ИСТИНА

Мodernity can be defined as a time and a condition of culture when picturing the world becomes less a rare privilege and more an everyday activity, implying and inviting a new type of reflection. As “everything solid melts into the air,” visual forms become increasingly divorced from matter, new technologies makе them affordable and transportable. The distant is brought close, with unprecedented force the largeness and the variety of the world present themselves to individual perception. This vision, at once inspiring and intimidating, was shared by Walt Whitman, who, unlike most poets of his age, was curious and optimistic about photography and practiced the new art enthusiastically, before the camera if not behind. The changes worked upon the human environment and communications as they were “thickened” by photographic images, the new notion of self as self-image, the analogies or differences between verbal and (mass produced) visual arts—all were constantly on Whitman’s mind. This preoccupation can be traced in his poetics. How does one deal with the condition that picturing the world as an ordered and bound “cosmos” is no longer an option, and that one confronts instead a multiplicity of unrelated particles, collectible and consumable, but offering little sense of interconnectedness and continuity? Can the vastness of the visible universe be pressed into an individual’s field of vision? To quote Susan Sontag: “[t]he most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world.” But how can a sense of coherence and “wholeness” be achieved? May the result of the process of collection be a library, an encyclopedia, an inventory, a dictionary? Or might not a panorama-like assemblage be preferable, offering an immersive panoptic experience with the subject at the center of a miniature model of the world, an environment that looks real but is known to be artificial? It is this experience that seems to be described in “My Picture Gallery" - a poem that inhabited Whitman’s mind for several critical decades in his life as poet. Unlike “Leaves of Grass”, which expanded over time, this poem shrank dramatically from an initial 116 lines to the bare six of its opening, which remained almost intact. The “allness” of the visible world is concentrated within the privacy of an individual’s mind/head. This paradoxical space described in the poem — enclosed yet open, limited yet limitless, private yet public—resembles, at the same time, a daguerreotype gallery of the type that cropped up all over New York in Whitman’s youth. Whitman attempts to model what he himself experienced as a visitor at photo-portrait galleries, his eye wondering freely from image to image. Their "strange fascination” sets imagination to work, as if turning on an electric chain: "An electric chain seems to vibrate . . . between our brain and him or her preserved there so well by the limner's cunning. Time, space, both are annihilated, and we identify the semblance with the reality." The analysis of the two version of the poem (separated by more than three decades) alerts us to the importance of the gesture of pointing in Whitman’s symbolic universe. A catalogue can easily be imagined as a rapid succession of pointing gestures that are both declarative (this is) and imperative (I want/will this) and thus expressive of the poet’s avid love of life, his will to contain what cannot be contained. In Whitman’ s early poetry we observe “consciousness in its acquisitive mood” of which, according to Sontag, “the camera is the ideal arm,” - it captures and appropriates experiences and objects, “putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power”? That is exactly what Whitman’s early rhetoric does: strident, emitting bolts of energy, an impulse per image. The desired effect is that of a sweeping, soaring, all-embracing vision, the closest analogy of transcendence. Instead of feeling air-borne, however, the reader may be left ground-bound and discouraged, - the directness of contact and energy exchange may be recognized for what it is - an illusion produced by verbal or a failed illesion, a kind of an imposition. The catalogue technique, used abundantly by Whitman in his early poetry, virtually disappears from his later verse. I then discuss the use of visual devices - manicules or printer’s fists (images of a hand with extended finger) - in the early and the later editions of “Leaves of Grass”. Here, too, we a change is easily observable which I take to be indicative (however indirectly) of a shift in Whitman’s aesthetic priorities. It coincides with increasing focus on the difference between semblance and reality which the modern art of photography (in S. Sontag’s interpretation) seems to make identical and problematize. Photographs, she argues, seem to carry information and knowledge, but do not explain or make you understand anything. They develop the effect of the real, inviting the viewer to intuit reality through oscillation (hesitation? temporization?) at its threshold—the visible surface that looks real but is not quite. Instead of reality as a self-sufficient base for representation, we deal with a sense of reality as the end product of the process of imagining. The progressive “aesthetization” of the world would take many forms to which Whitman in his ripe old age remained not at all unconscious leaning toward modernistic practices avant la lettre.