I Sing the Body Electric

There is a poem vivid in my imagination. It awakes memories of the colorful people that define so many of my experiences.  This poem is a celebration of what it is to be living, breathing, a flesh and blood human. This poem is “I Sing the Body Electric” by Walt Whitman. Whitman writes not about the abstract term “humanity”. He writes instead about the real, raw experience of being in the presence of people. In his words is an appreciation of all people and the image of God in each of their bodies and souls, whether he knew it or not. Whitman also didn’t know it but he wrote this poem about my family.

I had a childhood teeming with people. Not just a family of three younger brothers and two parents, but also my dad’s twelve siblings and their families, and my mom’s three sisters and brothers and theirs. I have grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and too many to count. The neighborhood I grew up in has multiple families with children my age, some older, most younger.  There were always new babies next door to hold and kiss on the cheek. I had more siblings than I could keep track of to play with, sometimes fight with, but mostly just get dirty with. Whitman writes,

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough, 

To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, 

To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough

And also, 

There is something in staying close to men and women, and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well.

I think of the summertime when we ran from yard to yard while our mothers held the babies and laughed together.  And the winter when we dragged our sleds to the nearest hill and then home to any house in the neighborhood to sit by the fireplace and dry our socks. 

My house in the neighborhood was a curious place. I asked my parents and they told me it was a house church. All I knew was that that meant on Sunday mornings my brothers and I would put aside sibling rivalries and put away our toys. We would convert the dining room into a sanctuary with hymn books on the chairs. The podium my father built went under the window. My father would lead a worship service from there. On Friday night’s my parents and others gathered in that same room for bible studies.

My home was open to all kinds of people. We would sing together, eat together, pray together, and sometimes live together. We once lived communally with another family, shared kitchen and a living room. When they moved next door there was always someone else moving in. Whether a student from Paraguay, a preschool teacher with her crazy dog, a young pharmacist from Chicago or Korean couple. I was always among people I loved, or sometimes people I would rather have nothing to do with had my parents not invited them into our home. Instead of Whitman’s housekeepers, fireman, wrestlers and farmer’s daughters In my house I remember Korean grandmothers, a Nigerian couple, an Iranian convert, a student with a beautiful singing voice, a monk, and especially a flavor chemist who gave me a collection of beads on my birthday. There was always a dynamic circle of noncompatible people who could somehow get along passing through my house, and often staying.

I hear that people are beautiful even when they are broken. They can annoy me and also have an intensity, a depth that I can never know. All I do know is that people are to be felt and experienced, known well and embraced.  Maybe the peculiarities of their personalities are not such a defining factor as the simple fact that they are human souls.

I SING the Body electric;

The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves;

And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?

And if the body does not do as much as the Soul?

And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?

[Whitman, Walt (1949) Leaves of Grass, and Selected Prose. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.]