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An incident far from here
Antioch Review, The, Spring, 2002 by Paul Christensen
But the women, the men, their desires, their blunt, animal passions were permanent, immortal, passed hand to hand down a chain of existence that was only now breaking down, rusting apart, falling to pieces. It was a world that had fashioned the identity of the American, and the substance of whatever America stood for. These quiet peasant bodies with their modest demands for a life in the world as it is, not in some dream of an artificial cosmos, stood for whatever it was we once were. My brother was an essential American, as defined by Whitman in his great chant to America, "Song of Myself":
The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power, but in his own right, Wicked, rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear, Fond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak, Unrequited love, or a slight, cutting him worse than sharp steel cuts, First-rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull's eye to sail a skiff, to sing a song or play on the banjo, Preferring scars and the beard and faces pitted with small-pox over all latherers, And those well tann'd to those that keep
What we were becoming under the new regime of monopolies and market emperors was something else again, a post-American of weakened selfhood and etiolated flesh. If my brother possessed any greatness, however unconscious, it was to adore and embrace this figure Whitman had celebrated just as things were turning against him. Just as his dream was fading. From then on, life became work, and work became the lunge toward transcendence and the ultimate escape from the will of the earth itself. The leap after 1855 was toward the cloned embryo and the pallid, bespectacled grimace of Bill Gates. Whitman had sung a dirge over America and its rough young people. The life hereafter seems composed of froggish intellectual men, and of women in dolorous, abject dresses doing the work of men, fearing their own natures and emotions, trusting no one. This is the world after him, and to think, a motorcycle leaning down in an arc of purest fate was the parting of the ways between us.
Paul Christensen's latest books are West of the American Dream: An Encounter with Texas, a memoir issued by Texas A & M University Press, and Blue Alleys, a book of prose poems from Stone River Press. He teaches in the English department of Texas A & M University.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Antioch Review, Inc.
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