Walt Whitman and the Ten Commandments

...What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and own no superior...

...Or in no gods...

...And so Yahweh abdicated the post, bought a potter's wheel, set it up in the shed around back, and spun out the universe: a work of art...

...What is in the macrocosm is in this microcosm...

...It is the commonality of human affection—what Rorty is not afraid to call love, but more often refers to as solidarity— that binds a religion, and must ultimately bind a democracy...

...And therefore, out of respect for every citizen's religious liberty, the First Amendment bars the state from endorsing or enforcing a particular religious point of view...

...I think of Bob Marley, Muriel Rukeyser, Martin Luther King, Jr., Edward Abbey, Deborah Meier, Thomas Merton, Muhammad Ali— all free-spirited artists, leaders, and teachers whose daily lives dramatize our escape from the mall and demonstrate how we might invent a culture worthy of the name...

...THIS POEM has a lot to recommend it...

...pOSTING "Laws for Creations" in classrooms and courthouses would be a promising move away from the psychology of guilt and toward the idea of self-creation...

...We put on its vestments and we pledge our allegiance to that familiar figure that the poet Elaine Equi calls "the patron saint of cash flow...

...To bring about such a future—to achieve our country—Rorty suggests that we "mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans" so we can work toward realizing the ideals of Lincoln and Whitman...

...Without a vision of what our country could be, we risk settling for what we have: an oligarchy of the super-rich and the greatest income gap in our history...

...Prabhavananda and Manchester: Mentor, 1948) This notion of God as a creative force dwelling within each of us seems to me much more inspiring than the idea of God as a judge, watching us through the surveillance camera known as guilt...

...in cultural studies will tell you, the most persistent graven images in our culture are not graven at all...

...As for the latter half of the Ten Commandments, there usually isn't much objection, even from the most strident anti-church quarters...

...Or when I think of Edward Abbey, alone in a small skiff on another rushing stream, the cold Colorado River, his wild, free presence an indictment of the dams that will ultimately choke the great river down to a trickle...

...The composer laid down the original melody line, the major themes, and we have been improvising on that score ever since...

...What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but that man or woman is as good as God...

...I propose, therefore, another set of injunctions to be hung publicly as an alternative to the Ten Commandments...

...The answer: Yahweh wanted to create a world that would operate outside the knowledge of good and evil...

...But twenty years have passed, and last December a sizable religious contingent took to the steps of the State Capital, rallying again for the public display of the Mosaic Law...

...I think he was right...

...And that you or any one must approach creations through such laws...

...Or when I think not only of Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial but of her monument to the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama—a curving granite wall where a continuous, cleansing sheet of water washes down over a biblical inscription, quoted by King: ...until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream...

...If you don't believe me, consider the experience of a college friend of mine who runs focus groups and crunches numbers for a prominent advertising agency...

...To reverse our pessimism about the future, Rorty says, we must begin thinking about democracy as both "civic religion" and "self-creating poem...

...I wondered what graven images she meant...

...Surely not...

...I began to wonder about the word "graven...

...And this syntax binds them together within nature's composition, "the ensemble of the world...

...I had just returned from a long hiking trip with Whitman's Leaves of Grass as my NOTEBOOK field guide and companion...

...They say Tommy Jeans, Abercrombie & Fitch, The Gap—all manufacturers of the clothes that many of the teenagers were certainly wearing beneath their sandwich boards...

...And that, of course, is the real problem...

...Baldwin traced this problem back to the selfflagellating theology of the Puritans...

...And really, think how closely the layout of malls resembles the most famous Gothic cathedrals, with their long naves and double transepts...

...And Whitman's penchant for repetition makes it easy to memorize...

...Racism may simply boil down to this: a projection of one's own self-loathing onto another group of people...

...Because we are at once characters and creators within the work of art, Whitman saw the same force, the same creative power, stirring within each of us...

...they are fluores100 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 cent and multicolored...

...There is nothing heretical in his claim, "there is no God any more divine than Yourself...

...In the words of Pulaski County judge-executive Darrell BeShears, these later proscriptions are just "good rules to live by...

...This credo is at once inclusively and uniquely American, while at the same time containing what may be the earliest religious impulse...

...So last fall, when a grassroots movement began in Corbin, Kentucky to introduce before the state legislature a bill that would require the Ten Commandments to be posted in public buildings, I took it as testament to the fact that basketball season hadn't begun...

...And that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean...

...In other words, democracy is a secular religion that must be enacted now, here...

...His employer has given him two years to discover the Process— an archetypal mapping of the consumer psyche that will explain our most elemental impulses to buy, which can subsequently be transposed into an advertising template for any business, no matter what the product...

...What does this mean...

...In fact, commandment number one presents such a theological and political snare that a serious thinker might never even reach number two...

...Those who are content within themselves have no need of a scapegoat...

...No, it's the first few commandments that ultimately get the attention of the chief justices...

...it seemed ludicrously archaic...

...I am speaking of Walt Whitman's poem "Laws for Creations": Laws for creations, For strong artists and leaders, for fresh broods of teachers and perfect literates for America, For noble savans and coming musicians...

...The mall is the real American church, the place where we enact our most important cultural rituals...

...It is not much longer than the Ten Commandments, for one thing...

...But, Whitman implies, if we turn our attention back to the Tree of Life, we might begin to understand how the natural laws of this world are synonymous with the laws of the Creator...

...Early in Leaves of Grass, Whitman said he would preach three greatnesses: religion, democracy, and love...

...Whitman is only calling our attention to how the laws of Yahweh-the-Artist manifest themselves in his creation, and consequently become the law of the heart: "And that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean...

...We invent new versions of the original poem, and we invent ourselves within the poem...

...Rorty's main point is that we must replace our culture of sin and shame with a sense of pride in our country and its potential...

...The final genius of "Laws for Creation," and my last argument for posting it in public, is that it appeals at once to the ancient strand in every religion that believes we still harbor a divine impulse within our hearts and to a secular humanist like Rorty, who accepts no metaphysical religion at all, but believes that democracy is, to quote Dewey, "a metaphysic of the relationship of man and his experience in nature...

...No American in this century embodies Whitman's three greatnesses more than Martin Luther King, Jr., who showed us a vision of an American society populated by our better selves...

...But personally, I have another problem with the Ten Commandments: they simply aren't very inspiring...

...In our oldest religious scriptures, the Vedas of India, we find what may be the earliest and most enduring religious idea—that we all carry within our hearts the divine law of the creator: As large as the universe outside, even so large is the universe within the lotus of the heart...

...When I think of Whitman's line, "What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and own no superior...

...From the Tree of Good and Evil, we learned to judge the world and to judge each other...

...Or in goddesses...

...Rorty is not unaware of the fact that Americans have reasons—a lot of them—to feel shameful about our past (his title is taken from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time...

...In my state—and I don't think Kentuckians are unique this way—disregarding the tenth commandment about your neighbor's wife can easily get you killed...

...The young woman who stood closest to the camera held a placard that read, THOU SHALL NOT WORSHIP ANY GRAVEN IMAGES...

...The scent of honeysuckle is the invisible syntax—Whitman's "divine law of indirections"— that draws the hawkmoth to the flower's pistil and stamen...

...they harbor no abiding insecurities that they have to blame on someone else...

...Within it are heaven and earth, the sun, the 102 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 moon, the lightning, and all the stars...

...Supreme Court two years later...

...Given this extraordinary admission, we can answer Martin Heidegger's famous question, "Why is there something rather than nothing...

...But, he believes that to let that historical shame infect the future is a prescription for despair...

...It means that we must shed the oppressive expectations of others and home in on the signal that emanates from what Yeats called the "deep heart's core...

...As any critic with an M.A...

...But all through the winter, the Ten Commandments kept popping up on classroom and courtroom walls in Pulaski, McCreary, and Harlan counties...

...All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world, There shall be no subject too pronounced— all works shall illustrate the divine law of indirections...

...The Kentucky General Assembly passed the same bill into law back in 1978, only to have it struck down by the U.S...

...Was this a conscious decision or is the design of malls driven by something more primal...

...After the Primordial Parents have eaten from the forbidDISSENT / Summer 2000 n I0 NOTEBOOK den tree, Yahweh tells the angels, in disgust, "Man has become like one of us, he knows good and evil" (Gen 3:22...

...My own observation has been that most of us are in no hurry to follow the charge of John the Baptist who, standing on the banks of the Jordan, admonished all who owned two Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirts to give one NOTEBOOK away to the poor soul who had none...

...This is significant, because whereas the Ten Commandments are a teaching that has obviously fallen from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Whitman derives his laws, his Leaves, from the other, neglected tree that also stood in the middle of Eden...

...Yet if the purpose of posting the Ten Commandments is to encourage the larger culture to take them seriously, then we might as well start by reexamining the secular images that distract us from the attention that Yahweh— by all accounts, a selfish god—demands...

...DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 103...

...More important, it never mentions the word not...

...Chandogya Upanishad, trans...

...Granted, it's no Song of David, but the steady time signature can keep huge crowds plowing along on the same note...

...ERIK ANDERSON REECE is the author of My Muse Was Supposed to Meet Me Here and A Balance of Quinces: The Paintings and Drawings of Guy Davenport...

...And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself...

...Such guilt too often becomes a crippling psychological burden...

...About 15 percent of "other" Americans—"other" being the statistical category to which they are usually relegated—believe in other gods...

...Art and nature are both governed by the principles of beauty, spontaneity, complementarity, and improvisation...

...And conversely, being faithful to one's spouse (number seven) can prevent a lot of heartache all around...

...Thou shalt have no other gods before me has always troubled theologians, seeing as it catches the One God admitting to the existence of other gods...

...Consider the telling comment that Yahweh makes in the Genesis creation story...

...James Baldwin made it clear in The Fire Next Time that we as Americans have not learned to "love our neighbor" because we haven't learned to love ourselves...

...Consequently, the laws of nature bear a strong resemblance to what Whitman called the laws of creation...

...God had grown bored with God's own realm of unchanging, infallible laws...

...A few months ago, I read Richard Rorty's new book—a manifesto really—Achieving our Country...

...In the middle of a brilliant legal career, Yahweh realized one day that the job of High Judge, Ultimate Arbiter, held no appeal...

...And it is in the spirit of imagining a more inspired citizenship that I recommend "Laws for Creations" as the credo of our civic religion, the catalyst for a more soulful, self-reliant, open-hearted America...

...Whitman understood the world as a poem, or a song, which is constantly evolving...

...Such is the American Civil Liberties Union's argument whenever it is summoned (in McCreary County, it was contacted by the judgeexecutive's own cousin) to mount a legal defense for civil liberties...

...Commandments six, eight, and nine (killing, stealing, perjuring) offer undeniably good advice for anyone who wants to stay out of jail...

...We learned to locate God's law in the sky, and to think of this realm as fallen, inherently corrupted by our own presence in it...

...To help with his research, my friend hired a full-time ethnographer to hang out in malls and study the rituals of consumers as they move from store to store, observing their own secular stations of the cross...

...White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other," wrote Baldwin, "and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed...

...Rorty's charge is a good one...

...What do you suppose creation is...

...The stone Buddhas that sit inconspicuously beneath the rhododendron in a few of the gardens around my neighborhood...

...When I turned on the news one night, I saw teenagers, wearing what looked like sandwich boards, each embossed with one of the commandments...

...Either way, we arrive at the same conclusion: Consumerism is our religion...

...Reading Rorty's argument that, for America to achieve its democratic ideals, we must return to the inspiring writing of Whitman and John Dewey was like reading an improved version of my own thoughts...

...After all, when were students or citizens ever stirred to intellectual creativity or self-realization by a list of ten things they should not do...

...It is easy for me to mobilize my own pride when I think of Martin Luther King, Jr., standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, refusing to believe that the "bank of justice is bankrupt," urging all Americans to search its vaults once again for the wealth we have hidden from ourselves...