against the fingers on either side—is nothing if not a “medium,” a center point of exchange between the body of the reader and the distant body of Whitman himself, whether figured on the verso or out loafing in the grass somewhere.82 This codex is the place where, if you feel the literal tension of those pages against the edge of your thumbs, you share a feeling as well as a set of terms with someone else through the mediation of something that is neither of you, although it is now and for this moment intimately associated with both at once. This shared association, a tactile dislocation of self relocated in the instant of readerly interaction, might be the starting point for a conception of the collection’s entry-point poem, “Song of Myself,” that takes a second look at its seemingly private, engulfing, lyric “I.” The book, and that “I,” are, in this view, less markers of some secret world to which we have stolen access, and more the markers and playfield for a staging of the type of association Milton Bradley would materialize five years later on the pasteboard grid of Life.
Figure 6. Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn: Walter Whitman, 1855. Courtesy of Library Company of Philadelphia.
After the celebratory opening of “Song of Myself,” the speaker declares, “what I assume, you shall assume / for every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you.”83 Here, as with the interactive counters of Life, Whitman establishes an early interface between the first and second person as recursively connected positions, a structured place from which to understand circumstance and shape it accordingly: “You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.”84 As a result, the imperious “I” of the speaker’s effusion is inaugurated with a gesture that is equal parts ego and radical formal empathy: we are the same because we shall occupy the same grammatical place in the text, a place where “all sides” are “filter[ed].” The speaker’s use of “assume” in these opening lines reinforces this by playing on both a locating sense—“assume the position!”—and an informational sense—“here are the facts that can be assumed.” This multivocality of “assumption” foregrounds Whitman’s equivocation between locating the reader in a place and giving a range of data possibilities that he or she may work with at that location. As in Life, the position a marker assumes has an intimate relationship with the options available to it (the assumptions it may make).
These possibilities are enumerated throughout the poem as various character types, locations, and affections that radiate outward in a flurry of inclusive disjunction—“or”s that do not preclude the possibility of “both.” We see one of the most explicit statements of this in Whitman’s characterization of the grass that forms the poem’s central metaphor: “Or I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. / Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord … / Or I guess the grass is itself a child.”85 This series of disjunctions never excludes any of the others; they are consistently additive, although only one may be read at a time. Each option maintains a singular quality both in terms of textual space and in terms of the temporal mechanics of reading. In this way, the repetitive syntax, while yielding a synchronic sense to the poem that many have noted, also acts as a textual metronome repeating a familiar beat that ensures the discrete separation of each possibility.86
Moreover, in terms of format, there is the suggestion of the kind of newspaper printing work that had informed much of Whitman’s life. From the dense two-column arrangement of the preface to the irregular clustering of lines that distinguish his poetry throughout, Whitman cues the movement of the eye across discrete morsels held together and split apart by the cognitive gravity of the page and its whitespace. In both form and format, his collection figures both synchrony and diachrony. Being an American is being this or this, or all of these things, but only as time allows, only as one lingers or returns to a given option in an ever-growing list.
Demonstrating a strategically flickering interplay between the liminal and the discrete, Whitman uses the phrase “I am the” to reinforce this effect. In one short passage, he writes: “I am the hounded slave,” “I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken,” “I am the clock myself,” and “I am an old artillerist, and tell of some fort’s bombardment / …. and am there again.”87 Here, analogous syntax reinforces the connection between each of these disparate narrative characters, linking them in an inclusive “I am,” notably in the present tense. Yet it also invokes the metronomic quality discussed above, acting as a reminder of those that have previously passed: the slave transforms into the fireman, and the fireman into the ticking clock. As a reader scans the disparate activity of these lines, they either say or think an “I am” that becomes, in Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s useful diptych, a “mimetic” script for subjecthood accompanying the “ontic” act of holding, sitting, standing, or lying down.88 There is a strangeness to the inclusive disjunction of the language that I would argue mirrors the uncanny feelings of physical difference and relatedness in the poem. Here the flesh itself becomes a messy but nonetheless legible-in-flashes kind of poetry along with the text. “Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,” Whitman stresses in the preface, “and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”89
Equally suggestive in a more conventional mode, the concreteness of each incarnation, the ability of the I/writer and linked you/reader to place themselves in the role that follows the “I am,” is specifically coupled to the passage of time. The “old artillerist” has a place (“[I] am there again”) just as he begins to “tell of some fort’s bombardment.” Telling a story takes time; it requires the teller to move in one narrative direction over another, to make choices. This interaction of temporal movement and identity reminds us of Life’s synchronic grid, where “Wealth” is always present, but players only enact its benefit in the right moment, in time, using the position they have assumed on the board. As a player’s eyes must drift across the possible positions available and settle upon the one that they would like to make, so must a reader (the “I” or “you” of Whitman’s poem) give attention to one thing at a time, even as they might remember the total assemblage. And as with Bradley’s counter, what holds Whitman’s ambivalent first/second person together is its unity as a place of decision making, along with its persistence as a thing that remains even after one has moved one’s hands away.
Apprehending the self as a possibility locus coincident with a body may account for Whitman’s declaration that the poem should be seen not as something one reads but rather as “someone.”90 This term, “someone,” acts as a personal cipher or marker, only fully intelligible in the action of choosing to linger on one or the other of the character choices imagined by the transcendent speaker. One cannot understand who “someone” is in the abstract; the pronoun simply stands as a mathematical variable might, a formal placeholder, unable to produce an output on its own. Yet one might understand this someone as a specific person if supplied with information about either the person’s actions or the framework in which those actions were carried out. “Song of Myself” is at pains to produce the latter, but it makes appeals to the reader to provide the activity that will make this framework productive of a concrete self (rather than an abstract someone). “Not I,” Whitman writes, “not any one else can travel that road for you, / You must travel it for yourself.”91 The “you” of Whitman’s song gains its constitutive definition by making decisions of focus from within the possibilities enunciated by the poem, similar to Bradley’s algorithm.92 This “you” is a strategy for visualizing an inhabitable marker, for allowing any number of readers to imagine themselves as a part of the world Whitman creates. In other words, it is defined as an avatar: in and through its situational use. In the patent for Life, the usefulness of the game lies its capacity to “exercise … judgment”; in the original 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman echoes this focus, claiming that the poet “is no arguer … he is judgment….
