love without sentimentalism

A friend and I have an ongoing conversation about the difference between love and sentimentalism. I was reading Whitman one day and realized that Whitman has it: love without that patina, that falsity, that leads to sentimentalism. So much of Whitman's poetry is the composition of lists, one thing to another thing to a person to an animal, and back again, large to small. All of these things are embraced by Whitman, as they are. My friend wrote back: part of the zen koan is how you think w. escapes sentimentalism and transcendentalism. he writes elsewhere that he can become the other. this implies a highly sentimentalized relationship with otherness that imports the transcendent insofar as it denies the extant barriers between friend/enemy, self/other and the very real power and differences that intercedes hover within and around these distinctions. is not to collapse them (what baldwin would call integration, or "being integrated into a burning house") a trap of sentimentalism?

Here is what I wrote in return:

you've got me on the transcendentalism thing, insofar as whitman does think all borders and boundaries can be transgressed, transcended. what i meant was, he's not an american, or romantic transcendentalist in that he is not--emphatically not--waiting for perfection or believing in the possibility of a future perfection. whitman sees present perfection, sees the present--even when it is horrifying, even when he is surrounded by the stench of the dead, even when he is miserable and despairing--as perfect if rightly understood. whitman does not believe that we can ever transcend our humanity. our humanity is our holiness, to him, and our holiness is our wholeness. this is distinct from other american transcendentalists (emerson, perhaps, alcott, thoreau, even) as i understand them.

here is how i understand sentimentalism. to be sentimental about something, or someone, is to apprehend it/them as they are not. it is to replace the reality of them (insofar as we can know it) with a paper cut-out, with a prefabricated idea. it is as if, looking at a landscape, you see not the landscape but the postcard of the landscape that you're holding in your hand (remember the whole thing with the red barn in White Noise?). It is as if, looking at a person, you see not them, but this poorly painted picture of them that you yourself has made, and mistaking that for them. worse, even: perhaps you see them as you've been told to see them, you're seeing them as this inherited image, like understanding love through a hallmark card.

i don't think whitman is guilty of this kind of sentimentalism. when he says he can become the other, what i understand him to be saying (and i'm not sure i've read the exact text to which you are referring) is that he rejects these pre-formed concepts that would tell him he is always and absolutely other than anyone else. whitman is a mystic: for him, all is well, and all is one. i don't see this as sentimental, i suppose because i don't see this as false. hm. so when i say that he has love without sentimentalism, i think i mean that i want to hold out the idea that he loves the world, and the people in it, as it is and as they are, not as he wishes them to be. wishing people to be other than they are: sentimentalism. to recognize self in other--how else do we move beyond racism? or sexism? or any ism? and that is what i see whitman saying. and this could fit with baldwin too: the re-cog-nition of the races means that black people must see themselves in white people, too, no? it is not enough that the oppressor see herself in the oppressed. the oppressed must also recognize the oppressor in themselves.

Since I really liked what I wrote (I felt inspired) and never heard back from this friend, posting it here is my way of continuing the dialogue.