1 “LET HELL BLAZE ALL IT CHOOSES” One is grateful for [Whitman’s] carnality, after the frigidity and bloodlessness of Thoreau, Emerson, or even Hawthorne. BORN 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 DIED 1. Per Volume III, page 375 of Horace Traubel’s WITH WALT WHITMAN IN CAMDEN: “One thing about Thoreau keeps him very near to me: I refer to his lawlessness — his dissent — his going his own absolute road let hell blaze all it chooses.” HDT WHAT? INDEX WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN 1761 For the next several years Elias Hicks would be hanging out with Walt Whitman’s grandfather Walter Whitman, age 13-17, on Long Island, going to dances, singing popular tunes, playing cards and gambling, hunting and fishing, riding horses in races at the Little Plains track in the summer, going on winter night sleigh rides and then “bundling” all night with girl Friends in their beds at home as was then the accepted practice even among Quakers, etc. On one occasion Hicks was thrown sixteen feet but was not badly injured. ELIAS HICKS “I never committed any sin but that I loved it better than my God.” Carpenters and Testifyers and Surveyors In his youth Friend Elias was trained as a surveyor, like the young Thoreau would be, and as a carpenter, like the young Whitman would be, two generations hence. But his main vocation was to be traveling around influencing people, which would also become the main vocation of Thoreau, and of Whitman, two generations hence. (Thoreau’s homemade surveying tools are now in the Concord Museum and are shown on the next page; Hicks had made equivalent homemade surveying tools.) Nevertheless, such linkages are obviously spurious and no serious historian would pay attention to any such linkages. –For they do not have the blessing of matching the presumptions of previous generations of historians. In his adult years the spirit of Friend Elias would map onto what we know as the spirit of Henry Thoreau, spirit for spirit, attitude for attitude. But our historians know nothing of this, for they are forbidden by their discipline to enter such arenas of subjectivity. No spirit, no attitudes. That would be undisciplined. Facts: we deal in facts. HDT WHAT? INDEX WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN And when an unattached inconvenient fact shows up, a fact which does not match the story that is established to be told, that fact simply — goes away. For instance, the Concord Museum at one time had on display, next to Thoreau’s flute, the slipcover in which Thoreau kept his flute. That slipcover which used to be on display was made of gray flannel cloth, of the sort used by Quakers for dresses, and it had a drawstring at one end. It was made, the card in the case asserted, from a scrap of cloth from one of Friend Lucretia Mott’s old Quaker dresses. When questions were raised about this card in the display case, the museum simply removed the slipcover from public display. Then neither a personal visit to the museum, waiting in the vestibule for officials who never came out from their back rooms, nor a formal letter to these officials by name on letterhead stationery of the project, nor a formal follow-up letter to these officials by name on letterhead stationery of the project, enclosing the previous letter, elicited any response whatever. That inconvenient fact has disappeared. That fact had been a mistake, it had never existed. The flute slipcover made out of a piece of cloth from one of Friend Lucretia’s old dresses had never existed and had never been on display. Friend Lucretia never existed and her gray dresses never wore out and she went around naked. Thoreau, we should know, had contacts only with Unitarians, with humanists, with members of the same faith system as the historians who write about the Reverend Waldo Emerson, and other such important people, and this low-rent imitator of their RWE, Thoreau, of course was influenced only by RWE, and other such important people, never by such a person as Friend Lucretia, who was after all only a woman, and only a Quaker, and not even in very good standing among the Quakers. On the following page is a Newell Convers Wyeth painting which well depicts the official respective standings of Emerson and Thoreau, down to and including the funny hats (next screen): HDT WHAT? INDEX WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN 1779 September 23, Thursday evening and night: The defeat of HMS Serapis under Captain Person in a 3-hour battle in the North Sea off Flamborough Head, Yorkshire by the USS Bonhomme Richard under Captain John Paul Jones, 2 with the moon almost full (a manly action per LEAVES OF GRASS, “SONG OF MYSELF,” 35-36 pornography): AMERICAN REVOLUTION Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight? Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars? List to the yarn, as my grandmother’s father the sailor told it to me. Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,) His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be; Along the lower’d eve he came horribly raking us. We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch’d, My captain lash’d fast with his own hands. We had receiv’d some eighteen pound shots under the water, On our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire, killing all around and blowing up overhead. Fighting at sun-down, fighting at dark, Ten o’clock at night, the full moon well up, our leaks on the gain, and five feet of water reported, The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the afterhold to give them a chance for themselves. The transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels, They see so many strange faces they do not know whom to trust. Our frigate takes fire, The other asks if we demand quarter? If our colors are struck and the fighting done? Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain, We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting. Only three guns are in use, One is directed by the captain himself against the enemy’s mainmast, Two well serv’d with grape and canister silence his musketry and clear his decks. The tops alone second the fire of this little battery, especially the main-top, They hold out bravely during the whole of the action. Not a moment’s cease, The leaks gain fast on the pumps, the fire eats toward the powder-magazine. One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are sinking. Serene stands the little captain, He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low, His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns. Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us. Stretch’d and still lies the midnight, Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness, Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the one we had conquer’d, The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a countenance white as a sheet, Near by the corpse of the child that serv’d in the cabin, The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl’d whiskers, The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below, The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty, Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars, Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, light shock of the soothe of waves, Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent, A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining, 2. It seems Walt Whitman was exercising a wee bit of poetic license, as the moon would not be completely full until September 25th. HDT WHAT? INDEX WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors, The hiss of the surgeon’s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw, Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull, tapering groan, These so, these irretrievable. HDT WHAT? INDEX WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN 1795 Late in his life Walt Whitman would attempt to describe the way his mother grew up on Paumanok Long Island around the turn of the 19th Century, and the way he had then experienced this environment as a child and youth in the 1825-1840 period: “Specimen Days” THE MATERNAL HOMESTEAD I went down from this ancient grave place eighty or ninety rods to the site of the Van Velsor homestead, where my mother was born (1795,) and where every spot had been familiar to me as a child and youth (1825-’40.) Then stood there a long rambling, dark-gray, shingle-sided house, with sheds, pens, a great barn, and much open road-space.