Schleim und Sein

So I washed the dishes and cleaned up the apartment yesterday, at least, and did laundry too, and vacuumed, and was feeling pretty happy about that. And I was feeling pretty happy, too, that I’m not snot-person sick. That my whole body hasn’t been replaced with snot the horrible way it sometimes is when you’re sick in the winter. The way your skeleton turns into dried-out hardened snot balled and knitted together and your blood becomes that runny spray from a too-wet sneeze and your internal organs are made up of that thick stuff that you’ve got to throttle-snort out of the back of your sinus cavity and swallow. Because that’s the worst, when you become made of snot. That which is snot walks with a human face and lives through you, moving by touch from one hand to another like in the one cool scene in that really silly Denzel movie, and you exist only to serve snot.

So I was thinking about how grateful I am to not be snot-person sick, and that got me thinking about Heidegger. (No, really!) See, if I want to reenact the whole spurious Cartesian binary thing, I could talk about how my relief is an intellectual reaction to the absence of a bodily problem, but y’know, that’s Philosophy 101 stuff, and I’ve ranted about it before. But Heidegger, in his later notebooks (I’m working from memory here), elaborates on his theories of the contingency of historical self-knowledge. (One can see from fascimiles that Heidegger rather cryptically titled the final volume, on the inside cover, his “schleimabwischendes tagebuch”, or literally, his “booger-wiping journal”.) Heidegger uses the notions of schleim, schleimsein, and schleimwerden (the snot-ness, the being-snot, and the becoming-snot) to extend his devastating critique of the spurious splits between mind and body, intellect and materiality, head’s ghost and heart’s machine, that constitute Descartes’ self-reifying practices. Via Hegel’s dialectic, one can approach echtschleim, true snot-ness, and thereby bridge the gap between the schleimsein of the head or mind and the schleimsein of the body or heart.

I got all excited about this, and I was telling the doctor about it this morning as he was X-raying my chest, and then he showed me the black-and-white transparency that looked like a big plate of scrambled eggs sitting in the middle of my lungs, and I said, “See? There’s proof of what Heidegger was saying! Do you understand how an intellectual understanding of the Hegelian dialectic has effectuated a material translation of snot from one place to another, Doc? Do you understand the implications this has for all of Western metaphysics, man?”

So, yeah. It ain’t no winter cold. I’ve got pneumonia.

(Note added 12/16: in retrospect, the snot stuff isn’t all that funny. But yesterday was such a crappy day, I had to have something to laugh at, and the doctor prescribed Tylenol 3 to help with my persistent-like-a-boomerang-to-the-lungs-with-Energizer-batteries cough, which probably did something for my sense of humor. Hell, with codeine for coughs, I’m wondering if he prescribes percoset for sneezes. Anyway: unfortunately, the pneumonia is no joke.)