Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Jonah Lehrer
Whitman, never one to hide a good review from “the Master,” sent Emerson’s private letter to the Tribune, where it was published and later included in the second edition of Leaves of Grass. But by 1860, Emerson had probably come to regret his literary endorsement. Whitman had added to Leaves of Grass the erotic sequence “Enfans d’Adam” (“Children of Adam”), a collection that included the poems “From Pent-up Aching Rivers,” “I Am He that Aches with Love,” and “O Hymen! O Hymenee!” Emerson wanted Whitman to remove the erotic poems from the new edition of his poetry. (Apparently, some parts of Nature still had to be censored.) Emerson made this clear while the two were taking a long walk across Boston Common, expressing his fear that Whitman was “in danger of being tangled up with the unfortunate heresy” of free love.
Whitman, though still an obscure poet, was adamant: “Enfans d’Adam” must remain. Such an excision, he said, would be like castration and “What does a man come to with his virility gone?” For Whitman, sex revealed the unity of our form, how the urges of the flesh became the feelings of the soul. He would remember in the last preface to Leaves of Grass, “A Backwards Glance over Traveled Roads,” that his conversation with Emerson had crystallized his poetic themes. Although he admitted that his poetry was “avowedly the song of sex and Amativeness and ever animality,” he believed that his art “lifted [these bodily allusions] into a different light and atmosphere.” Science and religion might see the body in terms of its shameful parts, but the poet, lover of the whole, knows that “the human body and soul must remain an entirety.” “That,” insisted Whitman, “is what I felt in my inmost brain and heart, when I only answer’d Emerson’s vehement arguments with silence, under the old elms of Boston Common.”
Despite his erotic epiphany, Whitman was upset by his walk with Emerson. Had no one understood his earlier poetry? Had no one seen its philosophy? The body is the soul. How many times had he written that? In how many different ways? And if the body is the soul, then how can the body be censored? As he wrote in “I Sing the Body Electric,” the central poem of “Enfans d’Adam”:
O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men
and women, nor the likes of the parts of you,
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes
of the soul, (and that they are the soul,)
I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my
Poems, and that they are my poems.
And so, against Emerson’s wishes, Whitman published “Enfans d’Adam.” As Emerson predicted, the poems were greeted with cries of indignation. One reviewer said “that quotations from the ‘Enfans d’Adam’ poems would be an offence against decency too gross to be tolerated.” But Whitman didn’t care. As usual, he wrote his own anonymous reviews. He knew that if his poetry were to last, it must leave nothing out. It must be candid, and it must be true.
The Ghostly Limb
In the winter of 1862, during the bloody apogee of the Civil War, Whitman traveled to Virginia in search of his brother, who had been injured at the Battle of Fredericksburg. This was Whitman’s first visit to the war’s front. The fighting had ended just a few days before, and Whitman saw “where their priceless blood reddens the grass the ground.” The acrid smell of gun smoke still hung in the air. Eventually, Whitman found the Union Army hospital, its shelter tents bordered by freshly dug graves, the names of the dead scrawled on “pieces of barrel-staves or broken boards, stuck in the dirt.” Writing to his mother, Whitman described “the heap of feet, arms, legs &c. under a tree in front of a hospital.” The limbs, freshly amputated, were beginning to rot.
After seeing the dead and dying of Fredericksburg, Whitman devoted himself to helping the soldiers. For the next three years, he volunteered as a wound dresser in Union hospitals, seeing “some 80,000 to 100,000 of the wounded and sick, as sustainer of spirit and body in some degree.” He would nurse both Union and Confederate men. “I cannot leave them,” he wrote. “Once in a while some youngster holds on to me convulsively and I do what I can for him.” Whitman held the soldiers’ hands; he made them lemonade; he bought them ice cream and underwear and cigarettes; sometimes, he even read them poetry. While the doctors treated their wounds, Whitman nursed their souls.
All his life, Whitman would remember the time he spent as a volunteer in the hospitals. “Those three [wartime] years,” he later remembered in Specimen Days, his oral autobiography, “I consider the most profound lesson of my life.” Never again would Whitman feel so useful, “more permanently absorbed, to the very roots.” “People used to say to me, ‘Walt, you are doing miracles for those fellows in the hospitals.’ I wasn’t. I was … doing miracles for myself.”
As always, Whitman transmuted the experience into poetry. He told Emerson that he wanted to write about his time in the hospitals, for they had “opened a new world somehow to me, giving closer insights, new things, exploring deeper mines than any yet.” In “Drum Taps,” his sequence of poems on the war — the only sequence of poems he never revised — Whitman describes the tortured anatomy he saw every day in the hospitals:
From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand
I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,
Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv’d neck and side-falling head,
His eyes are closed, his face pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump.
Whitman did look at the bloody stump. The war’s gore shocked him. Volunteering in the canvas-tent hospitals, he witnessed the violent mess of surgery: “the hiss of the surgeon’s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw / wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood.” Amid the stench of dying soldiers and unclaimed corpses, Whitman consoled himself by remembering that the body was not only a body. As a nurse, Whitman tried to heal what the surgeon couldn’t touch. He called these our “deepest remains.”
By the second year of the war, just as Whitman was learning how to wrap battle wounds in wet cotton, doctors working in Civil War hospitals began noticing a very strange phenomenon. After a soldier’s limb was amputated, it was not uncommon for him to continue to “feel” his missing arm or leg. The patients said it was like living with ghosts. Their own flesh had returned to haunt them.
Medical science ignored the syndrome. After all, the limb and its nerves were gone. There was nothing left to cut. But one doctor believed the soldiers’ strange stories. His name was Silas Weir Mitchell, and he was a “doctor of nerves” at Turner’s Lane Hospital in Philadelphia. He was also a good friend of Whitman’s. For much of their lives, the doctor and the poet wrote letters to each other, sharing a love of literature and medical stories. In fact, it was Weir Mitchell who, in 1878, finally diagnosed Whitman with a ruptured blood vessel in the brain, prescribing “mountain air” as medicine. Later on, Weir Mitchell financially supported the poet, giving him fifteen dollars a month for more than two years.
But during the Civil War, while Whitman was working as a nurse, Weir Mitchell was trying to understand these illusory limbs. The Battle of Gettysburg had given him a hospital full of amputee patients, and, in his medical notebook, Weir Mitchell began describing a great variety of “sensory ghosts.” Some of the missing limbs seemed unreal to the patients, while others seemed authentic; some were painful, others painless. Although a few of the amputees eventually forgot about their amputated limbs, the vast majority retained “a sense of the existence of their lost limb that was more vivid, definite and intrusive than that of its truly living fellow member.” The bodily illusion was more real than the body.
Although Weir Mitchell believed that he was the first person to document this phenomenon, he wasn’t. Herman Melville, twelve years earlier, had given Ahab, the gnarled sea captain of Moby-Dick, a sensory ghost. Ahab is missing a leg (Moby-Dick ate it), and in chapter 108, he summons a carpenter to fashion him a new ivory peg leg. Ahab