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2015: 9.4
DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
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"Vivas to those who have failed:" Walt Whitman Electric and the (Digital) Humanities
Nicole Gray <ngray2_at_unl_dot_edu>, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Digital methods in the humanities have helped to create the potential for resurrecting an experimental, recuperative critical mode that approaches literature in terms of its transformability. This essay draws on Walt Whitman's poems and his material practices to model this mode by interweaving the transformative logics of poetry and code. This can help to illuminate the structural mechanics of each, as well as their mutual dependence on figurative language. These resonances speak to the diverse human voices, practices, and forms of creativity that define digital humanities work today no less than the poetry and print of past centuries.
He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement . . . . he sees eternity in men and women . . . he does not see men and women as dreams or dots. (Walt Whitman, preface to Leaves of Grass (1855))
The field that has emerged as the digital humanities started with dreams and dots: pixelated digits and, beyond them, the prospect of methods and archives that could encompass almost an infinite number of texts. As it has grown it has developed a reputation as one of the few comparatively well-funded, expanding fields in an increasingly de-funded, precariously or under-employed academic humanities.[1] It has also been criticized for a lack of ethnic and gender diversity and an unwillingness to think across cultures or to reckon with the theoretical insights of the humanities more generally.[2]
As a result, in part, of these criticisms, the moment for work at the intersection of digital methods and the humanities has never been more exciting. Creators of forums like #TransformDH, #DHpoco, and #GlobalOutlookDH have worked to transform the digital humanities by opening up space for a more diverse set of practitioners and voices. Projects like the Colored Conventions Project and the Mukurtu CMS have built tools organized around artifacts and knowledge practices associated with African American and Indigenous communities. Scholars and programmers worldwide are engaging questions of access, training, and opportunity.
With these developments have also come a set of theoretical provocations, challenges to return to the difficult work of thinking about digital media and its relationship to human beings.[3] "[T]he black digital humanities promotes a system of change," Kim Gallon has written: "it is a mechanism for deregulating the tendency of technological tools, when employed in the digital humanities, to deemphasize questions about humanity itself" [Gallon 2016]. This transformative mode of thinking, the call to interrogate basic concepts and assumptions, shares some ground with an earlier moment in digital humanities. In the early 2000s, the SpecLab at the University of Virginia, led by Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann, conducted a series of textual experiments with that era's digital tools. These experiments in text and technology were informed by a methodological approach called "deformance", a creative and playful mode of reading.[4] One goal of this speculative, theoretical work was an ongoing effort to reimagine key literary terms like "text" and "work."
As digital methods that quantify and specify have come to play a prominent role in the digital humanities, perhaps it is worth exploring a complementary return to such ludic and experimental modes.[5] In the context of the transformation of the digital humanities by scholars of race and gender, however, we may need to reconceptualize the practice and the nomenclature of "deformance" to one of transformability.[6] The malleability of form, for those who study connections between the body and identity, is a politically charged matter oriented toward the future as well as the present. Transformability shifts the focus from a product or process that has happened in the past, or is happening in the present, to the crucial role of imagination in turning to what is possible in the future. Transformability involves not only the many forms the text has taken — the realm of book history — or the many forms the text does take — the realm of textual editing — but also the many forms the text could take, the vast scope of its potential iterations within historical fields of embodied practice.
Using Walt Whitman as a case study, this essay explores the ways that the dreams of an American poet have been and could be expressed in dots, presenting an opportunity and a provocation to apply the formal logic of machines to poems, and vice versa. Miriam Posner has written that a useful challenge for the digital humanities, now that many of its methods have become established, might involve rethinking some of the most basic structures and binaries enacted by data. The current political and cultural moment points to the importance of testing the logics that have made machines so functional and so central to human existence in the twenty-first century. Inseparable from such logics are complicated questions, long fundamental to poetry, about kinship, race or ethnicity, age, and gender — differences among human beings that affect the uses to which machines are put and the ways in which they have shaped and been shaped by historical narratives.
Whitman is a useful case study in part because his knowledge about and investment in the technologies of print so thoroughly inform both his composition practices and his poetry. Transformation, and to some extent failure, also define his engagement of race over the course of his lifetime. Recent critical assessments have shown the ways Whitman grappled with trying to develop a national poetry at a moment when the nation's internal contradictions were tearing it apart. The opposition to slavery and the forms of identification with enslaved people visible in his early poems largely gave way, after the U.S. Civil War, to a much more lukewarm position on the rights of freed slaves and other Americans of African descent.[7]
In the poem eventually titled "Song of Myself," Whitman calls on his readers to "Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" [Whitman 1855, 29]. If this were a hermeneutic challenge, one might propose questions tailored to our technological and philosophical moment: what would a model of criticism look like that combines a deconstruction of performative authorship, the thought-experiment of a (failed) mechanism, and a detailed attention to the material characteristics of an artifact? What lies between the sociology of the door-closer and the sociology of the text?[8] How do we map the crossroads of reparative reading and algorithmic criticism?[9] This essay draws on structures of computational processing to reimagine and ultimately transform a manuscript draft of lines that have been at the heart of critics' discussions of Whitman's poetic treatment of race. Combining the ludic with the Luciferic, it engages a struggle with embodiment in a text from the past in order to frame that text's transformation and re-embodiment in a troubled present.
In the first section of the essay, I discuss practices of text encoding and electronic transformation in widespread use by editors of humanities texts, arguing that such practices resonate linguistically and structurally with Whitman's own poetic and material practices. The second section of the essay situates Whitman's poem "The Sleepers" as a model for a critical approach that taps into a dialectic of dreams and failure that has been influential in the imagination and the politics of the United States. Casting the "dreamspace" Whitman creates in "The Sleepers" as an analogue of namespaces in computer and information science, I suggest that it functions as a transformative, experimental environment in which dreams, failure, contingency, and intentionality combine to produce radical insights and forms of identification. To exhibit that potential, I transform a manuscript draft fragment of "The Sleepers" into a basic script written in the programming language Python. Such transformations have much to offer the critical imagination, drawing our attention to new textual dimensions and to the points at which poetic dreams fail to become functional dots or durable reparative interventions.
"This electric self:" Machine Logics and the Transformability of Text
One of the notable revisions Whitman made to his poem "Bardic Symbols," first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1860, between that initial publication and its final version ("As I Ebb'd With the Ocean of Life") in later editions of Leaves of Grass , was to substitute the word "electric" for the word "eternal." Setting the stage for poetic reflection, Whitman wrote in the 1860 version:
I, musing, late in the autumn day, gazing off southward,
Alone, held by the eternal self of me that threatens to get the better
of me and stifle me
[Whitman 1860, 445]
This self was still eternal in 1867, but by the 1881 edition of Leaves , published just two years after Thomas Edison filed a U.S. patent for an electric lamp with a carbon filament, Whitman had revised both lines:
I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward,
Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems
[Whitman 1881-2, 202]
Now electric rather than eternal, the poet's self has also along the way become a prideful source of utterance rather than a stifling force. In becoming electric, the self is no longer alone, no longer occupied in wrestling with itself, but now turned outward and uttering poems.[10]
The distance from the electric to the electronic self is a matter of a century, a couple of commonplace characters, and some successful inventions. Success, a word with roots in genealogical as well as temporal succession, can be considered to drive much of the work of description and transformation that is today fundamental to electronic editing and data manipulation in computational environments. The markup language XML, with the specific vocabulary created by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), has come to dominate the practice of digital editorial work on humanities texts.[11] As is the case with computer programming and markup languages more generally, the functionality of XML and its related languages depends on logic.
The word "logic" is derived from the Greek λόγος, which has often been translated as "word." Logic can refer to a formal system of reasoning depending on symbolic and mathematical procedures to establish claims, or, in a more loosely defined sense, to a set of rules or structures by which argumentation, reasoning, or understanding can be enacted within a given context ("logic, n."). But λόγος is a complicated concept that extends further, encompassing speech or utterance, teaching, collecting, discourse, mind, principle, law, act, reckoning, cause, form, and pattern, as well as rational (or spiritual, or divine) order, or even revelation — all with just a hint of temporality, drawing on the idea of "original" or "originary." [12] I will use logic throughout this essay to refer both to the structure of language, utterance, or argument and to this more complex sense, a spiritualized form of expression, the making material of structure or order in the world, divine or otherwise.
The logic of XML depends on breaking data into machine-readable, processable parts, enforcing the description or the creation of boundaries. These boundaries ideally correspond to clearly defined units or categories, and they enable the construction of hierarchies and relationships. In the case of TEI these categories relate to inscribed materials like manuscripts or books. TEI also often encodes other categories that have been developed over years of academic production, like categories of genre, which underwrite the coherence of the discipline of literary criticism even as they are frequently challenged in individual studies. The logics that combine in the encoding practices and syntax of TEI are thus several, including logics of inscriptive technologies like the book and the manuscript, logics of categorical differences in style observed and enacted by literary criticism, and logics of information and meta-information that developed in library and computational contexts.
The textual crux represented by the word "eternal" in Whitman's "Bardic Symbols," for example, could be expressed in TEI. In a single file that described multiple versions of the poem, the tags <app> (for critical apparatus entry) and <rdg> (for reading), with the attribute @wit (to point to a textual witness), could be used to mark two versions of the line:
<rdg wit="#lg1860">
<l>Alone, held by the eternal self of me that threatens
<lb/>to get the better of me, and stifle me,</l>
<l>Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems,</l>
Marking the text in this way reproduces several logics: the structural logic of the text (marking the line as a line with <l>); the logic of the critical apparatus that describes textual revision or versions of the text over time (<app> and <rdg>); and the logic of the printed page, which consists of both inked characters and white space (<lb/> or line break).
A transformation of the text could proceed at the level of any of these logics, or all of them together. One could produce all the different versions of the line, one after the other, so they would display sequentially in a Web browser; or compare them as text strings and generate a visualization of the differences; or show the line in the context of other lines from the poem; or create a toggle allowing users to view or eliminate the line breaks, functionally reformatting the text. Data marked in XML can be transformed into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which in turn can be combined with display instructions to render readable, manipulable text in Web browsers. As display technologies and standards develop, XML remains useful, in theory, because the basic assumption is that it can be transformed into any number of other languages or data formats.
For Whitman, as the change from "eternal" to "electric" would suggest, the line from "Bardic Symbols" was transformable when he wrote it and remained so even after it was printed. He orchestrated several transformations of both wording and appearance between 1860 and the final printing of the line in his lifetime in the 1891-2 Leaves of Grass . To mark the line with TEI does not alter its ontological status, but it does produce new options for transformability in a digital environment. We might say that digital transformation is simply an extension of the imagination of transformability that, for Whitman, was a basic condition of textual production.
The syntax of transformation provides a surprisingly poetic point of continuity. The transformation of XML, like the original markup, is an interpretive act, introducing display and navigation elements that structure the reader's experience of a text. A primary language of transformation in such cases is Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), one of three recommendations that make up the broader language family XSL.[13] XSL depends on kinship as its metaphor for expressing locations, finding nodes in a document tree hierarchy based on paths articulated as a matter of succession. In the case of XML Path Language (XPath), the expression language used by XSLT, succession is a means of expressing relationships between elements or nodes.[14] The road from XML to HTML is navigated with siblings, parents, children, ancestors, and descendants. In order to select all of the <rdg> nodes to render a particular reading in a TEI file with an XPath that locates them in their relation to their parent <app> elements, for instance, you might use the notation: <xsl:apply-templates select="child::rdg"/>. In plain (more or less) English, you could say that you are instructing the stylesheet to apply a series of transformations to any reading (<rdg>) that is a child of the current node.
The logics and syntax of modern markup and transformation languages used for editing depend on a set of technical metaphors, terms for describing relationships that, in the case of XSL and many other languages, draw from family and nature — the stuff of poetry. And Whitman thought in machine logic, too, although his machine was the printing press. The kinds of material transformations that Whitman's texts underwent in the nineteenth century bear some resemblance to the file transformations and structural logics of the electronic age. Whitman's poetic transformations often involved cutting and pasting.[15] Modularity was key, and Whitman, a former printer, often composed with the structure of the printed text in mind. When he received proofs of a set of notes about Elias Hicks that would form part of his 1888 volume November Boughs , for instance, Whitman noted to the printer that he wanted the section to begin on an odd-numbered page:
Page proof of "Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks." Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
This move made logical sense for situating the Hicks essay as a new section of the prose in the volume — but it also reflected Whitman's practice of repurposing sections and binding them into later book issues.[16] He habitually arranged for the printing of poems and other materials independently on slips of paper, using them as the basis for proofing, sending them out for publication, circulating them among friends and acquaintances, and in some cases adding them into books. In ways that anticipated the concerns of twenty-first-century information scientists, Whitman designed his chunks of poetry and prose to be materially interoperable. If they were arranged such that they could be printed on separate sheets or gatherings, they could be assembled into other books or bound and distributed independently.[17]
Like XML-marked data today, Whitman's modular text could be used for a number of (multimedia) futures. Both books and languages like XML depend on structured relations, definitions, hierarchies, and dependencies. And yet the imagination that selects and designs particular transformations is, as tools and books develop, an increasingly crucial component of digital processing. Whitman's imagination of text and its possible transformations was shaped by the technologies of his time. We face a similar effect today, as critical and creative imaginations are challenged by machines that enable new forms of transformation, as humanities texts and machine languages combine in novel and interesting ways, and as practitioners are increasingly conversant in the logics of both. Conceived as a language whose use-value and sustainability were grounded in the possibility of transformation, XML is in certain ways an investment in the future of both technology and imagination.
"In the ruin, the sediment:" Poetic Dreams and Electric Failures
In Whitman's early, much-revised and much-discussed poem "The Sleepers," the dreaming poet begins out of sorts: "I wander all night in my vision, / ... / Wandering and confused . . . . lost to myself . . . . ill-assorted . . . . contradictory" [Whitman 1855, 70].[18] And yet the poet is capable, in this dream vision, of acts of acrobatic transcendence and identification. In "The Sleepers," Whitman first included and then edited out arguably his most striking identification across racial boundaries, lines in which the poet speaks as an enslaved person.[19]
Whitman had explored dreams as a space for transcending boundaries as early as his pre- Leaves of Grass fiction, and he may have been tapping into a genre of dream visions in literature. The unsettled mental state of the dreamer at the start of the dream in Whitman's "The Sleepers" and in his fiction is like that of other dream-vision narrators. The space of the dream for Whitman is liminal, in the sense that it seems to exist somewhere between pure presence and pure transcendence. In it the world of possibility is expanded, sometimes alarmingly.[20] Critics have argued that the redemptive vision at the close of "The Sleepers," in which the poet describes the sleepers "hand-in-hand" in a restorative sleep through which the illnesses and inequities of the world are healed, is a classic "dream vision" culmination of wandering in greater understanding and a sympathetic poetic enlightenment.[21]
Another way to think about Whitman's dreamspace — one quite out of time — would be to think of it as a kind of poetic namespace. In computer and information science, namespaces denote distinctions among objects (entities) or vocabularies, establishing boundaries around a specific collection of symbolic terms and related definitions. The use of namespaces allows for combinatory worlds in which the same word, element or object might mean something different in a specified context, or have a different relationship to other words, elements, or objects. Namespaces are often expressed using prefixes. One might, for instance, distinguish between the dreamspace "I" (ds:I) of "The Sleepers" and the waking space poetic "I" (ws:I) of the other poems in the first edition of Leaves of Grass . Let us say <ds:I> experiences discomfort, but possesses an ability to see and identify with the population of sleepers that extends beyond even as it informs the ability of <ws:I>.
The premise of namespaces and elements is the ability to declare entities like <ds:I> and distinguish them from other entities both within a namespace and outside of it. The striking thing about Whitman's dreamspace in "The Sleepers," however, is the very impossibility of that activity. In dreamspace, the night is a spatial as well as a temporal setting: of the sleepers, the poet writes, "The night pervades them and enfolds them" [Whitman 1855, 70]. The poet, too, both penetrates and enfolds the sleepers he describes. The poem begins with description: the poet, "Pausing and gazing and bending and stopping," simply looks at the sleepers. Next, he comes closer — "I pass my hands soothingly to and fro a few inches from them" — but still the restless sleepers sleep fitfully [Whitman 1855, 71]. He then joins them, sleeping and dreaming with them — "I sleep close with the other sleepers, each in turn; / I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers" [Whitman 1855, 71]. Finally, his dreaming produces a deeper identification: "And I become the other dreamers." In this state the poet pervades the dreamers like the night, taking on their identities — "I am the actor and the actress" — and acting in their stead. The poet of dreamspace transcends the boundaries between himself and the people he describes. The descriptive work of dividing the sleepers into individuals becomes the work of drawing them together through the consciousness and the transformative dream-vision of the poet. As the poem concludes, the sleepers rest "hand in hand," unified and beautiful in sleep, and the poet passes from night into day [Whitman 1855, 76–7].
"Elements merge in the night," Whitman writes in "The Sleepers." "The antipodes, and every one between this and them in the dark, / I swear they are averaged now . . . . one is no better than the other, / The night and sleep have likened them and restored them" [Whitman 1855, 75]. If the work of descriptive markup or the creation of distinct entities as part of XML namespace vocabularies involves breaking things down into parts, dreamspace might serve as an impetus to imagine ways of bringing them back together — or to recognize the artificiality of their separation. Like night in "The Sleepers," dreamspace enables the existence, or the imagination of the existence, of two simultaneous possibilities: a difference and a cosmic averaging. Dreamspace brooks mathematical experimentation, perhaps because its elements and entities are defined contingently, in relation to deep, incomprehensible forces — not the natural forces of physics and institutional agency that guide the elements and entities of waking life, but something more inward-looking and subjective. In Whitman's dreamspace, imaginative forays begin to mediate difference, bridging the gap between entities, even those posed as binary opposites. Transformability has both conceptual and material dimensions for Whitman, informing his dreams of poetic identification as well as his practices of revision and bookmaking.
If the digital humanities represents a field in which the logics of programming and machines are called upon to revise the patterns of humanistic and philosophical inquiry, where multiple namespaces may coexist and serve co-articulated purposes, perhaps dreamspace can be cast as a foil to the functional side of programming, an invocation of the vocabulary of experimentation, of margins, of imagination, and of failure. In an essay on the methodological potentials of repair, Steven Jackson casts breakdown as a starting point in thinking about new media. Noting the role of shipbreaking in Bangladesh, where the raw materials of old ships are recycled into usable products, Jackson situates failure as one stage in a longer story, one in which breakdown and decay form constitutive components of existence in the twenty-first century, and in which imagination and reconfiguration are key to building sustainable practice [Jackson 2014].
In science and technology worlds, failure (in moderation) has long held a special status. As journalists and media scholars have pointed out, the vision of failure as a preliminary step in success continues to be lionized in the "fail fast, fail often" mantra associated with Silicon Valley, however well the mantra corresponds to actual conditions of employment and production.[22] Stories of failure in a rapidly developing media world have an analogue in the newspapers and periodicals of the nineteenth-century. Frank Luther Mott's histories of early American newspapers and magazines showcase the way such productions went under with sometimes bewildering regularity. Newspapers were not the only industry full of folds, of course — Scott Sandage, tracing the ubiquitous failures of merchants in the nineteenth-century U.S., notes that "in addition to those who went broke or bankrupt, thousands of businessmen teetered on the brink for years" [Sandage 2005, 7]. Failure, according to Sandage, is the substory of the idea that came to be known as the American Dream. Constituting a central part of stories and experiences of life in the U.S., but never quite fitting into the vision the republic had of itself, failure lingered uncomfortably at the boundaries of success and identity for the American nineteenth century.
In the economic sense that would be associated with failure in the nineteenth-century United States, Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass , self-published in 1855, was undeniably a failure. An unusual book in both size and manufacture, the first edition of Leaves lacked a formal publisher and was set in type between other non-literary jobs at Andrew Rome's Brooklyn printing shop. Whitman's friend Horace Traubel reported in With Walt Whitman in Camden that "W[hitman] spoke about the first edition of the Leaves: 'It is tragic — the fate of those books. None of them were sold — practically none — perhaps one or two, perhaps not even that many. We had only one object — to get rid of the books — to get them out someway even if they had to be given away'" [Traubel 1906-96, 1:92].[23]
Today, copies of Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass are listed for sale at prices that range from $50,000 to $270,000.[24] The books that once failed to sell are now the most expensive and sought-after of the editions of Leaves of Grass . Failure has a place in the narrative of literary production, which like that of technology often centers on dreams, succession, and innovation. For Whitman, the arc of the future and its changing literary preferences fueled the popularity of his work over a century and a half of massive historical and technological changes. In the wake of a transformation in the value readers found in the poems that comprised his Leaves of Grass , the first edition has re-emerged as a site of interest. Its rarity, combined with critical and popular consensus about the value of Whitman's poems, has helped to make it one of the most expensive books of American literature on the market today. In the same economic sense that once rendered it a failure, one might say that the 1855 Leaves of Grass has become a resounding success.
Discussions of the digital humanities, too, are threaded throughout with tales of failure. Failures in the collection of essays titled A New Companion to Digital Humanities , updated in 2016, include the failures of collaboration [Edmond 2016], of fabrication [Sayers et al. 2016], of interdisciplinarity [McCarty 2016], of technology/hardware, of the imaginers of design fictions to account for humanities concerns about ethics and culture [Jørgensen 2016], of data to interoperate, of the search string to correspond exactly with the search meaning, and so on. Happily, in none of these cases is failure conceived as a reason not to attempt. Indeed, the failure often produces different insights and, in some cases, visions with more comprehensive impact.
Whitman splintered his poetry and prose into pieces, but like the shipbreakers he also brought it back together again in diverse and imaginative ways. One of his friends, Harrison S. Morris, recollected a story about the poet:
He said an idea would strike him which, after mature thought, he would consider fit to be the "special theme" of a "piece." This he would revolve in his mind in all its phases, and finally adopt, setting it down crudely on a bit of paper, — the back of an envelope or any scrap, — which he would place in an envelope. Then he would lie in wait for any other material which might bear upon or lean toward that idea, and, as it came into his mind, he would put it on paper and place it in the same envelope. After he had quite exhausted the supply of suggestions, or had a sufficient number to interpret the idea withal, he would interweave them in a "piece," as he called it. I asked him about the arrangement or succession of the slips, and he said, "They always fall properly into place." ((Qtd. in Kennedy [1896], 24))
Did Whitman ever think about failure, as he scratched out lines, cut and pasted, shuffled scraps in envelopes, relying on, in place of the muse, the seemingly mutual co-determinative pull of randomness and data? Do we think of failure as we gather, create, and transform data, trying not to let the questions determine the answers, trying not to let the machine be too much a reflection of our own biases and preconceptions? Is there any creative or analytical work that is not haunted by failure?
As he walks the shore, the poet of Whitman's "Bardic Symbols" ponders the deposits of the waves, "In the ruin, the sediment, that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe." The detritus or sediment cast onto the shore is not random (being at least in part the product of known and ordered industries or natural phenomena like shipbuilding, trade, and weather). Neither is it fully recognizable. The poet laments his inability to understand the meaning of the debris — "Oh, I think I have not understood anything, — not a single object, — and that no man ever can!" The signs or bardic symbols represent a momentary configuration, but also a cosmic and historical culmination. Recognition in this poem occurs when the poet stops trying to read, to find a pre-determined meaning, and embraces the transformative work of metaphor.
Struck shortly into "Bardic Symbols" by an "old thought of likenesses," the poet begins to think about poetry as he observes the detritus. "Bardic Symbols" becomes a poem about printing and inscription as much as it is about a poet observing the sea. "I wish I could impress others," the speaker begins, using language drawn from the technology of inscription of his time — the printed impression, the pressure of metal type on the page exerted by the printing press. Later, in an ecstasy of recognition, he exclaims "I, too, leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped island!" and concludes by looking up from the page to the reader:
We, capricious, brought hither, we know not whence, spread out before you, —
you, up there, walking or sitting,
Whoever you are, — we, too, lie in drifts at your feet.
Capricious, brought hither, through space and time, the drifts take the shape of the inked characters on the page or — now — the pixels or dots on the screen. The "semiotic ecology" of poetry encompasses the cast-off detritus of the ocean as well as of print, and all the forms future likenesses take [Drucker 2013, 74]. Whitman's drift, a complicated co-articulation of randomness and intentionality, offers a proleptic vision of digital textuality.[25]
"Seized by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot:" Re-scripting Race
Guided by transformability and repair, we might break Whitman's "Sleepers" back down into draft segments and imagine them further, beyond the familiar ground of TEI and namespaces, into Python, one of today's most powerful and widely used programming languages.[26] Like Emily Dickinson's description of reading poems backward, seized by Samuels and McGann as a provocation for deformance, transforming or translating poetry into a programming script defamiliarizes elements of both, opening the door — or unscrewing it entirely — inviting insights at the intersection of digital and poetic logics.[27] With particular force, this operation helps to demonstrate the ways in which what Ivy Wilson has described as "the presence of African Americans — suspended between the material and the apparitional, as it were — within the poetic space of [Whitman's] verse and other writings" could be made to speak back to both the containment of Black U.S. citizens and deterministic, abstract narratives of technological development [Wilson 2014a, ix].
The culminating dramatic moment in the poem that would be titled "The Sleepers," more dramatic in the form of one of several manuscript drafts, has a striking conditional:
I am a hell-name and a Curse:
The Black Lucifer was not dead;
Or if he was, I am his sorrowful, terrible heir
Manuscript draft of lines eventually used in "The Sleepers." Papers of Walt Whitman, 1838-1987. Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.
From the narrative present of the poem, the speaker looks back to a past time: "Black Lucifer was not dead." As Ed Folsom has written, the possible sources for Whitman's Lucifer are many, from the Biblical Isaiah's reference to "a fallen king of Babylon,...a reference that led to the mistaken notion that Lucifer was the fallen angel from heaven, Satan," to an ignitable match, to a nineteenth-century Webster's Dictionary description of Lucifer as "the planet Venus, when appearing as the morning star" [Folsom 2001] [Folsom 2000, 49]. Folsom notes that in one early notebook, "Whitman lists gods, including Lucifer, who are defined as 'made up of all that opposes hinders, obstructs, revolts'" [Folsom 2000, 48]. Lucifer was not dead, the poet-historian, poet-interpreter, asserts — only to undercut the assertion. Or if he was... Neatly bifurcating historical or spiritual time with a possibility, the poet-historian-slave follows one conditional path and moves confidently into the present: "I am his sorrowful, terrible heir."
Folsom situates this manuscript as one of several draft versions in which the speaker ceases to speak for the enslaved person and instead speaks as the enslaved person, in a culminating act of identification. The deleted line in this draft shows the speaker beginning with a declaration of identity that is at once naming and invective: "a hell-name and a Curse."[28] The fracture or bifurcation of historical/spiritual time introduces the capacity for the speaker to transform, fully, into the divine. As (possible) heir of Black Lucifer, the speaker becomes "the God of Revolt — deathless sorrowful vast." The draft moves then into the future: "I will either destroy themhim or theyhe shall release me."
The published versions of the lines that appeared in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass incorporate several revisions, among them the first word of the "Lucifer" line:
Now Lucifer was not dead . . . . or if he was I am his sorrowful terrible heir;
I have been wronged . . . . I am oppressed . . . . I hate him that oppresses me,
I will either destroy him, or he shall release me.
[Whitman 1855, 74]
Whitman's substitution of "Now" for "Black" is one example of his removal of explicit references to race that appeared in the manuscripts.[29] Functioning as a transitional word, "Now" emphasizes the temporal disjunction of this passage, moving to a new section of dreamspace in this poem about sleepers. But it also opens the door to another apparitional development: the historical moment and the institution of slavery have provoked an emergence that resurrects the God of Revolt, as undead (deathless) or in the form of succession.
The revision between manuscript draft and published poem situates the lines within the larger temporal frame of the poem, which flits, dreamlike, among past, present, and future. Other words already in the draft describe the complicated conditions of both genealogical and temporal succession. The operators in the lines of this manuscript — OR, IF — form the axes of legibility for many programming languages. If these lines were a script written in Python, they might look like:
def us_slavery(year):
year = int(year)
if 1619 <= year <= 1863:
self = 'enslaved'
self = 'free'
return self
def heir(I):
I = 'his sorrowful, terrible heir'
def lucifer(state):
I = 'self'
if state == 'no':
lucifer = 'Black_Lucifer'
return lucifer
I = heir(I)
def sleepers():
I = 'hell-name'
self = 'Curse'
year = int(input('What year is it? '))
self = us_slavery(year)
if 1849 <= year < 1881:
state = input('Was Black Lucifer dead? ')
I = lucifer(state)
if I != 'Black_Lucifer':
print('I am',I)
I = ['the God of Revolt','deathless','sorrowful','vast']
for i in I:
if not self:
print('REVOLT')
elif year >=1881:
print('A show of the summer softness\na contact of something unseen\nan amour of the
light and air')
elif 1776 <=year < 1849:
print('We hold these truths to be self-evident\nthat all men are created
equal')
print('Replica of the Great Hole of history')
sleepers()
Segments of the "Sleepers" manuscript can be produced by the Python script, which enacts executable parts of the poem. Depending on the date a user enters, the execution of the script might generate parts of the draft lines of the manuscript version, or it might generate other lines completely. The parameters are time, history, and the state of existence of Black Lucifer. In this transformation, succession returns to somewhere just short of its biological roots: Lucifer's conditional successor is a function and a refraction of American slavery. As a "hell-name and a Curse," Lucifer or his heir is handed down across borders of time and space, iterations of manuscript and print, evolutions of communicative machinery, to emerge briefly and dramatically in a peculiar, failed, breakthrough book of American poetry — or on your computer screen.
The kinship of languages is framed as relations of history (origin, reproduction), but recast as a matter of space, execution, and transformation within the specific, limited temporality of the script, or of dreamspace, or of the boundaries of the logics declared in our interpretations. The program points to the significance and the operability of the conditional. The poem points to the significance and the inoperability of the past tense. For the loop, something is or is not. "Was" is not operable or definable within the space of the loop. It could be argued that it is enacted by the space outside the loop, and the variables are handed down. But what must come outside the loop to begin to approximate the meaning? The entire history of U.S. slavery and oppression, condensed into a series of expressions? Would they be definitions, or descriptions, or conditionals?
That computers can draw critical attention to patterns that sometimes go overlooked by the human eye has formed the appeal behind many digital methods. One of the most powerful characteristics of computational analysis tools like text mining classification algorithms is that they can be trained or tweaked by programmers based on specific data or results sets. Can the attention of researchers also be trained to look more closely at the kinds of words that machines would find actionable or significant?[31] What would it mean to experiment with training as a mutual process, a kind of projection by a human into a computational mode of processing? In a world of posthumanist criticism, the insights of macroanalysis may be used to conduct even closer readings — to see the value in Whitman's "the" and his "or" as well as his "leaves" and his "grass." Such attention may, as Matthew Wilkins has noted, "suggest that there's a low-level linguistic basis for the category distinctions we've long been inclined to draw." It might also help us to produce new readings of well-traveled passages.
Book historians and bibliographers have demonstrated that the formal and linguistic interference of the editor is a crucial component of the afterlife of the work, and therefore its continued life in time. "Acts of translation and editing are especially useful forms of critical reflection," McGann writes, "because they so clearly invade and change their subjects in material ways" [McGann 2016, 368]. The heart of the way text is increasingly imagined today — the product of our data-vision — is its transformability. This transformability is a matter of succession, but not always of success. Whitman, an early exponent of modularity or transformability as a fundamental characteristic of textual production, serves as an instructive precursor. His transformational approach is visible in the scraps he shuffled in envelopes, the many editions of Leaves of Grass , and his re-making of books more generally.
Programming, perhaps for everyone, but particularly for those of us not formally trained in the art, becomes a study in errors. In writing the sleepers.py script, I encountered a series of errors:
TypeError: us_slavery() missing 2 required positional arguments: 'self' and 'year'
NameError: name 'slave' is not defined
NameError: name 'I' is not defined
File "sleepers.py", line 21, in sleepers
lucifer = Black_Lucifer
NameError: name 'Black_Lucifer' is not defined
lucifer = lucifer(input("Was Black Lucifer dead? "))
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'lucifer' referenced before assignment
The errors — TypeErrors, NameErrors, UnboundLocalErrors — that I produced in the making of sleepers.py mostly had to do with variables, either undefined or not included as part of the execution of a function that required them. In the case of a finished, working script, of course — or a script developed by an experienced, trained programmer — one may be less likely to encounter errors. Nor is it necessarily clear after the fact, unless a log or versioning system is associated with the development and made accessible as a complement to the resource, that they existed. Such data often fades into an invisible history of development, or it vanishes by virtue of being overwhelmed by an avalanche of incremental changes, commits, updates, migrations, transformations, deletions, and additions.[32] In this case, perhaps as a conceit, one might argue that the errors formed a layer of the transformation, the undefinedness of the variable part of its poetic interpretation. The missing definitions represent segments of American history as it is performed in Whitman's poems: the specific identity of the reader, the ambiguity of the designations of "slave" and "I." Somewhere between the failures of the programmer and the untranslatability of the poem fragment lurks the impossible largeness of poetry, its ambiguities and its historical roots, the unexecutable complicating presence of the undefined and the undefinable.
Before the publication of the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass , Whitman returned to pages from an earlier edition to revise "The Sleepers" for republication. On those pages, Whitman created a textual event, a deletion of the "Lucifer" passage:
A page from "The Sleepers," with Whitman's edits. Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection. Library of Congress.
Editing these and other lines out of his dreamspace, Whitman produced a final version of the poem tuned to a different historical present and different priorities on the part of the poet.[33] For Whitman, it would seem, the moment for the conjunction of experimental dreamspace with historical possibility had passed. If all you looked at was the 1891, "authorized" edition of Leaves of Grass , you would never know the self of "Bardic Symbols," now titled "As I Ebb'd With the Ocean of Life," had once been eternal — or that Lucifer had ever been there at all.
Luckily, Whitman's was not the final word on the matter. Transformation is one path to the other side of determinism — a methodology that resurrects fragments, writes dysfunctional scripts, and attends to errors, absences and deletions. Media have always had to do with light and darkness, shadow and space, figures, icons, and projections. They can affect the visibility of history, passion, identification or difference. Perhaps media technologies become most apparent when the binaries break down in the act of translation, transformation, or remediation: in error, or, sometimes, in deletion. Moments at which multiple possibilities exist, suspended in space, can look suspiciously like moments of failure to the backwards glance of history: Or if he was. From this vantage point we watch Whitman on the verge, pencil in hand, weighing the path of erasure. The penciled bars of his hashmark deletion bought "The Sleepers" into a new "Now," a post-war moment in which the promise of Lucifer's heir — "I will either destroy him, or he shall release me" — may have echoed uncomfortably even for many former abolitionists, by then inclined toward reconciliation. The voice of the former slave and his descendants would continue to be locked away and suppressed from full political participation up to and beyond the emergence of Jim Crow in a series of criminal acts of silencing, violence, and oppression whose ongoing existence and implications are abundantly visible in our own time. But in that first conditional instant, that "Now" in which the God of revolt was summoned, is also success, if only in the form of the recognition that one is part of a succession, sorrowful or otherwise.
Conclusion: "I, too, Paumanok"
A 2007 PMLA special topic forum about the digital editorial project The Walt Whitman Archive exposed fundamental disagreements about the use of metaphors as substitutions for precise descriptions of digital tools.[34] Demystifying the tools, however, does not rid us of metaphors, nor of the responsibility of navigating the complicated interplay of imagination, history, language, functionality, exclusion, and desire that defines the use and development of any technology. The transformative work of metaphor continues to inform the way technology functions, as well as the ways literary scholars can put it to work. Using imagination to cast seemingly competing logics against one another, to put pressure on the resonances between the words and the workings of poetic and machine language of the past and present, is one tool among many for training the attention to linger on a particular moment in a poem or other creative work and tease out some of its existing or potential implications.
Creative transformations applied to materials made digitally available by projects like the Whitman Archive can act as provocations to think and act and edit differently. In some cases, this may be a way to explore how underrepresented populations and perspectives are addressed (or erased) in historical documents. Recognition that race, gender, and other forms of diversity have shaped the historical record is finally beginning to affect textual and technological theory in ways that are slowly filtering back into editorial approaches, the digitization of literary and historical documents, and the work of thinking about the multiple versions of those documents in relation to the many different people whose histories they often imperfectly represent.
"If an electronic scholarly project can't fail and doesn't produce new ignorance," John Unsworth wrote in a 1997 essay, "then it isn't worth a damn." The costs of failure or confessing ignorance, in the face of today's confident, practiced users of digital tools and a historically bad tenure-track academic job market in the humanities, seem unusually high. Contingent, part-time, or adjunct positions can feel an awful lot like failure, without any guarantee of transformation, productive or otherwise. The current funding situation for the humanities and, increasingly, for education more broadly, is easily tied to the worst human motives — greed, racism, nativism, fear — and the darkest political prospects. Redefining the goals and parameters of success and failure for any project may be particularly necessary at such a time. Somewhere in theorizations like Sedgwick's, or in Jackson's repair, may be a glimmer of light, in the form of a call for the work of maintaining projects to become visible, for a broader notion of "success" to make that phenomenon visible in more places, for transformations of fields and texts to create the space for new voices and insights, and for the role of creation to be recognized in forms of labor other than authorship or innovation.
Is it time for the digital humanities to fail? As the humanities increasingly engages computation as a practice fundamental to the production of scholarship, or as the field called the digital humanities continues to splinter into method-specific approaches, we might resolutely cultivate one of its most exciting vectors: the emergence of a recuperative, radically experimental critical mode. In this mode, the imagination that fuels transformability is key, and failure holds a place of crucial importance. As Whitman's "self" became electrified over the course of the nineteenth-century manifestations of "Bardic Symbols," so might we find in the digital detritus of our own day an electrifying vision of the future, a set of new critical possibilities to build out of the ships and the shipwrecks of history, as well as the transformable lines of poetry and prose to which they give rise.
My thanks to Brett Barney, Matt Cohen, Mike Cohen, Ken Price, and Steve Ramsay for their thoughtful comments on drafts of this essay. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
[1] On this phenomenon as perception and as evolving actuality, see Kirschenbaum (2010) and (2012)
[2] This criticism has prompted a series of conversations about postcolonial, feminist, and queer digital humanities, as well as meditations on the possible complicity of digital methods with neoliberal agendas. See #transformDH and #DHpoco for examples of the former; for the latter, see Allington et al. (2016) and Greenspan's (2019) response.
[3] Bailey writes that "The move 'from margin to center' offers the opportunity to engage new sets of theoretical questions that expose implicit assumptions about what and who counts in digital humanities as well as exposes structural limitations that are the inevitable result of an unexamined identity politics of whiteness, masculinity, and ablebodiness." [Bailey 2011]
[4] Websites for SpecLab and the Applied Research in Patacriticism group are now defunct, though legacy versions are accessible through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. See Samuels and McGann's development of the term "deformance" in relation to critical interpretation, editing, and translation, and elaborations by McGann ( Radiant Textuality ) and Drucker ( SpecLab ). Later work by scholars and artists like Nick Montfort, Mez Breeze, and Alan Sondheim offers other examples of the creativity that has emerged at the intersection of art and algorithms. For further discussion of codework, the integration of programming syntax and creative expression, see Raley (2002).
[5] QueerOS is a notable recent example of this kind of imaginative work (see Barnett et al. [2016]). Play was proposed as a methodology for #DHpoco, as well; see Koh and Risam.
[6] The "emphasis was placed on de- rather than transformance," McGann writes, "in order to show that the object of critical reflection is not ultimately directed to the sign as such but to the rhetorical scene and its functional (social) operators, not least of all the person(s) engaged in the acts of deformance we commonly locate in a file headed 'Interpretation'" [McGann 2001, 102].
[7] See Klammer (2006); Folsom (2000) and Folsom (2014); and Mancuso (1997).
[8] See Latour (1988) and McKenzie (1999), respectively.
[9] Ramsay's algorithmic criticism is an effort to "locate a hermeneutics at the boundary between mechanism and theory" that explores transformation as key to the generation of humanities "data" [Ramsay 2011]. Sedgwick's reparative reading continues to offer a provocative possibility of thinking beyond (even computer) binaries, in part because it suggests that the fact that boundaries may structure our world in fundamental ways need not determine the kinds of actions or thoughts that must be taken in relation to or as a function of that knowledge [Sedgwick 2003]
[10] The first substantive revision to the second line appeared in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass : "Alone, held by this eternal self of me, out of the pride of which I have utter'd my poems" [Whitman 1867, 331]. See Gilmore (2009) for a discussion of the electrical and technological developments that underpinned the transformation of the poem titled "Poem of the Body" in 1856 to "I Sing the Body Electric" in 1867 and later editions.
[11] The use of XML has been questioned, and in several cases alternatives proposed (see e.g. Schloen and Schloen [2014]), but as inline or embedded markup it remains a common approach to encoding data and a standard for digital scholarly editing.
[12] See Liddell-Scott-Jones. Biblical commentary has explored the meaning of λόγος in the context of John 1:1 ("In the beginning was the Word..."). See, e.g., Jeffrey and Morris (1992) and Vincent (1889).
[13] These include XSL-FO, XSLT, and XPath [XSL W3C].
[14] This language of succession was inherited from earlier markup and stylesheet languages: the development of XSL syntax was influenced by SGML and its stylesheet language DSSSL, which in turn had been based on earlier programming and query languages. On the history and development of XSL, see Kay (2008), 26-40, and "Transformation." For a general discussion of lineal trees (and other metaphors) in relation to algorithms and computational data structures, and within a longer history of graph theory, see Knuth (1973), 305-406.
[15] For further discussion of Whitman's collaging as fundamental to his poetry composition, see Miller (2010).
[16] In an entry in With Walt Whitman in Camden dated July 31, 1888, Horace Traubel noted as much: "W. has an idea of putting the Hicks-Fox matter eventually into a special pamphlet. Made many changes of the make-up in order to get the Hicks started on an odd page. This is one of his memorandums to the printer: 'begin making up Elias Hicks on page 119 I will supply something for page 118'" [Traubel 1906-96, 2:64]. For another example of sheets that Whitman published independently and had bound into other volumes, see the entry for Passage to India (1871) in Winship (1991), 36.
[17] See Winship (1991), Myerson (1993), Stallybrass (2019), and Grossman (2019) for inventories and descriptions of Whitman's publications and printed slips. This comparison is not meant to gloss over Tara McPherson's important points about the racial and political implications of the "lenticular" logic of modularity and interoperability in the development of modern computing [McPherson 2012].
[18] The poem is untitled (or assigned the recurring title "Leaves of Grass") in the 1855 edition. It appeared in the 1856 Leaves of Grass as "Night Poem" and in the 1860-1 and 1867 editions as "Sleep-Chasings." It was first titled "The Sleepers" in 1871.
[19] For a discussion of this poem and related manuscript drafts, see Folsom (2001).
[20] A murder is juxtaposed to dream and sleeping scenes in Whitman's temperance novel "Franklin Evans."
[21] See, for instance, French (1990).
[22] See, for instance, Surowiecki (2014), Draper (2017), and Newman (2017). See also Liu (2004a).
[23] Whitman probably exaggerated here, as often in his discussions with Traubel.
[24] Estimates are based on prices and sales figures for copies listed on AbeBooks.com and sold at rare book auctions between 2018 and 2020.
[25] On Whitman's concept of drift and its relation to the distribution and circulation of his writing, see Cohen (2017).
[26] GitHub's 2019 "Octoverse Report" ranked Python as the second most-used language in Git repositories, based on number of unique contributors [Zhou 2019]. Python, like other programming languages and software platforms, has recently begun to reckon with its metaphors. See Oberhaus (2018) on the use and removal of the terms "master" and "slave." These terms have long been used (and recently, in some cases, deprecated) in other engineering and computational contexts, including as references to central and backup servers, primary and secondary drives, and primary and replica databases. For further discussion, see Eglash (2007) and Landau (2020).
[27] Samuels and McGann quote Dickinson's note, from "an undated fragment on a leaf of stationery:" "Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have–a Something overtakes the Mind–" [Samuels and McGann 1999, 26].
[28] Whitman works through this line in other drafts. For a complete list of transcriptions of the known drafts of these lines, see Gray (ed.; 2020) line 1775 https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1855/variorum/main.html#l1775.
[29] See Folsom (2014); Price (2004), 17-18; and Sandler (2014), 71-74.
[30] For the line elif year>=1881:, if the user enters a year later than or equal to 1881, she returns another line from the version of "The Sleepers" published in the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass , since the "Lucifer" lines are no longer present. For the line elif 1776 <=year <1849:, if the user enters a year after the date of U.S. independence (1776) and prior to the approximate earliest probable date of the manuscript (1849), she returns a line from the Declaration of Independence. On the final print command, see Parks (1995), 159.
[31] For text mining purposes, as Jockers and Underwood point out, "we know from years of authorship-attribution research that the most effective features for distinguishing one author's style from another's are high-frequency features such as the words 'the,' 'of,' 'him,' 'her,' and 'and,' as well as common marks of punctuation" [Jockers and Underwood 2016, 293].
[32] On the role of this kind of invisibility in the capitalistic exploitation of creativity, see Liu (2004b).
[33] For a discussion of this deletion and other omissions as related to Whitman's increasing concern about the role of Blacks in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction U.S., see Folsom (2000), 52-77. See also Klammer (2006). Whitman deleted other sections from the poem, as well: see, for instance, the two sections beginning "O hot-cheek'd and blushing! O foolish hectic!"
[34] See Folsom (2007); McGann (2007); and Hayles (2007).
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Amen, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
Glory to you, O Lord our God, Your love calls us to be your people. By sharing our many and diverse gifts we share in your mission. We ask you, Lord, to shape us into a community of faith. Nourish us by your word and sacraments that we may grow into the image of Jesus. Through the power of your Holy Spirit, heal us that we, in turn, may heal the wounded. Form us to be instruments of love, justice, and peace in our land, and send us to proclaim your saving work.
RENEW us, Lord, that we may renew the face of the earth, and when you do come to claim your people, we may gain the eternal merit won by Christ.
the author of all that is good.
others shall be an everlasting horror and disgrace.
2 2 Macc 7:14; cf. 7:29; Dan 12:1-13.
3 Jn 5:29; cf. Dan 12:2.
The Church begins and ends her liturgical year with lessons that remind us of our end and the end of the world. In the new liturgical arrangement, the Feast of Christ the King is celebrated on the last Sunday of the year and therefore the Church places the reminder of death, judgement and resurrection on this the penultimate Sunday. Today's reading from the Book of Daniel puts before our eyes the fact that this world will have an end marked by great upheavals and disasters. However, these will be followed immediately by a new and everlasting existence. This new life will be one of unending joy and happiness for those who are found worthy. For the others who did not think of it or prepare for it, it will be a life of unending shame and sorrow.
Here, surely, we have a solemn reminder of what is ahead of us and of what we ought to do about it. Every businessman worthy of the name annually takes a serious look at his business affairs to see how he stands. If he finds that all is going well he resolves to continue or to improve things if improvement is possible. If his business is going down, he will search for the causes of this decline and resolve to do all in his power to check the defects that are causing the decline. Today, we are all called on to make this stock-taking of our progress or decline. Our duty to have this stock-taking is of infinitely greater importance than that of the businessman. If his business fails it is not the end of him, he can find other ways of making a living. He has other options open to him. If we fail to be prepared for heaven, we have no second chance, our failure is final and for all eternity.
This is a thought that should make us stop and think. We have one life only on earth—a life of a few short years. Our real life, the eternal life of happiness or misery depends on how we spend these years on earth. We can waste them and arrive empty-handed at the end of our journey, or we can spend them well and hear the welcome words: "Come you blessed of my Father, possess the kingdom prepared for you," when we die. To which class would we like to belong when our end on earth comes? The choice and the answer is entirely in our hands, no one can make this decision for us. Our dearest and nearest will be helpless in this regard. Generously and gladly God will help us but we must cooperate with that help. In baptism he has already given us our passport to heaven. Each day in the sacraments and prayers of his Church he is offering us the necessary travel expenses. Again and again through his ministers he advises us to stay on the right road, but all in vain if we refuse to accept these gifts.
The rules of the road to heaven, the regulations which God asks us to keep, are not severe sacrifices or tasks beyond our power to fulfill. His ten commandments are not impossible or unreasonable restrictions, but rather rules which make life on earth civilized and happy. Where they are observed we have peace and harmony between neighbors and nations. Where the Fatherhood of God is revered and kept in mind, the brotherhood of man is recognized and his rights respected, there is true fraternity on earth. Somebody has said that if God did not exist it would be necessary for us to invent him–if life on earth was to be livable. But he does exist and in his goodness and mercy he has made life on earth livable and reasonably enjoyable–by laying down the sound rules which should govern our lives as rational creatures.
God is not a tyrant who will take pleasure in punishing those who ignore him and his laws. Rather is he a loving Father who wants all his children to share his eternal happiness. Therefore, his laws are not imposed on us as restrictions and burdens but as helps to guide us safely to our eternal home.
Today's lesson from Daniel is one of God's ways of reminding the forgetful ones of him and their own eternal destiny. Let them wake up and take stock of how they stand in relation to God; are they on the right road or are they wandering in the wilderness from whence they may never return?
there is no longer offering for sin.
CCC 1544 Everything that the priesthood of the Old Covenant prefigured finds its fulfillment in Christ Jesus, the "one mediator between God and men."1 The Christian tradition considers Melchizedek, "priest of God Most High," as a prefiguration of the priesthood of Christ, the unique "high priest after the order of Melchizedek";2 "holy, blameless, unstained,"3 "by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified,"4 that is, by the unique sacrifice of the cross.
2 Heb 5:10; cf. 6:20; Gen 14:18.
"By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity." This prayer, which the priest says when mixing a drop of water with the wine in the chalice at the offertory of the Mass, gives in a nutshell the profound meaning that the incarnation of Christ has for us. The drop of water is our human nature; it is absorbed in the wine–the divine infinity; and it shares in the incredible glory of becoming the precious blood of Christ. When the Son of God took our human nature, he made us capable of becoming sharers in the eternal glory, and happiness of the Infinite God.
If only we could fully realize what the loving God has done for us through the sending of his Son to "dwell among us," we would never stop praising, thanking and loving him. We are mere creatures, higher than all the other creatures on this earth because of the extra gifts he gave us–but still mere creatures–nothing in comparison with the omnipotent and infinite God. Out of an infinite goodness which our minds cannot even begin to grasp, he raised us up to the status of adopted children. He had no need of us, he did not require our company or our adoration, he is infinitely perfect and happy in himself. Yet, out of sheer benevolence he wished to confer on us a gift which we are to value and appreciate with our intelligence and freewill–but a gift which we could never even dream of expecting.
To give us the gift the incarnation took place: "the word was made flesh and dwelt among us." Christ became our brother; we became, through him, adopted sons of God and therefore heirs to heaven. The sins of mankind which had corrupted the world brought about the death of Christ on the cross–"a death he freely accepted." Through that death and as our representative and senior brother, he made a perfect atonement to God the Father for all our sins. His triumph over sin and death was our triumph; ever since his ascension, the incarnate Son of God is in the seat of glory in heaven, interceding for us sinners; he is preparing a place for us, his brothers, which will be ours when life on this earth ends.
Therefore, there is no comparison, as the epistle to the Hebrews stresses, between the intercession that the Levitical priesthood could make for the Chosen People of the Old Testament, and the intercession that Christ has made and continues to make for us. The sacrifices they offered were but shadows and symbols of the real sacrifice offered by Christ. Any value which they had derived from the true sacrifice which was to come. The members of the Chosen People who did God's will earned heaven through the merits of Christ and only after his ascension. Because of God's loving generosity these infinite merits of Christ were applied to all Jews and Gentiles, who, before Christ, lived according to their lights. They will be applied to all who have lived since his incarnation, provided they act according to the revealed or the natural knowledge of God which is given them.
We know this and our gratitude to God should be boundless. The years left to us on earth are long enough to enable us to earn eternity. Those who have weaknesses, temptations and trials must never forget that they are not on their own; they are not left to fend for themselves, they have Christ, their brother, in heaven pleading with the Father of mercies on their behalf. With such an advocate, with such a defending counsel, we cannot lose our inheritance, provided we do our best to be true and loyal to him. God grant that we shall never be among the ungrateful ones but rather that we may willingly and gladly cooperate with God to earn the eternal merit won by Christ.
4 Acts 1:7; Cf. Mk 13:32.
5 Cf. Mt 24:44; I Th 5:2; 2 Th 2:3-12.
7 Cf. Mk 13; Lk 21:34-36.
8 Cf. Lk 22:40, 46.
There are some obscurities in this extract from St. Mark. Firstly, because Christ was discussing and answering questions on two distinct topics: the destruction of the temple and the end of the world. Secondly, because we may not have the "ipsissima verba" of Christ here, as many exegetes suggest. The message we must learn from today's gospel comes across without any ambiguity or doubt: we must always be ready to face our judgement for we know not the day nor the hour when we will be called from this life. When or how this world will end is of no great importance to us; what is important is that we shall leave this world very soon and our eternity will depend on the state of our consciences at the moment of our departure.
This is the steadying thought the Church, in her wisdom, wishes to put before our minds today. We all know that we must die someday. We are strangers and pilgrims on this earth; we have not here a lasting city, as St. Augustine says. No sane person among us will try to deny this and yet, many of us are so immersed in the things of this world that we forget or try to forget that we must leave this world soon. This is very natural: life is a precious gift and as our earthly life is the only one of which we have experience our every inclination is to hold on to it at all costs. Even when our intelligence tells us that it can, in spite of all our endeavors, end very soon we try to convince ourselves that that "very soon" is really in the distant future.
We have God's word for it and the example of Christ's resurrection to a life of glory. Let us appreciate the truth that our death on earth is not the end of life but rather the beginning of the true life that will never end. As the liturgy says in the Mass for the Dead: "Life is changed (by death) not taken away." Our death is the doorway through which we pass into the unending life. The years on earth are a gift of God to enable us to earn the infinitely greater gift which in his loving mercy he has prepared for us from all eternity.
God in his mercy is calling on each one of us to be ready when our call comes. We can do nothing about the when or the where of that call, but we can do much about the state of our relationship with God when death comes; in fact, aided by God's grace we can ensure that all will be well with us. We cannot avoid a sudden death, but we can avoid an unprepared death by striving always to live in peace with God. This does not mean that we must be always on our knees praying to God and that we must take no interest in the things and the joys of this world. Far from it. God wants us to use the things of this world, but to use them so that they will not hinder us on our journey.
A very practical way to see how we stand in relation to God and to the things of this world, is for each one of us to ask himself today: "How would I fare if I were called to render an account of stewardship tonight?" This is the practical question that God, through today's readings, is asking us to put to ourselves. If, to our dismay, we find there are several things which have to be put right before facing our judge we will start right away to put them right. We may get another chance, another warning, and we may not. If we value our eternal happiness we will take this warning; we will put our books in order; we will make peace with God and our neighbors–and with God's grace we will do all in our power to persevere in this good resolution.
It is not simply – as one might expect – God, the infinite, the unknown, the eternal, who judges. On the contrary, he has handed the judgement over to one who, as man, is our brother. It is not a stranger who judges us but he whom we know in faith. The judge will not advance to meet us as the other, but as one of us, who knows human existence from inside and has suffered. Thus over the judgment glows the dawn of hope; it is not only the day of wrath but also the second coming of our Lord. One is reminded of the mighty vision of Christ with which the Book of Revelation begins (1: 9-19): the seer sinks down as though dead before this being full of sinister power. But the Lord lays his hand on him and says to him as once in the days when they were crossing the Lake of Gennesaret in wind and storm: "Fear not, it is I" (1: 17). The Lord of all power is the Jesus whose comrade the visionary had once been in faith. The Creed's article about the judgment transfers this very idea to our meeting with the judge of the world. On that day of fear the Christian will be allowed to see in happy wonder that he "to whom all power is given in heaven and on earth" (Mt 28: 18) was the companion in faith of his days on earth, and it is as if through the words of the Creed Jesus were already laying his hands on him and saying: Be without fear, it is I. Perhaps the problem of the intertwining of justice and mercy can be answered in no more beautiful way than that it is the idea that stands in the background of our Creed.
O good and tender Mother, thou shalt ever be our hope and the object of our love.
O Mother of God, send forth the holy Angels to defend me and drive far from me the cruel foe.
Holy Angels and Archangels, defend us and keep us.
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Baby Barbie and her younger sister, Susan, adore pulling off matching fashion and make-up looks! They always manage to get loads of attention with their equally pretty, equally chic looks, you know. Well, for this evening's outing at the cinema, with some friends from school, the two cute sisters are relying on you to help them look... equally adorably chic! Start their makeover by applying a pretty, babydoll-like make-up on baby Barbie's cute little face, then do your best to put together an identical make-up look for her younger sister, as well. Next, scan through the 2 girls' girly chic wardrobes and get them some matchy-matchy, cute fashion looks to sport at the cinema!


The challenges of finding a mentor in the professional world are well-known and greater for female attorneys and doctors. In Afghanistan, where cultural norms prevent men from mentoring the driven young women entering the legal and medicals fields, the challenges are greater still. It is these women that Gayle Zilber, former Fenwick litigation associate and current Mentor Program Director at the Alliance for International Women's Rights, spends her days helping.
In her current role, Gayle connects American mentors with Afghani mentees in the legal and medical fields. Mentors help with English language development, advise on conventions, systems and rules within the legal or medical fields and assist mentees with preparing applications, understanding cases and the like. With her own mentees, Gayle frequently imparts the knowledge she gained at Fenwick about effective communications and efficient legal research and analysis.


Editors of Sundial: Lawrence Susskind (vol. 1, nos. 1–3); William B. Bonvillian (vol. 2, nos. 1, 2); Richard Sulken (vol. 2, no. 3–vol. 3, no. 1).
Sundial, vol. 1, no. 1–vol. 3, no. 1 (Spring 1966–Spring/Summer 1969).
SUN, vol. 3, no. 2/3– vol. 5, no. 1 (Summer 1971–1983).
SUN supersedes Sundial with its Summer 1971 issue (vol. 3, no. 2/3) and continues its numbering sequence.
Five issues of Roy Rogers were published as giveaway spinoffs of Sundial between May 1967 and ca. May or June 1968. Two larger and unnumbered issues were later published in 1970 and 1974.
SUN, vol. 3, no. 2/3 (Summer 1971).
Sundial, vol. 2, no. 1 (Winter 1968).
Sundial was funded by the Protestant Episcopal Office in Earl Hall, and featured dynamic graphic design and an eclectic approach that opened its pages not only to Columbia students but to anybody connected to the school. When the Rev. William Starr officiated at the marriage of two protestors occupying one of the university buildings in the spring of 1968, the Episcopal Diocese pulled the money for the magazine and other programs. I had come up through the ranks, from staff member to poetry editor to editor—but suddenly found myself without funds to bring out an issue.
Eventually I scraped up some money, changed the name of the magazine to SUN, and put out several more issues. After getting out numbers that each totaled 250 pages plus, I found myself perplexed when people asked me, "Hey, this is great! When's the next issue coming out?" In 1972, while still doing the magazine, I began to think out loud about book publishing, bringing out Phillip Lopate's collection of poems called The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open as a trial horse.
SUN, vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring 1974). Cover by Rudy Burckhardt.
My tastes ran to the New York School, but there was a lot to admire (and publish) all around. In 1975 I brought out four titles, including Lauds by Harvey Shapiro, my own Theories of Rain and Other Poems, and Trevor Winkfield's translation of How I Wrote Certain of My Books by Raymond Roussel—and the press took wing. We did thirty-five books in all, sometimes in hardcover and with dust jackets—mostly books of poems, but here and there a novel, a book of nonfiction, and some translations: Max Jacob's Dice Cup edited and translated by Michael Brownstein, Ron Padgett, John Ashbery, and Zack Rogow, and me; the aforementioned Roussel, in two editions; Jules Supervielle translated by George Bogin; Malcolm de Chazal translated by Irving Weiss; Francis Ponge translated by Serge Gavronsky; and Gorän Sonnevi translated by Robert Bly.
The SUN list included Phillip Lopate, Ron Padgett, Bill Knott, Marc Kaminsky, Greg Kuzma, Jaimy Gordon, Michael O'Brien, Marjorie Welish, Maureen Owen, Serge Gavronsky, Paul Auster, James Schuyler, Tony Towle, George Economou, Carolanne Ely, Robert Hershon, Barry Yourgrau, Andrei Codrescu, Peter Schjeldahl, Alan Feldman, and Paul Violi.
SUN, vol. 5, no. 1 (Winter 1983). Cover by Glen Baxter.
When in 1985 illness made it impossible for my wife Phyllis to continue working on SUN, I realized that I couldn't support us on freelance poets-in-the-schools jobs. I found publishers for the several books that were in the works, began to empty the warehouse of backstock, returned manuscripts, and exhaled deeply as I closed up the shop. (I taught high school for the next twenty-four years.) The business side of publishing never thrilled me. Though the press and the magazine were generously supported by grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, when getting and spending and paperwork got me down I used to lament, "I started life as a poet and I'm ending it as an accountant." Nevertheless I am very happy that I published so many wonderful books that I wanted to read.
Complete checklist with all contributors available as a PDF.
A spinoff of Sundial, Roy Rogers was first produced as a giveaway stapled-and-mimeographed publication to accommodate the fact that a number of writers on the Sundial staff were writing so prolifically. Five issues of the "giveway" were done between late 1966 (?) and 1967.
After I took control of Sundial and restamped the magazine with the name of SUN, I produced two much larger issues of Roy Rogers, described below.
Roy Rogers  (1970). An "All Roy Rogers" issue, in which all material pertains to the cowboy hero. Mimeographed/stapled, 44 pp.
Roy Rogers  (Winter1974). A "One Line Poems" issue, in which all contributions are of that genre. Offset/stapled, with a wraparound four-color cover designed by Hannah Wilke, 117 pp.
Roy Rogers, vol. 1, no. 1 (May 1967). A giveaway.
Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. 1982. 174 pp.
Codrescu, Andrei. Selected Poems 1970–1980. 1983. 139 pp.
de Chazal, Malcolm. Sens-Plastique. 1979. Edited and translated from the French with an introduction by Irving Weiss. 163 pp.
Economou, George. Ameriki: Book One, and Selected Earlier Poems. 1977. 102 pp.
Ely, Carolanne. Love Wounds & Multiple Fractures. 1975. 36 pp.
Feldman, Alan. The Happy Genius. 1978. 75 pp.
Gavronsky, Serge. The German Friend. 1984. 164 pp.
Gordon, Jaimy. The Bend, The Lip, The Kid: Reallife Stories. 1978. 66 pp.
Heller, Michael. Knowledge. 1979. 88 pp.
Hershon, Robert. How to Ride on the Woodlawn Express. 1985. 59 pp.
Jacob, Max. The Dice Cup: Selected Prose Poems. 1979. Edited and with an introduction by Michael Brownstein, with translations from the French by the editor, John Ashbery, David Ball, Ron Padgett, Zack Rogow, and Bill Zavatsky. 122 pp.
Kaminsky, Marc. A Table with People. 1982. 117 pp.
Knott, Bill. Selected and Collected Poems. 1977. 121 pp.
Kuzma, Greg. Of China and of Greece. 1984. 108 pp.
Lopate, Phillip. The Daily Round: New Poems. 1976. 90 pp.
Lopate, Phillip. The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open. 1972. 61 pp.
Lopate, Phillip. The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open. 1976. 61 pp. Redesigned and reprinted from 1972 edition.
O'Brien, Michael. Blue Springs: Poems. 1976. 90 pp.
O'Brien, Michael. Conversations at the West End 1966–1974. 1979. 176 pp.
Owen, Maureen. Zombie Notes. 1985. 64 pp.
Padgett, Ron. Toujours l'amour: Poems. 1976. 104 pp.
Padgett, Ron. Triangles in the Afternoon. 1979. 46 pp.
Ponge, Francis. The Sun Placed in the Abyss and Other Texts. 1977. Translated from the French with an essay and interview with Ponge by Serge Gavronsky. 101 pp.
Roussel, Raymond. How I Wrote Certain of My Books. 1975. Translated from the French with notes and a bibliography by Trevor Winkfield. 42 pp.
Roussel, Raymond. How I Wrote Certain of My Books. 1977. Translated from the French with notes and a bibliography by Trevor Winkfield. Includes two essays on Roussel by John Ashbery and a translation of Canto III of Roussel's poem "New Impressions of Africa" by Kenneth Koch. 71 pp.
Schjeldahl, Peter. Since 1964: New and Selected Poems. 1978. 116 pp.
Schuyler, James. Freely Espousing. 1979. 92 pp.
Shapiro, Harvey. Lauds: Poems. 1975. 49 pp.
Shapiro, Harvey. Lauds & Nightsounds. 1978. 97 pp.
Sonnevi, Göran. The Economy Spinning Faster and Faster: Poems. 1982. Chosen and translated from the Swedish with an introduction by Robert Bly. Includes Swedish texts. 45 pp.
Supervielle, Jules. Selected Poems and Reflections on the Art of Poetry. 1985. Translated from the French with a preface by George Bogin. Includes French texts of poems. 172 pp.
Towle, Tony. "Autobiography" and Other Poems. 1977. Copublished with Coach House South. 68 pp.
Violi, Paul. Harmatan. 1977. 65 pp.
Violi, Paul. Splurge. 1982. 81 pp.
Welish, Marjorie. Handwritten. 1979. 60 pp.
Yourgrau, Barry. A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane. 1984. 99 pp.
Zavatsky, Bill. Theories of Rain and Other Poems. 1975. 91 pp.