[Newspoetry] The Sickness Unto Death: Intimations of Immortality

[DL Emerick]

The Sickness unto Death is life's path
of Fear and Trembling, said Kierkegaard.
It concerns a certain faithlessness of faith,
an ultimate facelessness of the dead,
however named and self-honor declaimed,
for only man ever faces death, each his own -
though he takes the death of others, in style,
saying, irrationally, "I go on living while they die.

The "power to go to war" is irrevocable, practically. - per Lawrence Korb
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/15/AR2007091501
452_2.html

Limited war, so 60 years of history say,
is all that is left, as an exercise, dubious,
of might, if even ever of any good reason.
Nuclear war, by implication, is beyond reason.

Granting limited power opens Pandora's box;
It lets the unthinkable genie out of the bottle.
Once the cruel evils of war are unleashed,
There is no democratic means of recovery.

How can I be poetic about limited things?
The terrorist-in-chief is chief commander,
The President and his Presidency,
Partisan, non-partisan or bi-partisan,
For all Presidents love war and death,
The trappings of power over life and death,
The followers who swoon at power,
Who suck up to and suck off power.

They believe in the Will to Power,
All of them - Clinton or Carter,
Bush or Bush, even anemic Ford
And that animated cartoon Reagan,
Much more than Nietzsche ever did --
For they seek after glory and vanity.

The highs of historians dwell on greatness,
In the way that leeches draw life's blood,
Talking of ever greater deeds in bloodletting,
Speaking of historical or universal purpose,
Of some larger significance of this or that,
Pretending to know what happens tomorrow,
For gods would be nothing if not foresighted,
All-knowing and all-controlling, all-moralizing --
Everywhere committed and involved, so they say,
Modeling their god after their own oversized egos,
Dwelling upon greatness in supine gratitude.

Accidentalists like me are left to shrug -
I believe in no mysteries of ultimate intentionality,
The subterfuges of reason and its escapes -
For reason is caged and thus becomes cagey,
It plots escape from both Box and Bottle -
Reason thinks itself immortal and universal,
And this takes out and over all other reason,
As if isolated, alone to be capricious God.

I believe in duties of responsible causality,
Limited to what I deem to do here and now -
A matter of absolutely judging all things,
According only to what I am now doing,
As to whether man dies or disappears:
I permit no appeals to distant consequences,
A discounting that make time itself immoral,
Discounting present life by presenting death,
Bringing "the" future in to justify "the" past,
ignores a present gift, abridging my times.

My philosophy is founded in infinitesimals,
Not in imaginary infinities of immortality:
My calculus computes higher derivatives,
Shrinking everything to this moment, now -
And, here, in this very moment, I live or die -
I choose between good and evil, now.

Both of these are imaginary matters,
As one is better imagined than another -
Whether I am wrong or right, ultimately,
Only God could decide and doesn't,
Because He has decided for Himself,
And leaves us that same choice,
Unwilling to take it away from us --
This gift of life is a matter of choice,
In calculable affinities of our flesh.

What happens after choice is accident -
For good choices and bad ones, too,
Lack connection to what comes after,
Except in the moment of action, itself,
For reactions come from others -
For good or ill -- incalculably to me -
Such is the gospel of Wellness unto Life,
Fearing no evil, and never trembling.
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