Just recently, on the underground trolley, I caught up with my old pal Marty Heidegger.
“Yo Marty,” I said, taking a seat on the opposite bench. “Hot as hell out there, eh? Heh! So. What‘s new?”
He’s an older guy, about a hundred and twenty, bald, tall and tan with a pear-shaped body. He wore a light grey jumpsuit with a bunch of zippers on it, like a fighter pilot costume or something.
“Nothing,” Marty replied. “Dread. Dread reveals Nothing. Dread is there, but sleeping.”
“What?”
“Yeah totally,” he said. “Exactly.”*
I had a deep breath and tried to have a deep thought.
“It smells kind of funny in this trolley,” I said. “Doesn’t it smell kind of funny in this trolley, Marty? Marty? Aren‘t you hot in that jumpsuit, Marty?”
He said nothing. I mean he didn’t say anything. But it did smell kind of funny. And that jumpsuit didn‘t look very cool.
The trolley’s red. Nothing special. It usually smells like piss and there’s a row of brown bench seats on each side of it.
“Whoa,” I said. A 7-Eleven and some guy without a Slurpee flew by in the window. “D’you see that guy back there? Why didn’t that guy get a Slurpee-slurp-slurp, Marty-Mart? It’s like a thousand degrees outside. Who does that?”
I looked at Marty and he seemed busy, thinking about Nothing probably.
“Marty? How’s the philosophy thing going?”
He sighed and folded his arms.
“A consideration of our momentary existence as one ruled by science has landed us in the thick of an argument,” he said.
“What? Who’s we? I mean our? Us?”
“Husserl and me.”
“Oh,” I said. “Figures. What‘s your guys’s deal, anyway?”
We reached Rio Vista Station, and my stop was next.
“The age of phenomenological philosophy seems to be over,” he said. “It is already taken as something past which is only recorded historically along with other schools of philosophy. But in what is most its own phenomenology is not a school. It is the possibility of thinking,” he leaned forward, “at times changing,” he untied his right shoe, “and only thus persisting,” then retied it, “of corresponding to the claim of what is to be thought. If phenom–”
“Jesus Marty,” I said. “What’s with all these big words, guy?” I was confused. “In? what? Is? Its? Jesus. Tone it down.”
He shot out an exhale and I heard something whistle. Booger, probably.
“If phenomenology is thus experienced and retained,” he said, “it can disappear as a designation in favor of the matter of thinking whose manifestness remains a mystery.”
“Sure,” I replied. “Sounds pretty confusing and boring as hell, Marty-Mart.”
The trolley stopped.
“Well,” I said. “I‘ve got to go now.”
Marty smiled. Then he said, “øúeσi gàr, w øílei, enestí tiV øiloσoøîa th ton ândròV dianía.”
“Yeah bro, you too.”
The trolley rumbled off and I stayed beside the tracks, looking down the tunnel, staring into nothing, sweating, existing and feeling overwhelmed, and all I could think about was why the hell didn’t that guy keep it real and get a Slurpee?
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*“‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Totally.’,” is not found in Heidegger‘s work, My Way to Phenomenology. The rest of Marty’s quotes can be found here: Heidegger, Martin. On Time and Being, translated by Joan Stambaugh, (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1972), pp. 74-82.
I keep thinking of the ennui experienced by Heidegger’s hammer, chisel, and screwdriver left unused on his workbench.