**Links to**: [[Sick motherfucker]], [[Cortisol]], [[Principle of Sufficient Cortisol]], [[Representation]], [[Memory]], [[Speech]], [[Markov blanket]], [[Language]], [[Communication]], [[Augmentative and Alternative Communication]]. During the Covid-19 pandemic one of our faculty’s captains, Marloes Westerveld, kickstarted an initiative intended to provide insights into faculty members’ lives at home, away from the office. The following contribution was mine. It details aspects of my trajectory into the working diagnosis of adrenal insufficiency, and tells of the day I had an aphasic episode (first ever, and until now, only one ever). Here goes: _August 3 2020_ As much as I’d like to overindulge and write a detached armchair piece, my present situation begs for this to be written from a very carnal, embodied perspective. Let’s start by titling the following meditation:  ### _2020: sick motherfucker_ I echo Jamie’s sentiments: what a year. In all matters health-related, for me, it has been especially disconcerting. Right before corona hit the globe part of my thyroid was about to be removed. I decided not to proceed with this perhaps unnecessary surgery, upon which I proceeded to get properly got: Covid-whooped (for my birthday), a full seven days of fever and self-pity. Thereafter, to some dismay, I became diagnosed with _Addison’s disease_.^[Note from 2024: this was what was told to me at the time by my then-endocrinologist. Now, some time after, my current endocrinologist is convinced it is _not_ adrenal insufficiency. But he cannot tell me what it is, nor why treatment for adrenal insufficiency is exactly what my body seems to need.] Unrelated to corona, or my thyroid, I say ‘some’ dismay because it was the necessary _explanans_ to a lot of the rampant symptoms I had been experiencing—in veritable exponential growth—over the last couple of years. Now, on corticosteroids for life, Covid-considering, my day looks like this: take steroids, read, hit the steroidal peak; have many ideas; smirk manically and write like a rabid dog. Come down, take steroids, repeat previous process. As the end of the day approaches (my day now feels like it lasts a whopping _forty_ _hours_ instead of what I had previously been experiencing as a mere _four_: cortisol seems to affect the temporal cortex), I’m sitting there, like a true philosopher, reflecting: _who am I?_ Am I this narrative pretense I title ‘Sonia’ or is this hallucination the result of some cheap chemical mirage? All bets, right now, are on the latter. For someone who likes to think about this kind of stuff, this strange incarnate experience has brought interesting scientific experiments to consider, especially when it comes to how cognition depends on the endocrine system. One Saturday afternoon, after a visit to the local kringloopwinkel, I started to truly _feel_ the world spinning. Unbeknownst to me: my cortisol was depleted. I collapsed on the street, and upon coming back to it I was unable to speak or understand language. I was alert, but felt like a proper dog. I wasn’t worried, actually kind of calm and aloof, a bit like: “this, too, shall pass.” It’s difficult to explain, in words, what it felt like _not_ to have words. When the paramedics spoke to me all I could hear was alienese mumble, and when I tried to say something my headspace felt like a psychedelic tunnel filled with voices, memories, visions, smells, all of which amounted to concepts—almost _perfect_ concepts—of what I wanted to verbalize. But the ‘tag,’ the much-needed word, was not there. (In this case, the word I was looking for to explain to the paramedics what was happening was “aphasia,” and all things aphasia-related were speeding through my mind, without any semblance of symbolic language). Ultrabiased scientific observation: you _can_ think without language, you just can’t really communicate. After having my confused corpse dragged in and out of an apocalyptic ER—the pandemic has turned hospitals into what look like scenes from a Terry Gilliam film—I regained the ability to speak and now I’m back, pumped on steroids and feeling great.  Despite all of this, and despite Covid-19, the last couple of months have been filled with pleasantries: the PhD meetings kindly coordinated by Lydia, often in the park and with wine; reading group meetings with Sjoerd, David and Jelle, sometimes resulting in fierce ping-pong championships and/or late night philosophical drinking. Reading in the garden, getting to know my neighbors better, experimenting with upside down goggles, rediscovering my pathetic passion for Albrecht Dürer, drawing and making music again (after years!) are all pleasant consequences of this pandemic, from my illusory perspective. The shit hits the existential fan, though, every time I realize our life, mine and that of most of my fellow NL peers, is but a minuscule sliver of misleading prosperity floating atop a chaotic sea of suffering and uncertainty. Speaking to my relatives and friends back in Buenos Aires I realize, once again, how stupidly easy it is to live in the Netherlands. Speaking to my relatives and friends in New York I realize how challenging it is to attempt—or in many cases simply _pretend_—to rise together against the brainless face of insidious discrimination: present everywhere, but always in a different guise. Speaking to my friends in Istanbul and Paris I realize what a placid, non-revolutionary spirit we engage here in NL. Placid, because it’s non-revolutionary, and non-revolutionary: because it’s placid.  So, while we raise the temperature of this frog-soup by semi-noticeable, incremental degrees—a metaphor which covers ideology, Covid-19 and global warming—my hope is that we don’t “go back to normal,” that we stop saying things like “the new normal” (& especially “doe normaal”) and, perhaps, that we exile the concept of “normal” altogether (isn’t that the task of any good philosophy?). I do hope we can meet IRL again, because people’s faces, body languages and tones of voice are essential food for thought, something we seem to forget reclining over the armchair sometimes. Even if we are aimless sacks of chemistry guided only by aimless chemistries around us: let our bonds become covalent once again. Have a healthy summer! S. PS: One last remark: whoever still dares to say viruses are not living entities? ### Some unfinished business on aphasia The abstract below is the first evidence I have come across for why I was able to gesture with my hands but not have access to any word-type of communicative token whatsoever, during the aphasic episode exposed above. Antonio Scarafone: “Some individuals with aphasia can communicate by using catalogues of icons and images enriched with, for instance, gestures and facial expressions (Augmentative and Alternative Communication, AAC). I will take the ‘expressive power’ of a communication system to consist in the kind of action coordination which it affords ([Enfield 2017](https://nickenfield.org/books/how-we-talk/), [Geurts 2019](https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/tl-2019-0001/html), [Drobňak 2024](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12136-024-00604-4)), and I will equate AAC with some structurally analogous natural languages used to coordinate joint activities on a large scale ([Gil 2009](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/language-complexity-as-an-evolving-variable-9780199545223?cc=ro&lang=en&)). For a wide array of purposes, AAC can be as expressive as a natural language. Based on these equivalences and a few more conceptual tools, I will claim that if an individual with aphasia can master an AAC system, there are behavioural criteria to attribute her contentful self-talk, or something close enough.” 2024, abstract for *Inner Speech Colloquium* 21-11-24. ### Klossowski on Nietzsche >“Since Professor Nietzsche's *ultima verba* turned into aphasia, it is easy for doctors to see this as a confirmation of their own reality principle: Nietzsche went beyond the limits, he lapsed into incoherence, he ceased to speak, he howled or remained silent. > >No one sees that science itself is aphasic, and that if it admitted it had no foundation, no reality would subsist - from which it derives a power that induces it to calculate: it is this decision that invents reality. It calculates so as not to have to speak, for fear of falling back into nothingness.” [[Klossowski]], [[Nietzsche]]’s Vicious Circle, xx. %% cf above quote with Bachelard + [[Surrationalism]]. %% ### Footnotes