The Amplitude of Time
Mayakovsky led me naturally back to Whitman. I remember well being astonished by Whitman in high school. Here was a man in the mid 19th century who saw it all, saw everything. But over the years he became an encrusted classic. Every now and then I would pick up Whitman and sometimes he’d strike lightning, but mostly it was like listening to The Beatles. Yeah yeah yeah. But seeing Whitman from the perspective of Russia in 1915 reminded me of the avant garde Whitman, the Whitman I first read at 15, the Whitman who liberates. Mayakovsky read Whitman in translation. Whitman arrived in Russia with French painting and the poems of Rimbaud and Mallarme. The dust was off the pages. I am again astonished by his pantheism, his sexuality, by his shocking spiritual vision, by the Emersonian soul as absolute. And I love that he does not snivel!
from Leaves of Grass, original edition, 1855
20
Who goes there! hankering, gross mystical, nude?
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?
What is a man anyhow? What am I? and what are you?
All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,
Else it were time lost listening to me.
I do not snivel that snivel the world over,
That months are vacuums and ground but wallow and filth,
That life is asuck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end
but threadbare crepe and tears.
Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids….
conformity goes to the fourth-removed,
I cock my hat as I please indoors or out.
Shall I pray? Shall I venerate and be ceremonious?
I have pried through the strata and analyzed to a hair,
And counselled with doctors and calculated close and found no
sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.
In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less,
And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.
And I know I am solid and sound,
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.
And I know I am deathless,
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,
I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.
I know I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize,
I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by after all.
I exist as I am, that is enough,
if no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own body today or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
My foothold is tenoned and mortised in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.
