All Mod Cons – or a Reflective Analysis on Whitman and American Institutional Technophilia

I’ve been too cruel to Walt Whitman’s works. Perhaps because I relate too much to the criticisms I have that it strikes fear in me. His work seems to uncover another honesty. The speaker appears often as a loving and encompassing man. He includes “everything” from classes, races, sexualities and into ecosystems in a vast democratic celebration of being. No small feat. Yet, this is much like many of the progressive oppressors I know. I’ve been groomed by Whitman too many times. Can I forgive the works? Leaves of Grass, Specimen Days, and Democratic Vistas all deploy a masculinist voyeurism. Moreover, the “I,” the speaking subject is the “neutral” and abstract. Put differently, this gets down to the institutionalized sexisms, racisms, classisms and all other isms that are inculcated within me. And I don’t always work to get them out and destroy them. Whitman’s voyeuristic vision watches over each and every, delighting in it. This includes even the most horrifying scenes, darkest spaces I’ve encountered. Too often I will denounce. Despite gestures to the contrary, including a book on an overly judgmental society (My First Painting Will Be the Accuser on Zephyr Press), I’m judgmental of his inclusivity. Or efforts therein. Yet, without his work I’d be no writer, understand much less, and yes there have been times when it saved my life. Whitman incorporates a hinge into the world, suturing a rift in reason, providing some repair that is desperately needed in these times.

Sometimes I’m so scared of the Civil War patent-office hospital he depicts in Specimen Days. Rarely even can I think about it. They stored dead soldiers in these patent cases.

A few weeks ago the vast area of the second story of that noblest of Washington buildings was crowded close with rows of sick, badly wounded and dying soldiers. They were placed in three very large apartments. I went there many times. It was a strange, solemn, and, with all its features of suffering and death, a sort of fascinating sight. I go sometimes to sooth and relieve particular cases. Two of the immense apartments are fill’d high and ponderous glass cases, crowded with models of every kind of utensil, machine or invention, it ever enter’d into the mind of man to conceive....Between these cases are lateral openings, perhaps eight feet wide and quite deep, and in these were placed the sick....It was, indeed, a curious scene, especially at night when lit up. (Whitman: Poetry and Prose, Library of America Edition 741)

While too much has been made of American innovation and technology, still the immense transformation of such a place and space (for place has a home within it) into its very opposite illuminates an eeriness, an ability to convey that beyond most capabilities. Or...was it the opposite? Here, the site of invention, “shades of makers of the world” (Wolf) haunts the groaning, dying boys and men. Machines, utensils, inventions, and “a poor fellow dying, with emaciated face and glassy eye, the nurse by his side, the doctor also there, but no friend, no relative” (Whitman 742). A piercing loneliness and alienation could not be more aptly scripted for one’s life. The Civil War was the first “technological” war in so many senses. The other side of making, but not thinking—the other side of thinking that new creation inevitably is “progress” in a sort of fascistic Hegelian spirit is that eventually a nation’s embodiment of technological advance will inherit the scores of dead bodies that thoughtless technophilia produces. For Whitman, institutionalism itself kills off the source of any liberated verse.

And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or
dead
But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest
any person for miles around approach unawares,
Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the
sea or some quiet island,
(“Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand” 271)

This hinge of the world may appear bucolic or naïve even. However, consider the alternative. It would seem within the sheer volume of Whitman’s work, much of the twenty-first century in the Global North is far closer to a Patent-Office Hospital, a making without thinking (Arendt, Essays in Understanding).