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In some other early notebooks
kept by Whitman, we can see the origins of other passages in "The Sleepers."
One of the most interesting is the evolution of the image of the whale
that comes to be associated with the angry slave. In one notebook, Whitman
muses on the issues of race and class, of wealth and slavery. His rambling
thoughts begin to settle around the idea of owning oneself, the right
of complete self-possession:
| If every man and woman
riding in this huge huge round car that whirls us through the universe,
be not touched to the vitals, by the question whether another of the
passengers shall be made a slave, tell me O learned lawyer or professor--tell
me what they are interested in? --What does touch them?--What comes
home to a man, if the principle the right to himself does not?--Is
there in the wide world any thing, that so evenly and so universally
bears upon every individual of our race, in all ages, in/tongues and
colors and climates, and conditions.--Is there any thing that it stands
us in hand--all of us without exception, to keep the rats and moths
so carefully away from, as this--the warrantee deed, the original
charter of the very feet that bear us up. |
Soon, Whitman is musing about
the ways that all humans are slaves to something: "I have heard of people
who suggest as a choker upon the right of freedom that all men are more
or less slaves--some to gain, some to fashion, others to priests and superstition."
Whitman has little patience with the clever and rational arguments against
slavery; he says the "strong and solid arguments . . . must be now left
aside":
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We will stand face to
face with the / chief of the supreme bench. We will speak with the
soul. The learned think the unlearned an inferior race.--The merchant
thinks his bookkeepers and clerks sundry degrees below him; they
in turn think the porter and carmen common; and they the laborer
that brings in coal, and the stevedores that haul the great burdens
with them. / But this is an inferior race.--Well who shall be the
judge of inferior and superior races.--The class of dainty gentlemen
think that all servants and laboring people are inferior.--In all
lands, the select few who live and dress richly, make a mean estimate
of the body of the people.--
If it be justifiable
to take away liberty for inferiority--then it is just to take away
money or goods, to commit rapes, / to seize on any thing you will,
for the same reason.--Is it enough answer to the crime of stealing
a watch, that you stole it from an ignorant nigger, who don't know
the odds between an adverb and three times twelve?--If you spend
your violent lust on a woman, by terror and violence, will it receipt
the bill when you endorse it, nothing but a mulatto wench?--/ But
as great as any worldly wealth to a man,--or womanhood to a woman,--greater
than these, I think, is the right of liberty, to any and to all
men and women.-- It is logical to take the life or property of some
poor fellow for his inferiority or color, as it is to take his personal
liberty.-- / Beware the flukes of the whale. He is slow and sleepy--but
when he moves, his lightest touch is death. I think he already feels
the lance, for he moves a little restlessly. You are great sportsmen,
no doubt What! That black and huge lethargic mass, my sportsmen,
dull and sleepy as it seems, has holds the lightning and the belts
taps of thunder.--He is slow--O, long and long and slow and slow--but
when he does move, his lightest touch is death. / [Entire passage
crossed out]
The flukes of a whale
they are as quick as light
The Poet
He has a charm that makes fluid every thing in the universe however
distant or however dense, and so he inhales it as a breath, and
it is all good air arterializes? Vitalizes the blood that goes squirting
through his heart.-- /" [DBN, 760-763].
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In this notebook, we see the
origins of the concluding image in the Lucifer passage, the haunting passage
of the whale, here emphasized as "black" and emerging, as did
the Lucifer section, out of Whitman's musings about race and class and
gender, all issues that he addresses subtly but effectively in "The
Sleepers." The whale appears first in Whitman's early notebook, where
he writes those earliest passages about becoming a "Curse."
Whitman has been writing in the notebook about how "The soul or spirit
transmutes itself into all matter," and how a person's soul must
cast itself "into rocks, and live the life of a rock--into the sea,
and can feel itself the sea," and how a man "must himself be
whirling and speeding through space like the planet Mercury--he must be
driving like a cloud--he must shine like the sun-- . . . he would rumble
and crash like the thunder in the sky--he would spring like a cat on his
prey--he would splash like a whale in the". Here the thought simply
stops, as if Whitman had written himself to an image he now would want
to explore in more depth. It arrives after a series of images of violent
forces, and the whale would now begin to become for him a real force not
only of nature but of man's soul, especially a soul that has, as he wrote
in the notebook above, had its liberty stripped from it by those who judged
this soul inferior. Nothing produces a greater and more forceful tap of
death than a soul denied.
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MANUSCRIPT
SOURCES: LUCIFER
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