A Few Final Words by Joe Dees

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Hello, I am a Being-in-the-World (Oh, Hell!), tied to it revocably. The hyphenated monstrosity is a term coined by the German existential philosopher Martin Heidegger (Hi, Heidegger! Heil!) to express the essenceless essence of the human condition. We are all, I suppose, tied to the world in much the same manner as we were tied to our progenitors: umbilically. That's what Heidegger meant by the hyphens, I guess. They're there for a reason (all symbols stand for something, you know). WE'RE not symbols, though; we stand (or fall) for no particular generality. We have reason, but not A reason, you see. And faith - O We Of Little Faith! Faith is by definition unjustified, or we would call it knowledge. Is it even justifiable? But I digress.

I apologize. You see, I am suffering from a depression. It's called my navel. Only Adam and Eve, Judaic mythology tells us, lacked this little hole within our centers. Surprise! Navel veterans all! So why am I so alone? Do we all join hands only to find we're just links in a chain of alonenesses? It makes me mad - bilious, if you please. But at what? Question: how can nothing be mad at anything? Perhaps this is why Sartre became a Stoic.

Stoicism is okay, I guess, but it's kinda hard to get excited about it, especially since I'm worried about my liver. I only have one, and my bile rises when I contemplate it (I guess I should stick to navel contemplation, but the thought fills me with a sense of forbodhing).

I get nauseated - is it a sickness unto death? And are Soren and Fyodor even compatible? Is my bile rising a symptom of a diseased liver condition? When it goes, you go. In that mortal sense, we are direly tied to our livers; first a liver, then a dier - living is fatal, you know. But this is not what I wanted to say. I'll try again.

Eliot's Sacred Three (them's the facts when it comes to brass tacks) - the significant events in human existence, are Birth, Copulation and Death, the creation, conjunction and destruction of Beings-in-the-World. Is Freud right? Do our lives hinge upon the anal, the oral, the genital? Are these much-maligned orifices and protuberances the foci around which our consciousnesses blindly gyrate? Or is Heidegger closer? Is it our annihilation rather than our copulation which comprises the fulcrum upon which we leverage the unnoticed attention of our days? There is a third choice, a side alley leading away from these either-or dilemming horns, a choice of which I only recently became aware. I'll dare to share, if you care.

It's not my idea; a man named Edgar F. Borgatta worked it out in 1954. His thesis is that the source of our dreads, anxieties and assorted insecurities is - deumbilification. When we are cut off, we feel abandoned, vilified (a deumbilifi-vilifi-cation nation?). The primordial Nurturer is gone. We are lost - not through preoccupation with sex or anticipation of death, but from birth. The contingent survivors die a-borning (where do we go from here? where is here?). Our nave - the hub of our spidery twirlings - parts, dropping us into the abyss of life.