In November I was exhausted. The span of good days between flares kept shrinking until it looked like I would have to accept that this was the new new normal, a new baseline. I couldn’t accept it though; I was furious. I was doing everything right and sick of it. I was avoiding the bad foods, and taking enzymes to make sure I didn’t react to the good foods. I was doing physio every day, and rehab at the gym every other day. I walked myself like a dog first thing every morning. I took my supplements, tracked vitamins. I met my step count. I was pacing, but I wasn’t doing stupid things like sitting still for too long. I was using braces and compression and muscle relaxants when I needed to, though I’d weaned myself off the delicious opioids which helped with pain but made everything else worse. I took magnesium baths and checked my breathing. I puffed myself up with electrolytes during exercise, and rotated slowly in front of a red light panel before bed. Each time I switched it off the world went desaturated and greenish, like a film from the early 2000s.
I attributed it to the onset of winter, or a new supplement. I attributed it to an invisible element in my flat, and ran the purifier for hours after it told me the air was clean. I got tired of explaining that, for whatever reason, my body simply would not do normal things like sleep, regulate temperature, pulse, circulation, blood pressure. (I later figured out that I was poisoning myself by cooking my broth for half an hour too long, turning it into a kind of histamine hell-stew). All of this would have been fine, if not pleasant, if I wasn’t on a deadline - a big and important one I couldn’t afford to fuck up. I’d been redrafting a novel every day since August, having realised that the final third needed to be rewritten entirely. Until November, this had been going okay. But in the new new normal it was like trying to work on a hangover, a comedown, and the first day of a flu all at once. Worse, I knew that whatever I wrote would not be afforded special consideration because of the circumstances. Illness is like class; no one will say your book is good considering how sick and/or poor you are, and pat you on the head. In order to be average you must be exceptional. This is probably why I got cinematically manipulated into crying at Marty Supreme the other week.
In any case, I was in a rut and I knew I had to do something. One night I was magnesium-bathing a subluxed shoulder and reading a book, Karl Marx in Karlsbad, about Marx’s three consecutive summers taking the waters in the spa town of Karlsbad, now Karlovy Vary in Czechia. It turns out that this a dangerous book to read if you are in a severely sleep-deprived, hyperadrenergenic state, because you will start getting ideas - but I’ll get on to that. The bulk of it is an essay by the anti-fascist writer and journalist E.E. Kisch, who turned to the subject of Marx’s burnout and physical decline, the introduction suggests, as a mirror for his own struggles. Kisch was an international figure with a formidable career spanning five continents; he was also an early prisoner of the Nazis and one of the first to warn that the terror would extend beyond Germany. In 1946, aged 60 and with his health deteriorating, he returned to his native Prague from Mexico City where he had been living in exile. He was invited to Karlsbad - a few hours West of Prague - to take part in a ceremony commemorating Marx’s visits to the city’s spas seventy years earlier. Kisch used local archives to reconstruct these visits, first producing lectures and eventually an extended essay - described in the introduction as ‘historical reportage that reads like a detective story of Marx in the company of bourgeois charlatans.’
