Killing Walt Whitman

The Case for Organized Religion.

“Strictly observant religious families are apostate factories.”

A wise man I know likes to say this.

He’s right.

The world’s full of “traditional” moms and dads. Devout Catholic parents at mass every Sunday with their eight to ten non-birth controlled kids. Rosaries in little hands. Education, strictly homeschooled. Babies who learn the Hail Mary in Latin before they ever hear Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Children currently or soon to be spending their adolescent years terrified of hell because they can’t stop masturbating. “Your sin killed God,” the preacher tells his crop of evangelical children. “You killed God.” You were bad, see. And, because you were bad… Jesus had to be tortured. That bloody mess of a corpse over there?

That’s on you.

And little Jewish boys and girls raised to believe God will hate them if they touch a light switch on the wrong day. Islamic babies from war torn countries brought up around adults who speak glowingly of jihad. Mormon children told to never question, never doubt, no matter how absurd what they’re told may sound. Just believe.

Just believe.

So it goes.

And then, of course… at some point those children give up.

Too hard. Too nonsensical. Too depressing. The guilt is too strong and the explanations too weak. One can only try and fail to be good so many times before giving up and declaring the whole thing nonsense. Before deciding that religion is for fools. Nothing but a tool of control.

The word is full of “traditional” moms and dads. Left alone. Religion intact but family in tatters, fighting between themselves over the loyalties of their apostate children and yet ironically ignoring the one or two who, somehow, kept the faith.

“Strictly observant religious families are apostate factories.”

Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da.

Life goes on.

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RESPONSE:

Fair enough.

But Man is evil though and, given the chance, would kill God. Do you deny it? Look at how easily we kill each other. How little regard most have for life. Men and women are held in check not by their benevolence but by their lack of power, and over and over again we see that whenever anyone gains an advantage over another, they never hesitate to use it.

We are evil. We do deserve punishment. Humanity is a broken species in need of constant discipline lest we slide into debauchery and violence. Come! Come look out at the world and see how people treat one another and then tell me the Preacher of Hellfire and Brimstone went too far. Be honest! Is it not much more likely that he did not go far enough? The homeless unfed, the widows uncared for, the babies blown up, the money stolen, the cheating, the adultery, the lies, the corruption…

And you dare to say that religion is “too harsh”?

No. No, for how could a perfect God look upon us with anything but disgust? If we have erred, it is not in being too strict but in being too merciful. We have spared the rod, and all the children are spoiled.

Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da.

Life goes on.

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Steam Punk Time Machine.

If you had a time machine, who would you go back and kill?

[High Pitched Voice [also… annoying]] “Oh Yoshi! I’m nice! I wouldn’t use a time machine to kill anybody! I’d just go back to visit my grandma and see the dinosaurs! [/High Pitched Voice]

Yeah, yeah. Okay Sparky. Sure. Humor me though and try to engage in the exercise.

If you had a time machine, and you had to go back in time and kill someone… who would you pick?

…

Think carefully.

….

….

Don’t say Hit…

…

You said Hitler, didn’t you?

…

Look. Hitler’s too easy of a choice. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a time machine is going to go back and try to kill Hitler. In all likelihood, he’d be dead before you got there. Assassinated by some other daring chronological rouge, leaving you holding the bag and having missed your one and only chance at retro-causal murder.

No. Try again.

…

…

Oppenheimer?

Okay. Better. Still pretty Basic though.

I agree it’s a nice idea to create a world without atomic bombs but, if Oppenheimer and crew hadn’t done it, somebody else would’ve. By killing him all you’d be doing is giving The Bomb to someone else first. Maybe even Hitler! Still not good. Try again.

…

Gavrilo Princip?

Now you’re thinking. Assassinating the assassin of Franz Ferdinand before he could do the deed averts World War 1 and, by extension, presumably also World War 2. Now, nobody even needs to go back to get Hitler! Adolf just becomes another failed artist running around Austria, probably eventually married to a Jewish chick and then later getting divorced. He maybe has a midlife crises and gets big into yoga. Takes glass blowing classes from a guy named Wayne.

See? Time Machines are fun.

Sadly though, if Science Fiction has taught us anything, it’s that, regardless of how logical it might seem, going back and trying to “fix” the past somehow always ends up making it worse. In general, messing with the Space-Time Continuum is to be avoided. Isaac Asimov said so.

Still.

If I had a Time Machine, eh… I confess I’d be sore tempted to go back about 200 years and try. There’d be a burning, relentless urge in me to finally be able to murder Walt Whitman.

A pox on his house.

Whitman…

No other name conjures up such ire.

If it’s an exaggeration, it’s not much of one, to say that Walt almost singlehandedly destroyed The Arts. The Wretch. The Wanton Cur. In depraved and perverted metaphysical licentiousness he unleashed his plague of “free verse” upon The Masses. A viral infection upon The Humanities for which there seems to be no cure, ripping the artistic souls from school children limb from limb. Generations now suffering in his wake, brought up by well-meaning but naive schoolteachers, hearing over and over again from these authority figures…

“Just speak from your heart Timmy. It doesn’t matter if it rhymes.”

Garbage.

Utter Garbage.

I tell thee truly… if any man has ever deserved Hell…

…

Okay.

Obviously I’m joking here. You know… a little.

But, joke or no, the fact remains that Whitman was one of the strongest advocates for the destruction of form in art. Perhaps not explicitly, no. But certainly by example. Championing free expression above all else, Whitman’s seminal work, “Leaves of Grass” laid waste to all of Poetry which had come before it, made it unintelligible to a people raised in Whitman’s cultural milieu. Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Blake, Byron… Trashed. All trashed. Scattered to the four winds by Whitman and his winnowing fork.

And we who survived?

We sickly savages forced to live in the radioactive waste of Walt’s artistic apocalypse?

Well. We grew up being forced to read stuff like this:

REDACTED
REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED

REDACTED REDACTED
REDACTED

REDACTED

REDACTED

REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED

REDACTED

And, worse… We grew up being forced to pretend that stuff like this was good.

(Author’s Note: Originally I included a real poem above (one published in the New York Times no less) by one of the most famous living poets. I decided however it was bad form to throw shade at others online, especially since I write pseudo-anonymously and wouldn’t be backing up my criticism under my own name. It was therefore redacted. You were all forced to read stupid poems in school though. It was one of those. Just use your imagination.)

I mean… what even is that?

Seriously.

Why are the lines broken so erratically? Why did she decide to chop the sentences up that way? What the heck is the poem talking about? What does “REDACTED, my REDACTED” even mean?

…

Nobody knows!

But… like The Emperor’s New Clothes, we were all supposed to pretend we did.

Pretend it was beautiful. Pretend it was deep…

Pretend it was good.

Because hey! It’s free expression right? Someone speaking from the heart and all so, that means we gotta respect it, regardless of its obvious lack of artistic merit and intelligibility.

At least… that’s what we’ve been told. That was the line. No such thing as a bad poem if it comes from the heart, right?

… Right?

Look. I know I’m being a bit of an ass here and, believe me, the irony of me complaining about someone else’s haphazard line breaks isn’t lost on me. I get it, and I’m sure Ms. REDACTED is a lovely woman. I’m not trying to attack her personally. It’s just… I mean…

Come on.

That’s what passes for world class literature these days? That’s the state of The English Language? That’s the sort of thing that wins awards and fellowships?

Disgusting. It’s perverse.

You see my friends, Whitman’s great lie, one which we as a culture have completely and totally imbibed… is that Art Is Subjective.

It’s not.

Beauty isn’t in the eye of the beholder.

Beauty exists on its own. On her own.

If we are lucky, if we are skilled… then maybe… just maybe we get to have the privilege of recognizing her. But we don’t create her. And neither can she, by we mere mortals, be destroyed.

Beauty exists you see.

Beauty Exists.

Yes, yes… taste and subjective fancy play a role in the kind of manifestations of Beauty that each of us prefer, but the idea that Beauty is a totally subjective phenomenon is an outright lie. It’s good and natural, for example, for men to have different tastes in women, and many different kinds of body shapes can be beautiful. If one man however, were to say he found beauty in cancer, or that he was especially attracted to a woman when she had tumors growing out of her face… we would be right to suspect there is something in him deeply and seriously wrong. In the same way then, in Art (while allowing for a legitimate spectrum of preference), we can say confidently that there actually is good stuff and that there actually is bad stuff and, to sum up the thesis of this article… Free Expression isn’t how you learn to make the first.

It’s just not.

Free Expression, absent a constraining force, just leads to the creation of garbage like the poem above and, worse, to a population who’s afraid to call it out for being shit. The situation would be bad enough if it was only literature struggling under Whitman’s Malaise but, sadly, all the other arts are currently faltering under the same disease as well. Art, as an institution, currently hates structure. It hates form. It hates tradition. All of which is ironic because without those things it could never have existed in the first place. The Institution of Art believes that all such things are only constricting and confining forces which bind and suffocate creativity and, as a result, has embraced Whitman’s idea that everything should be “free” and that sophistication is identical to formlessness and unintelligibility. Bad Work paraded around after Bad Work, everyone feeling compelled to clap.

Heaven help us.

This sold for $43 Million Dollars.

The problem is though that they’re right.

Tradition, structure, dogma, schools of thought and form… they are limiting, they do constrain you, they do restrict your creativity.

Yes.

And, if you think you’re supposed to adhere to them forever, then of course they will kill your soul and reduce your artistic output.

But… that’s not the point of such things. We’ve entirely forgotten why traditions and dogmas exist.

Take a haiku for example.

Haiku OS. My favorite computer operating system. Admittedly totally pointless but, like all art projects, functionality is not the point of the experience.

Seven, five, seven. Three lines. That’s it. What can you do with them? Can you, actually, in such a small breath of space, communicate something good? Something deep? Something profound?

Any idiot, given an unlimited word count and unlimited time, could probably hit upon a good idea, sure, just as any “poet” can spew his emotional diarrhea onto a page free form. But… can you do it sharply. Concisely. Can you, like a samurai with his blade, CUT to the heart of Eternity and the Human Condition in a mere seventeen syllables? Seventeen simple movements of the jaw?

It’s weight lifting you see. Form. Structure. Forcing your words to rhyme, or into a meter, or to adhere to syllable structure and the use of traditional season words, it’s putting resistance on your creativity in order to make it stronger. To make you stronger. Forcing you to work within limitations in order that you may feel more sincerely, think more clearly, and understand more deeply. It’s a training tool. A training tool for the mind and soul.

It’s only oppressive if you don’t see that.

Meter, rhyme, structure… all of it only feels constraining if you don’t understand that the purpose of working within limitations is to learn how to transcend them. Weights on your wings so you learn to fly. Growing up without that… with little Timmy or Sally being told that there are no rules and just to speak from their hearts…

They never learn to Create. They just make garbage.

The jewels of Life are inside them but they never learned how to bring them out. They were never forced to sharpen their blades against resistance.

Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da.

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The same is true in religion.

Religions likewise only become oppressive when we forget this same point. That all the rules and the dogma and the traditions are not the end goal in themselves, but only useful to the degree that they point us to something higher. Something, eventually, that we can actually attain. Sadly though, the world is full of people who mistakenly think that the purpose of learning and following religious rules is… simply to get better and better at following religious rules. And, consequently, to get more and more upset and judgmental about any little mistake.

Such people are like musicians suffering from arrested development. Musicians who somehow got it in their heads that the purpose of learning the scales was simply to be able to play the scales faster and faster and faster, or that the purpose of learning notation was simply to be able to never hit a bum note. They never got the message that all the scales and music theory and such were constrains meant to eventually free them… Meant to develop their skills to the point that, one day, they could forget all those things and just play.

Think about it. Right now, probably, you can conjure up a beautiful symphony inside your head, can’t you?

But… unless you’ve had musical training, your ability to manifest that symphony into the world, to make it real and share it with others… is probably almost zero.

You see, music is actually incredibly dogmatic. Terrifically rigid. A B-flat simply does not go on a C-scale. A proper A-minor chord simply can not have a G in it. 4/4 time means something and, if you’re going to play with everybody else, you can’t be doing a waltz.

But…

After you’ve learned the rules… after you’ve submitted yourself for years to the disciplines of music, to the discipleship of music…

You can forget all that and just go.

And that’s when you’re capable of manifesting Beauty. Of being free. That’s when you see that the constraints you labored under for so long have fallen off and now you can fly. Music will have been set in your bones. Second nature, like walking or talking. All of a sudden, all the symphonies in your head are Real, flowing into the actual world through your fingers.

But imagine if you hadn’t had that discipline?

Or imagine if you’d never realized you were meant to go beyond it?

Practicing the scales. Learning meter. Going over the choreography.

Jesus went beyond it. As did the saints.

Constantly, constantly, Christ was flouting and bending the rules and customs of his day, communing with sinners, showing mercy where the law said there ought be sticks and stones.

Why? How?

For the same reason that a master musician can throw in off notes. For the same reason Dali could paint in absurdities and yet produce magic.

Not because Jesus had no religion but because he’d mastered his religion. Not because he had no rules but because he understood why the rules were actually there and when they could be broken. Because he knew The Sabbath… and therefore realized it was made for Man, not the other way round.

Strictly observant families (and communities) forget this, and sooner or later their children rightly declare all of it ridiculous. It is ridiculous to follow rules for rules sake. It is ridiculous to think the purpose of believing in dogma is just to get better at believing in dogma.

But also…

To say there are no rules, and that any one thing is just as good as any other… that is to fall in the opposite direction, for it leaves you without the strength and skill to manifest the Beauty you can imagine in your mind.

See… The thing about Leaves of Grass is that it’s actually really good. Whitman was a master. A genius. But he only got to the point where he could wax long and beautiful without the rules by spending years laboring beneath them. Years writing in meter. Years studying rhyme. Just as you cannot, absent musical discipline and training, conjure forth the symphony in your head, so too you cannot, absent spiritual discipline and training, conjure forth the image in your head of whom you like to be. That selfless person. That loving person. That person full of patience and understanding and wisdom and kindness… You see it in your mind but… when you try to make it real it always comes out wrong…

Doesn’t it?

Like a child frustrated that their hand with its crayon isn’t producing the beautiful artwork they’re imagining, absent practice, we cannot actually manifest the Good Person that we so desperately desire to be.

So that’s why dogma. That’s why rules. That’s why tradition.

That’s why you go to Church.

To discipline yourself in order that person might become Real.

Amor Vincit Omnia.