Do you really! There can't be much left of you when you've done. When you've cooked the awful pudding of One Identity.
"And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral dressed in his own shroud."
Take off your hat then, my funeral procession of one is passing.
This awful Whitman. This post mortem poet. This poet with the private soul leaking out of him all the time. All his privacy leaking out in a sort of dribble, oozing into the universe.
Walt becomes in his own person the whole world, the whole universe, the whole eternity of time. As far as his rather sketchy knowledge of history will carry him, that is. Because to be a thing he had to know it. In order to assume the identity of a thing, he had to know that thing. He was not able to assume one identity with Charlie Chaplin, for example, because Walt didn't know Charlie. What a pity! He'd have done poems, pæans and what not. Chants, Songs of Cinematernity.
"Oh, Charlie, my Charlie, another film is done——"
As soon as Walt knew a thing, he assumed a One Identity with it. If he knew that an Esquimo sat in a kayak, immediately there was Walt being little and yellow and greasy, sitting in a kayak.
Now will you tell me exactly what a kayak is?
Who is he that demands petty definition? Let him behold me sitting in a kayak.
I behold no such thing. I behold a rather fat old man full of a rather senile, self-conscious sensuosity.