I Like Whitman, Shoot Me in the Morning

 

At one of my first Patrick Henry meals, I sat down beside Dr. Walker. He asked me if I liked Walt Whitman.

I didn’t, particularly, and that relieved him.

But I must have drunk some post-modern water because I like Walt Whitman now. I even like his beard, particularly in its frostiest stage. I don’t think I drunk the post-modern water at college. I think I drunk it somewhere else.

Whitman says that when he heard the learn’d astronomer discourse about space, he went out by himself and looked at the stars. Similarly, when I heard Dr. Kucks ask me to discover by mathematical calculation and diagramming how much space I would need to maneuver a mattress up the staircase I said, “Just give me the mattress and let me try.”

I think I like “The Wound-Dresser” best. I like the question in the first stanza: “What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panies,/ Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?”

It’s a question about memory. Time boils memories down and leaves the important bits. Why have I sweated to scavenge every detail of my life when memory maintains those which shine brightest? I have seen it in my own writing. Those who stress the importance of journalistic novel-writing could not possibly trust their memories, for they are reporters of the minutest details of the external world as much as they are miners of their own thoughts.

But I don’t have to mention that Whitman’s trade is to mine his own thoughts. Perhaps this is a fault. Either way, he trusts his memory.

I easily take up the words in “The Wound Dresser” and apply them to my vocation as a healer in the cursed world. I would like to shout these words against evil:

“Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,

Straight and swift to the wounded I go.”

And,

“I onward go, I stop,

With hinged knees and steady hands to dress wounds.”

And,

“open hospital doors!”

May our knees by full of hinges, and may we be healers. Without, of course, us being transcendentalists.

Chelsea Kolz, Senior, American Lit, Fall 2012