Deceased January 31, 2020

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In Memory

Michael Watson Dwyer—writer, artificial intelligence researcher, philosopher, photographer, guitarist and sometime connoisseur of the distinctive scents of different bookbinding glues, died at the age of 75 on January 31, 2020, in St. Louis, survived by his cousins Paris Day, Jane Fordyce and Edward Fordyce. 

The son of Lucyanne and Embert Watson Dwyer, Mike came to Amherst from Horton Watkins High School in St. Louis. He majored in philosophy at Amherst, writing his senior thesis on Ludwig Wittgenstein; applied to Yale Law School to please his father, who did not consider philosophy a sensible career path; left Yale after half a semester, convinced that the classroom sparring that characterized the Socratic method of legal education was little more than an elaborate game and returned to St. Louis, where he joined the McDonnell Douglas Research Laboratories and began a 24-year career in information technology and artificial intelligence, serving as an IT specialist, manager and senior scientist in the applied mathematics and computer science department there.

At the age of 48, taking advantage of the closing of the McDonnell Douglas Research Labs in a company restructuring, Mike, as he put it, “dropped out to devote myself exclusively to my underground literary endeavors.” Picking up on a passion dating back to his Amherst days, he began serious work on what eventually developed into a four-volume work of imaginative fiction: Volume One, a 144-poem sequence of Theocritean idylls; Volume Two, a collection of English translations/adaptations of various poems written in other languages, plus a reworking of Longfellow’s Evangeline (“to try to find the poem lurking inside”); Volume Three, including 37 “prose fictions” modeled on Borges’ fictiones (37 because that is the maximum number of pictures one used to be able to squeeze out of a 36-exposure roll of 35mm camera film) and Volume Four, consisting of a mix of idylls and fictions “tying off loose ends of the urgent religio-philosophical concerns” raised in the earlier volumes.

Mike planned that the work as a whole would be titled Amherst Eclipticalis, after John Cage’s orchestral work Atlas Eclipticalis, and although he described the 900-page manuscript wryly as a “totally unpublishable, idealistically uncommercial literary artefact,” he was proud of its creation and little troubled by the thought that the world at large was ill-equipped to appreciate it. Mike often heard a different drummer and was satisfied to step to the music he heard.

Geoffrey Drury ’66