Abstract
Walt Whitman's ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ (CBF) (1856) conveys and constructs an exhilarated passenger's experience with public transportation facilities of mid-nineteenth century New York against the background of modernization, urbanization, industrialization and globalization. With Whitman's America exploiting the continent's diverse resources along imperialist lines, CBF exposes the poet's implication in the early stages of the climate crisis. This article draws on scientific insights into human cognition to furnish a productive interpretative lens for analysing poetry and its role in human relationships with the more-than-human world. Exploring culturally adapted cognitive features relevant to the perception of time and scale in the context of ongoing planetary disruption, it argues that Whitman's attitude towards the future anticipates major issues in present-day environmental (in)action.
Keywords
‘What is it then between us?’
Section five of the nine-section-long CBF, one of Walt Whitman's most celebrated poems, opens with an invitation – or perhaps a challenge – to answer the following: ‘What is it then between us? / What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?’ (54–55). 1 First published in the second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856) and acclaimed as the most significant of the new additions (Kaplan [1983] 2004, xxii), CBF conveys and constructs an exhilarated passenger's experience with public transportation facilities of mid-nineteenth century New York. Through the poem's compelling imagery, the reader is carried towards the conviction that what the ‘most indispensable of all American poets’ (Matterson 2006, xxiii) saw, felt and thought there and then resists spatial and temporal constraints. Indeed, the very next line answers – or rather rebuffs – the above questions with an assured dismissal: ‘Whatever it is, it avails not.’ With CBF arguably being ‘the first great literary rendering of mass transit experience in all of world literature’ (Buell 2001, 95) and Leaves of Grass ‘a culture-bearing book’ that embodied the young nation's struggles with modernization, urbanization, industrialization and globalization, (Killingsworth 2007, 23–24), Whitman positioned himself at the intersection of what would become key issues of the contemporary environmental predicament.
William Rueckert – who coined the term ‘ecocriticism’ to refer to ‘the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature’ ([1978] 1996, 107) – defined poems as bundles of ‘stored energy’ that could be studied as ‘models for energy flow, community building, and ecosystems’ (110). In his discussion of Leaves of Grass, Rueckert sees this energy flowing out of the poet into the world and back, with Whitman's own conception of poetry resembling the water cycle in the biosphere (118). For Robin Wall Kimmerer, ‘The very facts of the world are a poem’ as illustrated by the multitude of ways in which all of the beings and elements in a given ecosystem interrelate, and it is language-based stories, whether told by the elders, scientists or writers, that make possible human reciprocity with the living land (2013, 345–347). Sylvia Wynter goes as far as renaming the human species homo narrans on account of our hybrid biological-storytelling nature (Wynter and McKittrick 2015).
The relationship between cognitive science and literature is anything but unidirectional, in keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the former that allowed it to flourish by embracing theoretical and empirical research from a range of disciplines. Cognitive and affective sciences can help us to understand literature, while the study of literature may help to train our responses and inferences, contribute to our reasoning, and develop our theoretical comprehension of emotion (Hogan 2015). As postulated by Nancy Easterlin – the originator of the term cognitive ecocriticism – ‘literary works that explore the mind's positive and troubled relationships with nonhuman nature importantly illuminate the conditions that shape human attitudes … toward the environment’ (2012, 93). It is my contention in this essay that, deliberately or not, in CBF Whitman reveals the workings of a mind in its complex relationship with the human and more-than-human world.
In The End of Nature, Bill McKibben calls attention to the fact that, used as we are to thinking of the Earth's changes as infinitely slow even as they are now dangerously speeding up due to human interference, ‘we tell time badly’ and ‘our sense of scale is awry’, our habitual perception of people as small and the world as large no longer aligned with reality ([1989] 2003, ix). Most of the currently mounting problems, challenges, and threats have been with us since at least the Industrial Revolution, but only recently have we become conscious of climatic and environmental changes, resource scarcity, pollution, etc. Worse still, we implicitly assume these are merely ‘temporary aberrations’ that can be solved and made to disappear, our innovation and ingenuity again triumphant, even as the global urban and socioeconomic expansion continues exponentially (West 2017, 8–9). Our perceptions are formed not only through cognitive processes, but also through ‘social interaction and within a particular cultural context’ (Whitmarsh and Capstick 2018, 15) and it is society that teaches us what to pay attention to through ‘cognitive traditions’ that enable members of a given community to separate the relevant from the irrelevant during the process of adopting their community's distinctive ‘outlook’ (Norgaard 2011, 5), with the outlook that is now dominant globally – and whose rise Whitman cheered on – facilitating denialist and delayist attitudes.
While the first-person plural repeatedly used above (and put to powerful use in CBF) may be problematic if employed to deny the diversity of human experiences across cultures and periods, the point still stands that, within the overbearing monoculture of the contemporary Euro-Western system of thought, such cognitive-cultural issues tend to come to the fore. In line with Vandana Shiva's concept of ‘monocultures of the mind’ that are oblivious to natural and social diversity and self-organization in their reduction of life to raw material, erasure of alternatives, and imposition of external management (2014), in this article I argue that the extractivist mindset driving the planetary crisis partly originates from and is aggravated by particular cognitions and perceptions.
In Naomi Klein's formulation, extractivism is a ‘nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of taking’, fuelled by a colonial mentality that thrives on relating to the world as a frontier of conquest rather than home and whose underlying logic asserts that ‘there would always be more earth for us to consume’ (2015, 169–185). The mid-nineteenth century America of CBF was very much in the midst of exploiting the continent's diverse resources along those very lines and some of Whitman's rhetoric appears uncomfortably close to imperial, colonial, racist and masculinist discourses (Killingsworth 2004, 143). Composed at the midpoint of that fateful century in a country that was about to dominate the world, CBF epitomizes the seductive pull of ‘telling time badly’ and ‘the awry sense of scale’. The very process of writing Leaves of Grass reveals Whitman's preoccupation with transformation, as he kept on expanding, revising and reordering his poetry, tinkering with punctuation, altering titles, swapping lines between poems and poems between ‘clusters’ (LeMaster 1998, xi), the latter a term he used for his thematic groupings (Killingsworth 2007, 50). His pre-Civil War poetry contains ‘clusters of vivid scenes and images that shock the conventional ear and suggest radically new, close-up perspectives on the world’ (Killingsworth 2004, 53). It is my intention in this article to provide a new close-up perspective on CBF and its involvement with and in human cognitions, behaviours and relationships as they evolve across time and space within the Earth system, thus following Easterlin in the ecocritical project of ‘combining cultural, historical, and literary analysis within a cognitive-evolutionary framework’ (2012, x). Taking the notion of ‘clusters’ as a useful organizing principle, I explore a set of culturally adapted cognitive phenomena relevant to perception of time and scale in the context of the ongoing planet-wide exploitation: cognitive dissonance and cognitive biases.
Cognitive dissonance is an ‘uncomfortable inner tension’ born of contradictory feelings, thoughts and behaviours which can only be relieved if one of its components is changed to restore harmony (Stoknes 2015, 61). Facing one's complicity in the climate crisis and one's limited capacity for addressing it generates dissonance that can be resolved by denying personal responsibility and concern altogether (Norgaard 2011, 68). Psychological studies suggest that the so-called WEIRD people (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) tend to suffer from cognitive dissonance more than other populations and ‘do a range of mental gymnastics’ to relieve their inner tension (Henrich 2021, 33). Managing one's cognitive dissonance in this way risks unreliable judgment of others as well as of oneself. Fittingly, one of the reasons why Whitman's poetry remains resonant is that the kinds of conflicted experience and language embodied in it ‘continually crop up in the discourse of political ecology’ (Killingsworth 2004, 9–10), while his uneasy alternation between the view of humanity as distinct from nature and as continuous with it anticipated the dilemmas of future environmentalism (Killingsworth 2007, 20).
Cognitive biases cause judgements and decisions to deviate from rational choice theory: ‘the notion that people have stable preferences, and that they accurately weigh the expected costs, benefits and probabilities of alternative options, allowing them to select the most efficacious solution' (Johnson and Levin 2009, 1593) and manifest themselves as ‘cases in which human cognition reliably produces representations that are systematically distorted compared to some aspect of objective reality' (Haselton, Nettle, and Murray 2015, 968). In this essay, ‘objective reality’ is interpreted as referring to planetary conditions that make possible the continued existence of beings capable of such cognition. While they are often conveniently defined as ostensibly distinct phenomena that warrant separate textbook chapters, I approach cognitive biases more holistically in their capacity for synergistic interaction within a cognitive-cultural ecosystem. CBF contains – or indeed comprises – a poetic cluster of cognitive, affective and behavioural predilections that brings to mind a cluster of time- and scale-related cognitive biases that are often invoked in relation to the modern-day climate (in)action.
Hyperbolic discounting is at work when those unwilling to incur short-term costs are willing to accept far greater costs long-term (Marshall 2014, 66) and thus fail to prepare for the looming climate challenges. It is one manifestation of a broader tendency for short-termism that continues to undermine climate efforts (Stoknes 2015, 32). In affective forecasting, predictions of future emotional states may motivate bad choices (Kahneman 2012, 398–406), including those related to environmental predicaments. Pluralistic ignorance, that is, ignorance of what others think on the part of all or most people (Thaler and Sunstein 2009, 63), may result in individuals conforming to views that they do not agree with (say, about a given aspect of the planetary crisis) just because they assume others do. Misconceptions arising from natural propensity for linear thinking (West 2017, 44) prevent many from appreciating the very real threat of climatic and ecological tipping points. Availability heuristic, defined as the tendency to make estimations based on ‘ease or amount of recall’ of relevant instances (Reber 2017, 186), impedes reliable judgement of complex circumstances. Planning fallacy, that is, a tendency for unrealistic optimism about the time required to complete projects (Thaler and Sunstein 2009, 8), fuels the confident assumption that problems will certainly be solved in time to avoid the worst. Finally, a cluster within a cluster: hindsight, outcome, and confirmation biases alongside narrative fallacy encourage reinterpreting what actually occurred in light of the outcome (or one's values) to reinforce its perceived inevitability (and their validity), in some cases leading to irresponsible risk seeking (Kahneman 2012, 202–204), with the illusion of understanding the past fostering overconfidence in our powers of prediction (218). This cluster may influence climate policies drawn from construing the apparent triumphs of the humankind up to this point as vindication of the past and assurance of the future.
Tendencies for dissonance and biases are anything but random, embedded as they are in our cognitive capacities that arose through evolution of brain functions such as perception, memory, motor control, emotions and consciousness (G. Edelman 2006, 77). In our evolutionary past they promoted individual survival and reproduction (Johnson and Levin 2009, 1593) as part of the mind's ‘adaptive toolbox’, in which intuitive decision-making heuristics are created and transmitted genetically, culturally and individually (Gigerenzer 2008, 19). Indeed, it has been demonstrated that certain cognitive abilities (such as reading) are culturally constructed, with practices, norms and technologies changing our biology and psychology without modifying the underlying genetics: as a result, modern (literate) populations are neurologically different from most societies that ever existed (Henrich 2021). This latter point is crucial for appreciating that there is nothing either deterministic or unduly generalizing about calling these cognitive phenomena ‘human’, as it is the diversity of human experiences that realises (and adapts) the potentialities of the evolved mind in (and to) specific circumstances (whether social, ecological, technological, etc.), with the degree of (mis)match between these inherited features and evolving societies thus subject to constant change, resulting in the plethora of cognitive traditions. While it is fair to argue, as Sylvia Wynter does, that the Euro-Western conception of the human has historically over-represented itself as the supposedly generic normal humanness (2003), attempts at pitting WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures against each other would be misguided (and symptomatic of binary thinking, itself a fallacy) as psychological variation across the globe is continuous and multidimensional both within and between cultures as well as historical periods, and continues to evolve (Henrich 2021, 31).
Scientific insights into human cognition provide a productive interpretative lens for analysing poetry (and the wider creative arts) and its role in human relationships with the more-than-human world. The following exploration of the ways in which cognitive-cultural dynamic that fuels the converging environmental and social dilemmas is exposed in clusters of poetic imagery reveals how Whitman's attitude towards the future illustrates, anticipates and indeed contributes to the predicaments born of the paradox inherent in the far-reaching short-termism of the extractivist mindset: wanting things to change and yet stay fundamentally the same.
‘The similitudes of the past and those of the future’
Whitman's foray into the future begins rather modestly with an address to those ‘that shall cross from shore to shore years hence’ (5), but within less than twenty lines those ‘years’ become decades and then centuries:
I could scrutinize CBF section by section, highlighting how ‘the thick-stemm'd pipes of steamboats’ (26) are now nowhere to be seen, how the view of ‘beautiful hills of Brooklyn’ (105) has since been obscured by high-rise buildings or how ‘foundry chimneys’ no longer ‘cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses’ (119) – but changes in the hardware of civilization since the nineteenth century are obvious enough. One particular piece of that hardware, however, deserves a brief outlining of its historical trajectory in relation to Whitman's cognitive dissonance: the ferry.
Since the seventeenth century the island of Manhattan saw ferrying of some sort, and by 1814 the Fulton Ferry that crossed the East River between Brooklyn and Manhattan used steamboats (Fletcher 2004, 145). Around the time CBF was written, over 25 million passengers were making the Brooklyn–Manhattan crossing every year (Buell 2001, 95). With the diversification of infrastructure and expansion of mass transit, ferries were eventually eclipsed by bridges, tunnels, and subway lines; Whitman's favourite was discontinued in 1924 (Geffen 1984, 9). Their revival in the second decade of the twenty-first century exposed their comparative irrelevance among modern commuting options; although several ferry routes are again available across the city, their democratized and democratizing character celebrated in CBF is long gone. Even as the population snowballed, the ridership shrank: from May 2017 (the NYC Ferry launch) until December 2019 (the last full year before the coronavirus pandemic) ferries carried a mere 14.1 million passengers (NYC Ferry 2021), roughly equivalent to three weekdays’ worth of ridership on the NYC subway, and a week's on the city's buses (MTA 2020). The Staten Island Ferry to Manhattan has historically fared better, but even it carries fewer passengers per year than the subway per week (CBC 2019). The poem's ‘countless crowds of passengers’ (104) can in fact be counted – to Whitman's likely dismay.
Yet Whitman the journalist and Whitman the poet painted quite different portraits of urban transit: in the former's articles, a typical ferry riders’ experience turns out to have been one of bad manners, rate increases, safety issues and delays (Buell 2001, 97; Nelson 1998, 156). Lawrence Buell argues that CBF might have been Whitman's attempt to imagine how urban transit should ideally be and to coax his readers-riders into changing their ways (2001, 98). But mindful of his ‘psychic investment’ in ferries generally and the Fulton Ferry specifically (Geffen 1984, 5), I view the selectivity and idealization on display in CBF as Whitman's efforts to reassure himself and his readers that one of his formative experiences would endure – even though this very experience was proof of the unrelenting process of change that it could not possibly escape. ‘Thrive, cities' (123), Whitman exhorts, but seems to (want to) believe that their thriving would not alter anything about them; that the landscape could be filled with ‘flags of all nations' (43, 118) but not undergo transformative change through the intersections of cultures and distances that these flags represented; that ‘a living crowd’ (23) would keep boarding ferries, yet its generative and disruptive energy would never change the underlying conditions that made the institution of ferries even possible. Is it thus not telling that he kept editing and expanding Leaves of Grass instead of moving on to publishing entirely new poetry books, as if caught between a desire for transformation and a need for stability.
At the time of composing CBF, Whitman was clearly in his element, the city he called home and the whole young nation having become a space of inspiration and fulfilment that he craved and celebrated. The poem justifies Whitman's claim to the title of ‘the New World's first urban poet’ (Killingsworth 2007, 48) on multiple grounds, not least because it makes New York ‘the epitome of the urban web of life’ predicated on ‘the possibility for living beings to enjoy spontaneous empathy with one another’ (Den Tandt 2009, 103). And yet CBF's confident enthusiasm seems forced or perhaps forged. In his own lifetime Whitman saw remarkable advances in agriculture, communications, medicine and travel (Woods 2008, 201). Between its first (1855) and last (1891–2) editions, Leaves of Grass witnessed transformative changes in America, from the Civil War to the abolition of slavery, to laying the transatlantic telegraph cable, to the first national parks, to electrification and to territorial, demographic and economic expansion, all of which proved how fluid circumstances of life could be. Whether by coming to a halt or by continuing, these changes would spell the end of the world that inspired CBF. Whitman must have known that better than anyone. After all, he kept reworking Leaves of Grass until his death and the notion of transformation was more than embedded in his creative life: it was his creative life. And yet his revisions of CBF never touched the ideological core of the poem even as he saw it being hollowed out by the forces of relentless progress. If anything, the very nature of his poetry stood in the way. Torn by the inner conflict between a desire for transformation and a need for stability, Whitman resolved it by devising a fantasy of non-transformative transformation, a perpetual motion machine of sorts, whereby inputs and outputs had no bearing on the process itself. Even as his own life circumstances changed over decades, and even as an elegiac tone could increasingly be heard in and between the lines of his poetry, he seemed ‘intent upon preserving the initial vigour and forward-looking hopefulness that he first sounded in “Song of Myself”’ (Killingsworth 2007, 69), as if in thrall to who he used to be.
Having proclaimed: ‘I loved well those cities’ (50), Whitman proceeds to demonstrate the authenticity and power of his enthusiasm with alluring imagery that asserts its deathlessness and freezes in time the exhilarating circumstance of a place in constant flux, with ‘[t]he similitudes of the past and those of the future’ (8) ensuring that countless others ‘will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore’ forevermore his poetry is thus not a memory of a long-gone age, but a foundation for its continuation in the ever-present entirety of human experience. However, as successful as Whitman might have been in perpetuating this fantasy within his poetry, the world external to his creative powers had other plans. Thirteen years after CBF was published, work was started on spanning the banks of the East River with what would become the Brooklyn Bridge, its objective being to supersede the Fulton Ferry and capture its massive ridership of over 100,000 passengers per day (Geffen 1984, 4). Given that in his other works Whitman praised new technologies, material progress and westward expansion, embracing the language of imperialism and manifest destiny albeit lamenting that spirituality and culture lagged behind (Killingsworth 2007, 20), he should have eagerly followed the bridge's construction and ‘gloried in its completion’ (Geffen 1984, 1). After all, in his 1871 poem ‘Passage to India’ he exulted great advances in communication epitomized by the Suez Canal, the continental railway system and the oceanic telegraph cables (Bradley and Blodgett [1973] 2002, xxxvi). While in a more local and journalistic context, he celebrated how fast his beloved Brooklyn was growing and detailed all the developments he noticed while walking about, simultaneously expressing his dismay at ‘the relentless urbanization that meant the loss of trees and increased urban squalor’ (Gill 1998, 84). In one of his only two known references to the Brooklyn Bridge, Whitman adds it to the expanded list of global technological wonders, apparently seeing the bridge's completion ‘as an even more powerful event in the march of progress’ (Geffen 1984, 2). In the other reference, Whitman described it in a vivid newspaper article five years before completion (‘– to the right the East river – the mast hemm'd shores – the grand obelisk-like towers of the bridge, one on either side, in haze, yet plainly defin'd, giant brothers twain, throwing free graceful interlinking loops high across the tumbled tumultuous river below’) and then went forever silent, going as far as ignoring nationally publicized celebrations of the bridge's opening in 1883, despite the fact that the bridge would have helped to realize his previously expressed hope that New York and Brooklyn would be formally joined in a new entity he envisioned as the ‘city of superb democracy, amid superb surroundings’ (Geffen 1984, 1–3).
And so there it was, a triumph of engineering that demonstrated the nation's creative energies, yet the poet of these very energies had nothing to say. It is this telling silence that undermines counterpoints to my interpretation of CBF as revealing Whitman's cognitive dissonance. Lawrence Buell argues that CBF's predictions were not so much about ‘this particular constellation of phenomena’ as about the interdependence of urban inhabitants. Whitman sought to counteract what he perceived as the threat of ‘modern commuting rituals’ to civility and community and grasped ‘the broader truth that separation of home and workplace’ necessitated ‘daily transit among strangers’ that ‘would remain down through late industrialism if not forever a typical urban condition’ (2001, 99–102). Similarly in his journalistic incarnation, his imagery of ‘the hustle and bustle of the ferries’ has been interpreted as representing ‘the frantic pace and impersonality of modern life’ in one of ‘the earliest protests against the rat-race of the urban commuter’ (Nelson 1998, 156). If that were the case, however, why would Whitman ignore new transportation links throughout the area – just as good material as any for pondering the quandaries of urban life and dilemmas of socioeconomic growth – and neglect the poetically-inspiring bridge at the heart of what amounted to his ‘holy place’ (Geffen 1984, 2) or, perhaps more accurately, his comfort zone?
It must have been about the ferry itself then – about its rise and demise, life and death. Whitman loved the ferry for what it was, with the journey merging elements that constituted the city as he believed it ought to be: the currents, the wind, the landscape, the living beings, all interacting and intermingling in ways and on a scale that no bridge, omnibus, subway car, or indeed a modern air-conditioned ferry could ever capture. When Whitman composed CBF, not even one pillar of the Brooklyn Bridge had been driven into the riverbed, and yet the poem's message and imagery were already poised to refuse to acknowledge – let alone celebrate – any developments of that sort, as if Whitman knew where all this was going even as he asserted otherwise. His silence about the fate of the ferry and his poetry on that topic have the same purpose: to look away from the unsettling feedback loops inherent in exponential socioeconomic expansion that he glorified. Eventually, he came full circle: the energy of ‘exuberantly hopeful poems’ that he composed early in his career partly concealed ‘social and political fears just beneath the surface’ (Killingsworth 2004, 142), while, later on, he was more open about his dissonant impressions as he celebrated progress while lamenting its failings. But the Brooklyn Bridge must have hit too close to home, so Whitman again chose silence over voice. And, thus, he became a hostage to his own fantasy: the only way to preserve the vision of non-transformative transformation that he put forward in CBF was to erase the existence of the very bridge that proved the poem wrong.
‘Throb, baffled and curious brain!’
In his exploration of the ways in which the rise of the novel as a genre has been implicated in global warming, Amitav Ghosh demonstrates how in the nineteenth century literary fiction and the science of geology shared a common assumption that the world was by nature moderate and orderly: the then new ‘modern’ worldview ridiculed catastrophism as primitive and welcomed gradualism as rational. The ostensibly ‘realist’ novel helped to conceal the very real power of the exceptional and the improbable to shape the world, thus underwriting the construction of Nature as stable and passive and emboldening humans to assume they were free to shape their own destiny (Ghosh 2016). Whitman did not make his name as a novelist – though he did write novels, novellas and short stories (Turpin 2017). CBF is powered by a similar conviction: human dynamism will continue indefinitely against the background of the abiding Earth that remains forever undisturbed by the consequences of that very dynamism.
Pushed and pulled by the circumstances imposed on him and those he constructed himself, Whitman exhibits in CBF a mind at once free and constrained, audacious and guarded, his brain indeed throbbing, ‘baffled and curious’, throwing out ‘questions and answers’ (106) but only those that do not dare undermine the premise from which they spring. In line with his careful separation of his roles as a poet and as a journalist discussed above, Whitman was much more scathing of social ills in his prose than in his poetry. In Democratic Vistas (an essay published in the same year as ‘Passage to India’) he swiftly moves on from hailing achievements of material progress to denouncing social backwardness, political corruption and business depravity, going as far as portraying American democracy as a failure and the American youth as degenerate (Killingsworth 2007, 90). In CBF he admits ‘It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, / The dark threw its patches down upon me also’ (65–66), but refuses to consider that the faults and flaws he is about to enumerate, if indeed as widely shared as he implies, are capable of derailing the train of progress he cheers on in his poetry. ‘I am he who knew what it was to be evil’, he divulges halfway through CBF and proceeds with a catalogue of ‘[r]efusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness’ (70–77) that puts a spotlight on some of his problematic propensities, not always clearly demarcated but all the more pernicious for it. Found both between and in the lines of CBF as well as in the poem's aftermath, his hyperbolic discounting, short-termism, affective forecasting, pluralistic ignorance, linear thinking, availability heuristic, planning fallacy, narrative fallacy, hindsight, outcome, and confirmation biases are interlocked and coevolving in multiple ways, the resulting cluster of images and ideas that feed off each other undermining Whitman's confident vision of the future.
For all the inspiration that Whitman extracted from the ferry, when its looming demise became apparent, he refused to acknowledge it, let alone come to the rescue. With his growing public stature, could he not have initiated a debate on the ferry's cultural significance? This refusal to bear the emotional cost of intervention suggests he valued his short-term discomfort more than any long-term loss for those whom in CBF he proclaimed to be the focus of his attention. This is by no means to accuse Whitman of hypocrisy, a charge he disarmed in advance anyway: in ‘Song of Myself’ he famously asserts ‘I contradict myself / I am large, I contain multitudes’ and it is this acceptance of contradictions that allows his self to be ‘simultaneously the whole field of existence and an experiencing entity within that field’ (Shaddock 2019, 326–327) where (in)consistency fails to register, let alone matter. Yet, successful or not, a mere act of speaking out for the real-world Brooklyn Ferry would do justice to the one immortalized in CBF better than silence.
Assuming the perspective of imagined future generations, Whitman confirmed for himself the validity of his own, any emotional states he relished while taking the ferry amplified through the presumed emotional states of passengers engaging in the very same activity for centuries to come. This in turn gave him what he felt was more than sufficient justification for creating the ferry's idealized portrayal as a way of shaping its future perception and operation to his liking. Perhaps not altogether paradoxically, such an approach made him more invested in the status quo that made such idealization possible, each and every face in the crowd, whether present or future, in effect a mirror image of the Poet, resulting in a hall of mirrors that had to be maintained even at the cost of looking away from the reality beyond.
Whitman believed that it was through him that the truth of America – ‘the greatest poem’, as he famously declared – could find its expression. In line with his Transcendentalist leanings, for Whitman it was an ‘act of faith’ that his assumptions and feelings were those of his readers (Gargano 1963, 268). His ‘insistent universalizing’ owes much to Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose concept of self-reliance asserted that ‘to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men’ is a sign of genius (as quoted in Killingsworth 2004, 142). Whitman's confidence that his thoughts, emotions and sensations were akin to those of his fellow passengers with whom he shared the commute, the experience of living in the city and indeed the privilege of witnessing the triumphs of humankind, may have been boosted by – if not born of – his background being small-town artisanal republicanism, his poetry a mediation between the village and the city and his perspective that of an ‘overly familiar bumpkin’ who treats city strangers like old friends (Killingsworth 2004, 143). ‘We understand then do we not?’ (98) asks Whitman less in his capacity as the speaker, author and protagonist of CBF, and more in conviction that he is indeed the voice of the many and as such entitled to lovingly gaze at the crowds (of his contemporaries and his successors), ships, islands, seagulls, the entirety of it all and confidently proclaim ‘These and all else were to me the same as they are to you’ (49).
Whitman's was a time when one could simultaneously gush about rapid socioeconomic growth and believe in infinitely slow planetary change, a legacy of disconnect which is still with us today in ‘the contrast between the pace at which the physical world is changing and the pace at which the human society is reacting’ (McKibben [1989] 2003, x). With Leaves of Grass, first published six years before the Civil War began and continuously expanded for over a quarter century after it ended, Whitman's magnum opus witnessed epoch-making events, yet its author failed to appreciate that future generations might experience – indeed initiate – changes that would seem to him as extraordinary as the ones he himself lived through would have seemed to those who had come before him. In line with what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls ‘the Lucretius problem’ (2012), Whitman seems to believe that the biggest events he has seen are the biggest that could ever be, ignoring the fact that, being bigger than their predecessors, they may well have still bigger successors. As a result, CBF's vision of the future is linear if not downright static, any further changes expected to proceed in a predictable and orderly fashion, ensuring that the experiences Whitman held dear – even sacred – would not be fundamentally disrupted and rendered unavailable to his future readers. There is but a hint that Whitman was alert to the paradoxes of scale, as alluded to in the lines ‘the role that is what we make it, as great as we like, / Or as small as we like, or both great and small’ (84–85), but he stopped short of concluding that the processes he witnessed might scale up and transform – if not bring to an abrupt end – the world he depended on for meaning.
The imagery in CBF is created by a multi-layered intersection between hydrosphere, atmosphere, lithosphere, anthroposphere and semiosphere. Throughout, Whitman seems content with reporting on whatever appears to his senses – with ‘the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide’ (19) but one of many memorable lines – and does not entertain the possibility that these ‘dumb, beautiful ministers’ (126), that is, ‘the entirety of life-forms and inanimate objects in the environmental surround’ (Buell 2001, 102), may not be everlasting. These images are some of the oldest and richest ones in the human imagination; by experiencing (and recording) them Whitman was ‘moving among archetypes’ (Nelson 1998, 157), but the apparent ease with which he recalls these archetypal scenes in CBF contrasts with his journalistic interests and confirms that ‘the place in his head where Whitman did poetry was different from the place where he did urban environmental reform’ (Buell 2001, 95). For all its seductiveness, his comforting vision of the permanence of the human condition against the backdrop of the unchanging ‘Nature’ may have come on the verge of a profound shift. It is virtually certain that the twentieth century rate of sea level rise along the US Atlantic coast was faster than at any time since the beginning of the Common Era (Walker et al. 2021, 2). Admittedly, ‘to judge Whitman too harshly would be unfairly anachronistic’ (Killingsworth 2004, 161), yet CBF's blind spots remain jarring and cannot be dismissed simply by asking ‘Who could have known?’ If anyone at all, certainly Whitman in his ‘self-appointed dual role of poet and prophet’ (Geffen 1984, 8). To illustrate this point, let's consider a counterfactual where, rather than an inspiring coexistence, CBF envisions a fundamental incompatibility between ‘sea-gulls oscillating their bodies’ (94) and ‘foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night’ (47). Reading such an incarnation of the poem today, would we not rightly celebrate its insight and foresight, Whitman's status as the prophet of the human and the urban powerfully (if depressingly) confirmed? To call attention to a missed opportunity here is merely to wish Whitman had transcended boundaries yet again.
What Whitman does know is what he wants for America, although it is not a scheduled completion of any specific plan he looks forward to. Psychological explanations for unrealistically optimistic timelines of project completion underestimate the fact that in a world of rising complexity and interdependence of social, economic, and other systems of modernity, we increasingly rely on technologies that are prone to errors and interactions that are harder to predict (Taleb 2012, 284–285), thus compounding cognitive factors such as overconfidence. The world of CBF perched on the cusp of modernity, Whitman is enamoured with the changes taking place, and yet wants them to stay, in a way, frozen in time. Instead of assuming that a project will be completed on schedule, his peculiar brand of planning fallacy comes down to an act of faith that the project of building a new nation will simply continue in its current glory, at once progressing and remaining the same, the very fact of it being in progress its ultimate purpose. This is not only its own kind of overconfidence, but a key characteristic of the extractivist mindset: constant growth provides its own rationale and readily powers only those transformations that reinforce the status quo.
‘A community's sense of the past, present, and future [being] collectively constructed’ (Norgaard 2011, 76), Whitman takes it upon himself to join in and indeed lead the construction. CBF's confidence relies on a narrative that builds on Whitman's interpretation of the past to understand the future, the perceived progress in the present confirming the inevitability of his desired outcomes:
These lines from ‘Sun-down Poem’ – CBF's earliest incarnation – ended up excluded by the time of the 1881–2 edition, but the conviction that underlies them remains to animate the finalized text. Whitman looks forward to those who would look back on him and from that selected (and selective) future perspective casts a recursive glance at himself, seeing in his own self-recognition all the proof he needs of a mutual link across generations, thus creating a timeless story whose beginning is its (happy) ending, and vice versa.
‘Ever so many generations hence’
Among the many proposed alternatives to the Anthropocene as the term denoting the current epoch, one rather infrequently discussed is ‘Extractocene’ with its emphasis on how it is the exploitative colonial extraction that has dominated our times (Pilar 2019). Whitman's implication in extractivism was always fluid, but it is evident in his 1873 poem ‘Song of the Redwood-Tree’ that links manifest destiny ‘to a view of nature as a boundless resource base for human expansion’ (Killingsworth 2004, 64) and in ‘Passage to India’, where his ‘propagandistic commitment to the full sweep of manifest destiny’ is at its loudest (78). In the former Whitman follows the social-Darwinist thinking in confidently asserting the ‘naturalness’ of westward expansion that would ultimately reach completion through globalization (Killingsworth 2004, 70), while in the latter he inaugurates ‘the global vision that he would always thereafter identify with technological progress’ (75). It is true that, even as he celebrated huge infrastructural investments, he could not have precisely envisaged planetary consequences of undertaking projects on this and larger scale. But it remains the case that these consequences were occasioned by the then-ascendant extractivist mindset that promoted hubristic confidence in (white) man's right and power to shape the world – a confidence endorsed, indeed savoured, in Whitman's work, including in CBF. With incitements such as ‘Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys!’ (119) Whitman became one of the coils in the dynamo of relentless growth that both enabled and endangered what he deemed most precious.
This extends to the key theme of CBF – population. Whitman's approach to future generations in the poem is not altogether different from the way nature poetry treats earthly objects as property to extract personal meaning from and as such ‘aligns ideologically with the extractive industries that overexploit precious minerals, water, and soil’ (Killingsworth 2004, 15–16). In Whitman's attitude towards the future generations one can discern that dimension of extractivism that sees human beings as ‘human resources’ ripe for exploitation and instrumentalization:
Whitman speaks directly to his readers – ‘I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence’ (21) – his poetry breaching the barrier of time to establish a two-way link with his future readers based on mutually recognizable experiences. This exhilarating image helps place CBF among Whitman's most powerful works but is also symptomatic of the poem's striving to reassure the speaker/author/protagonist himself that he indeed has – and always will have – someone to speak to and be heard by; that it will all have been worth it in the end. CBF assumes – indeed wills – the existence of future generations as a (re)source from which Whitman extracts a sense of meaning and through which he adds value to his creative output. He all but lays it all out halfway through CBF: ‘The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious, / My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?’ (67–68), continuing in the 1856 version with: ‘Would not people laugh at me?’ (The Walt Whitman Archive 2021, 216), a question deleted only a quarter century and several editions later. With Whitman's need for validation so palpable, these questions are by no means rhetorical, nor is answering them inconsequential. One way to convince oneself of forever having answerers and indeed admirers (whose very existence would provide a resounding ‘no’ to these questions) is to record one's experiences for the purpose of them being relived by future generations:
Whitman's confidence is born not so much of his self-delusion as of his contribution to promoting a vision of American society and civilization that could accommodate any number of new citizens to ensure growth of the nation he loved and crowds of riders and readers he craved. In true Whitman fashion, his attitude to reproduction was anything but simplistic. His lengthy catalogue of ‘dark patches’ – human frailties and failings – was initially even more confessional until in later editions Whitman removed from it the phrase ‘solitary committer’, as if attaching real guilt to the non-reproductive act of masturbation (Nelson 1998, 158). In an apparent attempt to ‘repudiate interpretation of his poems as celebrating homosexuality’ Whitman claimed to have fathered six illegitimate children (Bennett 2019, xvi), which – despite no good evidence – fed into repeated attempts to align him with a heterosexual norm, until the rise of queer studies prompted academic scholarship to accept the sexual ambivalence of his poetry as ‘defiant of simplistic categories and reductive generalizations’ (Killingsworth 2007, 111). The claim was recognized at the time as evasive (Coviello 2013, 83), but there is something more at play here. Peter Coviello demonstrates how, since the Civil War, Whitman had his own hard-won and unique perspective on family. Caring for wounded soldiers and writing letters to their loved ones, he developed a range of surrogacies as a ‘father and mother and friend and lover and uncle and comrade’ figure (2013, 77; original emphasis) with some of the soldiers whom he took care of, naming their sons in his honour and others calling him ‘father’, he knew he could indeed carry new generations forward, all of which made him wary of taxonomical dichotomies inherent in the then newly-minted clinical notion of homosexuality that he must have seen as failing to do justice to the rich complexity of his identity. Whitman ‘the binder of wounds’ (L. Edelman 2004, 108) therefore neither follows what Edelman calls ‘reproductive futurism’ nor rejects it. Instead, he leaves open a possibility that ‘a future can be something you parent, with and through sex but not heterosexual reproduction’ (Coviello 2013, 82). Or, as I argue here, through the act of artistic creation that both depends on and contributes to the body politic not only surviving, but flourishing. Whitman's ‘Thrive, cities’ (123) is as much a call for the personified cities themselves to keep growing as it is an appeal for more flesh-and-blood humans to people them and forevermore enjoy poetic accounts of how all that thriving came about.
Whitman is not alone in his attempts at extracting the ultimate meaning of life from the presumed existence of those who would come after he would be gone. Actual immortality may be impossible, but there are ways of attaining it figuratively, from parenthood to works of art to important contributions, even if these are but ‘poor substitutes’ (Benatar 2017, 149). This is where his reaching out to future generations makes Whitman relevant to modern climate change debates over intergenerational responsibilities. These are usually conceptualized as unidirectional: the framing of climate action in terms of ancestors bestowing a gift of survival (or indeed of utopia) on descendants is premised (often implicitly) on those descendants being there to receive it. Not unlike Whitman invoking ‘others who look back on me because I look'd forward to them’ (52), many today look ahead and then back again, examining current actions from the future generations’ perspective – ‘Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you’ (112) – assuming someone will surely be there to pass judgement on us with the benefit of hindsight. Such assumed existence of descendants provides comforting justification for continuing the struggle against deteriorating environmental conditions and systemic forces that are responsible for them, but at the same time enables delayism and denialism even in the most well-meaning individuals and institutions. After all, since the existence of descendants is thus conceptually constructed as guaranteed, certain necessary climate measures may be perceived as excessive. Therefore, while not subscribing to the logic of reproductive heteronormativity – ‘that most cherished and fantastical notion’ that inherently overstates the power of reproduction to remake a broken world (Azzarello [2012] 2016, 138) – in the flesh, Whitman does so in the spirit, of which CBF is arguably his most powerful statement.
As George Marshall observes, such ‘intergenerational challenges pull together several parallel cognitive themes’, from bringing future closer to the present, to creating a direct connection between ‘us’ now and ‘them’ then, to building on parental instincts, etc. (2014, 188). Concern for future generations in the form of direct descendants may seem to powerfully motivate environmental action, but in reality, parents are no more concerned about climate change than non-parents, if not less, as ‘having a child will mobilize the full tool kit of biases and avoidance strategies’ (189). Neither was Whitman a biological parent nor was climate change in the headlines he wrote or saw, but his desire for achieving immortality through poetry-enabled connection with future ferry passengers is echoed by the modern phenomenon whereby having children inspires us to create a personal climate change narrative in which ‘the overall prognosis becomes more optimistic, our own emissions become less significant, we become less vulnerable, and we accept a world of extreme inequality of future outcomes on their behalf’ (Marshall 2014, 189–190). As noted by Bradley and Blodgett, in stanzas excluded from another poem, Whitman reveals himself to be ‘a genuine poet, under the compulsion of a mission and a message, who found apparently none to hear, unless they lay still asleep behind the locked doors of tomorrow’ ([1973] 2002, xliii). Hence the exhilaration that infuses CBF and its vision of the present and the future merging in a timeless continuum of everlasting fulfilment, with citizens of the ever-youthful nation continuing their journey through the rivers and islands of NYC in perpetuity, validating and indeed embodying all those who came before.
Whitman's exploitative attitude towards future generations is both parallel with and divergent from his exploitation of Native American heritage. In what may be another instance of his cognitive dissonance, he honoured the Indigenous past with his insistence on using American Indian place names, while the living Native peoples were for him but ‘ghostly figures on the current scene’ (Killingsworth 2004, 86–87). This puts him in the company of Hawthorne, Thoreau and Melville, who wrote ‘in and about New York and New England, areas from which Native peoples either were thought to be “extinct” or were considered as somewhat pathetic “remnants” who would disappear soon’ (Rifkin 2014, xvii). Having famously proclaimed in ‘Song of Myself’ to be ‘of Manhattan the son’, Whitman celebrates himself and his place in the world, any gestures towards those who were displaced by the growth of his beloved city half-hearted at best. Assuming ‘a settler position’, Whitman relies on ‘the loss or absence of Indigenous people’ (Hood 2021, 149) to feel safe in the knowledge that he will remain forever alive as a hallowed ancestor to the never-ending procession of worthy descendants. Imagining in CBF such an intergenerational mutual support system, Whitman reiterates Horace's exegi monumentum, but his own non omnis moriar may have a more defiant – or perhaps desperate – tone. Marshall suggests that avoidance of the climate change issue may be driven by still-deeper strategies for coping with fear of death (2014, 48) and indeed in CBF Whitman's evading of the eventual decline and fall of the nascent American empire anticipates his subsequent looking away from the challenge the Brooklyn Bridge posed to the survival of the Brooklyn Ferry. His evasion perhaps was not altogether successful even in the poem itself. Killingsworth notes how ‘[t]he many senses of illumination all play out in the poem, which dramatizes the experience of enlightenment as a dawning of understanding all the more poignant for its sundown setting’ (Killingsworth 2007, 49) and the original title ‘Sun-down Poem’ has an elegiac quality to it that might have been a reluctant premonition of the inevitable end, even as the poem itself seems to make a case for the eternal (sun)rise of the new nation.
Could Whitman's leaving out of inconvenient truths be interpreted as an effective application of ‘disattention’? Different from a typical agenda-free inattention, that is, a simple failure to notice, disattention is an act of deliberately avoiding and ignoring, and then failing to verbalize the reasons for the avoiding and ignoring in an act of meta-silence (Marshall 2014, 82). Whitman celebrates how his life will also be the life of future generations in a process of contributing to the social construction of cognitive traditions as CBF serves to generate the myth of an ever-youthful NYC and an ever-ascending USA – the myth he depended on to fend off his fear of death. Thus, he participates in what is akin to the process of socially organized climate change denial whereby ‘ignoring occurs in response to social circumstances and is carried out through a process of social interaction’ [original emphasis] that employs an existing cultural repertoire of strategies to ensure ‘collective maintenance of reality’ (Norgaard 2011, 9–23). Just as the process and state of denial involves a spectrum of cognitions and behaviours, so too Whitman's place and role in it involves more than resorting to pre-existing cultural strategies and cognitive tendencies but also co-generating and disseminating them through the powerful amplifier of his poetry. As Norgaard observes in the context of climate change, information might be ‘known’, but people keep it separate from all that is happening in their daily lives (2011, 52). Whitman ‘knows’ about the relentless pace of transformation but keeps it separate from his comforting imagery of the future, asserting that neither he himself nor his country would fundamentally change, much less entirely die. This is what Allen Ginsberg must have alluded to in concluding his ‘A Supermarket in California’ (a poetic tribute to Whitman published exactly a century after the first version of CBF) with the following question: ‘Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?’. For all its optimistic trappings, CBF's enthusiasm for the future conceals a darker vision.
All this brings to mind terror management theory originated with Ernest Becker. According to Becker, ‘our innate way of coping with our death is to invest our energy in our social group and its achievement’ – that is, our ‘immortality project’ – and indeed climate change and the wider planetary crisis may be a proxy for death, as many typical reactions to climate change such as ‘extreme rationalization, denial, or placing climate change impacts far in the future’ are consistent with standard responses to fear of death (Marshall 2014, 209). Whitman's immortality project was to (co-)create America that would live forever in its vibrant youthful state, a perfect image of human vitality against a stable natural backdrop, even as the technoeconomic augmentations of that vitality already began to eat away at that backdrop. As a man of letters, Whitman's (re)imagining of nature was predominantly textual, a specific application of the linguistic relationship that humans develop with the so-called ‘environment’ in an attempt to approximate what nature really is, the ‘only possible resolution’ being ‘our final, permanent, (re)union with the landscape outside of the text’ – in a word, death (Outka 2005, 52). Whitman was prescient in his conviction that his poetry would ensure he would not entirely die, but CBF's predictions were simply wrong: not only is the ferries' contribution to mass urban transit in modern NYC ‘in reality meagre’; worse still, instead of looking fondly to their ancestors, many young users of public transportation today might want to question Whitman and other apologists for endless growth why they so blithely encouraged a process that would come to undermine their own declared long-term goals. Rising numbers of those who could otherwise opt for parenthood are now indeed considering long and seriously of their children before they are born – and deciding against bringing new life into the world of accelerating environmental degradation.
‘Dumb, beautiful ministers’
Marshall highlights how more than any other issue, climate change ‘exposes the deepest workings of our minds, and shows our extraordinary and innate talent for seeing only what we want to see and disregarding what we would prefer not to know’ (2014, 2). The same could be said of Whitman's mental gymnastics of extrapolating his fleeting moments on the ferry to the entire future of the nation, even as the scene he immortalized was already being undermined by the very same processes that brought it to being. As Whitman's intended readers who ‘stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current’, we (are made to) carry on with business as usual on the rising tide of far more powerful forces.
Today, reading CBF for insights into human cognitions, actions, and bonds as they evolve across time and space, knowing about the mixed blessings of exponential socioeconomic expansion, and seeing through Whitman's and his generation's cognitive biases and extractivist tendencies, as dire consequences are now threatening the very world they ostensibly built for their and our benefit, one cannot help but wonder what biases and tendencies of our own age the future generations (however many – or few – are yet to come) will hold up to the light. Unlike Whitman and his contemporaries, those of us today who have their hands in one way or another on the levers of power cannot claim ignorance. The science is clear and so are the impacts. What might have been mere biases and tendencies for Whitman has now solidified into a disastrous creed of the still-dominant civilization, as his ‘dumb, beautiful ministers’ are no longer passive and patient elements of the background that ‘always wait’ (126) and that ‘We use’ (129) as a resource in our confident march towards the never-ending future, but, provoked by the intransigent exploitation and extraction, are turning increasingly hostile. For all the exhilarating narratives developed in Whitman's time, what used to power our world has now (been) empowered itself and is taking the humankind on a wild ride that – unlike Whitman's beloved ferry – has an unknown destination.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Lies Wesseling and Louis van den Hengel for providing extensive feedback and guidance, and to the anonymous reviewers for inspiring valuable revisions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
1
Unless otherwise indicated, parenthetical references cite the final version of CBF from the 1891–1892 edition of Leaves of Grass by line number(s). Original stanza breaks are omitted.