Lines

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could i answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

Tenderly will i use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, IT may be if i had known them i would have loved them, It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps, and here you are the mothers' laps.

I really enjoyed these lines, Whitman brings a fresh and personal perspective on even the smallest lines. He's like, consider this. What do you think of this? And it opens the dormant portions of our brains and were like oh shit, i would have never thought. You can call it conformity, and the business of life. I call it America. California living is fucking rough. Excuse me, i mean expensive. Education is at the near bottom, and we find ourselves going to school longer, in hopes of attaining a job that might not be there considering, how fast technology is progressing.

What i'm trying to say is were are so busy, working, studying, learning and living, that we often cannot question the world around us. We accept it for what it is and we have no qualms about it. So what if we have to breath dirty air and drink poisoned water and eat treated food. It's life. But if we could only question. Are we allowed to? What if everyone questioned the government, like what the fuck are you doing with all the taxes were paying you?

Most importantly, Whitman's perspective of the grass allows hims to lower himself to the innocence of a child, whose view of the world is unadulterated and pure. They have a fresh outlook and Whitman wants to go back and view the world from the eyes of a child, for the first time, with excitement and bewilderment. What is grass? I can be an asshole and say it's just a plant that grows by sucking CO2 and sunlight and nutrients and it grows. Done. But what is it really does it breath? Does it flinch when we step on it? Does it cry? God i don't know, i'll have to take a closer look.

A Happy Hour's Command

Gathered from this specimen day, i believe Whitman has returned home from his sojourn, traveling various clinics and encampments, tending the wounded and dying from the war. (civil war) He has collected various notes, diary entries, postings, scrapbook material for a book he is writing. But has stated that he will not publish most of his private notes which are often stained in blood, perhaps a reference of the trauma he experienced tending to so many wounded.

I noted the excitement in this entry and the manner of which he scans all these premature and rough artifacts of a sordid and strong experience. He encountered the war first hand, not kill and shooting, but rather the aftermath, the part where most history books leave out, the numbered wounded, crippled and dead. Those that are broken are left out. It's easy to talk about going to war and the decorum of various campaigns, but once your knee deep in the blood and gore, and your stomach has been churned and curdled, your perspective is shifted and tainted.

In relation to Leaves of Grass, i believe these notes are the progenitor of his first transcript. They may have laid the foundation for what might have been the first draft or possibly a second. Experiences shape who we are as individuals and i'm certain that the war had a drastic impact on Whitman and his writings, leaving a traumatic stain upon his verses. And i believe that is why Whitman forcefully tries to convey our relation to one another, how we are all one and the same, united by some spiritual means. He wants to show us that once we see how were all brothers and sisters, fighting amongst ourselves in war, would be unimaginable.

Wilmot Proviso

If someone was making a deal with me for whatever reason, be it a transfer of money, a trading of shifts or maybe a simple exchange of words, and tossed in some underhanded comment to undermine the deal or sneak a quick jab for insult, i'd be pissed. Now the Wilmot Proviso, would have banned slavery in any state acquired and was added as an amendment to a funding bill. This proviso is important because this was one of the many straws that broke the camel's back in terms of tensions between the North and South in terms of slavery. Granted, it never passed and was never accepted in any bill it was tied to, it was considered as a strike against the south, forewarning the beginning of an escalating tension which would result in the Civil War. The proviso merely slighted the south.

The great loafer would have supported the proviso, but most importantly he would have feared the consequences that would follow if it failed. Whitman was a smart man he must have realized that the North and South were not only struggling over a serious national issue, but that communities and families were being torn between sides, that supported one side over the other. Fratricide. Fathers clawing at the throat of their children. Siblings aiming muskets amongst themselves. Whitman's world and atmosphere of acceptance and love and civility was  shaken and tossed out the window once the Civil War started. Whitman was a man that according to Songs of Myself, tended to the a runaway slave, feeding him, clothing him and providing shelter from a world that fought amongst a political issue. Whitman understood that slavery wasn't about the profit and agriculture and politics and whose right and wrong, it was about people. People being free, for themselves to do what they please. The perfumes of politics and all that was artificial and fake merely masked that only the truth that mattered to Whitman, which was experience the world, and knowing one's self through the experience. How could a man or woman reach such a spiritual plateau if there is a human dominance, a master of their universe, looming above them, striking them and removing all which personal?

Slavery stripped more than rights, it stripped cultures and identities. 

Leaves of Grass

This class will be fun.