Lauren Shufran’s “Walt Whitman’s Inscriptions”

Judith Goldman (bio)
SUNY Buffalo

Passage to more than India!
Walt Whitman, “Passage to India” (line 224)

It is not an obvious time to return to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855-1892).¹ Though, as we witness the United States venture ever closer to what seems like civil war and/or the dissolution of a nation, taking insistent strides, in Ibram X. Kendi’s formulation, in our “racist progress,” perhaps a serious quarrel with Whitman will get us to the heart of matters.² Or so wagers Lauren Shufran’s searching, poem-by-poem entanglement with the “Inscriptions” section of Whitman’s magnum opus, a project that reckons not with what we could more comfortably call contradictions borne of his containing multitudes, but with his repressed racist legacy. Yet rather than turn to the direct expression of racism in his lesser-known white nationalist journalism (such as his Free Soil writings of the 1840s³), or to various of his odes to Manifest Destiny (such as “Pioneers! O Pioneers!,” first appearing in the 1865 edition of Leaves of Grass), Shufran chooses to interrupt our familiar, homey sense of Whitman’s cosmic, absorbent self-dilations by digging into the logical underpinnings of the brief lyrics, mainly on nationhood and democracy, that open his American epitome, and challenging their semblance of political universality.

Yet it is the particular intertextual angle of Shufran’s exposure that adds a crucial complexity to her work, as she joins a long tradition of commentary on Whitman vis-à-vis his adaptations of Vedantic thought. That is, her queer but partial and critical identification with Whitman specifically takes on both the poet’s work and the Whitmanian dimensions of the robust racism current today in the U.S. by attending to a triangulation that haunts Leaves of Grass: its relation to the 700-verse, synthetic Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita. In “Walt Whitman’s Inscriptions,” Shufran engages in rigorous commentary on one of her chosen spiritual tradition’s core texts, its parallels and contrasts with Whitman, and its potential capacity to illuminate our racist predicament, while, resurrecting Whitman as a 21^st-century companion practitioner of yoga who joins her on a journey to India, she also gently reflexively mocks Western tourism on the subcontinent and its consumption of yoga and related services.

Direct self-satire enters Shufran’s portrayal of Walt availing himself of the amenities India has to offer the queer Western spiritual traveler from the opening premise of the first poem featured here, “To Thee Old Cause”: “Walt is on Tinder in India.” Noting that only the first twelve lines of Whitman’s “To Thee Old Cause” can be fit in his 500-character Tinder tagline, her persona dangles the scenario that she herself (and given the uncertainties of deixis, the reader too) is in turn cruising the website and finding appeal in Walt, “Because you are in India, trying to find yourself.” As this exemplary burlesque in which Americans leave home to find the self in India only to have Whitman then stand in some wise as India’s essence might suggest, what Shufran’s layered reading and positioning throughout these poems makes evident is that the cultural traffic in Whitman goes both ways. “Whitman has been read in other cultures and into other cultures,” as Ed Folsom writes, “looping into other traditions and finding its way back.”⁴ Whitman’s most intensive cross-cultural intersection is with Hindu thought, and Shufran’s “Walt Whitman’s Inscriptions” in part responds to the tendency of past and present yogic teachers and followers of every nationality and ethnicity to idealize Whitman in their frequent citation of him as Vendantic seer to forget his racism, his jingoism, his white supremacist thought, in turning to Whitman at just those moments, ironically, when poetry is called on to heal or transcend political rifts and their violence. If contemporary Hinduism often uses Whitman not only as Whitman himself envisioned his cosmo-political-poetical role, but also as Whitman had made use of the Bhagavad Gita, Shufran gives the dialectic another turn, reading and troubling that return circuit while cannily setting up Whitman as a double and foil for herself as a white, queer, American poet and spiritual practitioner even as she recommits to her beliefs.

One might refer not to Whitman’s racism but to his complexly interwoven racisms. In “Song of Myself” Whitman models white humanitarianism towards fugitive slaves and figures a (problematic) merging of the self with black persons, while in works such as An American Primer (1904) as well as in his notebooks he romanticizes “the American aborigines,” throughout his corpus preferring their toponyms (“Paumonok”; “Mannahatta”). Whitman’s homegrown social Darwinism nonetheless leads him in a number of poems speculatively to depict the dying out of these putatively inferior races, African Americans and Native Americans.⁵

“Passage to India” (1870) offers a more sanguine (if no less exoticizing) outlook on the other Indians he valued. In this rhapsody on the completion of the Suez Canal, the undersea transatlantic cable, and a transcontinental railway in the US, Whitman portrays contemporary physical linkages between East and West as achieving a performative “rondure of the world” (line 81).⁶ In Whitman’s peculiar anachronism “Lo, soul, the retrospect brought forward” it is only now that Western technological accomplishment has caught up to the spiritual destiny of humanity laid out long ago in “the Sanscrit and the Vedas” (128, 139). Columbus’s deferred goal (e.g., to find a passage to India) has been fulfilled, but, more importantly, conditions have been made ripe for “The flowing literatures, tremendous epics, religions, castes” of India to reach their apotheosis (135). “[T]he past lit up again,” modern science may thus “Eclaircise the myths Asiatic—the primitive fables,” because the real passage at stake has always been the one central to (Whitman’s version of) Vendantic mysticism, the soul’s communion with the divine (127, 17). It is perhaps not surprising that, in turn, a filiated anachronism of past-made-present might be mirrored in a Hindu perspective on Whitman: as V. K. Chari notes, “Sri Aurobindo, the sage of Pondicherry,” in The Future Poetry (1917-1920), saw Whitman’s poetry as that “in which ‘one of the seers of old time reborn in ours might have expressed himself'” (396).

Whitman’s writing has been read as closely paralleling the philosophy in the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, and has been used in different parts of the globe to explain those texts or to emblematize them, though it has remained a point of scholarly contention for over a century just how well acquainted he was with these and other Indian sources (in part because Whitman both protested the autochthony of his poetry and attested to the influence of Eastern religion and philosophy⁷). Transliterations of a few Sanskrit terms appear even in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, but these were likely gathered from digests and reviews of Eastern religion and philosophy in contemporary periodicals.⁸ In a footnote to Walt Whitman: His Life and Work (1906), Bliss Perry writes, “Emerson once remarked smilingly to F. B. Sanborn [a journalist and a biographer of the American Transcendentalists] that Leaves of Grass was a combination of the Bhagavad-Gita and the New York Herald,” yet, early on, Whitman seems mainly to have absorbed the concepts of Indian thought into his poetry through reading Emerson and other American Transcendentalists scholars (276).⁹ As Nathaniel Preston writes, “H. D. Thoreau, in a letter to Harrison Blake from December 1856 [right after the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass] recounts his first meeting with Whitman. Thoreau remarked that Whitman’s poems were ‘wonderfully like the Orientals’ and asked Whitman whether he had read them. Whitman’s reply was ‘No; tell me about them'” (253). However, in his own essay A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads (1888), where he recounts “some…embryonic facts of Leaves of Grass,” Whitman states he read “Shakspere, Ossian, the best translated versions I could get of Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante’s among them,” prior to first composition (577-78). No doubt the study of Hinduism was a lifelong preoccupation for the poet. His copy of J. Cockburn Thomson’s 1855 translation of the Gita, thought to have been sent him by his English friend Thomas Dixon at Christmas in 1875, was well used and annotated (Hendrick 13). “When Whitman died,” Richard H. Davis writes, “it was reported, a translation of the Gita was found lying under his pillow” (74).

From the late nineteenth- through the twenty-first century, most scholars tracing the Vedantic influences and similitudes in Whitman (or refuting them) have focused on his mysticism without examining its political implications.¹⁰ By reading the Bhagavad Gita “with” Whitman to produce creative translations of his “Inscriptions,” Shufran not only traces the “elsewhere” in that most homegrown, all-American text Leaves of Grass but also closely examines, for instance, the dialectics of particular and universal, multiplicity and unity, self and other, so obsessively staged by Whitman that draw on, as well as skew and distort, Hindu mystic thought, in order to discern his poems’ deep political architectonics.

“To Thee Old Cause,” already mentioned above, which finds Shufran and Whitman at Mandrem Beach (a tourist site in North Goa, India), creates and explores a set of parallels between Whitman’s eponymous poem, which proclaims the necessity of fighting “a strange sad war, great war” (39) the American Civil War for a “cause” that remains unnamed throughout, and the first eleven chapters of the Bhagavad Gita, in which the god Krishna, in the form of a man, argues with Prince Arjuna about the necessity of fighting a civil war, finally appearing to Arjuna in a divine vision of “universal form.” In what becomes an ingenious meditation on tropology, modes of causality, embodiment, difference, and desire, Shufran playfully analyses Krishna’s various manifestations by adventitiously introducing Whitman as obsessed with Tinder: thus, Krishna both as “avatar,” a Sanskrit word that, as she explains, “initially meant: the descent of a deity/Into terrestrial form,” and as “theophany,” divine unity revealed immediately as infinite multiplicity, meets a match in dating avatars that are not directly bodies, but images, and that together amount to a secular theophany. (As Whitman, a continuously-swiping-right Arjuna, remarks, “everyone is divine.”) Shufran’s poem’s persona continues further to parse the erotics and micro-politics of figurative relation through reference to interactions with her own lover and their ensuing affects, involving shifting senses of sameness and difference in homoerotic liaison, the pitfalls of gauging the reality of intimacy, and the contradictory, self-thwarting aspects of attachment.

If, in her version of “To Thee Old Cause,” Shufran questions Whitman’s statement in the 1871 poem, “my book and the war are one” (39), she again expresses skepticism towards Whitmanian tropology as tending towards “forced equivalence” in her translation of Whitman’s poem “For Him I Sing.” As Whitman there declares regarding his unnamed dedicatee: “With time and space I him dilate and fuse the immortal laws,/To make himself by them the law unto himself” (43). Whitman’s poem seems faintly to be derived, Shufran finds, from the concept of “Sanatama dharma,” “the absolute set of duties/Incumbent upon all Hindus” elaborated by the Bhagavad Gita (and other Vedic texts), a connection Shufran refutes by detecting in Whitman’s juridical organicism a key metaphor in his “For Him I Sing” is a tree growing from its roots a neo-fascist whiff of corporatist nationalism, her suspicions crystallized in her comment that these “immortal laws” are not reducible to “the temporal laws…of a nation.” Augmenting Whitman’s organic figures, Shufran then ventriloquizes for Whitman an ideology of poetic and legal form as “autopoiesis” (a theory of biological life co-developed by the Buddhist neuroscientist Francisco Varela).¹¹ While autopoiesis proposes a long evolutionary cycle of adaptation through recursive self-generation as organisms interact with their environment, in Whitman’s corrupted version as applied to the law and to poems that articulate the logic of the law the process is accelerated and twisted such that the autopoietic incorporation of authority involves not a millennia-long “history of perturbations,” but rather a single compound synecdoche, as the law authorizes what is outside or above the it in its own name, as its own authority. What Shufran’s “For Him I Sing” goes on deftly to argue is that Whitman’s distorted model of sovereignty, in which someone might function as a “law unto himself,” becoming the law incorporate, is precisely that of the American police state. As Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton argue in “The Avant Garde of White Supremacy”:

If the spectacle of police violence does, in fact, operate according to a rule of its own …, what does this suggest about the social institutions that generate it and which it represents despite persistent official disavowals? [T]he cultural content of the actual policing that we face is to be a law unto itself, not the socially responsible institution it claims to be in its disavowals…. They [the police] make problematic the whole notion of social responsibility such that we no longer know if the police are responsible to the judiciary and local administration or if the city is actually responsible to them, duty bound by impunity itself. To the extent to which the police are a law unto themselves, the latter would have to be the case.(n.p.)

“I was in India with Walt Whitman/The day the two-hundred-and-third black person/To be fatally shot by the police in 2016/was killed,” Shufran writes. And later: “Walt writes a poem called/ ‘This Poem is a Law unto Itself’;/It is about the Baltimore police and the Ferguson/Police and the Oakland and Cleveland/Police and the SFPD and the LAPD and the NCPD;/And it is a poem that dilates to encompass all the PDs.” Yet further layers accrue to Shufran’s conceit through her engagement with the figure of Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback who in the 2016 season at first stayed seated and then knelt during “The Star Spangled Banner” to protest the barrage of killings of people of color by the police. (Kaepernick stated he would continue to kneel until the American flag “represents what it’s supposed to represent” [qtd. in Hafner].) Framed by Shufran as a correlative of Arjuna on the battlefield at Kurukshetra, at war with his own family and teachers, Kaepernick enacts self-critical patriotism as a salutary form of autopoietic feedback: he does act as a law unto himself but rather performs a corrective dissent that draws an entirely self-estranged law back towards itself.

We find Shufran’s persona and Whitman in Kerala at the Ayurvedic center (Walt is receiving yet another massage) in the third and final poem selected here, a translation of Whitman’s “To the States.” Despite jibes at the poem’s platitudes and her reflexively counter-organicist use of the poem to diagnose Whitman as having a Pitta dosha imbalance, the speaker admits, “It’s a fiery miniature of a lyric.” Composed in the late 1850s and initially entitled “Walt Whitman’s Caution,” “To the States” in its entirety reads as follows:

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States,
     Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth,
     ever afterward resumes its liberty. (44)

But Whitman’s miniature, with its strident message, functions in Shufran’s poem mainly as a cautionary backdrop to the aftermath of the 2017 US presidential election, emblematized in the poem by the triumphant, interactive ending of a speech given by white nationalist Richard Spencer at an Alt-Right conference convened shortly after Trump’s win. As reported in the New York Times, “As [Spencer] finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute. Mr. Spencer called out: ‘Hail Trump! Hail our people!’ and then, ‘Hail victory!’—the English translation of the Nazi exhortation ‘Sieg Heil!’ The room shouted back” (Goldstein n.p.). Shufran weaves a connection between this grotesque but by now clearly all-too-likely episode and the Bhagavad Gita by focusing on the moment in its second chapter when Krishna remonstrates with Arjuna for his reluctance to fight, out of pity for the family and friends who are his adversaries: (in Shufran’s rendering) “How un-Aryan of you, Arjuna; how cowardly/And unbecoming, this pity.” She further explains that “In Sanskrit, the word ārya/Means “noble or advanced”;/Anārya means: “those who do not know/The value of life.” For Heinrich Himmler—who, Shufran also informs us, daydreamed about himself as Arjuna to Hitler’s Krishna, had these lines memorized, and carried the Gita in his back pocket—what seems to have resonated in this scene beyond that term was the idea of the “kshatriya, the warrior, class,” as well as Arjuna’s concern about his mandate “to keep the caste system intact.” Part of the larger point of this poem is the flexible conscription of texts to ideologies. But, throughout, Shufran’s ingenious play on the word “unbecoming” is also key: Arjuna is worried about the dissolution of the social order, “I will unbecome us/If I fight,” while Krishna argues that such apprehensions, if they keep one from fighting, are unbecoming a warrior. Though the poem doesn’t mention it, Krishna also accuses Arjuna in this chapter of impotence and unmanliness. Is he calling Arjuna gay? As the poem does directly say, Himmler “fantasized the many deaths of Walt Whitman.” Another of its turns on the unbecoming is the most un-Whitmanlike but recognizably queer way in which Walt waxes self-conscious about his chubbiness: “How unbecoming,/Cringes Walt Whitman, as four hands bump over/The excess flesh above his serratus posterior.” It is with this tenderness towards the vulnerable queer body as it embarks on a cross-cultural regime of wellness and self-care, and with an absolute repudiation and despairing at the notion of caste with which the poem ends: “Can one disprove the untouchable/Simply by virtue of touching?“

Footnotes

1. See, however, CAConrad’s scathing critique of Whitman’s racism in “From Whitman to Walmart.” See also Rob Halpern, Music for Porn, especially the section, “Notes on Affection and War,” a piece focusing on the Civil War-era American eros elaborated by Whitman that would “bind the community in the figure of a dead soldier” (60).

2. Ibram X. Kendi, “Racial Progress Is Real. But So Is Racist Progress.”

3. See Klammer 105.

4. See Folsom, “Database as Genre.”

5. I draw on leads from Folsom’s “Native Americans [Indians].”

6. My reading here draws a bit on Ahluwalia.

7. In “Walt Whitman’s Use of Indian Sources: A Reconsideration,” Nathaniel Preston notes: “Walt Whitman’s insistence on the absolute originality of his poetry often led him to deny or obscure the intellectual and literary influences on his work. He began promulgating the myth of himself as a ‘natural’ poet of America as soon as he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. In an anonymous review of his own book, published in September of 1855, for instance, Whitman asserts that he ‘makes no allusions to books or writers; their spirits do not seem to have touched him.’ Whitman’s continuing assertions that his poems were the result of untainted inspiration have provided critics with the challenge of deciphering the real influences which shaped the poet’s art” (256).

8. See Preston, 253-55.

9. Perry goes on to say, “Compare, for example, Whitman’s well known use of the communal ‘I’ with Krishna’s speech in the ninth chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita: ‘I (ego) who am present everywhere in divers forms. I am the immolation. I am the whole sacrificial rite. I am the libation offered to ancestors. I am the drug. I am the incantation. I am the sacrificial butter also. I am the fire. I am the incense. I am the father, the mother, the sustainer, the grandfather of the universe—the mystic doctrine, the purification, the syllable “Om!'” etc. etc.” (276-77).

10. Reviewing Indian scholarship in particular, Chari writes, “Thus it is the spiritual aspect of Whitman’s poetry that attracted most Indian thinkers of the early generations and that still continues to engage the attention of Indian academics, rather than his democratic or purely humanitarian message or his futuristic vision of the New World apparent in poems such as ‘Passage to India” (397).

11. For a synopsis of Hugo Maturana and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis, see Luisi and Houshmand.

Works Cited

• Ahluwalia, Harsharan Singh. “A Reading of Whitman’s ‘Passage to India.'” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review vol. 1, no.1, 1983, pp. 9-17.
• CAConrad. “From Whitman to Walmart.” Harriet: A Poetry Blog. The Poetry Foundation. 8 June 2015. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/06/from-whitman-to-walmart/.
• Chari, V. K. “Whitman in India.” Walt Whitman and the World. Ed. Gay Wilson Allen and Ed Folsom. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995, pp. 396-405.
• Davis, Richard H. The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015.
• Folsom, Ed. “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives.” PMLA vol. 122, Oct. 2007, pp. 1571-79.
• — “Native Americans [Indians].” Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. Ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. Reproduced by permission in The Walt Whitman Archive.
• Goldstein, Joseph. “Alt-Right Gathering Exults in Trump Election with Nazi-Era Salute.” The New York Times. 20 Nov. 2016, n.p. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/alt-right-salutes-donald-trump.html
• Hafner, Josh. “Why Kaepernick is honoring, not dishonoring the flag.” USA Today 30 Aug. 2016, n.p. http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/nation-now/2016/08/30/why-kaepernick-protest-flag-troops-military-column/89582194/
• Halpern, Rob. Music for Porn. Calicoon: Nightboat, 2012.
• Hendrick, George. “Whitman’s Copy of the Bhagavad-Gita.” Walt Whitman Review vol. 5, Mar. 1959, pp. 12-14.
• Kendi, Ibram X. “Racial Progress Is Real. But So Is Racist Progress.” The New York Times. 21 Jan. 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/opinion/sunday/racial-progress-is-real-but-so-is-racist-progress.html?_r=0
• Klammer, Martin. “Slavery and Race,” 105. A Companion to Walt Whitman. Ed. Donald D. Kummings. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006, pp.101-121.
• Luisi, Pier Luigi, with Zara Houshmand, Discussions with the Dalai Lama on the Nature of Reality. New York: Columbia UP, 2009.
• Martinot, Steve and Sexton, Jared. “The Avant Garde of White Supremacy.” Social Identities vol. 9, no. 2, June 2003, n.p.
• Perry, Bliss. Walt Whitman: His Life and Work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906.
• Preston, Nathaniel. “Walt Whitman’s Use of Indian Sources: A Reconsideration” Ritsummeikan bungaku vol., 627, July 2012, pp. 1-12. http://r-cube.ritsumei.ac.jp/bitstream/10367/4575/1/L627Preston.pdf
• Whitman, Walt. A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads. Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems. Ed. Francis Murphy. London: Penguin, 2004, pp. 569-84.
• —. “For Him I Sing.” Leaves of Grass. The Complete Poems. Ed. Francis Murphy. London: Penguin, 2004, P. 43.
• —. “Passage to India.” Leaves of Grass. The Complete Poems. Ed. Francis Murphy. London: Penguin, 2004, pp. 428-437.
• —. “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” Leaves of Grass. The Complete Poems. Ed. Francis Murphy. London: Penguin, 2004, pp. 257-261.
• —. “To Thee Old Cause.” Leaves of Grass. The Complete Poems. Ed. Francis Murphy. London: Penguin, 2004, pp. 39.
• —. “To the States.” Leaves of Grass. The Complete Poems. Ed. Francis Murphy. London: Penguin, 2004, p. 44.