What can be more mechanical? The difference between life and matter is that life, living things, living creatures, have the instinct of turning right away from _some_ matter, and of blissfully ignoring the bulk of most matter, and of turning towards only some certain bits of specially selected matter. As for living creatures all helplessly hurtling together into one great snowball, why, most very living creatures spend the greater part of their time getting out of the sight, smell or sound of the rest of living creatures. Even bees only cluster on their own queen. And that is sickening enough. Fancy all white humanity clustering on one another like a lump of bees. No, Walt, you give yourself away. Matter _does_ gravitate, helplessly. But men are tricky-tricksy, and they shy all sorts of ways. Matter gravitates because it is helpless and mechanical. And if you gravitate the same, if the body of you gravitates to all you meet or know, why, something must have gone seriously wrong with you. You must have broken your main-spring. You must have fallen also into mechanization. Your Moby Dick must be really dead. That lonely phallic monster of the individual you. Dead mentalized. I only know that my body doesn't by any means gravitate to all I meet or know. I find I can shake hands with a few people. But most I wouldn't touch with a long prop. Your mainspring is broken, Walt Whitman. The mainspring of your own individuality. And so you run down with a great whirr, merging with everything. You have killed your isolate Moby Dick. You have mentalized your deep sensual body, and that's the death of it. I am everything and everything is me and so we're all One in One Identity, like the Mundane Egg, which has been addled quite a while. "Whoever you are, to endless announcements----" "And of these one and all I weave the song of myself." Do you? Well, then, it just shows you haven't _got_ any self. It's a mush, not a woven thing. A hotch-potch, not a tissue. Your self. Oh, Walter, Walter, what have you done with it? What have you done with yourself? With your own individual self? For it sounds as if it had all leaked out of you, leaked into the universe. Post mortem effects. The individuality had leaked out of him. No, no, don't lay this down to poetry. These are post mortem effects. And Walt's great poems are really huge fat tomb-plants, great rank graveyard growths. All that false exuberance. All those lists of things boiled in one pudding-cloth! No, no! I don't want all those things inside me, thank you. "I reject nothing," says Walt. If that is so, one must be a pipe open at both ends, so everything runs through. Post mortem effects. "I embrace ALL," says Whitman. "I weave all things into myself." 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."