The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Between the Body and the Soul: Neri Oxman Reads Walt Whitman

Between the Body and the Soul: Neri Oxman Reads Walt Whitman

A century before computing pioneer Alan Turing comforted his dead soul-mate’s mother, and perhaps himself, with the insistence that “the body provides something for the spirit to look after and use,” and generations before Rilke defiantly refused to become “one of those who neglect the body in order to make of it a sacrificial offering for the soul,” Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) appointed himself the poet of the body and the poet of the soul in one of the most famous opening lines in all of poetry, from one of the most beloved poems in his Leaves of Grass — a poem that has helped Holocaust survivors survive and continues to help generations endure the small everyday terrors of life.

That timeless, generous poem came alive at The Astronomy of Walt Whitman — a special miniature edition of The Universe in Verse on Governors Island in partnership with Pioneer Works — in a soulful performance by designer, artist, architect, inventor, and poet of matter Neri Oxman.

Half a century after Rachel Carson made ecology a household word, Oxman coined the term material ecology — a term Whitman would have cherished — to describe her singular work weaving the structures, systems, and aesthetics of nature, from silkworms to honeybees to the human breath, into our built environment. That term became the title of a visionary Museum of Modern Art exhibition by curator Paola Antonelli, making Oxman the first designer working in material science to have a major exhibition at a major New York art museum, a century and a half after Whitman envisioned museums as places to teach us “the infinite lessons of minerals… wood, plants, vegetation.” At the time of her Universe in Verse performance, she had just given birth to her first child — that supreme attunement of the body and the soul in the poetry of being, an embodied consecration of Whitman’s conviction, thoroughly countercultural in his day, that “it is as great to be a woman as to be a man” and that “there is nothing greater than the mother of men.”

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into new tongue.
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.
I chant the chant of dilation or pride,
We have had ducking and deprecating about enough,
I show that size is only development.
Have you outstript the rest? are you the President?
It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on.
I am he that walks with the tender and growing night,
I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.
Press close bare-bosom’d night — press close magnetic nourishing night!
Night of south winds — night of the large few stars!
Still nodding night — mad naked summer night.
Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset — earth of the mountains misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
Far-swooping elbow’d earth — rich apple-blossom’d earth!
Smile, for your lover comes.
Prodigal, you have given me love — therefore I to you give love!
O unspeakable passionate love.

Couple with poet Sarah Kay’s wondrous performance from the same show, then revisit other timeless treasures from the full-scale Universe in Verse: Amanda Palmer reading Neil Gaiman’s tribute to Rachel Carson and his feminist poem about the history of science, Marie Howe reading her tribute to Stephen Hawking, Krista Tippett reading “Figures of Thought” by Howard Nemerov, Regina Spektor reading “Theories of Everything” by the astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson, and astrophysicist Janna Levin reading “A Brave and Startling Truth” by Maya Angelou, “Planetarium” by Adrienne Rich, and Whitman’s classic “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.”

Whitman-era portrait of Neri Oxman by Brooklyn Tintype


Published February 25, 2020

https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/02/25/neri-oxman-walt-whitman/

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