WEBVTT

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And it's now that I want to read
this fragment from Whitman's

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Song of Myself,
because in a way,

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he made the question one that
one had to in some way face.

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He takes Plato's ladder,
so-called ladder of love,

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which is set forth in the
symposium where Socrates

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describes what his
teacher Diotima told him

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about love, how it moves from
various particular things

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to the general
upward and upward,

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until finally love is
directed toward the absolute.

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And Whitman takes the ladder
and simply turns it around

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and walks down it
without in any way

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decreasing the sacredness
of what he finds at the end.

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On the contrary, giving
to the lowliest things

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the sacredness Plato
didn't think they have.

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I want to read this
particularly because

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for a Michael Hogan who's
here, and who I just discovered

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this afternoon also
loves Whitman as I do,

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and for his son Gary,
who before I read

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came up and hugged me to
give me the strength to read.

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Whitman says, loaf
with me on the grass,

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loose the stop from your throat.

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Not words, not music
or rhyme I want,

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not custom or lecture,
not even the best.

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Only the lull.

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Only the lull I like, the
hum of your velvet voice.

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I mind how once we lay such a
transparent summer morning, how

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you settled your
head athwart my hips

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and gently turned over
upon me, and parted

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the shirt from my
bosom bone and plunged

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your tongue to my
bare-stripped heart

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and reached till
you felt my beard,

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and reached till
you felt my feet.

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Swiftly arose and spread around
me the peace and knowledge

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that pass all the
argument of the Earth,

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and I know that the hand of God
is the elder hand of my own,

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and I know that the spirit of
God is the brother of my own,

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and that all the men ever
born are also my brothers,

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and the women my
sisters and lovers,

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and that a kelson of
the creation is love,

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and limitless are
leaves stiff or drooping

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in the fields and brown ants in
the little wells beneath them

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and mossy scabs
of the worm fence,

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heaped stones, elder,
mullein, and poke-weed.

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