The Electron Cloud of my 'Sense-sational' Time and Being, Narrated by Whitman

From what I call the ‘Kafka moment’ – when I realized that we would need a ‘tutor text’ – I have been thinking back on the intellectual figures that have shaped my epiphanies and guided my ‘moments.’ While there certainly are a few, Walt Whitman immediately came to the fore.  In my youth (like’ awkward phase’ youth) I read through several transcendentalist authors and waffled between loving their all-encompassing interpretations of community and spirituality, and mocking the trite overtures and elitism.  Yet, Whitman seemed to embrace the contradictions, quite literally, and run with them – exploring the world in meter and verse with a simplicity and eagerness that prompted my own enthusiasm.   Whitman fostered connections with the world and people around him, ‘encountering’ satisfaction and repulsion without judgment to prioritize the experience, the process and reflection, over the conscriptions of society - and I wanted that kind of attitude, that kind of exploratory and participatory mind.

While my intellectual mentors have expanded and altered, I still consider Whitman a part of my attitude, a reminder to embrace the contradictions of life and participate – to curb overanalyzing and ‘be where you are’ - to consistently become – to move and change and to enjoy that change – to consider and hope, but not to allow the past or future to fully rule the present.  I joked about being attracted to aesthetics, the ‘shiny objects’ of sight and sound that interest me first and then prompt reflection, my ‘sense-sationalism.’  Yet, like most academics, there is a steady hummmmmmmmm of contemplation that frames my experiences.  Even while turning to respond to the ‘shiny stuff’ of the world, I am configuring its place, my relationship to it, the purpose or position, my reactions and associations, etc.  For me, Whitman is not only about participation and experience, but balanced reflection – an open view of the world that considers the multiplicity of experience, the aesthetic and rational environment, as well as my place within it.  Whitman acknowledges it all, the electron cloud of attraction and repulsion that navigates our being and becoming, the dromosphere reason of our NOW.

Once,

in South Africa

I was entangled with my past -

living between two continents somewhere in the ocean

instead of fully embracing my present experience.

My Worldview, the Past a Retrospection altered by Personal Memory, Positioning in Reflection.

Yet my physical displacement from home and known acknowledged a limit 
that fostered a freedom,

A moment of being on a beach that began my becoming.

Whitman had traveled with me,

His Leaves of Grass marked by movement and contemplation.

As I marked a moment of self, His 'Songs' situated my sense,
And crafted a Literary Pastiche of Remixed Time:

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself…

I loafe and invite my soul…

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,

But I do not talk of beginning or end…

My Present, an intersection and overlap of knowledge and experience.

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,

I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait…

I am satisfied – I see, dance, laugh, sing…

I believe in those wing’ed purposes,

And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,

And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional…

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,

And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing…

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,

With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds…

And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,

And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,

And of these one and all I weave the song of myself…

The Potentiality of Experience, Past, Present, Future

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,

Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,

Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine,

One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same,

A Southerner soon as Northerner…

I resist any thing better than my own diversity,

Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,

And am not stuck up, and am in my place…

Conventional Time Image
Where I have walked in the Past, Growing, and Reflecting to Fuel My Present
The Participation of the Now, the People and Places that mark my Position - Fingerpainting Sense-sationalism
The Unknown and Unwritten Hopes for the Future

I know I am solid and sound,

To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,

All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means…

I find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance,

Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine…

At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,

And that we call Being…

Time Image II
The Way I see Time and Experience the World
My EPS

Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess’d at,

What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the grass,

What I guess’d while I lay alone in my bed,

And again as I walk’d the beach under the paling stars of the morning…

I take part, I see and hear the whole…

It is time to explain myself – let us stand up…

I am an acme of things accomplish’d, and I an encloser of things to be…

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,           

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

** The quoted section taken from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” but certainly ‘remixed’ in order to tell the story of my becoming, my time image.