"This is what you shall do"

This is the day 156 years ago that Walt Whitman self-published his first edition of Leaves of Grass.  It began with a preface that would be left out of future editions, which read in part: 

The land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes … but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than [their] beauty and dignity [. . . ] … they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls. Men and women perceive the beauty well enough … [. . . ] The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, the love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, all is an old varied sign of the unfailing perception of beauty and of a residence of the poetic in outdoor people [. . . ] The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses to things nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else and is in the soul [. . . ] This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families . . .

For more, go here.

(H/T: The Writer's Almanac)

Five Hundred Miles

This song has been on my mind.  It seems to me such an essentially American song: simple, strophic, tuneful, and mournful, sharing its themes -- of a trip taken far from home, of loneliness, of a kind of exile imposed in equal measures by the exigencies of circumstance, and by those arising from personal shame and pride -- with other great American songs (like "Poor Wayfaring Stranger," for instance, or Woody Guthrie's "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad").  It's supposed to have been written by Hedy West, a singer on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the late 1950s-early 1960s, who based it on songs sung by her Appalachian grandmother, and wrote it from the point of view of a railroader.

 My friend Rodak has recently made me a Peter, Paul, and Mary convert (which didn't take much), and here is their almost-heartbreaking version of the song:  

Here is Joan Baez's winningly ingenuous version.

And perhaps my favorite, by the Australian group The Seekers, which sounds slick in comparison to the simplicity of the others, but whose beauty can't be denied.

Happy Fourth of July to all my American readers.

Culture Wars for Losers

Although this blog does not generally delve into political issues, I'm going to suspend that unofficial policy just long enough to attempt to articulate what is most heartrending for me about the upcoming election. Ironically, my feelings resonate on some level with a previous commenter's rather snarky remark about "the losers in life."

In a recent blog post, Tertium Quid suggests that, though the culture wars may be waged by intellectuals, their rank and file members are those who consider themselves, in some sense, to be numbered among the aforementioned losers:

If Barack Obama expresses aspirations bottled, stifled, busted, almost lost, and possibly resurrected, Sarah Palin expresses such things for a different kind of voter. Governor Palin will suffer much during the next few weeks, an intense dose of what Senator Obama has become numb to, if not used to. I am afraid . . . that we are going to have a brutal election because a vocal and malicious minority in each party is sure that America is too small a country to nurture the aspirations of both those who cheer Senator Obama and those who nod their heads and smile at the words of Governor Palin.

So Obama and Palin (let's face it, the election is really between them) personify the intense longing of those on each side who believe that they have lost in the culture wars and that their time has now come. The sad thing is, neither Obama nor Palin, nor any other politician in post-utopian American, can fulfill that longing, which is, in many ways, not political but spiritual.