Field notes

This Friday (3 October 2025) I’ll be having surgery on my right knee to correct an unstable kneecap that has troubled me since I was 11. It turns out that my kneecaps are still about 20mm too high, even after bringing them down when I was a teenager. My legs aren’t straight, giving me knock knees, my tibias are rotated, so my feet point outwards, and I have a bunch of ligament damage from multiple dislocations.

The surgery to fix this is complex, and I’m grateful to be having it. I’m going to be recovering for about two months, probably doing very little work for the first three weeks. But, perhaps, maybe plenty of time for reading and writing as I’ll be stuck on the sofa for most of the time.

For posterity, here’s how the surgeon describes the procedure.

The main procedure will be a high tibial osteotomy to straighten your right leg. During the same operation, we will rotate your foot to correct the external tibial torsion and perform a distalisation of your tibial tubercle. This combined approach will address three issues through a single osteotomy, which we will stabilise using a plate and screws.

Additionally, we will perform arthroscopic surgery to tidy up the joint, carry out soft tissue releases on the lateral aspect with a lengthening procedure, remove the loose bone fragment, and reef and tighten the medial structures. While we discussed the possibility of a medial patellofemoral ligament (MPFL) reconstruction, this will only be performed if necessary during the operation. We will have the equipment available should it be required, though typically the soft tissue procedures are sufficient.

After 25 years of crappy knees, I’m excited to be on a path where I might get good function and not having to worry about dislocations.

Aesthetic refers to the perception of sensations arising from being in contact with the world. Anaesthetic is the absence of this sensory experience, which is the effect of the class of drugs we call anaesthetics.

So another way to describe this spectrum of presence is to say that one end is aesthetic (heightened sensory perception) and the other is anaesthetic (dulled or absent sensory perception).

It’s interesting that so many objects we value for their ‘aesthetics’ (e.g. phones) in fact act as functional anaesthetics by dulling our senses and so taking us further out of contact with the world.

1798, from German Ästhetisch (mid-18c.) or French esthétique (which is from German), ultimately from Greek aisthetikos “of or for perception by the senses, perceptive,” of things, “perceptible,” from aisthanesthai “to perceive (by the senses or by the mind), to feel,” from PIE *awis-dh-yo-, from root *au- “to perceive.” - etymonline.com

zettels: 3.2b2, 3.2b2a

There’s something about knowing that it’s possible to be met in the depths of your thinking by another that gives permission to go to those depths in the first place.

It opens up the possibility that a response is possible, that someone can confirm that you’re not crazy, that you’re not writing into a void. That your thinking is useful to someone, somewhere.

He went on writing letters to Urras, even when he mailed none of them at all. The fact of writing for someone who might understand—who might have understood—made it possible for him to write, to think. Otherwise it was not possible. – Urusula Le Guin, The Dispossessed

zettel: 3.4c