At Paumanok

"...And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future,

And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn'd to beautiful results,

And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death,

And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact,

And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any."

~ Walter Whitman

Not much of this text is really clicking with me.  I've always been a bit masculinely challenged, regardless of how much I fought to play the character that I felt was required of me to tell a better story.  My nature was never that of a "man," by terms of societal expectation, but I did play a nihilistic rebel well enough to be excluded from activities in which I would have to prove my manhood.  Anyone who took the time to get to know me found me to be more of a rascal that a rebel: Skeezix; the secret passion project that I knew wouldn't get me anywhere, but I dreamed and dreamed until I woke up in my thirties with a body of work that I could never show anyone, and a not very promising future.

Whitman was clearly a Man, living a manly life, focused on manly things, with a bit of a heart in there somewhere.  I never had to learn to do manly things; I was always celebrated for the heart things, like acting and music.  So, you could say that I was always a Heart, living a feeling life, focused on feeling things, with a bit of a man in there somewhere.  All this talk of war and duty and country and fighting and man man man, falls distant second to the talk of equality and beauty and soul and the universal aspect of all, which he doesn't touch on much in the earlier "chicken arms" feeling of scrappy youth, though he was mid thirties when he first published Leaves of Grass, and really spent the rest of his life "fixing" it, the first work is always a bit of the accumulation of life thus far, and it plays accordingly.  I could have kept reading this morning, but stopped at the lengthy Song of Myself, which I feel is worth more attention than I was capable of investing.

Does my little mountain town in Southern California compare to PauMANok?