Dear Everyone, I hope this email finds you all well. I’m well and genuinely wish that for all of you. These past few months have been an experiment in lowering my dosage to alleviate the impact of my medicine’s side-effects. The hope was that it would lessen my cognitive and physical impairments—which it did! The fear was that evidence of my cancer might reappear. It didn’t! That’s the news after my most recent visit with my oncologist. I will always ‘have cancer’ but the expectation is that this medicine will continue to work for another 7 years, maybe longer, and there will likely be revolutionary new medicines arriving in the near future. I will be on this medicine for a long time, but I should expect to be living into my old age. Ironically, feeling better felt bad for a bit. Gaining more clarity of thought, more reserves of strength, strangely made me feel more aware of my incapacities. I had felt at peace with my the fact of my debility before, even if I struggled against it. It was what it was. It was new, and kind of interesting, and so clearly beyond my control. Then, with my new dosage, I was so much closer to my old self, so many things felt more possible, and yet there was a threshold at which my fatigue would overwhelm me and I could’t make it across the finish line. Only another night’s sleep would get me to where I could face the work I had ahead. I’m sure many of you are familiar with ‘spoon theory’ -- you begin with only so many ‘spoons’ in your cup, and each task removes them until there’s none. It’s not perfect but it works. What’s baffling to me is that any task, physical or mental—lifting my guitar case, climbing the stairs, driving, making a meal, doing a few emails, ordering somethings, checking text messages, walking the dogs, dishes, checking my calendar—it’s all equivalent. It’s all spoons. When you have extremely limited resources and you experience their depletion throughout the day, there a horror to knowing that inconsequential events like not finding a nearby parking place, a conversation with a well-meaning stranger, or a pile-up of text messages, might mean abandoning other plans or responsibilities. Like playing musical chairs and watching more and more chairs are taken away. Feeling better means that life can be fuller than you could hope. The other night was Erev Rosh Hashana and if the last few weeks are any indication the next year will be amazing. I had piece in the MCAD Faculty Biennial, a collage, my first exhibition of this kind in quite a while and got to celebrate it along with my MFA students. I imagined I’d be making a ton of work this year, but many things colluded to undermine that aspiration, cancer being one. Making this one piece of work was hard. Making art is hard. I’m not even talking about making good work (which I’m happy to let others be the judge of). Making art that matters to you is hard. One of the cognitive impairments I am experiencing is lethologica. It’s the experience of a word I want to use being just within reach but being unable to grasp it, so, like a mountain climber, groping for the nearest word I can purchase. This made writing poetry easier than speaking. When I was in the depths of this illness in early February, just a few weeks after receiving my medicine, I went to Paris for a residency with Pete, my bandmate from Yellow Swans. Looking back now, I have no idea how I did it. We composed a new piece of acousmatic music based on a poem I’d written about ghosts, cancer and fascism. I wrote a slew of poems after that, the most poetry I’ve ever written. Pete returned to Minneapolis a few weeks ago and we turned some of those poems into more music. We played two incredible shows in Minneapolis and Chicago. It was exhausting, but I felt the old fire inside me, the almost boundless energy that wants to explode through me when we play. I felt like a new version of my old self. Amidst all this School has picked up again and I’ve begun teaching. I love my job, though it’s harder than a year ago, before cancer. Around 5:00pm I can feel my brain shutting down; suddenly teaching primitive accumulation and social reproduction theory feels like it needs to be someone else’s responsibility, but the students are supporting me and I feel more clarity than ever before that this work is important. I assume everyone knows at least part of the story about why Higher Ed is in crisis, but I’ll let you in on a secret: it’s not the teachers or the students that are confused. Students are hungrier than ever to learn to think beyond algorithms and hot takes. They really want to know ‘why the world is this way’ and ‘how do I change it?’ Politicians, corporate interests and school administrators have all colluded to gut schools of the things that make them schools, as if schools were really just factories, and now they’re confused about why schools aren’t functional. AI conartists are trying to convince them all that robots can make their product just as well, a little faster, and a whole lot cheaper. Why would students want that? How does competing with YouTube and ChatGPT represent a future for Higher Ed? In my experience, education is about being transformed, deeply, utterly, by your encounter with knowledge and the communal experience of doing this with another human being. Knowledge is not just facts and figures, not in STEM or in History. Knowledge is something embodied, driven by desire, it’s created through effort, it’s holistic, it depends upon others to be created, and it is created anew in each person. In my classes we’re often reading things and discussing things and the point isn’t to memorize and have the ‘correct’ understanding, but to use the things we read and discuss to catalyze thought itself, to think as a communal act, as a social act, as mutual aid and reciprocal care. We realize our potential through creative thought, not automation, not becoming a better calculator or LLM. My cancer has made being a teacher easier. I lose the train of thought or can’t recall the year this or that book was published (or can, and am shocked), but I feel more at ease and free than I’ve ever felt. More confident that I know something than ever and less anxious to prove it. All this is to say that I’m alive and that it’s good to be alive. As always, thank you. I wish I had the capacity to thank each of you individually, but I really don’t. All I can ask is that you believe me when I say that to each of you, I couldn’t do it without you. Gabriel