Calamus, Come For Us
The Victorian consciousness, labeled in conventional academia and history as thoroughly repressed and compartmentalized, is revealed in the documents of chapter 6 to be anything but. When we shift our eyes from convenient assumption and towards the historical reality, rich crenellations and borders appear; in them a wealth of romance, desire, and love come into focus. Oftentimes these impulses were dealt with by the dominant cultural authorities in same manner that their industrial counterparts managed untamable natural ecologies: paved over, made legible and straight, and, ultimately, vulnerable to the natural forces that overwhelm any restrictive pattern. Entropy—here taking the form of art, love, and in due time legislation—always prevails.
Acorus Calamus
Which is not to say that creating a successful life lived in an alternative sexual mode demands conquest or confrontation. Rather, it is accomplished—then as now—through subtle redirection of the discourse to a place where they come within the scope of possibility. To wit, the dandy is dapper dresser: not solely because of an intrinsic attraction to fabric, but because high style can become a means towards group expression and identification, carving out a discursive position and legitimizing their existence in the larger social conversation.
And so Walt Whitman, that pioneer of language and dreams, expresses his devotion to the male form in Calamus with language that is at once explicit and winking. By constructing a dialogue of open-hearted devotion and love, Whitman disarms his potential critics who would emphasize the illegality of his attraction by turning his love into an avatar for universal love: if you deny his right to love a man, you may as well deny man’s right to love his wife, or love God. “Every time you should think that you had unquestionably caught me, behold!” he playfully exclaims, “Already you see that I have escaped from you.”
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and in its own way the story of the poet’s journey through the nation, offers a preview of a very different society than the one that dominated the 19th century American discourse. Liberation, he finds, lies not through abstraction or confrontation, but through a return to the seashores and groves where the deafening scientization of sex falls silent and a far deeper kind of science once more becomes apparent. Leaves refers again and again to the Edenic state, and Whitman sings a cosmology where every man can become Adam and every woman Eve (or happily subvert and mediate the genders) simply by stepping out of the roles so deeply implanted and reinforced by medicine, education, institutional religion, and government and into communion with the body of one’s self, the body of a lover, or the body of a moonlit night.
