I recently purchased a book called The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction by Brian Kiteley. Today, I completed Exercise #9, “Historical Omniscience.” Here’s the core of the prompt:
“Write about an event set well in the past, twenty or one hundred years ago. Write from above, as if by means of researched opinion (but I suggest you do little actual research). By this I mean write about several historical characters or an interesting event, imagining any POV you want.”
700 words
Background: Walt Whitman was an American poet, essayist, and journalist, best known for his poetry book titled Leaves of Grass. He lived from 1819-1892 and was part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism. Leaves of Grass starts with the following lines:
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Leaves of Grass was self-published, and Whitman, who was relatively unknown, sent a copy to highly successful Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson responded with a letter of unbridled praise for “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” Whitman, without Emerson’s permission, went on to controversially publish the letter in the book’s second edition, creating a complex relationship between the two writers.
The following piece is written about the historical event of Whitman reading Emerson’s letter and is told from the point of view of atoms, specifically his.
Atoms
We celebrate within your body, and in the joints of ink that link and swell to a fearsome joy in the letter that arrived this morning. Those of us in your fingers quiver around the paper, crisply folded. The ones in your eyes spiral rapidly, shouting to the brain: This changes everything!
Print it on the spine of your book—your own spine will have it no other way. Oh, the tingle! The sudden shoot of pure euphoria that bundles around each of us like a winding ribbon of sun! The lean body of the word “Emerson,” scrawled perfectly over the atoms of once-trees. We will flood the inky inscription on the book’s final spine: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career. R.W. Emerson.”
Those of us stacked in your tiny ear-hairs wonder, “Must we pay for this? Do we betray the confidence of these earth-laden words?” But the ones in your lungs stretch, web-like, around a breath of Brooklyn. The envelope this morning holds a sunbeam that matches the little hearts in each of us. We must tilt it and pour light over every consonant that lies, shut and shaking, in the drawer of your wooden desk.
So, throw open the curtains! Alert the printer! Dance on the sidewalk, drinking the gutter’s perfume! Each of us have become a pigeon, pecking and flapping our river-toned wings, alight with the love of a man who transcends. Another Brooklyn breath… we ache deliciously.