Democratic Divinity
The single most important image in all of American literature
In Walt Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” he presents us with the greatest image of democratic divinity in American literature.1 Walt is riding the ferry between Brooklyn and Manhattan, the sun ‘half an hour high’ before setting— he meditates first on his connections to all people, including us,2 and then his connections to everything in the universe.3 As he looks over the railing of the boat at the water below, he sees a curious sight— the silhouette of his head shadowed on the water, surrounded by dazzling sunbeams reflected in diamond-like flashes dancing on the waves. While looking at “the fine centrifugal spokes of light,” he says “Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sunlit water!”
In this moment, Walt reinvents the core image of all Western art— the classic golden halo around holy Christian figures like Jesus, Mary, and the saints. But now, instead of a static halo, it’s a changing, dynamic, modernistic halo. And now, instead of a halo reserved for saints, this dynamic halo diverges ‘from any one’s head’. It’s the ultimate image of the inherent divinity of all individuals. This is a liberal-democratic divinity: liberal because it celebrates the single individual as a sacred, essential center of freely divergent creation; democratic because that divinity emanates from any one’s head.4 All individuals are holy avatars of humanity, holy loci of relation, connected to all people and all things by these ‘centrifugal spokes of light.’ Every human silhouette radiates infinite potential futures.
I’m extending and beautifying a point made by Harvard professor Phil Fisher in Still the New World.
“On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose, / And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you may suppose.”
“The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day, / The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme”
It’s also liberal-democratic because those sacred individuals are who they are precisely because of their integral relationships with everything else in the world— the adaptive silhouette of the abstract individual is the X that balances the equation of the universe. The universe is gapless, “well-join’d”; every creative negation of the yin-like individual is inextricable from the web of relations that generated it, even as it alters that web through the alchemy of its close collision— every new creation ripples outward across the cosmos like light along the changing waves.