I'd like to think my soul came out at night like Walt Whitman's but to be honest after a night of writing dry legal content, I fear it's shrivelled up and died in a corner of this silent house.
Inspiration can be a fickle thing, flickering when you least expect it and draining away when you want to call upon it. Coffee can keep me going through midnight but it's a poor awakener of the soul. The reality is we move in the same places, drive the same highways and go through the same motions every day. The possibilities are out there spread across an indistict horizon that becomes more abstract everyday.
So do we stick to these designed roles? Do I walk everyday into the same wordless lunchrooms and see the same people cowered over their sandwiches? Or can we seized the abstract, do the unexpected and finally change who we are?
I'm not sure what this has to do with Whitman, but mainly I hate this poet and see him as overrated, not that I've had much time to study his work. He looks like a beardy old bore, though, the type of guy who would harrangue you at the railway station when you are trying to read your book - so there.
A Clear Midnight by Walt Whitman
THIS is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou
lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars
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