[Newspoetry] Knowing Another: Action and Regardingness

[DL Emerick]

Knowing Another: Action and Regardingness:
Cliff's Notes upon the Death of a Salesman

We all suffer from our sure losses of memory.
Every forgetfulness comes in greater blessing.

There is nothing paradoxical in contradictions,
There is the tension of certainty in the unknown.

Contradictions arise only in conscious choice,
as actions can not both be and not be themselves,
not in this present time of undoing some undone,
to untie unknotted lines, repenting a penance paid.

Contradictions refer to these choices unmade
as opposing, standing against all choices made;
nothing can be and not be itself at the same time.trashing the bastard

*******

One of my younger brothers -- Cliff -- died,
a year ago this 22nd of June - back in 2004.

He didn't live long enough to see triumphs,
like the Cubs winning the World Series at last,
like the Illini emerging First from the Final Four,
like Democrats saving America from Bushitism.

Cliff was more than just another brother to me...
He was a pal of mine, a friend and a confidant.

It's not like he and I were very much similar.
No, it was quite different than all of that.
Our identity -- our bonding -- was his doing,
it lay deep in how he regarded the world.

Me?  I am rather impersonal, abstract, curious,
a useless laziness of the scholar, well-informed,
but truly not too committed, nor caring enough,
more given to expression than to any form of doing
my accomplishments lie in saying the well-said.

Cliff, by featured contrast, by way of attraction,
was ineffably ever doing something in his life.
If he traveled all over Illinois, with Lincoln books,
looking for the places where Lincoln walked,
where Lincoln spoke, where Lincoln appeared,
his was not an activity designed to prove truth,
as if truth were some immortality existing ever.

Lincoln, so Cliff would say, was a mortal man,
a man who walked these lands, and rode about,
sleeping in houses along the way, eating, talking,
a living man was Lincoln, ever taking up others,
by their incessant bickerings with one another,
and arguing about the wronged rights of a side,
of the merits of a justice that fixes all wrongs.

I argued with Cliff, over in great Springfield,
standing in the middle of the old Capitol building,
before the statue of my beloved Lil' Giant Douglas,
dwarfed even in stone by the lanky Lincoln form,
that the greater of two men was a Compromiser,
a man who insisted that a question be unanswered,
as a matter of national policy, of national union,
to let each state sovereignty decide the question,
each according to it laws and customs and will.

Shall we make war for the sake of consistency,
shall purity of essence, of sacral ideology itself,
rule out all possibility of meaningful difference?

Oh?  Do I sound like an apologist for Slavery?
If our choice, said even Lincoln, is between
National Unity with some slavery, here and there,
and a National Unity, kept by war in bloodshed,
then let us choose a tolerant peace, some slavery.

So, Lincoln sounded much like Douglas to me,
down at the level of the actions he'd choose,
regardless of all the speeches he might have made.

Cliff never succumbed to any of my arguments,
while he listened and overcame all my objections,
even my objections to Lincoln as a corporate lawyer
who liked to pretend he remained one of the people,
while his aspirations were ever to imperial grandeur,
not even truly caused by his ostensible royal spouse,
who rather symbolized than caused Lincoln's vanity.

Oh, Cliff and I visited with one another many days,
even though he scorned all philosophical arguments
that I would occasionally raise, as interesting me,
saying that such questions were pieces of fluff,
a mere intellectual puffery without consequence.

Does God exist?  Who cares!  No one does --
for the believers in God believe on no proof,
and thus nothing will disprove their belief --
they find the mantra of God like a blanket,
a thing they may wrap around them when cold,
to keep from feeling the emptiness of the world,
the void that sucks away the heat of living from us.

So, Cliff never wasted his words on such ideas,
but he was quick to note a story about Lincoln,
when Clinton was accused of infidelities in office.
Lincoln, he said, slept with prostitutes now and then.
Cliff did not care what such an act might mean,
to Lincoln's wife, or family, or to Bill or Hillary.

Who cares?  While it may have moral significance,
moral significance is an insignificant universalism,
a flattery of the ego that its own morals are right,
and that all the rest of the world is wrongly sinful --
that the rest of the world is damned and damnable,
going ever faster towards a hell it is ever deserving.
Cliff saw that all morals were foolish vain follies.

Cliff raised flowers and tomatoes, in a garden,
and his garden was always greener, and greater
than the one I planted and tended, haphazardly.
He took an interest in whatever he was doing,
and learned whatever was usefuls to know,
in doing the things that he wanted to do.

Oh, he said, you have to be willing to do a lot,
to learn to do anything, including making mistakes,
criticizing constantly whatever it is you are doing,
never quite accepting your own work as good enough,
ever generous in praising anyone or anything helpful,
never falling into self-indulgent egoisms of a vanity --
a thing that I ever do, feeling proud of my thinking,
of my informed knowing, vastly superior reasoning.
Cliff never much accepted such praises as his due.

Cliff once had an interest in "occult" matters,
reading stories about UFOs, or of haunted places.
But, I have since felt of his interests, even then,
that he did not care at all for the possible truth,
not in these "occult" matters.  His was an aural one:
in what ways did people expressed their interest
in such stories, as to what they would hear to say.
That he gave up following and telling such stories
measures his own growing concern with credibility.

Cliff was as prone to gimmicks and fads as any man,
especially one who listens too long to marketing guff.
He essayed to raise guppies as a possible money-maker;
he sold cookies, mobile phones, rhino robots, bibles,
nature foods, and many other now unmentionables.

A salesman never quite believes in what he sells,
but he believes most fervently in the value of the sale,
that there is a reason for which every person will buy
whatever it is that you always have got to be selling,
and, believe me, every person is a salesman, dying --
when the sales don't close, then the salesman dies.

His was a greater heart larger than most people have,
because he was constantly dragging the novel home,
a stray cat or dog, pieces of junk found in life's ways,
odd, curious and quaint people, strangers befriended,
to know Cliff was to transcend your own order of life,
to find yourself looking at things you'd else ignore,
as simply an unplanned incongruity to be passed over.

Cliff never quite accepted my claimed Jewishness --
he thought, my long arguments to the contrary,
that the culturality of Judaism was non-acquirable,
that you had to be born into any culture to be of it,
and that you would otherwise ever be an outsider,
like an in-law who is never a blood family member,
and we all know what is thickest in this bound life.

Apart from my intellectuality, I suppose he was right,
in the sense that Mann says, 'You can't go home again;
you can't be born again -- not as a Christian, nor as a Jew --
there is no rebirth, no renaissance, no total self make-over."
Cliff and I will always be brothers, just like that, too --
even though he has found a way to stop speaking to me,
I still hear him everyday talking about his view of life.
If Salesman have to die for the Sale, he died well.