The Weekly Whitman
No. 2: April 12, 2020
A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and completely hold and enclose them.
excerpted from Leaves of Grass
1892
Prompt:
What line resonates with your day today?
What phrase mirrors something you experienced in the past week?
Prompt:
What line resonates with your day today?
What phrase mirrors something you experienced in the past week?
A pragmatic fact of life is: every being constantly looks for ways to benefit from the life forms around it. Rather than see this as depressing, I see it as the reason Whitman's words hold so much truth as I look around nature. On the Serengeti plain the greatest migration of animals in the world takes place: the wildebeest are moving. This momentous event draws dozens of other animals trying to benefit from the wildebeests: hundreds of thousands of zebras and gazelles who can't safely navigate the tall plain's grass follow in the wildebeest's footsteps. And beneath millions of hooves, the grass grows. The grass relies on the migration to provide the nutrients required to thrive, but the grass needs long periods of rest to regrow. The herds are kept moving by lions, cheetahs, leopards, jackals and hyenas who for their part are just trying to get dinner. This sort of natural community is common all over the world and with all types of life imaginable: every creature in this world takes advantage of everything else and this creates an unimaginably complex global ecosystem so grand even Walt Whitman needed an entire book to describe it.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it’s a matter of how closely we examine what’s in front of us. The rug on my living room floor looks like a single entity, but if I get on my hands and knees with a lens I can see the warp and weft of the fabric – individual threads that bind the rug into a whole. And what are wildebeests and grasses but the warps and wefts of ecosystems? This is the view Whitman chose for examining much of what he saw and experienced – hence four hundred pages of Leaves of Grass. But what if we choose to step back and take the long view? See John Dobson’s take in Weekly Whitman no. 6: Are there really ninety-two elements, or are there – as the ancients proposed – merely four of them, with names like Earth and Water?
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