Relics of the Unified World

A Meditation and Reflection from September, 2024

In these summer throwbacks we are revisiting past meditations and reflections, delivered every Friday at our regular time, 9 am EST.

In the early 1950s, my father and his father took a camping trip to the Delaware Water Gap. It was a trip my father cherished the memory of. He had not had many outings with his father, a salesman who spent time away from home. Not to blame the man; my father never really did. But they were close only in flashes, like two stones clapped together now and then, producing a spark, an argument, or a burst of love. This trip must have been such a moment between them. They brought home a stone, on the bottom of which is still type-written on a sticker: "Probably a petrified clam." Whether it was an ancient fossil of a clam—it had a clam's shape and was ridged and beveled like a clam—made no difference to my father, who kept it his entire life. It was not merely a silent rock but an old survivor to him, a reminder of constancy in the otherwise river-rapid unpredictability of his relationship with the old man.

I remember the clam now as I think of Whitman's poem. Though he published “I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing” in 1860, it was inspired by a trip to New Orleans twelve years before, when Whitman was still in his twenties. In all, the poem evolved over the most important period of Whitman’s poetic development, and it was completed just after his 1855 version Leaves of Grass left his name inscribed into the annals of American Literature. In the poem, he describes an encounter with that same sort of constancy--and the relic he took home to remind him of it.

I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing

by Walt Whitman

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its
friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around
it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wideflat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.

Walt Whitman went to New Orleans in 1848 to help start a newspaper. We can presume he had a vision there, a live oak growing joyfully in an open space apart from other trees of its kind. The vision stewed in him and stayed with him until the years leading up to the Civil War. By 1860 it appeared in print, less than a year before the Union was to split. It is a moving appeal to healing the brokenness and change he observed around him, later to be explored in Drum Taps after he had moved to Washington to nurse the sick and wounded. When Whitman writes, “all alone stood it…uttering joyous leaves of dark green,” I feel the self-effulgence, the complete and perfect self-reliance of this being, this tree, a unity unto itself. At the same time Whitman acknowledges that such self-effulgence would not be possible for him, “for I could not,” he writes, utter joyous leaves without my friends in my midst. It explores the notion of “itselfness” while at the same time expressing the longing for togetherness and belonging. When Lincoln quotes Matthew 12:25, “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” we see this comparable image of America's wholeness in Whitman: now it is a deeply rooted tree, glistening and independent, standing in wide open space in the world.

Whitman’s familiar, erotic notes are here. The tree, “lusty,” a token of “manly love,” “rude,” “unbending,” reminds him of himself and of the bodies of men. Beyond the merely sexual and brooding aspect, though, there comes a reclamation about Whitman the poet. Before Leaves of Grass, there was little indication of Whitman’s mysticism; his early newspaper poetry was over-zealously patriotic and mechanical. By the time he was 35 in 1855, however, he emerged as a unique voice; he would be called the first truly American poet; he would come to influence future poets like Hart Crane, Rabindranath Tagore, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Gerald Stern, Mary Oliver, W.S. Merwin, and many more. The tree, alone in open space, seems to have come out of nowhere, like the poet himself.

The tree is a model for spiritual life. It reflects a self-effulgent spiritual being, one whose power comes not from fixing or changing the environment in which they stand, but from a self-generated perspective within. They stand “unbending” with all the power surging forth from a center whose source is infinite and untraceable. Whether Whitman was purposefully alluding to such figures, they are ubiquitous in world literature. In Exodus 3:14, “God said unto Moses, I am that I am.” The “I am” as a source of consciousness precedes the small self, surely the grand “Myself” of Whitman’s song, in which the whole universe is that “I am” in disguise. The Live-Oak is Jesus on his rood, a holy tree, Odin on his Yggdrasil, the world tree, God speaking from a burning bush. For Whitman, who saw this Self in a blade of grass and the bustling movement of ordinary people, the Live-Oak was a strong reminder of who he already was but has forgotten: “I know I could not.” Like any pilgrim visiting a shrine or a basilica, he therefore takes a piece and wraps some moss around it to remind him of the powerful itselfness around which everything is wrapped and carried. He bows to the Live-Oak the way we might bow to the giant wooden Buddha in Deer Park in Nara, Japan, or how we might pray at the reliquary in the crypt at Assisi.

There has been a lot of writing on the subject of Whitman's mysticism, but hardly anyone could say where or when it exactly arose. I think it was already in him, long dormant. William James later refers to the poetry as mystical in The Varieties of Religious Experience. It must have naturally emerged out of Whitman’s own sensibilities and his estrangement from the world, and from the longing for tenderness and connection that can arise from marginalization. There is evidence, too, of his readings of The Upanishads. What emerged was ultimately a driving love for the Self in all the forms it assumes. “The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order," writes James, "and he expressed these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited individual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words and ends by persuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things are divinely good.”

But the real reason I opened the semester with this poem, I must admit, has to do with its message around community and togetherness. There’s a story about the Buddha in which he's asked which of the three jewels (the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha) are the most precious. The Buddha answered, of them all, it is the Sangha (the group); furthermore, it may only be the Sangha that we need to reach awakening. I find my own heart in that story. Over these last two years, I have felt the power of that message constantly, feeling in your presence our compassion for each other and the hurting world. I have come to understand why Thich Nhat Hanh once said, "the next Buddha will be a Sangha."

Oars for the Boat

How do we go to the root of our work, how do we find the Self that is fine-as-itself within us? We have all made pilgrimages great and small, whether they be the Hajj or to the Holy Land or to climb a mountain in Colorado or to walk through Muir Woods in Mill Valley or among the river stones of the Delaware Water Gap in 1951. Almost all of us have felt the urge to bring something home from that journey. My own desk is covered in rocks, shells, coins, and even a river stone of my own here and there. Whitman himself was so moved by the live oak that he wrapped a twig in moss—a symbol for his very poem—and brought it back to show the world. We need nudging, all of us.

To start our work on impermanence this semester, discover in your midst a small item that reminds you of the surge of itselfness that fountains from you. Let’s recognize with Whitman the examples of self-effulgence to show us again, if need be, that the fire of “I am,” can be found in every speck we bend down in devotion to. For Whitman, a blade of grass may as well have been a burning bush. I hear him in all of those sacred texts that assure us of our real identities. I hear him in the voice of Nisargadatta Maharaj: “Make love of yourself perfect. Deny yourself nothing--give yourself infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them; you are beyond.”