Welcome to Hella Immaculate, I love you.
I’m Dave, a comedian and budding abolitionist. I love making light of heavy shit and taking frivolous things too seriously. Hella Immaculate is my existential, spiritual, political, creative-process-and-culture-obsessed alt-weekly.
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No essay today, just a clip from this week’s episode of This Is Your Afterlife. My guest sent me “This Compost”—a Walt Whitman poem that is the closest thing to a distillation of my guest’s vision of the afterlife—and I read it between my intro and our conversation, with a song from his band underscoring my reading.
You can read the text of the poem here, but I’m proud of how the audio turned out, and I think you’ll like the clip above.
This Compost
1
Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.
O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?
Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.
2
Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.
What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will
none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.
THIS IS MY PODCAST, THIS IS YOUR AFTERLIFE
I talked to: Matthew Sage, multi-instrumentalist member of Fuubutsushi, an ambient jazz/folk/field-recording quartet who put out 4 albums this past year, each tied to the season it was released. I think the winter one, Setsubun, might be my favorite, but they’re all so good and really kept me tethered to the earth and the present this past year. Their newest, Natsukashii, the summer album, just came out.
We talked about: All of the things we had in common! It was uncanny, and I think I’ve made a new art man friend. Here’s a small sampling of our similarities:
obsession with naming things, especially bands
nondenominational Christian upbringing
knowledge of the Christian ska band Five Iron Frenzy
type one diabetes!
surviving comas!!
went on trips with our partners last fall to close-by Midwestern “fall color” destinations (him = Wisconsin, me = Michigan)
It’s one of my favorite episodes in a while.
THEY’RE JUST, LIKE, MY SUGGESTIONS, MAN
Watch the mushroom/mycelium documentary Matt and I reference in the episode, Fantastic Fungi. It’s an entertaining and inspiring look at our planet’s largest living organism.
Unwind TONIGHT with a Friday the 13th “Yoga Nidra guiding you into deep rest and meditation, exploring the themes of thresholds and liminal spaces.” It’s on Zoom at 7pm Central Time, again, TONIGHT!!! Register here. Taught by my partner, Hope Barnes, so, yes, I am undeniably biased, but she really is quite talented at leading yoga nidra and puts a massive amount of time and care into crafting each one. And I helped her with her sound setup, so you know that shit will sound crisp!
Fill out this survey with your thoughts about police, if you live in Chicago. It’ll take 90 seconds and help the Defund CPD campaign a lot. And you don’t have to be an abolitionist, just willing to share your honest thoughts (multiple choice, no essays).
Come to the next Local Live(s) show I’m co-hosting and co-producing with the Chicago Sun-Times on Wednesday, August 25. LL combines storytelling, live journalism, and music in the closest approximation of real human interaction you can get on Zoom. I’ve helped curate a stellar lineup, and I’m really stoked for this. Free!
Listen to/watch these playlists of podcast episodes and videos about abolition if you want to deepen your abolition education. Assembled by Damon Williams, who is performing at this month’s Local Live(s) and helps steer the city’s Defund CPD campaign!
Got a response to something here? Reply or comment, and I’ll hit you back.
MAY I PLAY YOU A SOUND?
It’s the song under the Whitman poem up top! Matt said when Fuubutsushi finished this song, he was taken aback, didn’t realize they had this in them. After listening to it on repeat all week, I can hear why. It’s awing, rooted, levitational.
So flavorous and juicy,
DM
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient