Perpendicular
The Architecture of America and Surviving the Second Wave
Sound engineers are leery of rectangular rooms with hard surfaces. A piano generates the same music no matter where it is played, but from there the sound strikes against either the carpet or the hardwood, a perpendicular wall or an angled one, and the windows or the furniture and so on. Certain frequencies will accumulate in the rectangular room, and as the piano plays a quiet and lucid song, an awful and shrill noise begins to manifest.
I have been thinking lately about the angles of the room and the shape of America. The pandemic has touched every continent. It makes the same noise wherever it goes, but there is something unique in our architecture which seems to amplify it. We are still dying in America. We cannot wear our masks and cannot stay home and cannot keep the businesses shuttered or put the classrooms online and so we are still dying in America. 140,000 bodies in the ground and we are exhausted with fear. An unnecessary second wave of the pandemic seems to have something in common with jazz, the Saturn V rocket, and lynching — all uniquely American inventions.
Who built the room and when? Who does it serve and what can we do to dismantle it? I don’t claim to have somehow found my footing on any of this. Long before the first American Covid-19 case (back in January), I had been researching Walt Whitman and Washington DC during the Civil War. These notes were obviously never intended to be part of a discussion on a global pandemic, and perhaps I am drawing connections where there are none to be drawn — like a conspiracy theorist standing in front of a wall of photos armed with a ball of red yarn. Alternatively, if the idea of it happens to suit you better, feel free to believe that I happened to wake up a few days ago, opened a history book to a random page, and landed on 1855.
Six years before the start of the civil war, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass went on sale for 75 cents. It exalts the physical over the spiritual. The tangible over the abstract. It celebrates individual expressions of the whole. Whitman tried to get newspapers to do positive reviews of the book by sending it with a note from Emerson and a letter from Thoreau. People liked Thoreau, so maybe they’d like Whitman. Sometimes the letter worked. Sometimes it didn’t.
In the March 15, 1856 issue of The Saturday Review, an editor wrote “If the Leaves of Grass should come into anybody’s possession, our advice is to throw them instantly behind the fire.” Whitman persisted and paid out of his own pocket to have a printing company issue the first 795 copies of the book. There’s a romance to it — that Whitman believed in it before anyone else.
To be clear, Walt Whitman is not the reason we are deep into a second wave of Covid-19. He strikes me as the type of person who would be wearing a mask at the very least. There is something, however, in the way we have chosen to talk about him. Or the things we choose not to say.
In 2004 and 2005, I was paid to tell the story of Walt Whitman over the phone. I worked at a small self publishing company whose customers paid to put their own books into print. Just over $400 for the basic package. More for a publicity plan. More for editorial services.
The big publishers wouldn’t know good if it punched them between the eyes, is what I was supposed to say. You know Whitman? Everybody loves Whitman. Even Whitman was self-published (the poets, in particular, seem to feel the pangs of emptying their pockets for their art). There was a long list of authors on a small white square of paper. Stephen King. John Grisham. Edgar Allen Poe. The Chicken Soup for the Soul guy. A couple of names per genre.
No one wanted to hear the names. I listened on the phone for too long, pressing it too tightly against my ear. One of the girls in accounting asked if I needed a headset. Your ear is red again, she told me when we crossed paths in the break room.
I wasn’t the one who printed the list of authors’ names. I didn’t pin it to the gray fabric on the tall cubicle wall. There’s a line in Leaves of Grass that says “Resist much, obey little.” I wasn’t a model employee in my strange little cage with almost but not quite enough room to spin aimlessly in circles in the old office chair. They moved me next to the printer after I kept falling asleep. I listened to frustrated poets until both of my ears turn red.
The story I did not tell is about Whitman in 1854, uncertain about the one small payment that will establish him as the Father of American Poetry. For the writers on the other end of the phone line, the fable of inevitable celebrity (or even recognition) is a drug they cannot resist. They see Whitman as a successful competitor, not a writer. They see themselves always a hair’s breadth away from winning the same arbitrary competition. They’ve invented a hill just so they can fight to the top of it and play king of the mountain.
This, perhaps, is the first wall of the building. The first in a list of long list of items that amplifies the worst frequencies. The American addiction to competition is the invented mountain that is killing us. It’s the self-importance and the climbing. It’s the way we see everything, even wearing a mask, as either a loss or a gain. It’s the consistent choice to pit ourselves against each other, and our willingness to reach after perceived personal opportunity at the expense of a loss to the collective.
I don’t think Whitman necessarily embodied this or that he was the architect here (he strikes me as someone who would have worn a mask). It was the way I was asked to talk about writing. For a certain amount of money, we’d call Barnes and Noble and get them to put your book on one of those tables in the middle aisle. As if that was the goal. I had always imagined that writing was like sitting for 20 years at the kid’s table at Thanksgiving, eavesdropping on conversations between the adults (Neruda, Steinbeck, Carver, Updike, Gaitskill, Didion, Dostoevsky) until finally having the guts to chime in.
I’ve always had a hard time with the way Americans insist on painting everything with the color of competition and climbing. My boss at the publishing company liked to tell me to dress for the job you want, not the job you have. She didn’t understand what I did or why I thought I could wear hoodies and busted up chucks to an office job. My duties included moving files up to and downloading them from a server with FTP. All I had to do is offer to show her “file transfer protocol” and her eyes rolled back in her head. OK, OK, she said. I’ll leave you to it.
She put me on the “Editorial Board” so I could read books that might have marketing campaign potential. Most of them were obscure, so-called celebrities: a body builder who placed in the world championships, the actor who played Eddie Munster, one of the West Memphis Three, and The Long Island Lolita (that one ends up on the NY Times Best Seller List). Celebrity over content. Every time.
Our best selling book was called How to Good-bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way? by Hiroyuki Nishigaki. No one in the company liked to bring it up, because it makes us all feel like a joke. Someone always got a copy at the office Christmas party, but it didn’t ever go over as well as you’d think. For two years I showed up at work, dressed for the job I had (selling a book about how tightening your butthole can make you happier), and spent roughly four hours a day writing poems. Two years after I began on the editorial board, I gathered the poems, printed them into a booklet at Kinkos, and quit my job to go on tour as a poet. I left the list with Whitman’s name on it in the cubicle.
Walt Whitman’s younger brother, George Washington Whitman, fought for the union in the Civil War. Walt and the rest of the family, at home in New York, dutifully checked the newspapers for the names of the wounded and killed, waiting to hear the worst. In December 1862, the newspaper reported that a “G. W. Whitmore” had been wounded in Fredericksburg. Not Whitman. Whitmore.
It could be a typo. Was it?
Sometimes you don’t get certainty. But you move anyway.
Walt assumed the worst and headed to Virginia to look for his brother. He made it as far as Philadelphia before he was robbed on the platform, waiting for his next train. He dusts himself off and keeps going, every step and mile of track suspended on the possibility of a careless typesetter. Without a single cent in his pockets, Walt starts to search the 40 hospitals operating in Washington DC at the time.
Walt ran into a sympathetic friend who found him an entry-level clerk’s job. Enough to survive on. Eventually, the search carried Walt to the site of the battle in Fredericksburg, where he found a mansion converted to a field hospital. Outside there was “a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart.” Walt was never the same after. His brother, George Washington Whitman, was fine, having only suffered a superficial wound to the face.
I think a lot about Whitman on the platform in Philadelphia with unanswered questions about G. W. Whitmore and his brother and then putting one foot in front of the other until he ended up in Fredericksburg. I think about it because it seems impossible.
The second wall of the room is the opposite of Whitman moving south. It is a paralyzing fear of the uncertain.
Don’t get me wrong — it’s not the CDC’s data itself that has been uncertain, but what our lives might look like if we chose to read it and understand it. When no one could guess how long it would take, or how we’d close businesses, or what would happen to the NBA finals, we chose to ignore the evidence altogether. It’s not new. We’ve been doing the same thing with climate change science for the last 30 years. The American imagination is so hamstrung that we couldn’t even imagine a world with reasonable regulations and collective responsibility, so we press our palms against our ears and chose the comfortable lie instead.
I cling to certainty and security where I can find it, but I can’t seem to find it very often. I remember talking to a therapist the night after I decided I didn’t believe in God anymore. I told her that something about it felt like I had pulled the rug out from under my own feet, but there wasn’t any floor underneath, and I was just trying to come to terms with just how safe it had felt when I had been on that rug. Everything, I said, ends in a question mark now. I remember there was just enough silence that I had time to think about it and then to be OK with it. The therapist never said anything about living with uncertainty. She eventually told me I had self-esteem issues and, coincidentally, she had a book about self-esteem, and if I bought the book my next session would be free. I never went back.
A month after I quit the job publishing books like the constricting anus one, I took 95 south after a pair of shows in Baltimore. At that point I was almost 30 or so shows into the tour, having made a decent amount of money in the Midwest, then New Jersey and Delaware before heading to DC, following a similar path to the one Whitman did in 1862.
My cousin, who was in his second year at the Naval Academy in Annapolis came to the DC show. Almost all of my poems were anti-war poems, but he politely avoided the topic in general after the show. He asked if I remembered playing whiffle ball in the parking lot just before our uncle’s wedding. We were supposed to have been tying empty cans to the muffler of the groom’s car, but someone found a bat and a ball and we squared off in our dress shoes to hit long flyballs until one of the aunties found us and told us we had to stop before we got all sweaty. He laughed as he told the story. We had taken turns doing outlandish home run calls. He had a great Vin Scully. Who brings a whiffle ball bat to a wedding?
I don’t know, I said.
What are you hoping to do with the poetry stuff?
I don’t know.
After the show in DC, my cousin slumped back to the academy and the rest of us went out to dinner at one of those all night restaurants that serves breakfast food at all hours. We pushed all the tables together on the patio and compared stories about our disastrous exes and blue collar jobs. It was part of the routine in every town I went to, but DC was the only place where no one talked about getting enough money to be able to get up and leave. I don’t know if they wanted to stay or if they felt stuck, but it seemed like they could see every flaw and foible in their city and loved it anyway. For all I know, they’re still there on the patio.
During the civil war, Washington DC had grown rapidly, becoming the de facto destination for a quarter of a million wounded Union soldiers. Churches and theaters and large homes were all converted into hospitals. The population of the city boomed as relatives arrived to care for their wounded brothers and sons.
There was a large military camp established across the river in Arlington. The camp was dry, so (of course) almost immediately after it was populated, several people were arrested trying for trying to smuggle booze to soldiers. Since male soldiers were not allowed to frisk female ferry passengers, several ingenious women found a way to sew large bladders that could hold liquid into their undergarments. With these pouches full of liquor, the seemingly big-breasted women casually board the ferry and then returned home from Arlington several hours later with notably smaller breasts and pockets full of cash. American ingenuity at its finest.
Whitman returned from Fredericksburg and began spending any extra time he had in the hospitals. In a sense, the followup to his wildly successful poetry collection was to waste the next six years working a lowly clerk’s job and visiting hospitals. It’s not that he didn’t write poetry. But it wasn’t as good. He wrote poems about the war, but they likely won’t be the sorts of things you discuss in an Early American literature class. By one estimate, he visited between 80 to 100,000 wounded soldiers (from both sides of the conflict). He brought them candy and sat next to their makeshift beds and played 20 questions with them. If they were illiterate or couldn’t otherwise manage to write letters home, Walt would bring paper and pen and transcribe for them. Most of the letters contained a small postscript: “Writen[sic] by Walt Whitman, a Friend.”
The third wall is, perhaps, is our tendency to think of kindness as transactional. By some definition, Walt gains nothing by sitting in those hospitals and playing 20 questions with a dying soldier. We gain nothing by staying home and wearing masks. It is a simple and small acts of kindness, but (again, by one way of measuring it) the return on investment is isolation and exaggerated discomfort.
There is more to love than the give and take of it. I am also guilty of the calculation of it sometimes. I wish I was better at kindness for kindness sake.
The dying soldier benefits. That’s the ROI. The immune-compromised. The vulnerable. The elderly. But we are convinced that the benefit to the group cannot outweigh the personal loss, no matter how small. The sound is bouncing off the other walls now. The noise begins to accumulate.
The show in DC was one of the last on the entire tour. I drove over night and into the next day, stopping at rest stops to recline the seat and sleep awkwardly for a few hours. Somewhere in an Ohio (I think) truck stop bathroom, I tried to shave off a wild and unkempt tour beard. When I finally arrived home, it felt like any other day on tour, with a driveway and a living room and a bed as unfamiliar and new as any other I’d seen for the past month.
I got a job at one of those restaurants where they bring a small pot of coffee to the table, even if you’re only going to drink a single cup. I worked nights on a handful of different manuscripts doing simple editing jobs. The work was good when I could get it, but I couldn’t get it too often.
After the tour I lived for several years in a small apartment with thin walls. My bedroom had two huge windows facing south, and the room got impossibly hot in the summer. I wrote a few poems in that house, but not many. I dated a girl who worked on a road construction crew and had a megaphone mounted on top of her work truck. Sometimes she’s pull the truck up behind my apartment in the middle of the night and wake up all the neighbors, shouting into the megaphone at 2AM to ask me what I was wearing. The megaphone doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but it still makes me laugh.
I remember collecting a large glass trophy for poetry from the Omaha Entertainment Awards show later that year and thinking that none of it made sense. It was televised, I think. I got a few texts from people who I guess had seen it and recognized me. I didn’t know you did poetry, they said. I remember feeling apologetic about it. Yeah, sometimes I write things, I said. I didn’t tell them that I felt more myself filling coffee mugs at 4:30AM and then I ever did on stage. I didn’t tell anyone. A few years later I was on tour again, sick with a stomach bug and lying on the bathroom floor in a hotel in Vancouver (or maybe it was Milwaukee? or Charlotte?). I was a few hours away from performing in front of a few hundred people, pressing a cold washcloth to my forehead and running the lines silently. You want like a pita or something? my tour mate asked.
No, I said, I just don’t want to read poems anymore.
I don’t know why it took me so long to say it. I wonder sometimes if I didn’t know it at all until I said it.
I know that as a poet, or as someone who once did poetry, I should have a sort of genuine admiration for Whitman. I don’t. He wasn’t the benevolent saint we make him out to be. Not even close. He was an overt racist at a time when many of his contemporaries offered full-throated support for Abolitionism and people like John Brown. At the very least, a more sympathetic position on emancipation would seem to have fit in neatly with the thematic egalitarianism in his poetry. Instead, Whitman wrote that America should be “for the Whites” and that blacks were “a superstitious, ignorant and thievish race.” He was in favor of collecting them all and shipping them off somewhere. As one scholar wrote, “Whitman’s all-embracing love for Americans was, in effect, limited to white Americans.” It feels irresponsible to say anything about Whitman without mentioning this. The man was deeply, deeply flawed.
The city itself continued to grow. It was the second city (after New York) to experiment with mass transit. Large, horse-driven omnibuses ran from the residential areas farther north to the Naval Observatory and back. From the Observatory you could walk to a handful of hospitals or cross the river into Arlington. Each bus was owned by its driver, and whoever reached the passengers first got the fare. As one bus would collect a few passengers, the next one would race by, trying to get to the next stop first. More than once, a pedestrians was trampled and killed as competing busses bouncing up onto the sidewalks to pass each other. The deaths became a regular occurrence. City officials and newspaper editors begged the wealthy to come in and buy up the busses, monopolize the routes, and eliminate the competition.
Walt Whitman, for his part, couldn’t get enough of the dare-devilish bus drivers, sometimes riding the full route in circles just to listen to them shout and joke. One night in 1865, at the end of the last route of the day, Whitman sat in the coach and talked with the driver long after the other passengers had gone home. The driver was a former confederate soldier named Peter Doyle. Peter climbed down from his perch and sat beside Walt in the coach, placing his hand on Walt’s knee. They were in love immediately, but Whitman felt humiliated and ashamed of his homosexuality. In his private journals, he wrote about trying to give up a “feverish, fluctuating, useless, undignified pursuit of 16.4.” The 16th letter of the alphabet is P. The fourth is D. It doesn’t take a lot great deal of deduction to recognize who he was writing about. It’s interesting to imagine Walt’s care in counting out the letters of the alphabet to get to “P”, coupled with the shame of being unable to put his love’s full name down in ink.
The fourth wall is what makes it a room. It is the inability to pronounce the inconvenient but true parts of ourselves. The flaws of America were never meant to be ineffable. The founding fathers were never meant to be lionized. It is not a coincidence that we give perfunctory-at-best discussions to American tragedies like The Trail of Tears or the Tulsa Race Massacre and now find ourselves unable to change course after months and months of calling the virus a democratic ploy and a hoax.
I don’t have answers for what America looks like when we begin to question the architecture, but I know what it looks like if we change nothing.
This, I suppose, is what you learn when you quit your job to go on tour to read poems in bars and coffee shops all across the country. You begin it thinking that every town will be different, but then, one after another, they are not. Maybe in Chicago they sit alone at the piano after the bar closes and maybe in Denver there is no piano, so they walk to an all night diner and order tea. Maybe in Duluth they drive a little reckless and in Austin they just hoof it. It’s the moon that looms over Albuquerque and the sun that bears down on Omaha. The flavor is a little different, that’s all. When you finally unravel into a familiar bed at home, you realize, of course, that you were the thing that changed. And that is how you grow.
We are asking for the walls of the room to be dismantled, but they are stubborn, so we begin to dismantle ourselves. Where we’ve taken the shape of it, we work to unmake it. Kindness for kindness sake. The last wall closes us in. We can and must admit we were wrong. The next 140,000 lives depend on it.
