Yesterday, in an anthology of poems in praise of trains, I came across Walt Whitman's paean to the locomotive 'To a Locomotive in Winter'. Yet, I couldn't help thinking that first and foremost, it is I who is the locomotive, who loco-motes under his own steam from place to place. And so, I saw it first, this poem, as a eulogy to the organic and original human being, as all Whitman's poems essentially are, and to the electric body, which is not the black cylindrical tube of some inanimate (and invariably polluting) engine, but to the engine of the body itself, and the underlying life force which drives it.
"It is not original sin which keeps man unaware of his own godhood, but his failure to connect himself with his own powerhouse,' writes Colin Wilson in Religion and the Rebel.
At the foot of the Loch Humphrey path at Kilpatrick.
From up here on the Kilpatrick Braes it's possible to see a whole range of 'locomotives': trains, ships, cars and trucks, tractors, planes.... Indeed, as a vantage point for locomotion the Loch Humphrey path has it all! Never before in the history of the world has there been such a varied view of locomotion. And yet.... I keep thinking that the finest locomotives are not down there but up here, the birds, the animals, the walkers, the cyclists...
ALL THESE ENGINES
All these engines:
Train, plane, automobile,
‘auto’ - ‘mobile’
All these engines
None so ingenious
As the absolute body.
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