Of the terrible question of appearances
In this poem Whitman confronts five kinds of skepticism:
relativism: the fear that what appears true or real depends on our present point of view, and might seem completely different from another point of view;
philosophical skepticism: the idea, explored by Descartes that it is impossible to certify, beyond doubt, that anything exists;
“mystical skepticism:” the sense that this world is merely an apparition, while the real is something “yet to be known;”
religious despair: the fear that the doctrine of the soul’s immortality will prove a sham, and that death will mean simple annihilation;
nihilism: the sense that nothing is true or real; everything, in this life and any possible afterlife, means “naught any how.”
Whitman’s intermittent sense of reality as a sham, a suck, and a sell is linked to his sense of American life as a crass, materialistic project, in which the capitalists are extracting not just money but also meaning from daily life, leaving a hollow shell behind. In these desperate straits, camaraderie is more than individual love; it is brotherhood and resistance.
Whitman uses four parentheticals to double down on his meanings and his process, even at the expense of logic. “May-be these are, (as doubtless they are,),” he says, apparitions. How can something be maybe true and doubtless true at the same time? Whitman is of two minds; he contradicts himself; and this doubleness, or duplicity, is itself part of the problem; it is self-consciousness that robs reality of its given-ness and separates us from nature. In the second parenthetical, appearances become serpentine and malicious: they “dart out of themselves, as if to confound and mock me!” This is the flip side of Whitman’s grand or grandiose self-assertion. When things are good, the fact that he is a cosmos, that everything in the universe signifies to and for him, is thrilling; but when things are bad, grandiosity becomes paranoia.
Whitman has no answer to the terrible question of appearances. Descartes is wrong; you cannot think your way through radical skepticism; neither the existence of God nor the fundamental self-perception “I think” is an adequate foundation. The answer comes not from within, but from without; these doubts are “curiously answered by my lovers, my dear friends.” More particularly, they are answered when “he whom I love travels with me, or sits a long while holding my hand.”
Why is the answer “curious?” For one thing, it is curious, or odd, because even after his friends “answer,” Whitman does not know the answer: “I cannot answer the question of appearances, or that of identity beyond the grave.” It is also “curious” because it leaves the question, the curiosity, intact; it transmutes terrible doubts into benevolent curiosities, wonders, and wonderment. Rather than supplying Whitman with a visual or verbal answer, love charges him with untold and untellable wisdom, rendering him silent, indifferent, and completely satisfied.
This charge takes place when “the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason hold not” surrounds and pervades Whitman and his lover. This line makes a subtle hinge point. In one sense, he is re-describing the anguish of skepticism: the feeling that words have lost their meaning and reason cannot grasp its objects. But now the subtle air is descending on two people holding hands, not on one person alone. The charge in the air is reversed by the magnetism of the lovers. The subtle air swiftly changes from being menacing to being the source of untold wisdom, and silence no longer means that speech has failed; now it means that speech is happily superfluous.