Jonathan Ned Katz: "Comrades and Lovers," Act I

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ENTRY IN CONSTRUCTION

Jonathan Ned Katz: "Comrades and Lovers"


ACT I
LIGHTS OFF; WHITMAN'S FIRST WORDS ARE HEARD IN THE DARK.


WHITMAN:

Love thoughts


SPEAKER 1

love-juice,


SPEAKER 2:

love-odor,


SPEAKER 3:

love-yielding,


SPEAKER 4:

love-climbers,


WHITMAN:

and the climbing sap,


SPEAKER 1:

arms and hands of love,


SPEAKER 2:

lips of love,


SPEAKER 3:

phallic thumb of love,


SPEAKER 4:

breasts of love,


WHITMAN:

bellies pressed and glued together with love.


LIGHTS ON, NIGHT.
SCENE TITLE, PROJECTED OR PRINTED ON PLACARD:
1 Walt Whitman, "Love-thoughts"
WHITMAN AND A "BOY" MOVE CLOSE TOGETHER, ADDRESS EACH OTHER.


BOY:

The wet of woods through the early hours.


WHITMAN:

Two sleepers at night lying close together as they sleep,


BOY:

One with an arm slanting down across and below the waist of the other.


WHITMAN:

The smell of apples,


BOY:

aromas from crushed sage plant,


WHITMAN:

mint,


BOY:

birch bark.


WHITMAN:

The boy's longings,
the glow and pressure
as he confides to me
what he was dreaming.


BOY:

The dead leaf tallings its spiral whirl,
falling still and content to the ground.


WHITMAN:

The sensitive, orbic, underlapped brothers,
that only privileged feelers
may be intimate where they are.


BOY:

The mystic amorous night.


WHITMAN:

The curious roamer the hand,
roaming allover the body,


BOY:

the bashful withdrawing of flesh
where the fingers soothingly pause
and edge themselves.


WHITMAN:

The limpid liquid within the young man,


BOY:

the vex'd corrosion
so pensive and painful,


WHITMAN:

the torment,


BOY:

the irritable tide
that will not be at rest,


WHITMAN:

the like of the same I feel,
the like of the same in others.


SCENE TITLE: 2 Rufus Griswold, "Once licentiousness"
RESPONDING TO THE EARLIER VERSE, GRISWOLD APPEARS WITH LEAVES OF GRASS, SPEAKS TO WHITMAN.


GRISWOLD:

Once licentiousness
shunned the light;
now it writes books
showing how grand and pure it is,
and prophecies
its own ultimate triumph.


TO AUDIENCE, HOLDING UP LEAVES OF GRASS


It is impossible to imagine
how any man's fancy
could have conceived
such a mass of stupid filth.
We leave this gathering of muck
to the laws
which have power to suppress
such gross obscenity.


FIRE AND BR1MSTONE PROPHECY


"Peccatum illud horribile,
inter Christianos non nominandum."


WHISPERS TO WHITMAN


(That vile sin among Christians not to be named.)


WHITMAN AND SPEAKERS RESPOND TO GRISWOLD.
SCENE TITLE: 3 Walt Whitman, "Through me"


WHITMAN:

Through me many long dumb voices,


SPEAKER 1:

voices of the interminable generations of slaves,


SPEAKER 2:

voices of prostitutes and deformed persons,


SPEAKER 3:

voices of the diseased and despairing,


SPEAKER 4:

voices of wombs and the fatherstuff,


SPEAKER 1:

voices of the rights of them the others are down upon.


WHITMAN:

Through me forbidden voices,


SPEAKER 2:

voices of sexes and lusts,


SPEAKER 3:

voices veiled
and I remove the veil,


SPEAKER 4:

voices indecent
by me clarified and transfigured.


WHITMAN:

I do not press my finger across my mouth!


SPEAKER 1:

keep as delicate around the bowels
as around the head and heart,


SPEAKER 2:

copulation is no more rank to me than death is.


SPEAKER 3:

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,


SPEAKER 4:

seeing, hearing, and feeling are miracles,
and each part and tag of me is a miracle.


WHITMAN:

TO BRONSON ALCOTT AND HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WHO APPEAR IN THE NEXT SCENE
If I worship any particular thing
it shall be some of the spread of my body;


SPEAKER 1:

You my rich blood,
your milky stream pale strippings of my life;


SPEAKER 2:

Breast that presses against other breasts
it shall be you,

SPEAKER 3:

Root of washed sweet-flag,
timorous pond-snipe,
nest of guarded duplicate eggs,
it shall be you,


SPEAKER 4:

Mixed tussled hay of head and beard and brawn
it shall be you,

WHITMAN:

Trickling sap of maple,
fibre of manly wheat,
it shall be. you;


SPEAKER 1:

Winds
whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me
it shall be you,


SPEAKER 2:

Broad muscular fields,


SPEAKER 3:

branches of liveoak,


SPEAKER 4:

loving lounger in my winding paths,
it shall be you,


WHITMAN:

Hands I have taken,
face I have kissed,
mortal I have ever touched,
it shall be you.


ALCOTT AND HENRY DAVID THOREAU RESPOND TO WHITMAN
SCENE TITLE: 4 Bronson Alcott: "This morning with Henry David Thoreau"
ALCOTT ADDRESSES AUDIENCE; THOREAU ACCOMPANIES HIM, FOCUSING ON WHITMAN


ALCOTT:

This morning
with Henry David Thoreau to Brooklyn,
to see Walt Whitman.
I find this Whitman
likely to make his mark on Young America
he affirming himself
to be its representative man and poet.


WHITMAN AND THOREAU EYE EACH OTHER SUSPICIOUSLY; ALCOTT OBSERVES


Thoreau and Whitman
each seemed planted fast in reserve,
surveying the other curiously,
like two beasts,
each wondering
what the other would do,
whether to snap
or run.


THOREAU:

TO ALCOTT, INDICATING WHITMAN
There are two or three pieces
in his book
which are disagreeable
to say the least,
simply sensual.
He does not celebrate love at all.
It is as if
the beasts spoke.
Men have been ashamed of themselves
with reason.
I do not wish
his poems' sensual parts
were not written
but that men and women
were so pure
they could read them
without harm,
that is,
without understanding them.


TO HIMSELF; A NEW THOUGHT


Of course,
if we are shocked,
whose experience are we reminded of?


SCENE TITLE: 5 Walt Whitman, "By silence"
WHITMAN RESPONDS TO THOREAU


WHITMAN:

By silence
the pens of poets
have long connived
at the filthy law
that sex,
desires,
lusts,
organs,
acts
are unmentionable,
to be ashamed of,
driven to skulk out of literature.


SPEAKER 1:

This filthy law
has to be repealed
it stands in the way
of great reforms.


SPEAKER 2:

It is in the interest of women
as well as men
that there should be
no infidelism about sex,
but perfect faith.


SPEAKER 3:

The present diluted deferential love
is enough to make a man vomit;


SPEAKER 4:

as to manly friendship,
everywhere observed in the states,
there is not the first breath of it
to be observed in print.


WHITMAN:

The body of a man or women
is so far quite unexpressed in poems;


SPEAKER 1:

that body is to be expressed,
and sex is.


WHITMAN:

TO JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS, WHO APPEARS IN NEXT SCENE
All theories stagnate in their vitals,
cowardly and rotten,
if they cannot publicly accept, and publicly name,
with specific words,
the things on which all decency,
all that is worth being here for
depend.


SYMONDS, INSPIRED BY WHITMAN'S WORDS, STEPS INTO THE LIGHT.


SCENE TITLE: 6 John Addington Symonds, "Is it not strange?"


HERE, SYMONDS IS TWENTYSEVEN; HE HAS BEEN MARRIED THREE YEARS AND HAS TWO DAUGHTERS; HE'S WELL-EDUCATED, AND COMES FROM AN OLD, ENGLISH, ARISTOCRATIC FAMILY, BUT HE MUST WRITE LITERARY AND ART CRITICISM TO SUPPLEMENT HIS INHERITED INCOME.


HE INTRODUCES HIMSELF TO THE AUDIENCE AS A CLOSE CONFIDANT, FULL OF INNER PASSION


SYMONDS:

Is it not strange I should have read
Whitman's Leaves of Grass only this week?
If I had read it years ago,
and if I had understood,
I should have been
a braver, better, different man now.


The Leaves is not a book.
It is a man,
miraculous in his vigour,
and love,
and omniscience,
and animalism.
and omnivorous humanity.


ELATED AT HIS RECENT DISCOVERY OF WHITMAN'S CELEBRATION OF LOVE BETWEEN MEN


His Calamus poems
treat the whole matter newly.
This man has said
what I have burned to say;
what I should have done
if opinion and authority
and the contamination of vile lewdness
had not ended in muddling my brain.


WITH SLIGHT SELF-MOCKERY


Yet even with these bruised wings and faded petals
it is good to know
that we bear in our breast
the Psyche and Flower
of the noblest
most masculine Democracy.


RAISING HIS ARM TO INTRODUCE THE WHITMAN POEM THAT FOLLOWS


Behold!
A light has risen
which may not be denied.


LIGHTS UP ON WHITMAN. TITLE: 7 Walt Whitman, "Alone I had thought"


AS WHITMAN SPEAKS HE IS JOINED, ONE BY ONE, BY A GROUP OF YOUNG MEN. WHITMAN AND THE SPEAKERS ADDRESS EACH OTHER

WHITMAN:

Alone I had thought --
yet soon a silent troop gathers around me,


SPEAKER 1:

Some walk by my side, and some behind,


SPEAKER 2:

and some embrace my arms or neck,


WHITMAN:

They, the spirits of friends, dead or alive -- thicker they come, a great crowd, and I in the middle,


SPEAKER 3:

Collecting, dispensing, singing in spring, there I wander with them,


WHITMAN:

Plucking something for tokens -- something for these, till I hit upon a name -- tossing toward whoever is near me,


SPEAKER 4:

Here! lilac, with a branch of pine,


SPEAKER 1:

Here, out of my pocket, some moss which I pulled off a live-oak in Florida, as it hung trailing down,


SPEAKER 2:

Here, some pinks and laurel leaves, and a handful of sage,


SPEAKER 3:

And here what I now draw from the water, wading in the pond-side,


WHITMAN: (0 here I last saw him that tenderly loves me -and returns again, never to separate from me, And this, 0 this shall henceforth be the token of comrades -- this calamus-root shall, Interchange it, youths, with each other! Let none render it back!)


WHITMAN GIVES CALAMUS-ROOT TO SYMONDS, WHO TAKES IT GLADLY, HOLDING IT UP TO AUDIENCE]


SCENE TITLE: 8 John Addington Symonds: "I am taking with me to London"
SYMONDS ADDRESSES AUDIENCE, HIS CONFIDANT, WITH URGENCY, ON THE TRAIL OF CALAMUS


SYMONDS:

I am taking with me to London
an introduction
to the American Unitarian clergyman, Moncure Conway,
whose biography of Whitman appeared in the Fortnightly.
From Conway I hope to learn


ENTRY IN CONSTRUCTION -- TO BE CONTINUED