ing life by exhibiting on occasion discontinuities and all sorts of
sudden elisions and transformations. For the laws of the post-
mortem world will not be those of physics but of psychology,
since our survival (according to the hypothesis we are consider-
ing) will be of a psychological rather than a physical survival.Hick also conjectures that in such a state the deceased may be able to
conjure up images of touch, taste, smell, and even images of the three-
dimensional world. The raw materials from which they might fashion
mental images, he concludes, are the memories of their mortal selves and
of their mortal desires, halfway between “a private-mental-world picture
and a bodily-resurrection picture.” In cautiously (and apprehensively) ap-
plying Hick’s speculations about the interaction of the sentient dead with
the sentient living (the core motif of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”) it is well
to remember Hick’s caveat that postmortal “dreams” can demonstrate
only a limited consciousness of life-formed experiences, and (in con-
tradiction to Whitman’s assumption that the soul continues to develop
through all the stages of its existence) that the souls of the dead have no
further options for growth. And even though the shadowy ¤gures beheld
in this dream-death might possibly appear to be vivid, Hick warns, they
may, after all, be only delusions.^36 Whitman’s sentient postmortal persona
is essentially a poetic creation, and it may be unwise to expect his version
of life beyond death to jibe with any explanation based on logic, theology,
or science.
The persona of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is presented as an immortal
spirit with a local habitation somewhere above the route of the poet’s
beloved Fulton Ferry—a reborn and fully conscious inhabitant of an ideal
postmortal world.^37 In this elevated state of being, he appears to be vi-
sionary and immune to mortal af®iction but still endowed with curiosity
and compassion and the ability to utter truths. Although ostensibly dead,
he retains recognizable mortal characteristics, empathizing with everyone
he beholds, longing for followers and lovers, confessing the “dark
patches” of misery and doubt that link him to all living men and women,
and recalling the affectionate thrill of eying the “young men” in public
places and feeling the “negligent leaning of their ®esh against me as I sat.”
In his mortal state, the persona had liked to “sit and look out” at the
world and its ways as an observer “both in and out of the game”; and now,
in this free-®oating state of “psychic migration,”^38 he can still observe,
120 / “The Progress of Souls”