Song of Myself - Walt Whitman

Whitman writes of wonderful interconnection; cosmos wheeling underneath, numbered hairs and dignity within, and without. So many roads to walk and, similarly, to move under our feet. "And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe." How to synopsize, how to coalesce and communicate a statement of the self that is at once driving headlong, and similarly, felt at the margins? Both bold in assured dignity and timid in tentative wonder? Much as Whitman bequeaths himself to the dirt, or hastens to converse with the chorus of the all-purposed invisible, he lives and breathes, touching within and without, in surrender.

The binding notion for Whitman, in my own estimation (at least today) is total emptiness at the center: the arrival of oneself is the whole coming-together of an entire history of the universe - past, present, and at the knife-edge of creative novelty. We are, and it all is, constantly being reinvented. "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." Total stability renders phenomena immobile. Thermodynamics demands the loss of energy; the unintended outcome gives rise to the new world, and, thus, the new self. If we were already full, determined, drivers of our own destiny, then whither our new sense of self, our own transformation? We would be rendered immobile by Ecclesiastes - disparaging of nothing new under the sun. Recombination. Stagnation. Death there.

But I hesitate to simplify it, even so. Surely there is much more to find and be found. Wiser minds thinking wiser thoughts. The mountain doesn't simply come to Muhammad, nor can it provide our own salvation. Each, like Whitman, brings what he or she will to each new pass-way, each tight-rope movement. Transcendent effort, his, and each of us can meet him along the road - that place of co-production. Thus, the world is borne again, and each of us within it, and constituting it. Forever and ever. Great exultation there.

"I know I have the best of space and time, and was never measured and never will be measured."

Thanks, Gary.