Literature

Into recognition, vaulting

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Walt Whitman developed his ideas on equality slowly and over the course of decades. In his art, however, Whitman pierced the fathomless moral confusion that attends all racism and saw, in a man being sold at auction into chattel slavery, the father of worlds:

Within there runs blood,
The same old blood! the same red-running blood!
There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations,
(Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in parlors and lecture-rooms?)

This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns,
In him the start of populous states and rich republics,
Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.

How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries?
(Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the centuries?)

- I Sing the Body Electric, Leaves of Grass