Andrew Weeks died on the night of 13/14 June 2024. This was his personal page. It has been preserved to offer those who are interested a chance to learn about Andrew’s life and work.
- Socialism in Time of Plague
- The Reader as Mystic
- Mysticism and Realism
- Metaphysical Rebels
- An ALS Diary
Socialism in Time of Plague
Thoughts and reactions during the pandemic (selected posts from Normal, Illinois, and Paris, France).
Notes on the Plague Year
I passed our first pandemic year trying to remain normal in Bloomington-Normal. As a 73-year-old retired professor of German, I needed to stay active and connected. Via Zoom, I took courses in Russian and French and became good friends with my instructors. I drove older or indigent patients to their hospital appointments and heard from…
Platypus and the Plague Year
My student friends and I talked about starting a reading group, but this presented logistical and organizational challenges in the plague year. Then Andrew Pfannkuche (aka “Pancake”) heard about a high-powered intellectual group that met online, a leftist reading group that went by the name of Platypus Society. Their reading syllabus included not only classics…
Thoughts on Socialism in Time of Plague
I should explain why I sympathize with socialism and have a critical appreciation of Marx. I don’t doubt certain premises of the defenders of capitalism. I don’t question the benefits of enterprise and competition. Yet the great apostle of capitalism himself, Adam Smith, was more critical and perceptive of its flaws than its current apologists.…
Retail Politics in Time of Plague
My closest friends for whom this blog was intended will have heard much of it before. I tend to repeat myself. I try to boil my inchoate experiences down to the essentials and then plot them out for revealing connections. Why did this or that seemingly insignificant experience mean something? Students of literature acquire these…
Sources of Lucidity in the Plague Darkness
In recounting how books about death and darkness inoculated me against depression in the plague year, I forgot to mention Victor Serge’s Mexican journals from the last decade of his life. It would be difficult to equal his grounds for depression: a man of boundless energy and deep human sensibility, Serge had experienced the demise…
Hospitals Compared in Light of the Plague
The other day I drove to Chicago for an appointment with my radiation oncologist. With time to kill, I hung out a bit in the DCAM Center for Care and Discovery, a name that sounds more like a theme park than a hospital and compared it to the other hospitals I’ve spent time in in…
Does the Left suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder?
This open letter was originally written and circulated on 23 June, 2020 in the wake of #MeToo and the George Floyd Protests but It is not until recently that we had a space for it. We hope that it is an accurate reflection of our thoughts and feelings of the summer of 2020. Comrades, We…
How the Commons became Commodities
Recently I was reminded of Raoul Peck’s film Young Marx, a slightly ludicrous buddy movie about young Karl and Friedrich groping their way to world revolution. But it must be said that Peck did his homework. There is a powerful opening scene in which wood-gathering German poor folk are ridden down in a forest by…
Paris Beyond the Plague
I’ve been in Paris since the first of November on a second extended stay in six months. I’m in the same Montmartre apartment and am experiencing the aftermath of the year of isolation and lockdown. In August I couldn’t get the pass sanitaire so I was mostly shut out of public places and could only…
Plague is an Alchemical Fire
It needs to be said that a pandemic is not just something that invades us from without. A pandemic is a cataclysmic process that reveals what lies within a society. A fire in a public space might seem to be a mainly physical event. But the catastrophe lies not simply in the fire but in…
The Hidden Extremes of Paris
In the interval of eight days, I think I have encountered and to a degree studied several of the political and cultural extremes of this city and country. First, I met M-L, my neighbor downstairs, a cultivated and independent-minded artist who lived in the US before returning to her native Paris to devote her life…
Germinal at the School of Acts
“Everyone needs a right of free movement, because the world belongs to no one; . . . goods move in large ships, even as human beings are deprived of the right to circulate . . .” Manifesto of the School of Acts. Aubervilliers, 2018. I’m not a prophet, but on the eve of the second…
Discovering Alain Badiou
I discovered Alain Badiou when I was holed up in a Montmartre apartment last November, collaborating on a research project by day and trying to improve my uncertain French comprehension in the evenings. In search of a clear, cognate-rich French, I googled politicians and authors. Then I happened upon Badiou about whom I knew almost…
Conversions: Falling in Love, Becoming Political (Part 2)
But I want to get back to the question. Now I want to formulate my thoughts about two kinds of life-transforming experiences: falling in love and becoming politically oppositional. Alain Badiou places them together under the heading of life-transforming events, though the first is personal and oriented toward one other and the second social and…
The Grammar of Conversion (Part 3)
A subject is what acts in an active verb and what transforms an infinitive of possibility into a fact of positive discourse. An object is what is acted upon. Transpose it into the subject position and the sentence becomes passive. In our minds and culture, we have embedded a grammar of passivity in which we…
On the Meaning of Multiple Worlds
On this quiet gray Saturday afternoon, in the last days before an election that seems to come at us like a road approaching a chasm without a bridge, I read two interesting articles in short order. The first by Stephanie Burt writing in The New Yorker (“The Never-Ending Story”) is about the prevalence of the…
A Badiouvian Reading of Emmanuel Carrère
If you can recall a college roommate whom you mildly disliked yet shared unforgettable experiences with, this is how I feel about reading the books of the French author Emmanuel Carrère. He was once referred to as “the French Knausgaard”—the ultimate hypnotically self-absorbed author. He can’t rue his male malfeasance without regaling us with the…
Remembering the Student-G.I. Anti-War Movement
When I came home from Europe in August 1968, the antiwar movement was not new but it was gaining momentum. Young guys my age faced the threat of induction. I was called up twice for the pre-induction physical, but I managed to stall the first draft order by extending my student deferment and the second…
What Makes French “Critical Theory” so Distinct?
During my graduate study and career, I disliked the cult status of French critical theory in American English departments. This began after the 1960s and lasted until around the turn of the century. I had come of age at a time when Marx, Hegel, Sartre, and Lukács still set the tone. I was convinced that…
An Island in Time
I want to record in words one of the strongest and strangest experiences of my life: my month-long ordeal of traveling to Hawaii on short notice to bring home my estranged son. Because of a disagreement about his dietary regimen, he had been shunning me for over a year before he disappeared. My wife and…
The Reader as Mystic
Reflections and lectures on the endangered culture of books and the complex activity of reading.
The Mysticism of Reading: An Introduction to the European Narrative Classics for Students, Teachers, Reading Groups, and Independent Readers
Qu’est-ce que la littérature ? une réponse personnelle à la question de Sartre
The Columbus of Kamchatka
Night Train to Kaliningrad – Night Flight to Vladivostok
Egyptian Darkness and the Diaspora of Light: Notes and Reflections on the Rural Southern Illinois Intelligentsia
Falling out of Time: The Afterlife of a Left-Leaning Humanist
Mysticism as Realism
All literature, mystical or Modernist, reflects historical reality. There is nothing else it can reflect. The contributions assembled here demonstrate that mysticism and Modernism are not the antitheses but rather the proof in extremis of historical realism. This was a once hotly debated but now somewhat forgotten issue of oppositional thought and Marxist literary criticism. Given the present malaise of truth and authority, such issues should be revived.
Metaphysical Rebels
German philologists and German scholars of German literature are superbly trained and rigorous, but they can also display the disciplinary conformism of a military corps. Not only does their cohesion render outside voices inaudible. Their conformism and corps spirit render the questionable images of certain German authors canonical—precisely by glossing over the rebels and antiauthoritarians. Since my work countering the received image of Paracelsus is scattered and partly in German, I have summarized it in the first essay below. Other contributions are on the nonconformist theorist Valentin Weigel, on the debt owed by Arthur Schopenhauer to German mysticism, on the misunderstood profile of Dr. Faustus, on the thread of influence leading from German Protestant dissenters to Spinoza, on the Young Hegelianism of the early Marx, and on the double plagiarism of the poet Clemens Brentano and the reactionary filmmaker Mel Gibson.
Editor’s note: Before his death, Andrew (Weeks) and Didier Kahn completed a translation of Paracelsus’ cosmological and meteorological writings. Although it is not mentioned in the introductory materials prepared by Andrew, it has been included here for those who wish to continue where Essential Theoretical Writings left off.
An ALS Diary
An ALS Diary (part one): On Being Overtaken by a Rare Incurable Disease
Within the interval of a year I went from a vigorous and strong 74-year-old to the stricken and failing sufferer of the rare disease of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. My benchmarks were solo journeys I undertook, first in May, 2021, to rescue my son in Hawaii, then in August…
ALS Diary (part two): Surprises and Disappointments
My family needs to take things one step at a time in order to avoid a crippling anxiety. This leaves all planning and preparations to me. My strategy now is to make advance preparations for the summer. I’ll spend most of May in Paris where I still have work to finish and friends to visit.…
ALS Diary (part three): Reading the signs of ALS; reading myself into Riker’s Guest Lecture.
Five days ago on the way to the supermarket I felt a disturbing quiver in my lower lip, then a slight numbness comparable to the sensation when the dentist swabs something on your gum before giving you a shot to deaden your mouth. The next few days it was more like the contractions from the…
ALS Diary (part four): Another Day, Another Doctor
Zallek will be my last one, so it’s good that we got on well. He reserved two hours for me in order to gauge my reflexes and responsiveness. If he sees a fair number of ALS patients, I can imagine that he has to blunt the force of the diagnosis and perhaps struggle with disbelief…
ALS Diary (part five): Thoughts on Remaining Human
On my way to the Credit Union this morning I happened to hear something on my car radio that I found moving. During the Second World War, while the Wehrmacht was inflicting its frightful siege on Leningrad, Shostakovich composed his symphony in honor of the suffering city. When the symphony was finished, the defending Soviet…
ALS Diary (part six): A Long Saturday and into Sunday Three Days Before Paris
I forgot to post what I did and thought on the last weekend before leaving. First Felix came over for a long morning conversation about politics, the allure of Adorno, his Ph.D thesis, and his new gig at a Catholic Benedictine College near Naperville. At 1:00 pm I went to the conversational luncheon of the…
ALS Diary (part seven): Arriving in Paris and Acclimatization
On Thursday morning, Didier met me at the airport and we got to work as soon as we arrived in the rue Tholozé (after we had eaten at a deli across from my apartment). We worked all afternoon. In the late afternoon, Pancake (Andrew (Pfannkuche)) arrived from Luxembourg. On Friday, we kept to the same…
ALS Diary (part eight): An Early May Morning in Paris
It’s a crisp May morning two days after May Day. I slept well and we undertook a small expedition into the rue Caulaincourt for groceries and a sidewalk cafe. The Café qui parle wasn’t open yet, so I sat on a bus stop bench while Pancake took our shopping list to Franprix, and I watched…
ALS Diary (part nine): Friday and Saturday in Paris
Again, I got up relatively early, before seven today, and the three of us, Urs, Didier, and I, worked through much of the day, pausing at one o’clock for a carry out lunch of bakery pizza. This has the advantage that it gives me a full-day of effective activity and hearty companionship with a minimum…
ALS Diary (part ten): My Second Week in Paris
From Sunday to Monday, I slept better and then felt better getting up, but by 4 pm I am more or less exhausted. We’ve worked well today and I am confident I can finish the project I came here to do. After a modest dinner, Pancake and I walk to the Place des Abbesses, buy…
ALS Diary (part eleven): An Intermittently Rainy Day in Paris & the Fisher King
On Tuesday night, I went to sleep a little earlier and slept soundly throughout the night. To anyone with ALS or undergoing treatment for cancer like me seven years ago, I would strongly urge that they always aim for a good night’s sleep. It’s therapeutic, good for the mind and for the body. Loss of…
ALS Diary (part twelve): Memory as an Escape back to Reality, Dammtor Station
Now that I’ve realized that nothing is more important than not obsessing about my condition, and that one of the best palliative medications is memory, I’m indulging mine and finding that it’s more than ready to do its part. Pancake is a willing audience with his experiences that resonate with mine. This rainy Friday in…
ALS Diary (part thirteen): A Splendid Day with Friends and Memories
It’s a beautiful mild and sunny Saturday. Serge and Pierrette came for lunch, bringing an unlabeled bottle of red wine from her home in Gruissan. It had the taste of simple friendship and hospitality that I associate with Narbonne, which is next door to Gruissan. When I first found out where she is from I…
ALS Diary (part fourteen): Memories of Comradeship, a Night of Desolation
Last night, the balance tipped from sweetness to bitterness and I had a bad night. There are rules I have to follow. My only way out is into the past. So speak, memory! Pancake has begun to remind me of my erstwhile close friend and comrade in the antiwar movement, Gregg Gauger. Same long hair.…
ALS Diary (part fifteen): Walking Is Getting Harder; Solitude and Memories of my Children
Pancake is back in Luxembourg to defend his M.A. thesis. I don’t mind a bit of solitude but my mobility outside the apartment is limited. I don’t fancy the prospect of a broken hip or leg. I’m noticing that it’s harder to maintain my balance or climb the curving narrow staircase that leads up to…
ALS Diary (part sixteen): A Conversation and an Exhausting Walk to the Montmartre Cemetery and Back; Thoughts about Compassion
On Wednesday, Pancake is still in Luxembourg. Serge and Pierrette come for lunch bringing everything with them. I am impressed and pleased by the simplicity of their typical meal, an unvarnished puréed cod dish, baguette, cheese eaten with bread and with simple leaves of lettuce unsalted and fresh strawberries unsweetened. We talk for quite a…
ALS Diary (part seventeen): What is the Role of Compassion in Oppositional Politics?
There are rules of courtesy that have nothing to do with the use of tableware: anyone who happens to hold a position of dominance (for whatever reason) should see to it that the (for whatever reason) disadvantaged get their turn. Do that, and do it even for the homely self-conscious kid on the sidelines. Show…
ALS Diary (part eighteen): My condition is Worsening; the Home stretch
Recently I could tell that my condition was getting worse. It was harder to maintain my balance, harder to get up the stairs, harder to go to sleep at night. However, my part of our project is as good as done, and Didier had only ten pages to go. In five days, I’ll be in…
ALS Diary (part nineteen): Wrapping it up; Last Thoughts in Paris
I began writing the last blog entry the day before yesterday, continued writing the rest of it yesterday, had visitors all day today (delightful but exhausting) and will be packing and saying goodbye tomorrow at lunch, and then on my way home the day after tomorrow. When nothing happens, I don’t know what to write.…
ALS Diary (part twenty): Waiting for my Flight at CDG, in Flight, Home, and why this ALS Diary was so Problematic
Now, after the warmest and most helpful send off I could have asked for, I’m waiting for an hour at my CDG departure gate. The sky was a perfect blue on the way here and the air had a pleasantly cool freshness. I’m noticing my compulsion (which is a characteristic tendency of literature professors) to…
ALS Diary (part twenty-one): At home again, I’ve lost ground
Yes, I have lost ground. I knew that I was losing ground in Paris and I expected to lose ground even before I left for Paris. I expected it to be worse in fact. Nonetheless, while in Paris I blamed my losses on the sloping uneven streets and on missing my exercise routine at the…
ALS Diary (part twenty-two): Kick-Starting my Social Life Back in the USA
For most of the week after flying back home, I’ve felt achy and weak. Naturally, I saw this as a portent of pain to come. And maybe it is. But at the moment, I rather think that it’s being under the weather. I’m hoping that tomorrow things will brighten up. Tomorrow I’ll meet Jim and…
ALS Diary (part twenty-three): A Favorable Turn of Events
I regret the depressing inexorability of a diary in blog entries documenting the progress of an incurable disease. I have thought seriously about shutting it down and having it deleted, or at least relegating it to an even more private space. That was difficult for technical reasons. But now I feel that though I am…
ALS Diary (part twenty-four): Settling Into a Routine
Any reader of this blog must get tired of reading the same report of my worsening condition. I can understand that. My balance has gotten worse since I am home. My hands and forearms are subject to unpleasant cramps. My lap swimming has come up against my shrinking endurance. By the end of the second…
ALS Diary (part twenty-five): Father’s Day
I’m behind in my planning. I can see the phase fast approaching when I will no longer be able to make it to the bathroom or use the toilet on my own. In my vague expectations, I had imagined that I would first reach the phase where I could no longer swallow or breathe unaided.…
ALS Diary (part twenty-six): Living Badly, Dying Badly
From a New Yorker article about terminal ALS patient advocates demanding drugs that the FDA has not yet adequately tested, and the hatred faced by critics and dissenting ALS patients: The skeptical [ALS] patient told me that he thinks about this all the time. “There are maybe twenty-five thousand of us now,” he said. “But…
ALS Diary (part twenty-seven): Reflections of Where I come from, Rachel Cochran’s ‘The Gulf’
Four years ago, I decided to spend time in the poor southern region of Illinois (“Little Egypt”) where I am from. It was a bit like exploring the ruins of an abandoned civilization. I saw small towns that had once been rich from mining or river commerce. Once sizable towns had been reduced to modest,…
ALS Diary (part twenty-eight): the Body Declines, the Soul Hits Bottom, & Brother Lear
Following the downward progression of an ALS patient is truly about as exciting as watching paint dry. Yesterday, I had a conversation related to relationships within my family that for once I am going to withhold. Actually, it’s wrong to say “for once.” I’ve always held back and also often intimated family problems. Still, the…
ALS Diary (part thirty-two): Countercultural Continuity
Recently, I read an article about Constance Garnett, the prodigious turn-of-the-century British translator of the great 19th-century Russian authors. I remember her steady English voice so clearly. It accompanied my adolescent and young adult reading. It resounded in contrast to the extremes of the translated Russians. It was like hearing a staid clinician recount the…
ALS Diary (part thirty-three): Comparative Notes on the Terminally Ill and their Families
So far, I haven’t signed up for an ALS support group or tried to persuade anyone in my family to go to one, but my friend Laura has been spending time with her father who is about my age and has terminal leukemia. It helps to hear from her about getting along with her father…
ALS Diary (part thirty-four): The Palliative Power of Love
Last night, I happened to read a promising, but in the end rather disappointing, New Yorker article on “transference in the classroom” (essentially this is about the student or teacher seeking from the other the love or approval missing in family or conjugal relationships). The effect of stale Freudian concepts addressed to current pedagogical issues…
ALS Diary (part thirty-five): A Secret Brotherhood
On Saturday I had lunch with a friend named Tony (she is close to Jim and Nancy) and with another lady my age or a little younger from the same circle. The Indian buffet is a place that I once loved to patronize on Saturdays midday. Now the spices have gotten too potent for my…
ALS Diary (part thirty-six): The Invisible Brother- and Sisterhood of the Initiates of Death
Now it’s becoming clear to me that my friends and acquaintances can be divided into two distinct groups. There are those who are on familiar terms with death. They talk about my condition with matter-of-fact sympathy but without much ceremony. And there are those who shy away from me because the looming Grim Reaper makes…
ALS Diary (part thirty-seven): An ALS Webinar on Palliative Medicine
Last night, I took part in a webinar on palliative medicine designed for ALS patients. I learned some things that my doctors hadn’t mentioned (such as that ALS can affect cognitive functions). One possible ALS symptom has the effect that the patient cries when something is funny and laughs when something is sad. By the…
ALS Diary (part thirty-eight): Narratives of Death and Revelation
It’s an old genre, the tale of the blasé protagonist who only faces ultimate reality in a confrontation with death. First of all, there are the many iterations of the late medieval, early modern Everyman-plays. Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych shares the lightening simplicity of those dramatic treatments. But I want to consider a…
ALS Diary (part thirty-nine): Plain Words about an Exit Strategy
I’m grateful that my wife went with me to my neurological appointment in Peoria. I’m grateful that she not only took part in the conversation with Dr. Zallek but even stayed with me (I asked her if she preferred to go outside) when I brought up the matter of what I call my “exit strategy”.…
ALS Diary (part forty): More Literature of the Moribund – Bascombe, Zorn, Ivan Ilych, Everyman
After finishing Fritz Zorn’s Mars, I’ve started another book in the same vein: Richard Ford’s Be Mine. It’s not cancer-themed like Mars, but specifically ALS-themed, narrated by a father whose 47-year-old son Paul is dying of a faster-acting variant of what I have. That’s what motivated me to mention it to my wife who bought…
ALS Diary (part forty-one): How the Novel Ends and What it Makes me Think About
Frank Bascombe’s ALS-afflicted 47-year-old son Paul in Be Mine is not autistic, but in his relationship with his father he is tactlessly out of synch, tone-deaf, and entitled. His father rents a camper mid-winter and takes him, caviling and complaining, to see the World’s Only Corn Palace and the stone presidents of Mount Rushmore. Upon…
ALS Diary (part forty-two): Looking Backward, Forward, and Summing Up; The Death of Ivan Ilych
It’s been almost five months since I was diagnosed with ALS and more than a year and a half since I began noticing my symptoms. Two years ago, neither I nor anyone observing me noticed the plodding gait that I would soon exhibit. Since then my walking, my strength and balance, have gotten steadily worse…
ALS Diary (part forty-three): Nietzsche’s Cartoonish Contemplation of Death
Several of Nietzsche’s most beautiful poems can be read as contemplations of death. As such they can be both unsettlingly strange and grotesquely funny (not unlike the Mexican artist Jose Posada’s crazy strutting and partying skeletons, though Nietzsche is deeper and more layered). For someone facing off with our cartoonish Grim Reaper, this sort of…
ALS Diary (part forty-four): Nietzsche and the Lyric Poetry of Death, “Die Sonne sinkt”
Nietzsche’s poetry, which we too often try to unlock with the code of his labyrinthine philosophy, is accessible to existential empathy. He was a loner whose body was signaling its imminent demise but whose spirit could still rouse itself to flights of incandescent illumination. I’ve known that condition since my student days. I know what…
ALS Diary (part forty-five): Normalizing Death and Dying
It’s absurd to talk about normalizing death since nothing could be more normal as it is. Nonetheless, we all naturally fear it. Aside from its horrific variants wrought by violence or disease, death means a foreclosure of all human possibility. No other living creature, we are told, knows that it will face this foreclosure. It…
ALS Diary (part forty-six): Why Does Letting Go Get Such a Bad Press?
After a lunch conversation with Terri in which, inevitably, the topics of illness, pain, and death came up, I read a thoughtful and moving New Yorker article by Peggy Orenstein in which she recollected her father’s old age dementia. The New York Times had an article recently about Dutch communities for elderly sufferers of dementia.…
ALS Diary (Part forty-seven): An Updated Theme of the Double: Are We Really Interchangeable?
We just finished watching Orphan Black (Laura in Urbana and me here at home). I had seen it before. So had she on my recommendation. It grows on you, so another viewing was worth it. Orphan Black is thought-provoking fare for the ALS patient or anyone intrigued by the mystery of life. OB implicates questions…
ALS Diary (part forty-nine): We Scholars: Actors Without a Stage, Musicians Without an Audience
Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, even on All Souls’ Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being I don’t regret the direction of my life and…
ALS Diary (part fifty): Kitsch and Death
“Kitsch is a folding screen set up for curtaining off death.” Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera is generalizing from the forced positivity of May Day celebrations in socialist Czechoslovakia, where the Communist authorities had declared the struggle between good and evil to be superseded by the progression from good to better, a…
ALS Diary (part 51): The Little Delights of Daily Living.
“He wanted to live in his wealth of minutes, the ones he had left anyhow.” said of the retired Irish detective Tom Kettle in Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time What are the little delights of daily living? I can’t say that they include food. I do get hungry and I retain my sense of taste.…
ALS Diary (part 52): Life and Schopenhauer’s Will; Love Versus Solidarity
What is the measure of life? Voltaire philosophizes about the response of a fine young man who in consequence of falling off a horse became quadriplegic—reduced to a life without activity, physical love, or initiative of any sort. Voltaire expresses wonderment that the young man nonetheless loves life. I have heard from my neurologist friend…
ALS Diary (part 53): Solidarity in extremis
Recently, I stumbled into the new world of online discussion or group chat, which seems to have been shaped by Twitter/X. I’m inclined to see it as a commodified version of the Renaissance and Enlightenment-era tradition once known as the “Republic of Letters.” Before European countries achieved a measure of egalitarian and democratic polity, thinkers,…
ALS Diary (part 54): Isn’t Killing Worse than Dying?
Here are my thoughts on the present cacophony of responses to the situation in Israel/ Palestine: One man can kill another man but one truth can’t kill another truth. Many things on the ground are invisible from a height of 10,000 feet or from an equivalent historical distance. Their invisibility isn’t the same as their…
ALS Diary (part 55): Some Things I’ll Never Understand
I don’t get it. Here is a site under the aegis of a self-declared Marxist and socialist, Freddie DeBoer, whose followers (though clearly not all of them) regularly applaud his posts with the warmest accolades, yet one gets the impression that such terms as “expropriation” or “worker solidarity” are absurdly out of place here. These…
ALS Diary (part 56): Reflections on the Brink
One peculiarity of ALS: you feel your body slowly dying even while your mind is unaffected, free to contemplate your whole existence even as you are soon to depart it. Since throughout life you’ve been haunted by the feeling of things needing to be done (Good heavens! how onerous that was for me as a…
ALS Diary (part 57): The Circularity of Regrets; Kicking the Habit of Living
First of all, I regret having started this ALS Diary to begin with. I must have expected it to elicit some ultimate profundity, which of course it cannot. I expected it to confer a sense of control over the process of decline; but that sense instead morphed into a kind of self-imposed tyranny. I have…
ALS Diary (part 58): Losing My Legs, A Warning to be Strategic about Bowel Movements, and Reading
In my last ALS Diary post I expressed my regret for subjecting readers to so much of the same thing (it’s always “a little worse”) along with so many extraneous thoughts and comments with a kind of cheap solemnity and faux depth. I decided that I should limit the entries and cap their number. This…
ALS Diary (part 59): My Changing Condition Two Years In
I decided to cut back on and cap my diary entries. The increasingly political material will go on another site. On this one, I will report tangible changes in my condition. I realized that the compulsion to keep an ALS Diary was pushing me to overdramatize what is in fact a completely boring decline. True,…
ALS Diary (part 60): Calling It Quits
I’ve been promising to put an end to this ill-advised account of my decline, and I think the proper moment has arrived. I came to this decision because on the one hand, it was becoming too much like a compulsion, one that urged an over-dramatization of the banal condition of dying, and on the other…
ALS Diary (Appendix A): A Steeper Decline
Now it’s a few days more than a year since I received the diagnosis and a good two years since I first suffered the symptoms of ALS. It may be worth knowing that, in my case, there is a steeper decline at this point. I could still get around at the Y with a walker,…
ALS Diary (Appendix B): The Imminent Crash
Now I feel exhausted in my entire body. I’m not in acute pain, just tired. In the back of my throat a sensation of nausea that could be a response to hunger or related to the onset of the paralysis in the throat muscles. I can imagine already longing for the big sleep. It won’t…
ALS Diary (Appendix C): Hitting the Treetops
You could compare the trajectory of my ALS decline to the descent of a plane that has lost power. First comes the long smooth decline, then you graze the tallest tree crests. The flight is no longer smooth but it’s not yet the crash. Two weeks ago I began to suffer constipation which made me…
ALS Diary (appendix D): Hospice
For two weeks since the beginning of April, I’ve had a urinary catheter. Yesterday my wife agreed to allow a representative of the hospice service to visit and explain how it works. The nurse and case manager has paid her visit now I was satisfied and Veronika hit it off with her especially well, so…
ALS Diary (Appendix E): Marginal Mobility
N.B. – From two weeks ago. I can still hoist my body into the power chair, navigate to the bathroom, brush my teeth, pivot onto the toilet, clean myself, and then make the return journey to the chair or sofa where I began. All of this. But just barely. I choked this morning on my…
ALS Diary (Appendix F): Where is the Exit Door?
In the last weeks of May and the first of June, I fell several times and found it impossible to get up from the floor without a strong pair of shoulders to hoist me onto a chair and help me rise from it. I approached the subject of full-time care. I think we will have…
ALS Diary (final part): Everything Solid Melts: Music and Love Transcend
Für V., in Liebe geschrieben. Wrecked in route to nowhere. On the cusp of annihilation, Of last gasps and chaotic recall Of memory-splicing intellection, Gray as old snow, last ever to fall, I’m entombed in the icy-spectral residue Of an errant searcher’s existential wreck Were once-pure snow and rainbow-dew Blind omens of what our lives…
Normal Thoughts 