I got a new hat

I'm holding the old hat in the bottom two images: up top, the new one. I received the old one from a friend, while I was at Chapel Hill. He picked it up at a genetics convention in New Orleans. I associated that hat with various Walker Percy personas: Binx, Thomas Moore, Will Barrett. The new hat was bought by Jami while at the Methodist General Conference in Dallas - but it's not so much Percy as Whitman. I've received both hats while living in the Chapel Hill - Durham area.
When I was a kid, a small child, I had a hat from my grand father that I wore every where. It looked just like that hat Jed Clampett wore on the Beverly Hill Billies, with its hole in the top and felt construction, rumpled and misshapen. My parents were apparently embarrassed by it, and one day dad buried the hat out in the woods.
I was distraught. But then my dog, a beagle that I named Beagle, a dog that enjoyed digging in the woods, brought my hat back to me.
Dad was flustered of course. Years later, after I'd forgotten the affair of the hat, he would bring it up to me.
This new hat poses none of the issues of the old hat buried in the woods. It is clean and intact. It smells of the jungle its material was hacked from; the texture of the strong hands that shaped it are oiled into its structure. It receives from me the sweat and shape of my head on its smooth unremarked surfaces. When I walk on the forest path, under the sun light trickling through the forest canopy, my bald summit is shielded from the blistering heat.
Over me, around my head, it forms a halo of golden joy.

A long day

And the best part of the day was walking around the golf course: I walk, Jami runs and meets me, and then we walk on together. What a wonderful Sunday: we went to 1st Presbyterian here in Durham and heard a wonderful sermon from Joe Harvard: God is an extravagant disperser of seed - everything so Whitmanesque lately, but no wonder that God's abundance is without calculation, that it goes everywhere, without measure. We live in a world where many people don't believe that: wanting to believe that the necessities of life are scarce. I say, only because we make them scarce through our anxieties and fear, when we act out of self preservation. We seem culturally wired to disbelieve Jesus' message of abundance and forgiveness, instead believing it is better to hold grudges and squirrel away all we have. For this we go to war, we build fences, we engage in security theatre and polarizing rhetoric. An objective view, a nuanced view - these are drowned out, brushed aside.
Has it ever been otherwise?
Today, after church we went to see Hellboy II. What a great film. There's the sense in this film that humanity never learns its lesson. We found ourselves drawn to Hellboy and his elven protagonist. If demon spawn and elf-brood and goblin can get along, why can't we? Why can't we care about the planet we live on? This trend in super villains, where they've got a good point, is an improvement over the black/white, good/evil dichotomy that's prevailed for so long.
And then, after the movie, for some reason I thought the reception for the vice-moderator was today (it's next Saturday) and we drove from the theatre in Morrisville into Raleigh, only to find an empty parking lot and the doors to the church closed. I would like to blame the weight watchers diet: that it leaves me insufficiently fueled to run my complex brain; but I would have made this mistake on a full stomach - and last night, I did make this mistake on a full stomach - or moderately full.
After we returned home, we went for that walk around the golf course, in the woods, among the trees, on a wide graveled path. All around me nature was green and bright. I am amazed at how beautiful the world is, even close at hand: how water trickling in a culvert among rocks can be transcendent. Whitman and Merleau Ponty ring in my ears: I'm in my body and in the world, moving through time, and I exist in this place, facing this horizon.
Tuesday I will be received into presbytery. And this moment and that moment are tied together. I will stand before my colleagues in ministry knowing and not knowing, forgetting and remembering.
When the long day is over I put my tired legs under the covers and cherish the presence of my wife. Together we laugh. Hearty Rabelaisian laughs.

Have I written about this before?

When a friend of mine, Karl's wife Rebeca, informed me that women don't lounge around nude, languidly watching TV, reading a book, drinking coffee, cooking, but at least like to wear large T-shirts, I did do a short series of figures where I had women wearing at least underwear. I drew big floppy T-shirts as well.
Rebeca's assertion has haunted me over the years, even as I've gone back to drawing nudes. Nothing is more interesting than the bodies God gave us. Male and female: we are knit together with bones and muscles and covered with skin. What is more incredible than that our consciousness is embodied. Merleau Ponty goes to great length in his Phenomenology of Perception to describe, to set out, how the consciousness is in the body and how as body and consciousness we exist in the world, as points with horizons. And so I have to agree: how do I exist in time? Isn't it a wonder that the point I am now was preceded by such points as a child playing in the yard, a teenager caught in a rainstorm in the mountains, an adult in graduate school drinking in a coffee shop?
This wonder is found also in Whitman's Leaves of Grass. As I've combed through his lines (now I am investigating how his 1855 edition changed into the edition we have in the Norton anthology), I wonder at the consciousness of a human being in 1855 having the sense of himself that Whitman does. To say that he is both victor and conquered; lost and found; and that he is to be found under our boot soles, filter and fibre for our blood. And many more such things - these amaze me in their inclusiveness. Whitman has written a phenomenological description- and Ponty does describe the way the body exists with its consciousness as a work of art - a poem.
The body and soul together are works of art. Each human life is a work of art. Do we sense that? Do we see how this honors the image of God? When we see ourselves and others statistically, we lose that sensibility - we reduce others and ourselves to ciphers, caught in the metanarrative of market forces (the idolatry of the day).
Do we understand that we live in works of art? That our very living in the bodies we do is a work of art itself? The child kicking a ball; the old man walking with his cane; the couple walking by a shore; as well as bored and anxious people waiting in line; or refugees in Palastine. We are works of art - tragedy and comedy.
And God gave us such bodies to act in Her creation.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.

Jami bought me a new Panama hat (though these things are not - as I've been informed - often crafted in Panama now a days). My old hat, which I had received from a friend back in 1989 had become very brittle from weather and neglect and over use, covered with grime and a patina of paint and oil, pocked with holes and threatening to become a visor. So I needed a new hat for the summer, and Jami found it when she was at the Methodist general conference on business for Duke Divinity. It is a magnificent specimen, broader of brim and more snug in its fit, rounder and not as fedora-like in style. It goes well with my white linen shirt. Inspired I began reading Whitman's leaves of grass - posing myself as near as I could remember in the famous title page photo that graced the first edition.
I can't believe that I'm 48 and only since January, when I saw a PBS American Masters on Whitman, have I immersed myself in his work. He's extremely interesting. "I celebrate myself and sing myself" - penned in 1855 and revised until 1881 before his death. Amazing that such a thing would be written in America in the 19th century, much less before the civil war.
Sure this poem has things often referred to: the "barbaric yawp" for instance - but it is much more. I especially find touching this last section, 52.

"The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless.
And filtre and fiber your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you."

Whenever I come to that last line, my eyes get watery. Certainly I'm prone to sentimentality. But I believe it is more: Whitman has crafted an odyssey, a journey of the poet among the people, and after declaring that "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" in the third line, he is stating that his presence, or the presence of his muse, his daemon, or his prophetic sensibility, exists forever and remains - that death is not an end - we have only to look for where that presence waits for us. The tone of the end is comparable to the end of Prufrock - which I would not be surprised to learn that Eliot had lifted the form from Whitman: "I have seen them [the mermaids who had be singing] riding seaward on the waves/ combing the white hair of the waves blown back/ when the wind blows the water white and black//We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/ by seagirls wreathed in seaweed red and brown/ till human voices wake us and we drown." The elegiac voice, but without Whitman's hope, Whitman's expectation and willingness to remain and wait.

But this poem has more. From the first line we are encouraged to celebrate ourselves - as does the poet, who enjoins us the be aware of his journeying among us. I am amazed that a man, living in America in the 1850s could be so aware of his body, his being and the being of others and the earth, and declare it on paper. It's scarcely possible today to imagine such transparency. How unhealthy is our puritanism: not just in discussing matters sexual (and the puritans were somewhat frank on that - unlike their descendants) but in being embodied, in not being governed by an over weening sense of shame. I feel that this call to celebrate and sing is missed today. Certainly there are people who promote themselves - but Whitman's distinction is that he is not of the promoters, the advertisers, but simply singing himself - not a cause, not an ideology. Winnicott gets at this with his distinction of the authentic and the false self, obsessed with what others may be thinking of it. Whitman is proclaiming that he is about living authentically.

I celebrate myself and sing myself.
Wearing a straw hat and white linen shirt as I enter my 49th year on life's arc.
Earlier I'd written 48th, but I've completed 48 years. When this year is over I'll be 49.