Language of Drug Use in Whitman's "Calamus" Poems, The

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2004 by Auclair, Tracy

Nevertheless, the feeling of self-extension that the calamus root induces remains exclusive to the speaker. "Through me shall the words be said to make death / exhilarating," he promises in "Scented Herbage of My Breast." Yet, in "Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand," he is tormented by his inability to share the sensation of self-effacing emotional investments (LG 344). At first, it seems that the reader can participate in the speaker's experience by assuming the position of his disciple (LG 345). Next, the speaker suggests that he can convey his secret to the reader by kissing him (LG 345) and then, dismissing that mode of transmission, by pressing against him, "For thus, merely touching you, is enough-is best" (LG 346). Finally, he admits that there are no conventional means of communication that will work, "For these leaves, and me, you will not understand, / They will elude you at first, and still more after- / ward-I will certainly elude you..."(LG346). Kissing, touching, reading, and all other methods of discovering the speaker's meaning inevitably fail because of the enigmatic nature of his mental state, which makes it impossible for him to participate in a relationship of reciprocal understanding and mutual transparency. While his capacity for death-like attachments would seem to make him well suited for such relationships and for the community that they create, his isolation from others is actually reaffirmed by the unusual power and, therefore, the rarity of his empathy. It seems that without having received death from the calamus root, the reader cannot fathom the extraordinary identifications that characterize drugged consciousness and, consequently, cannot know what the speaker knows.

Making drug-induced experience comprehensible to others is a pressing problem for Ludlow, as well. In The Hasheesh Eater, he wonders, "What state of mind lies back of, and conditions the capacity to recognize, through symbols, the mental phenomena of another?" (86) His answer to this question is

Plainly this: the two who are in communication must be situated so nearly upon the same plane of thought that they behold the same truths and are affected by the same emotions. In proportion as this condition is violated will two men be unappreciating of each other's inner states. (86)

It is seriously violated, Ludlow claims, when one man has ingested hashish and the other has not. For the man who is on the drug,

a virtual change of worlds has taken place, through the preternatural scope and activity of all his faculties. Truth has not become expanded, but his vision has grown telescopic; that which others see only as the dim nebula, or do not see at all, he looks into with a penetrating scrutiny which distance, to a great extent, can not evade. Where the luminous mist or the perfect void had been, he finds wondrous constellations of spiritual being, determines their bearings, and reads the law of their sublime harmony. (86)

Yet, when he tries to describe his visions to his "neighbor" who is in the "natural state," "he finds that to him the symbols which convey the apocalypse to his own mind are meaningless, because, in our ordinary life, the thoughts which they convey have no existence; their two planes are utterly different" (86). For Ludlow, these "planes" can be realigned, not by having the individual who is on hashish describe his mental state to the one who is not, but by having both men use the drug (86-87).