Whitman On the Verge: Or the Desires of Solitude

MICHAEL SNEDIKER Whitman On the Verge: Or the Desires of Solitude The body is in a state of alert, on the lookout for its own desire. Furthermore , cruising implies a temporality that accentuates the notion of the meeting, the 'first time.' As if the first meeting was endowed with an extraordinary privilege: that of being withdrawn from all repetition . . . Cruising is anti-natural, anti-repetition. Cruising is an act that repeats itself, but the content and the meaning of this act are absolutely new each time. Roland Barthes Poem? The Cruise ? A Cruise a notebook entry by Walt Whitman Some time before i860, Walt Whitman wrote on a scrap of paper two by three inches the notes for a poem, which this essay's second epigraph quotes in full. The tercet, if we may call it a tercet, suggests that around the time of his i860 revision oí Leaves of Grass, Whitman was attempting to think through poetry's relation to cruising. Words gather divers and tenuous subtexts long before the subtexts are accommodated by definitions proper. Thus, even if cruising, following the OED, wouldn't acquire its sexual implications until the turn of the century, it is impossible to say unequivocally what Whitman, meditating on the cruise, had in mind. Given Whitman's libidinal identifications and engagements with the sea, what William Bronk describes as a kindred "elemental passion," it is no stretch to imagine Whitman conceiving within cruising's definitional nautical flânerie an erotic Arizona Quarter!} Volume 61 , Number 3, Autumn 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 610 28 Michael Snediker valence. This essay, however, is not interested in a history of cruising, per se, so much as locating within several Whitman poems what I have come to read as proto-cruising moments. Those poems—"As I Ebbed with an Ebb of the Ocean of Life," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking ," and "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me"—first appeared in some form in the aforementioned i860 edition, and are triptychally bound, despite the intervening poems between one and the next. Strikingly (and perhaps counterintuitively for a discussion about cruising), these poems figure Whitman's speaker alone. For all the bodies that populate the various editions of Leaves of Grass, these three poems collectively suggest a repetition-compulsion, a working through of nearly identical scenes of solitude. What I find cruisy about these scenes is in part the speaker's insinuated availability for the reader alone, or whomever (to paraphrase Calamus) is holding the poem now in hand. More to the point, however, I am interested in how these solitudes rehearse, reiterate, or prepare for earlier and future erotic encounters. That is, if cruising mediates between two people, these poems saliently describe an individual's erotic repertoire, and slow down the putative magic of instantaneous interpersonal sparks. Many queer readings of Whitman too quickly conflate his identificatory importance as a gay poet with the same-sex relations his poetry often seems to celebrate. This essay ventures the importance of thinking about the ways in which Whitman's erotics works, even when there aren't other bodies with whom to share it. TOWARD A PHENOMENOLOGY OF CRUISING Cruising privileges itself as the beginning of an erotic interaction , which (pending circumstances and motivations) could move in one of several directions. Cruising—that is, successful cruising—marks the first possible collision of two hitherto separate identities. I think of cruising as the means by which one set of boundaries contemplates or negotiates another. The moment at which a selfgives itselfup is also, it might seem, the moment at which a self is most emphatically singular. In this teeter between singularity and vulnerability, the position of a cruiser, like that of a lover who has lost his love-object, parallels the Whitman On the Verge 29 position of a lyric poet. Orpheus is the poet given, through otherwise irrecoverable loss, the subject of all subsequent poems. The man on a cruise, looking for a hook-up (emphasis less on direct object than present participle), could potentially write about anyone. One might read these three poems as exercises of desire before the arrival of an...