23 May 2009: "Always just trying 2 b authentic."

This post is about Walt Whitman. Carles adopts the poetic approach Whitman perfected in Leaves of Grass to catalog the many self-creating possibilities open to young Americans, which paradoxically produces a rolling crisis of identity.

In "Song of Myself," Whitman wrote,

In vain the speeding or shyness,
In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,
In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder'd bones,
In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,
In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying
low,
In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,
In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,
In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,
In vain the razor-bill'd auk sails far north to Labrador,
I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.

In a similar vein, Carles offers this apostrophe:

I am just trying to create an authentic life for myself.
I am just trying to fill up my apartment with meaningful items.
I am just trying to create authentic art.
I am just collecting some cameras from different eras.
I am just enjoying a beer, relaxing.
I am just collecting old magazines with pictures of nature/old stuff
I am just mashing up genres of music.
I am just sitting on my authentic couch.
I am just going buy some used books later that look ‘old’ and ‘historically relevant’.
I am just going to buy some humble shoes.

The use of repetition by both Whitman and Carles conveys a sense of irresistible force that propels the modern quest for identity. But along with this relentlessness comes an everrefeshing disappointment. Whitman writes:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things

Carles echoes this sentiment in his coda:

I am just 1 bro
I am just 1 bro searching for meaning
I am just 1 bro searching for meaning in our modern world.
I am just 1 bro creating art in my meaningful space
looking to transcend
evrythng

Carles's allusion to Whitman's great poem allows him to refine his argument about the delusive quest for authenticity that he has delineated in several previous posts: The search for meaning is an effort at self-transcendence and self-forgetting, of becoming without ego like the lower orders of the animal kingdom, blessed with a spontaneity of action. The "mania of owning things" is fueled by the uniquely human quest for self, which finds its definition in the atavistic dream of being freed from the burden of reflexivity. The "modern world" Carles laments also at once offers protection from the realization that more unmediated contact with the natural world foists upon us, how impossible is our retreat into blissful animal impulsiveness. The modern world, with its indulgence and celebration of the aesthetic effects only humans are capable of, offers us slight but not negligible consolations for the pain of being human. But though we have "art" and "meaningful space," we have lost what the animals take for granted, a unity with the whole of creation as given, far beyond the need to ever spend time "discussing their duty to God."