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

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

If the addressee puts calamus "within" himself, providing it with the "warmth," "the aliment and the wet" of his physical body, the plant will "open, and bring form, color, and perfume" to him in what sounds like a multi-sense hallucination. This experience, the speaker assures the reader, will not differ from the one that he has described, but will be "unfolded on the same old terms"; in the same way that such visions have "come slowly up out" of him, they will "come slowly up out of you." Indeed, it appears that calamus is "the token of comrades" because its users are bound together by a uniformity of perception (LG 348).

In "Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone," Whitman describes the homogeneity of drug experience that, according to Ludlow, leads to an efficientform of information transference. This mode of communication depends on the drug user's ability to intuit the mental state of other users, a skill that Ludlow exercises as he monitors a friend, who is in the throes of hashish-induced ecstasy:

The connection which his peculiar state of sensitiveness had established between us, made us, for all purposes of sensation and perception, wholly one. I was able to follow him through all his ecstatic wanderings, to see what he saw, feel what he felt, as vividly as it is possible without myself having taken hasheesh. . . . It might have happened . . . from my former thorough acquaintance with all such states. (179)

Because Ludlow knows first-hand about the quality of drugged consciousness, he can participate vicariously in his friend 's visions simply by considering his own. Through self-contemplation, he inhabits the mind of his companion and, in this way, saves him from struggling to convey what cannot be put into words. In short, by bringing them both to the same state, hashish maintains the private nature of their respective "trips" while reconciling these discrete encounters with communal experience. This superimposition of the personal onto the communal makes it possible for Ludlow and his friend to know each other without speaking and without using any system of external signs.

A similar method of exchanging personal information without the aide of representation seems to be at work in the "Calamus" poems. In Whitman's Journey into Chaos: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Poetic Process, Stephen Black astutely observes that, "As 'Calamus' develops, Whitman's lovers become increasingly silent and intuitive" (198). The soundless communication to which Black refers occurs frequently throughout the poems but is illustrated particularly well in "Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances." Here, the speaker contemplates the nature of reality and illusion, and his questions on these issues "are curiously / answered by my lovers, my dear friends" (LG 353).

In an attempt to explain these recurring moments of satisfied silence, Black argues that Whitman converts his sexual fantasies about his mother into "the sorts of friendships that occur in the preadolescent period of sexual latency-'Calamus' friendships" (208). Whitman seems to want to protect these fantasy friendships, Black continues, by "abolish [ing] actual social exchanges altogether" and enforcing "intuitive communion" among his lovers (211). By tracing this quiet concord to regressive fantasies of the pre-oedipal stage, however, Black subjects a mid-nineteenth-century text to a later psychoanalytic framework. Far more than an anachronistic theory, Ludlow's descriptions of discrete but homogeneous drug experiences provide a temporally and culturally appropriate context in which to read the mutual knowledge, attained through extra-lingual communication, that we see between the poetic speaker and his comrades.