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

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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:

1 Walt Whitman, "Love-thoughts"

THROUGHOUT THIS PIECE, PHOTOS OF THE CHARACTERS MAY BE PROJECTED.

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 falling 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 all over 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 BRIMSTONE PROPHECY

"Peccatum illud horribile,

inter Christianos non nominandum."

WHISPERS, THREATENINGLY, 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:

I 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:

TO BRONSON ALCOTT AND HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WHO APPEAR IN THE NEXT SCENE:

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:

TO BRONSON ALCOTT AND HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WHO APPEAR IN THE NEXT SCENE

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.