They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.
I embody all presences outlawed or suffering. . . .
I and this mystery here we stand.
[ Two of Mike Hastie's images. Left, a 2018 image of 93-year-old My Lai survivor Ha Thi Quy, and, at right, a touching juxtaposition of squats at the Vietnam Wall in D.C. Hastie has suggested Memorial Day should be called Forgetting Day. ]
" 'Song of Myself' is by far the greatest poem ever written by an American." So says critic Stephen Mitchell. "Certainly the poem embodies an outrageous egotism, an 'I' so shamelessly naked that even a bodhisattva can admire it. But Whitman was also writing about selflessness." (A bodhisattva is, in Mahayana Buddhism, a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings.)
To me, there is no better statement of the process of life and the eternal conversation between conservatism and change than the following lines from "Song of Myself":
But I do not talk of beginnings and the end.
There never was any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world. . . .
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
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