Two and a half weeks ago we had a daughter, Rose Elizabeth, born a few days after her due date and after a spell in the hospital during which she exhibited no great urgency to sally forth into the world. In this she somewhat resembled her absent Uncle Joey, who sometimes needed a cattle prod to get going but, once underway, could thrash through the world like a newborn, or at least like someone to whom all things were new.
Rose is an incredible creature, all squirms and appetites and growth, and it hardly seems possible that Kate and I alone should be entrusted with the responsibility of keeping her safe and fed. She is also, now that she's out, a completely separate creature from either of us - absolutely dependent on us though she is, her little growing mind and body are now all her own, and the path she follows from now on, and what she thinks about it all, will be hers alone.
When we lost Joey, we lost a world. His consciousness and all that it contained - that little spark behind his eyes that held all of his thoughts and experiences and dreams and doubts - vanished utterly. Like archaeologists excavating a buried city, all we have are traces of that world from which to piece together a partial picture. But by creating Rose, we have created a new world - one to which we likewise only have indirect access, but that we know is churning and expanding nonetheless. That doesn't mean that her presence somehow makes up for Joey's absence - in some ways it makes his absence more glaring - but it does serve as a reminder that death has its counterpart in birth, that new plants grow from soil fertilized by those who have come before.
That image - of life growing out of death - is one of the recurring motifs in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. When not swaying with Rose or photographing Rose or feeding Rose (and sometimes while feeding Rose) I've been reading Justin Kaplan's biography of Whitman, the contribution of my father-in-law David to last Christmas's book swap. It's a luminous and tender biography of a man that I really didn't know much about, despite having borrowed one of his poems for the title and spirit of this blog. Among the biography's virtues is that it spends as much time illuminating the meanings of his art as it does narrating the events of his life; it's a bit like taking a poetry seminar with an unusually erudite professor. Kaplan identifies many animating ideas in Whitman's poetry (urban life, democracy, love of all sorts), but one of the most powerful and persistent is summarized in the image of grass growing from the grave. This is from "Song of Myself":
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.
And then, a few lines later:
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
The eponymous leaves of grass, then, are those which are found in a graveyard. They begin as the smallest of sprouts, and they are nourished by the dead. As Kaplan says, Whitman saw "the earth as a vast compost heap and life as the rich leavings of many deaths." Here's another statement of the same idea:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
And so this is what I think about as I watch my daughter sleep and listen to her cry: in all sorts of ways her life will be nurtured by the life that has disappeared. She is a sprout (though not the only sprout) growing out of what remains of my brother's brief existence on Earth.
Rose is a fortunate baby. There is a great crowd of people out in the world just waiting to help her grow, to ply her with books and toys, to squeeze her cheeks and calm her sobs. That crowd is precisely one individual smaller than it should be, but she'll feel his presence nonetheless. Uncle Joey will show up in her grandparents' love and in her father's tenderness, when her father manages to be tender. He will show up in the home that her parents will make for her, which will be full of stories about him and books that belonged to him and music that he loved. He will accompany her on family road trips. He will bequeath to her, I hope, a love of travel and a restless curiosity about the world.
Whitman's poetry is famous for its gusto, for its delight in the sensuous, earthy pleasures of the body and of American life. Joey was a bit like that, and I hope Rose will be, too. Like Whitman, Joey was a big, gentle guy whose social self did not always match his exuberant private self. After one of his famous rambles through New York City, Whitman said, "Wasn't it brave! And didn't we laugh (not outwardly - that would have been vulgar; but in the inward soul's bedchamber) with the very excess of delight and gladness? O, it is a beautiful world we live in, after all!" Joey could almost have written that himself, especially the bit about vulgarity. Also like Joey, Whitman could be a lethargic fellow; he once claimed it was a family trait "to tide over, to lay back on reserves, to wait, to take time." Joey would have fit right in with the Whitmans in this respect; it remains to be seen whether Rose will show a similar set of inclinations, but if her lackadaisical entry into the world is any indication, this seems likely.
I want to be sure I'm making myself clear. I do not expect Rose to resemble Joey in any significant way, nor do I especially want her to. She is not a replacement for my brother or some kind of compensation for his loss. She must not be burdened by his memory, expected to live up to him, or come to resent him (or me) because she's had to grow up in his shadow. She must and will be her own person. But the world she lives in - the air she breathes and the food she eats (especially if that food is listed in the Roadfood guide) - will have an unmistakable Joey flavor. And as long as she loves her life as much as Joey loved his, it matters not one bit whether she resembles him in any other respects.
In the preface to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman offered his readers some fatherly advice. It's the kind of thing Joey might have told her someday - not in so many words (there are way too many words here for Joey), but in spirit and by example.
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air each season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.It's good advice; with a little help, I bet we can plant at least some of these ideas in Rose's little brain.
