After finishing the previous section of this essay, I asked my family what they thought about nuclear semiotics. Like, casually. How would you try to warn future people about a site where nuclear waste is buried. Say, 10,000 years in the future? Easy, said my son, the eshay, who then described in surprisingly good detail a coded gold disc that some scientists have sent into space to communicate with extra-terrestrial life. I don’t know about the premise of language there, said my partner. Like, what about the Internet? Couldn’t the Internet keep up with chronicling and preserving a changing language? Ah god, the Internet. Over a few short minutes, both set about explaining how a little ChatGPT screen (“or something”) could be set up over the burial site, staying fully current with the latest language. Easy!

I want to get back to the relationship between poetry and the thyroid. For instance, think of how Christina Rossetti suffered from a form of hyperthyroidism known as Graves’ disease. In 2023, I saw Abigail Fisher present a guest lecture on Rossetti where she mentioned, along with the well-known idea that Rossetti’s Graves’ was connected with her intense religiosity, an idea that thyroid issues have been linked to an idea that there is something the sufferer cannot say. Interesting! How does one know what one cannot say? For instance, how do I know that there is something I cannot say, right now?

Graves’ is a curious affliction involving the immune system’s relation to the thyroid gland. Something (an unknown something, I discovered when diagnosed last year) triggers the immune system to over-produce an antibody called Thyroid Stimulating Immunoglobulin (TSI). This TSI attaches to healthy thyroid cells, an attachment that causes the thyroid to overproduce thyroid hormones (the main thyroid hormones are T3 and T4).

I asked ChatGPT to “explain Graves’ disease to me like I’m 10 years old”:

Easy! Graves’ disease is a condition that can make your body act a little bit crazy. It’s all because of something called the thyroid gland in your neck.

Imagine your thyroid gland is like the boss of your body’s energy. It makes a special kind of hormone called ‘thyroid hormone’ that controls how fast your body works. It’s kind of like a gas pedal in a car […] in Graves’ disease, something goes wrong with the thyroid gland. It starts making too much thyroid hormone, like stepping on the gas pedal too hard. This makes everything in your body speed up. Your heart may beat really fast, you might feel jumpy or nervous, and you might have trouble sleeping. You might even feel hot all the time because your body is working too fast.

What the body is working too fast against is the body. Is the self-cannibalising body a symbol, or is it the symbol of symbols, so maximally symbolic that it exceeds the limit of the symbolic? I am struck, too, by the image of hyperthyroidism as the body stepping on its own gas pedal. Could we think of the hyperthyroid body as the body of the storyteller, in the sense that Walter Benjamin gave it (‘The Storyteller’ in The Storyteller Essays, 2019)? That the point is not only that this body has a story, but that this body is the story. If hyperthyroidism is the global storyteller of the great acceleration (Refresh! Refresh!), then the agitated heart is beating its way to syncope, black out, failure. Dominic Symes writes:

                    look at this ventricular wall I put up
meaning: I stay regularly irregular   (always on time)
not jazz or syncopation   but syncope  synecdoche:

(‘Minor Seconds,’ 56)

It may sound counterintuitive to say that the issue in hyperthyroidism is not with the thyroid. The issue with hyperthyroidism is, rather, that it speeds up every system in the body. It is a system issue. Heart goes into irregular palpitations, skin sweats regardless of ambient temperature, and, for some reason, hair falls. Digestion also steps into overdrive:

like being overfed but undernourished
coming down too fast
           from a sugar high

(‘Speeding Up & Slowing Down,’ 40)

I don’t mean to imply that the poet is himself afflicted by hyperthyroidism, and I apologise for how peculiar this must seem, as an approach. Still, I hew this way (for now) because it seems to me that the second collection of poems at hand is very concerned with chronicling the global pace of language, with an overarching idea of a system in overdrive; chronicling, too, an idea of the impossibility of regulation, “(is anyone ever just / ‘whelmed’?)” (‘Beginning & Ending with a Line from Hera Lindsay Bird,’ 63).