Unspeakable Desires

Capital from L'Abbaye Fontevraud

Photograph by the author

Notes from Aug 17/18 2019

Whitman: a prophet of the sexual revolution

Well, what about all the revolutions we’ve had: were they not political, social, economic revolutions, upheavals in the forms by which men govern each other and treat each other and exchange the goods of livelihood? And our religious revolutions? — a Luther proclaiming freedom from an old decadent church system. And our artistic revolutions, our literary revolutions, our peripheral revolutions from peripheral, “cultural” conflicts. What were these human storms, these controversies often bloody, always verbal, always far from the point of real unspeakable human desire for an actual breakthrough to the “conditions” of the garden of Eden, “the forest of Arden,” a world where it is finally admitted that we want to make love, and eat and sleep, and bask in the days and nights of our true, fundamental life…

—Jack Kerouac’s diary,  December 1, 1948 (New York Public Library)

With the Humanity of God you must live here on earth, in the labors and sorrow of exile, while within your soul you love and rejoice with the omnipotent and eternal Divinity in sweet abandonment. For the truth of both is one single fruition… Do not, then, undertake anything else. But serve the Humanity with prompt and faithful hands and with a will courageous in all virtues. Love the Divinity not merely with devotion but with unspeakable desires, always standing with new ardor before the terrible and wonderful countenance in which Love reveals herself and engulfs all works.

—Hadewijch, Letter 6, to live Christ, p. 59

 Last week, I was at the New York public library where I came across the current exhibit on Walt Whitman. 

Walt Whitman is a whole world unto himself, and even mentioning his name opens the door into a window on the infinite. Yet at the same time the man’s name alone, as a signifier for the entirety of his monumental poetic works, invokes the whole universe, it also focuses a magnifying lens on one single astonishing, extraordinary, and unifying principle: our humanity. 

Our unfathomable, unspeakable humanity.

That humanity encompasses breadths and depths which words alone cannot indicate; yet they are what we have, and when we have Whitman, we have all of them in their greatest glory. Kerouac and Hadewijch—especially Hadewijch— are of course exotic flavors of their own, each one tinged with the same humanity, the same vital beat of the heart that motivated Whitman. 

Whitman calls us back to a basic understanding of our humanity, a vision so basic that, while it reaches across nations and history with an effortless gesture of genius, makes sure that even a wad of grass in a child’s hand become a profound mystery we share together. It’s our humanity he calls us back to: that same humanity that Kerouac mentions as preferable to all our “revolutions”— a word that means, at its root, the revolving of bodies in orbit, that is, a mechanical and repetitive action.

 Kerouac’s diary entry, which ends with a meditation on the nature of society (an artificial construct, in his eyes) calls us back to an understanding of humanity, rather than culture — a call to our organic nature, rather than to the institutions we create, all of which are self-referential and — as the word revolution notes — mechanical. Not conscious.  Not even truly related to the meaning of our life, what he calls our true, fundamental life. 

 There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that Whitman called us to an understanding of true fundamental life in terms of the spirit. The fact that he included an honest appraisal of our sexuality as a part of that seems modest when measured against the whole ambition of his call. It was, without any doubt, a call to the greater part of our souls, not the crude rubble we paste together in our cities and stuff in our garages, safe deposit boxes and storage units. 

That call centers not around things, but people; not around objects, but relationships; not around acquisitions, but love and honor that are freely given.

 This is where I draw a connection to Hadewijch, whose devotions in the cause of love seem greater than perhaps any other mystic of the Middle Ages — if not all time. Her call to serve humanity reminds me well of Whitman; and yet, while Whitman calls us to a service of humanity on what is perhaps the exoteric and ”larger“ outer scale, she calls us to a service of humanity that begins within, and that serves the divine first, recognizing its essential connection to the human principal. 

 There are those who might think an esoteric spiritual work has nothing to do with these outer functions — the ones that Whitman and Kerouac write about and were interested in— yet it has everything to do with them, because if the inward functions that develop a spiritual inflection of meaningful gravity don’t forge an important and well-balanced connection with outward life, especially in regard to the compassionate and intelligent practice of conscious honor relative to other beings, they become worthless. And, as Catherine of Siena noted:

“…when human life comes to an end the will that was free is bound. So for the dead the time of earning is past. If they (people) end in hatred guilty of deadly sin, by divine justice they are forever bound by that chain of hatred and remain forever obstinate in their evil which keeps gnawing away within them. And their suffering grows continually, especially at the side of others whose damnation they have brought about.” 

—Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, translated by Susan Noffke, Paulist Press, 1980, page 82

 Her comments, of course, precede Swedenborg’s like observations by some four centuries or so, but the Gnostic tradition they document is ancient and long-standing.  If we don’t engage with one another through love and caring, through compassion and an effort to understand, we become frozen in our hatred and it becomes just as eternal, in its own way, for us, as God’s love is for the whole world. 

The tradition of Metaphysical Humanism traces an identifiable line through the great minds and hearts and souls of century after century, era after era, and we hear its echoes in all of the characters I present you with here. 

 Yet there are those who are bound to serve through outward action, and in an ordinary way – even though the ideas they bring us are without any doubt extraordinary – and those whose task it is to carry on an inner transubstantiation of the finer spiritual energy that makes Metaphysical Humanism possible. That finer energy creates the conditions on earth that allow the Whitmans and the Kerouacs to write what they write, that allows the great painters to paint what they paint, and so on. The task for this type of action is undertaken secretly, by quiet people, who make no great waves and asked for no rewards, but they serve in the way Hadewijch describes; which is what makes her works so important and so much worth reading. 

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.