On a beautiful Sunday evening I got my AstraZeneca (Oxford) jab at the Francis Crick Institute. They were running ahead of schedule, so they called me (on a foreign mobile phone-number!) to ask me to come in early. It was brilliantly organized; the crew was cheerful -- 'yes, I was ready to make history!' I responded -- and I was in and out of the building under fifteen minutes. Sometimes, I get a glimpse of why the the Brits adore their NHS.
Anticipating the moment six weeks ago, my wife had initiated the effort to get me -- a foreign citizen living abroad -- registered in the NHS through her GP. (Long story, but the bureaucratic hurdles to my family arrangements are the effect of Brexit.) It was not a very easy process, not the least because of my foreign phone-number. If I had been able to leave my bedroom, I would have gotten a local phone, but all the High street phone-stores were closed through lockdown anyway.
As it happened, just after I confirmed my booking for the jab, I met my local GP last Thursday for the first time. She was extremely empathetic and informative. She had also had suffered from long haul covid since March 2020, and had just gone back to work full time again after a year of struggles. (I suspected she still struggled with it because she was a bit scattered and very fatigued; she did not deny my observation.) She took her time with my story, referred me for blood-work and to a special long haul covid clinic to see a neurologist. She was adamant that I should not expect much medical help, but that she did expect my convalescence to be enhanced by proper diagnosis of my symptoms. It will help you craft your narrative. I noted quietly, based on a small sample, that while Dutch physicians love their new-age 'energy-levels,' the English are more into hermeneutic self-care. In her view, covid had induced a viral encephalitis in me. After six months you should see real improvement. A bit of mental calculation told me, I was probably near the end of my fourth month.
Maybe it was the emotional let-down of feeling heard, but the next day (after my visit to the local GP) I felt awful. It was a long day of fatigue and headaches. I was concerned because due to my wife's shift, I was alone with my son for three whole days. But Saturday I awoke after a restful sleep and then had my best 48 hours since mid December. (For my covid diaries, see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here.) We walked all over NW3 to farmer's markets, tennis, table-tennis, and other errands. When I got the jab, the superstitious part of me worried that I was messing with success.
I was right to be worried. Monday I had a strange new headache. On Tuesday I had a strange new nausea; and on Wednesday I was intensely fatigued. While the blood-test on Tuesday was unavoidable, the whole experience was dispiriting: standing in long queues in a truly ugly building (the Royal Free), and a computer mishap that turned me into Eric Liesser. I very much regretted going to my dental hygienist yesterday (mercifully she turned off the radio for me). But postponing it every other week for the last few months, had felt like giving in to the microbes. I also had a sore arm, but it was not as bad as I had worried.
In order to cheer myself up, I tried reading the final lecture/chapter of Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics in order to see if I could still do philosophy and re-start these digressions properly. (I really do want to complete my series on the book this Spring.) It was not a wholly silly plan; I have been reading sci fi for two weeks now. And increasingly the reading has become less effort and pure fun. This has been good for my sanity; I love watching movies endlessly in the theatre, but at home I actually find it tiresome. I now was almost at the 'being-sick is fun' part of my convalescence.
Anyway, I have learned that there is a major difference between reading a book without much concentration immersed in a kind of flow and reading a book with concentration in order to, say, write about it. In the second, I am constantly taking mental notes (sometimes I scribble these in the margins) and I am in a perpetual silent conversation with the implied author about the work I am digesting. To be sure the flow is not absent in the second kind of reading, which I find very enjoyable and ordinarily (forgive me) energy enhancing, but it involves a further mental activity that I am clearly incapable of now. What's interesting to me -- switching briefly to auto-phenomenology of disease -- is that I find my hyper-engaged ordinary style of reading no less immersive than the kind of reading without much concentration now.
As regular readers know, one of the side-effects of my covid (or the encephalitis) is a great deal of irritability when engaged with conversations with more than one person at a time (or having radio or music in the background during a conversation), and any zoom/phone conversations. It's pretty clear to me -- I am, after all, the editor of a volume on sympathy -- that my capacity to engage in even modest sympathetic activity has been greatly reduced. This is why I have compared myself recently to an Asperger's. I had not quite realized before that my manner of reading involved so much mental, dialogic activity. It's a skill that presupposes a brain that I don't have at the moment.
Interestingly enough, and undoubtedly not a coincidence, a lot of the sci-fi novels I have been reading have been exploring the nature of such dialogic activity by positing brains with two or more minds. It's a nice mirror to all the plot-devices that explore the nature of networked intelligence (and AI). A brain with two minds also is a nice metaphor, thus, for reading and so these sci-fi space operas are engaged in a sly form of intertextuality.
It didn't help me, of course, that in violation of all teaching manuals, Foucault introduces whole new special jargon in the final lecture! (This prevented me from reading the lecture merely at the surface in the way I am reading social media.) He gets away with it not because he is Foucault, but because he treats his lectures at the Collège de France as serial in nature rather than as self-standing series. (There are cross-references among them.)* It's a bit unfair to say this (and given Derrida's criticism of Searle, ironic), but by the end of the 1970s, he is clearly also understanding himself as a franchise.
*Admittedly, it's also a rhetorical conceit to flatter your audience by treating them as if they have been with you as a kind of fellowship all along and have been taking excellent notes.
Fascinating to read, as always. I tell people that this is the best political theory blog on the internet.
Posted by: KearyMike | 04/26/2021 at 05:29 PM