To be in any form, what is that? (Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,) If nothing lay more develop'd the quahaug in its callous shell were enough. Mine is no callous shell, I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop, They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me. I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy, To touch my person to some one else's is about as much as I can stand.
Afterword
An Iraqi theater director once told me that on a visit to New York City he deliberately bumped into several people on the sidewalk to gauge their reactions. Americans, he concluded, always apologize—an observation that might have amused Whitman, who would likely not have begged forgiveness, and might well have surprised the stranger by embracing him. “O taste and see that the Lord is good,” the Psalmist sings—an imperative that Whitman follows according to his own lights in his psalm of the democratic self, substituting Life for Lord, seeing things in this section through the agency of touch, tasting the world. He does not shy away from anyone.
Not long after my conversation with the director in Baghdad, I traveled to Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, and one morning on a drive through a valley green from the spring rains, outside a village lying between two stark mountain ranges, my friend suddenly slammed on the brakes, veering around what I thought was a large rock. There in the middle of the road was a turtle (born for all I knew during Whitman’s lifetime), oblivious to the traffic, or so it seemed, its head barely protruding from its shell. “Mine is no callous shell,” said the poet, translating his every sensation into song. My friend and I gazed at the beautiful creature, kin to the quahaug and the mollusk and indeed every form of life, each a part of the whole to which we have all belonged from the beginning, and then, because we had somewhere to go, we drove on.
C.M.
Question
Most languages have some set of images that relate humans to clams or oysters or other shelled creatures. In English, we say that someone who won’t talk has “clammed up.” A shy person may “retreat into her shell.” What is the value of such figures of speech? Is Whitman’s assumption that humans live in skin that is continually sensitive to the world true to your experience, or are imagined shells important too?