Song of Myself

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
 
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
 
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
 
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.—Section 1, “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman, 1855

By the end of his life in 1892, Walt Whitman had published eight revised editions (eight or so; there is some debate on this matter) of his major volume of poems, “Leaves of Grass,” culminating in a ninth edition, what he himself called the “deathbed edition.”

“L. of G. at last complete—after 33 y’rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young & old,” he wrote a friend. He was only 72 when he died, but with his white beard and self-presentation as a man who had existed for the entire country’s history, he seemed older.

It all started on the 4th of July. On this date 160 years ago, Whitman published the first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” a book that contained twelve poems, each without a name, and starting with the opener, a poem that became known over time as “Song of Myself.”
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Empty Foresight

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One of my favorite expressions, one that I used to employ frequently but no longer do, is, “This is X-number of minutes I am never getting back.” I would say this after experiencing something incredibly boring and frustrating, like waiting on line only to discover that I was waiting on the wrong line the entire time, or when I was in a traffic jam in which I learned that the hold-up was people gawking at an accident which by itself would not have created the traffic jam.
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Objets D’Obsolete

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Each of the three cars I have owned … hold on, was it three? Let’s count.

My first car exploded into a fireball and melted into a big mound of car before my eyes precisely 23 hours after its long-standing overheating issue had been repaired. Making so many repair shop visits about this concern had been annoying, but some quick fixes are neither. The next car was also prone to overheating—steam, not flame, in this case—and I perpetually thought it was ten minutes from an explosion as well. When one has owned a car that one watched meet its end via self-immolation, one develops a sensitivity to over-heating. PTSD, even. But I saw that car on the roads of my town for a full five years after I sold it. My last car was repossessed because I was not an adult back then, and banks like doing business with adults. So, yes, three cars.

The tools of life and I do not have a functional working agreement.
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