"I Kept A Journal For Years... "(Part Five)

Eidolons by Walt Whitman And thee my soul, Joys, ceaseless exercises, exaltations, Thy yearning amply fed at last, prepared to meet, Thy mates, eidolons. Thy very songs not in thy songs, No special strains to sing, none for itself, But from the whole resulting, rising at last, and floating, A round full-orb'd eidolon. I kept a journal for years, sometimes treating it like a diary of everyday life, as if I were storing minutiae for some over zealous historian of the common life. Other times I wrote abstruse passages meant to penetrate the meaning of these times. The journal is no longer itself, it is a symbol whose possible and probable meanings spread widely through space and time, already beyond my ken. But not beyond my soul's need and interest and curiosity. I ascend to the third-story room in my apartment and see the real world, perhaps only a small vista of its immensity but still it is a genuine place of trees, shrubs, lawn grass, and humble creatures who are my neighbors. But as I read my books, write my poems, think my thoughts, I become obscurely aware of openings, cracks in what passes for solidity, corridors of light summoning me to the other side of things. It is a mystic calling and I am certainly ready for it. If I sense my eyes blurring after a long night of reading and thinking, I can only imagine the clarity of my spiritual vision, which hastens to balance the doubleness of experience. Inner and Outer mirror each other, Life and Death complete each other, Music and Silence exchange their arts. And now we sense the rightness of Walt Whitman's paradox: Ever the mutable, Ever materials, changing, crumbling, re-cohering, Ever the ateliers, the factories divine, Issuing eidolons.