This Means, The End

I am near the end of Stanley Elkin’s The Franchiser.

I started the book because I learned that David Foster Wallace was heavily influenced by it.

I’d read Elkin had Multiple Sclerosis. The Franchiser suffers from M.S. and near the end Elkin writes:

“I almost forget my teeth have goose bumps.”
“Goose bumps?”
“This M.S. is no respecter of feelings. It blitzkriegs the nerves, gives your hair a headache. You think there are splinters in your eyes and the roof of your mouth has a sunburn…

And this reminded me of Heidegger. Who would have thought that I would get so much mileage out of Being And Time –a book I read in the Spring of 1992!? -for an Existentialism Course.

I remember the professor for the course stressing the point that we often look past things, like tools, until they break down and we have to look at them, not as a means but as the end.

Heidegger provided this distinction: ready-at-hand and present-at-hand

I like the Alan Dix’s description here:

ready at hand — when you are using the tool and it is invisible to you, you just focus on the work to be done with it

present at hand — when there is some sort of breakdown, the hammer head is loose or you don’t have the right tool to hand and so start to focus on the tools themselves rather than on the job at hand

Your hair, doesn’t usually have a headache.

We use our bodies as means to ends –to get us here and there, to lift this and that.

We never, well, rarely, look at it or treat it as the end.

But it is.

And we do take it as the end, when it starts to break down. The Elkin passage shows just when you, we, might start to take account of our body.

Remember the year I read Being and Time?

1992

I was 22.

I am now 46.

I have, recently, had to take account of my body. Good lord I have taken account of my body.

I try to work out consistently. I ran a half-marathon in late April, and under two hours.

Not bad for a biped like me.

Then, about two weeks later, two gluttonous weeks of “sure, I’ll have another bowl of Dark Cocoa Karma before bed, why not?” I felt a little twinge in the ole lower back.

Don’t worry about it, a little twinge. What would Dad do? He’d go to work.

So I kept going.

Then there was the morning I could barely put on my shoes.

Then another week of pain.

And thoughts/images on an infirm me, unable to play with my kids start rummaging around up there; unable to chuck the apple? Unable to rassle or epic tickle fest?

I think not.

Vigilant I will be. Observant of my intake and output.

Because my body is more than a means.

I mean it.

The End.