I am large, I contain multitudes.
-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
But here’s the thing, Walt. Sometimes I’m tired of my multitudes.
-Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful
You said it between parentheses, Walt, like a hushed voice of surrender to a truth we find uneasy: we are unsettled by wanting the thing and its opposite, and the thing next to each of the first things, to display our decent public sides and hide our raving madness in private, to be our present selves carrying the wounds and yearnings of all our previous selves, so convinced we are of our continuity over time, unwilling to grapple with the inefficient, irreducible multiplicity. We are made of cells, not one of which pulsing today the same one that heard early criticism, felt coolness of eyes averted in anger, saw disappointment on that loved one’s brow.
And speaking of faces, Walt, what to do with the disturbing knowledge that we see the collection of bone, flesh, tendons that form into hands, or feet, but we will never see our own face? We see the faces of others, and they see ours, yet we’ll pass our entire lifetime glimpsing only approximations of our own – this beloved, familiar thing I have come to believe is my face – distorted in reflection or response. The peony seems not to mind, the crow squawks to warn the creature with a face it doesn’t trust to stay away from the tree with its nest. Neither speaks of the pain of wanting the impossible, gives voice to the burden of being everything and nothing, here but not here, the magic trick of seeming solid when all evidence points to an ever-shifting energy field, comprised of other energy fields.
Something sees out, Walt, but can’t see in. Something is large, something contains multitudes, but not even the poet endlessly searching will find the “I” of the eye, the “you” behind any pair of eyes, is at risk of diving right past Narcissus into the pool’s clear reflection, seeking momentary reprieve from not knowing who or what is being contained.