Colour Supplement

Articles by writers around the world

Sunday 22 July 2007

 

The Song of Myself

By Gordon Atkinson

 

“What is truth?” Pilate asked Jesus. And Jesus answered him not.

One of the poems in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is called, "Song of Myself." That poem caught my attention the first time I read it, and I have contemplated its meaning many times since. Singing the song of yourself has a thrilling and dangerous appeal, like skinny-dipping or hitchhiking across the country with only twenty bucks in your pocket.

Many times I have wanted to sing the song of myself, but I’ve never been willing to take the time or pay the price.

What would it take to sing the song of yourself? What would it cost you?

First, you would have to know yourself. And that is quite a thing to consider. You would have to take a long, careful look into what is deep and hidden within you. What is lurking around the corners of your mind? What memories and obsessions haunt you? What causes your glands to seize? What gets your blood moving so that your veins and arteries swell and push to the surface of your skin? What comes from your gut? What do your instincts say? Who or what speaks to you at night when the raw cuts of your home movies are shown on the screen of your mind?

Knowing yourself takes a long time, but even if you take that journey and arrive knowing yourself as well as a person can, you still might not sing the song of yourself. What would stop you?

Cowardly fears and righteous obligations.

Because…

Singing the song of yourself means telling the truth, and the truth has a way of severing ties to people and places and things. The words are spoken and a gleaming scalpel flashes. Living cords are sliced away. There are howls of pain and then silence.

Because…

Singing the song of yourself is like removing your clothes and standing naked before the world. Clothes do not make a person; they make the image of that person. Underneath the clothing lies the vulnerability of flesh. This is my true body. This is all I was given and all I will take with me. There will be no more hiding.

Because…

Singing the song of yourself creates a flash of white-hot fire in the kiln of your life. Everything that is not you is burned away. You lose it all, all the stuff you have accumulated over the years that follows you from house to house, wailing like a wraith. It would be gone forever. Burned away.

Because…

You might lose your community. Few relationships can withstand the song of yourself. People don’t want to hear your song. They don’t want to hear their own songs. They want to sing little love ditties filled with undefined words all the days of their lives.

So if you dare sing the song of yourself, be aware that you might be standing alone at the end of it. Maybe there is one person in the world who can bear the flames and will sing his or her song beside you. This is the person you've longed for and can't get enough of. The person whose voice you would recognize in a thousand voices. The one who draws you out and brings you forth. Perhaps you will find that person.

But probably not. You will probably be alone at the end of your song. The last refrain will echo back slowly, and there will be silence and solitude.

“So what would be so great about singing the song of yourself?” you ask me.

I’ll tell you. Singing the song of yourself would be the closest you could come to real truth. Descartes knew this. He knew that the only truth you can know and sing is the truth of your own existence. And maybe truth is the Siren whose song has charmed and tempted you all of your life. No one knows how you have longed for her, wanted her, pined for her, sought her in the hard places.

When I began Real Live Preacher back in 2002, I had an insane dream of singing the song of myself. I couldn’t do it then, even though I was anonymous. What held me back was your opinion of me. Within days my blog had already formed the crust of a persona, a crust that has thickened over the years.

And persona is death to the song of yourself.

Every time I sit to write, I flirt with the melody of the song of myself. I can feel the song. I can sometimes imagine the words I would lay down on paper, were I to sing it. I also count the cost. Singing the song of myself would hurt people, and that would hurt me. Truth is brutal. The cost too high, and it is getting higher every day.

So I push the edge a bit. I pull a few things out of my gut that are risky and lay them down with language that, ironically, gets its beauty more from what I left inside than from what I put on the paper.

But I tell you this ferociously and with bared teeth. The song of myself echoes in my ears every day. I’m in love with the idea of that song, though I have never even hummed it to myself.

Because I would like to write the truth about one human being. And I’m the only human I will ever truly know

Gordon Atkinson is pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in San Antonio, Texas and has his own outstanding website www.reallivepreacher.com.  We are most grateful to Gordon for his permission to reproduce his essays here.

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