Elephant Bookstore, an oasis, in Sofia, subtitled, Whitman Note #0
When in Sofia I found the lovely
book-nook called Elephant.
Of the modest haul there the most
curious volume I took away and sank into re-reading, after more than 20
years it seems: The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman. With a refreshing
shock,
all my years of Eastern European search for proper "radici" came face to
face with one major psychogeographical tap-root in the poetry vein. Whence my long-lined
lurching neologistic run-on rambunkious paratactical vagabondage
linguistique no longer needing to be wrapped in ye olde Beat tortilla, and I had plumb forgotten.
Of course not the least of the voltage
released after long capacitance came with the fascinating recognition of
so many themes, things, topics and 'tudes (attitudes not etudes) I had
either not observed or swept under the Orientalizing carpets I thought prettier than
some others. It seems that nothing was beyond the amoebic
Atman-Brahmanic inhalations of the self-in-everything-celebrator, the
omnivorous Orphic hoover impulse in which Whitmania assimilated guns, bayonets,
daggers and aggressive war-cries and the open declaration of eagerness
in being the weapons and hero supplier, the global gendarme of this by
now imperiled empiric democracy we call American.
I wondered what would
happen if instead of my U.S. passport instead I offered the grenzenkontroller my copy of the Complete Poems, would I get a stamp? On my ass-port if
not my passport. On the foot or in the bolly chops. Forgive the noise of life. In certain society's
cursing and vulgarity is not so obligatorily shunned and seen the
sign of disfigured minds. On the other hand, purposeful prudery has it's
value in establishing hierarchies of respect, aristocratic regimes and
bolstering caste systems.
While our old wood-splitter (as Pound
said of him) might have been ribald and borderline raunchy back in the
day, I seem to read Whitman speaking in tones of pioneer gentility almost, while in the light of the prevailing post-colonial
discourse one wonders if the "visionary" aspect of Whitman's "democracy"
doesn't contain the dangerous ideological codes of tyranny and
militarism and a kind of vatic assimilationist rhetoric that makes
American democracy into some Marinetti paleo-futurist manifesto of melting pot macho manifascist destiny that rubs the wrong way both right and left.
Is democracy a woman? Maybe then like Kafka's Lady Liberty holding a sword.
"Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands...
I will make inseparable cities
with their arms about each other's necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme."And yet, if I take time to read the work in terms of extended hermeneutics many things become more confoundingly clear about the antinomian tactics, the self-subversive elements of a mystical purist democracy of monastic & purposeful textual reversals that echo the twists of the actual psyche of the masses, the mirror-mind measured in manic traversals to find the food of imbalance
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