Dear Body: Whitman's Body Miraculous

A celebration and invocation of poet Walt Whitman- a true champion of the love and beauty and wisdom of the body and earth. The text for the reflection that is presented in this episode of The Bodcast is below. Works referenced and quoted are listed beneath the transcript. Whitman’s Body Miraculous  Let us be humbled, as Walt Whitman sang, by ‘the limitless and delicious wonder.’ Humbled by the earth and all the earthlings. Whitman’s love was awe mixed with joy. He tells us in no uncertain terms to trust the body, all the bodies, all the natural wonders, big and small. He opens his arms wide, his heart wide, and his tongue and nose and ears and eyes and skin and imagination wide. He dilates his entire being so that the body and soul, poet and reader, earth and sky, commingle and interpenetrate inside a moment and a poem. This is the secret- to look no further for God or gods or the soul, but to respond, to open, to go with the armies of Life and Love. Resistance is futile. Charge it all with soul and be prepared to know the limitless and delicious. The Wonderful. Humility matters here. This is not the diversions of a hedonist. This is not just intoxication. This is Gibran’s true lover, ready ‘to know the pain of too much tenderness.’ Ready to be not just the feaster but also the sacred bread for Love’s feast. To be guided to the bedsides of the wounded and dying. To be guided to enter the heated dialogues and debates and battles of society and the world with the song of the exquisite body and miraculous earth to share. Whitman may have had a strong conviction. It came from baptising himself in wonder each day. Big and small. High and low. Drunken and sober. Black and white. Female and male. Country and city. Natural and human-made. Body and soul- ‘nothing else but miracles.’   ‘To die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.’  ‘Argue not concerning God-’ just open to It. Yes, he knew many privileges. Yes, these privileges nourished and underpinned his audacity and courage. Yes, his poem is not enough. Yes, it is just a finger pointing. It points to a ‘democratic vista’ where the body in all its forms, human and more than human, sings electrically for the deliverance of all back into the mother’s lap- the Deliverance of all to the open country of summer grass, the soulful, the brave and free.  Whitman points to a place birthed by a song of celebration where we may meet, in this body or another, even amid the confused and corrupted, violent and smutty. Where we may find a quiet place to sit holding hands, speaking little, maybe not at all, and feel happy to be together. Whitman works referred to here: The poem ‘Miracles’ The poem ‘A Child Said, What is the Grass?’ Phrases from his notebooks Preface of Leaves of Grass The poem ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ Title of the poetry collection Democratic Vistas The poem ‘A Glance’  The poem ‘I Celebrate Myself’