[Newspoetry] Letter to an Activist Friend

[Donald L Emerick]

Dear Mark,

What you wrote, I was going to write, but in a longer note, and in a less
direct comment, to leave as an inference the pending moral question: do you
have any obligation to anyone, other than to your own sweet sense of smug
self-satisfiedness, when you withdraw and retreat into the hard shell of
individualism?  But, of course, even that is too terse for me, for I would
want to make the affirmative case also stand up, for inspection -- and it
runs along the idea, vastly corrupted by Judaeo-Christian mythologies of the
original sin, that man is everywhere born into debt, that debt is socialized
for the good of the person and for the good of the people.  That is, in
plain and simple terms, your parents, like the generations before them, work
to pay off the debt they owe -- from birth -- to their society and its
civilization.

Consequently, I might add, if the original debt could be much larger than
any individual might ever hope to pay (even if he lived for hundreds or
thousands of years), then all that the individual could properly hope to do
is to expand the estate of society such that the debt is carried forward to
the next generation and that they are at least as well endowed -- morally
and physically and so on -- as to continue to meet the payment obligation's
schedule -- so that the mortgage will not be called by Nature and its firm
accountings -- which would evict Man from the State of Nature and deprive
him and his kind of being.

And, here, I contra those who think that Man lives in a State of War when he
lives in a State of Nature -- for I argue that the State of Nature is,
precisely, civilization in some sense of the term, and that the ancients
(Hobbes, for instance, or Rousseau, for that matter) were greatly mistaken
on this point.  Society does not represent some corruption of the
patrimonial estate (to hear Locke talk of it) which breach could then be
then healed by a social contract, to overcome, as it were a naked
individualism pre-existing before society, as a State of Nature.  Instead,
interpretively, if I am right, then the State of Nature, for Man, is that of
civilization, from which there have always been deviants, outcasts and other
rude barbarians who elect to wage (unholy) war against Nature -- the blood
lusts of lazy criminality, such as the class of people around George W Bush
so well exhibit, represent the psychotic quackeries visited upon by these
miscreant socio-homeopaths.

Well, such would have been the tenor and the thematic attack upon the
cowardly retreat from aggrandizing individualism into anomic individualism
(for the latter is the consequence of the former, as I understand (say) Eric
Fromm's Escape from Freedom) that I would have written.  Perhaps, it might
be just as well that I say nothing critical at all, rather than to offer
these abbreviated objections, that barely open up the imprisoning dungeon
into which the poet casts himself by casting off completely his common
humanity, in order to indulge (excessively) the uncommon part of his
humanity, the part that is peculiar to him, his individuality.  Only a sick
person would need that kind of extended bed-rest, covered in blankets and
spoon-fed chicken soup, isolated and withdrawn into the nest -- and, only
then to wait for a time when recovery occurs, restoring one to the state of
wellness, of being civilized by being an engaged portion of civilization,
one with the world and not somehow extra special, to be saved preciously
only when somehow set apart from it.

(For, from the latter, springs the overly privileged lords of Man -- those
greedy hands who would be always ahead of us, over our heads, in immoral
salutes and other obscene gestures towards their corrupting powers over
reason, to dismiss it totally -- to use it as it pleases them, which is to
abuse it -- never to learn from reason, as a child from a parent.  For the
idea of civilization as social evolution would be just this: the imperfect
shall make the imperfect that is just a little more likely to make another
imperfect an indiscernible degree better than the most recent first
imperfect, and all of this is called in the future imperfect language, what
ought naturally to follow is unknown, but what ought not to follow is not
unknowable and is never knowable as some negation (eg, war or death), whence
derives the affirmative of civilization, the pre-existing debt.

I hope my circular reasoning, in its tour de force, or farce, suffices -- in
its brevity of outline of the horizon -- by the things scraping against its
skies and rising from their own grounds -- to show enough of my thinking (a
futile thing, I know) of what we ought to think, and thus to say.

Thanks, anyway, for listening,
(if you have made it thus far),
Donald L Emerick

PS: Dear NP-editors, consider the letter as a form of news, for which a
poetics follows, perhaps.