Please let the pain stop. I don’t know if the pain is grief or loneliness or envy of others. The odd formation of thought then holds this credo: If I can find the right thing to think, I will be set free to fall asleep. Thought, placated then, will let me sleep.
In order to sleep, one does mad things: I measure my happiness: I slap a label on it as if I were going to mail it, or a description of it, somewhere. I go bravely into unhappiness: I think about wretched injustices—the deaths of others, my own predicaments, my clearly marked dissolution into merely trying to get along inside my peculiar life, my not being able to live here—until then it is all a mode of torture: an inquisition by an unhappiness so great that I Must Answer It in Its Brutal Pursuit of Correction or I Must Die. What feels like bravery and happiness may be a trap: only victory counts, after all. For me everything interesting lies in a territory not in the pain continuum. I lie about this to myself, to others. I don’t quite truly ever feel unhappy. I feel real pain: and everything else is a state of happiness. The insomnia moves step by step, sometimes into the humiliation of not having a fate like anyone else’s. One came here to enter, with luck, a statistical category.
They are rich enough to be able to bear you.
In the daytime, I can pass for real. At moments even—and what bliss it was—for a moment or two here and there, without nonsense. Sometimes my reality to some extent matches that of other souls.
Some people can bear me as long as I am this age.
What I am to others is often primarily an idea taken from books and movies, from talk and various things current in the world (at that time) and from a classroom idea of what someone is and of what life is for a boy, and what sort of boy I might be and what I am as a sample boy.
In a football game or at a track meet, running in front of an audience, me, for me a sense of unreality marks the heightened reality, the adrenaline stuff, and the rest of it. To be insomniac erases that. This is the flat thing . . . To be here has the unreality of a major game, and to be good-looking, to be considered it, and to be smart: that’s something that confers a sense of unreality. One is not ungrateful, but those things solve nothing: they merely mean you can enter or leave the game.
I have not left the game here. I expect Casey to relent toward me. And Daniel to be sensible. Neither will ever happen but I did not know that.
To be smarter than someone less smart, or to be less smart (than Nonie, say, than Nonie was with Casey), what significance could that possibly have in real life? I knew of no poem on the subject and of no play by Shakespeare that would inform me and no tradition that speaks of this: Is Hamlet a tragedy about degrees of intelligence? And of moral intelligence? The Tempest and Macbeth and Othello and Antony and Cleopatra—each is in part a study of being more intelligent and then less intelligent than the people around you . . . But what in the world could intelligence mean? Or be? A mental attribute that wavers and does not matter much, much of the time? Something without real existence as itself but having to flesh itself in terms of the world and others?
I had no money. I had no power— That’s not quite true; I had power in a limited way; but I had no language derived from a relation to. the world other than that of my entire life in this world. Success: power and language: money. The essence and privation for an organically real thing is that it is not possible for anyone, for everyone to accept it. It has to struggle. Lila had said in a curious sibylline voice: You had better be a doctor . . . You don’t mind sick people. And people will leave you alone if they’re scared for themselves . . .
To be destroyed meant what eventually? A poem? Seventeen finally worthwhile hours in all the hours of one’s life?
You’re not so smart . . . You’re too smart for what ails you . . . Look where you’re going . . . You’re dreaming . . . You don’t know what you’re doing . . .
Everyone has fallen in love with me. The agony of such imposture is like being locked in a barrel—the stiffness of crouching. And the oddity: it is all grotesque.
The bones hurt; the heart hurts; one cannot sleep.
An uneasily fulfilled nothingness, a temporarily melodramatic fate—it is easily taken as the nothingness of everything.
Madness
Awareness in the dark. Not nothingness—time is something . . . Am I ill? I know that the first enclosing paradise was the human belly of my mother. It was so changeable that I encountered the passage of time in the paradise there, the salt birthplace of my spirit, in my awareness (a dim confidence) that one would feel better, one would be all right: that was the loose evidence: that was the measure of paradise from the beginning. Amphibious state. The unretum that time is includes the mechanical thing that awareness has always an element of resistance to time itself in it. It refuses the identity that time proposes to bestow on minutes, on everything. It is a force of resistance, resistant even to those forces that constitute it. The force of individuality in a particle, since it is time-ridden, would vary and weaken not entirely mechanically and give birth to the world and to anomalies. A balance, a situation has to have a form of awareness, or knowledge, of itself as a balance or how could it exist as moments pass? The urge in time itself is to exist—and it names and individuates everything in a mystic electricity—and force—in eerily always renewed individuation—until it fails for this or that thing—the hurried dawns and semi-sleeplessness of matter and its nakedness to the brushing formation and anatomical trespass of the creation of existence—and then the lapse, the letting go, the decay—the restlessness of amendment—in that, I drown, waking-and-sleeping, fluke-attentioned in ways that jeer in the mental light in the dark at really crippling fear until thoughtlight becomes a dance in mental darkness of fear and beyond-fear, a little natural chemical fire in the skull, a little buzz of hellfire—and resistance—in the skull, beneath the hair.
Without cure or remission, the flickers of memory and the present-tense sense of merely-a-room alternate.
And in resignation to the crawling, wormy, maggoty minutes and breaths, the tiny, transparent monkeys of my breath, the snake-flutters of eyelashes and of lungs, I endure my punishment.
In the alternations, it seems to me, my shadow eats the world and drags me in its belly (in the mind of my mind) into a moment of eclipse. My darkened self proposes and manages an awful kind of marriage and filial thing with darkness itself, with awful matter. An infant patience, seemingly infinite, inside the night, preserves me as I straddle the alternations and twists and moment-by-moment prolongation of this condition of loneliness and of predicament in amphibian contradiction of everything I have been taught about simplicity and ideas.
Clapping a mind on top of a mind, an observing consciousness, another placement of awareness on top of the one before, and then piling body on mind, on minds, and superimposing a giddily aerial (and sad) form of mind on all of that, and still another form of mind to watch, to judge and observe, I rise to a kind of a glimpse of the nighttime room.
People say, I know all about it . . . And: We know nothing about that . . .
I am not tired of God—but the idea of God is so much simpler than the sense of presence in the passage of moments that I can’t ask for anything but merely wait for mercy, here, so long after my birth into the immorality of sheer existence: one rises with a heavy beating of wings into a condition of migration. Thought and recognition of the motions of thought, the most elaborate imaginable collection of simultaneous riflings of predatory exercises of worded will, stories and whatnot, made of stiff letters erected in a phallic one, a single quill sufficient, or insufficient, for warding off despair. I want to be like a book in its powers of survival, me in my powers of survival. I feel the whispering inside and outside of me—strange primal stories: Would you like to speak the language of the, atoms, Wiley? The formation of the cosmos? The first war cries on the shore? If you fail to sleep, you can hear the howling of the electrons in the black spaces in you; and a kind of Troy arises—and falls then—the nothing with its peculiar motio
ns stitching it, seamed nothingness, into borders, until it is me—factual and predicted light of awareness, like light, a form of time (maybe), weight and counterweight, weight of attraction, weight of heaviness and of speed. Lila allows me a lot of freedom—because she is ill. We worked this out over the years.
One’s democratic sleeplessness . . . I won’t sleep with Daniel . . . I won’t touch him . . . Reality is instructing me in itself—it is like a courtship: fucking reality breeding a subsidiary reality on the body of what is real in me. That this state is deprivation, or zero, I recognize because time now whispers, Know me.
If everything is possible to belief, then one might throw oneself from the porch in the conviction that one might fly. We have only small laboratories of time and limited abilities and we have large wonders and great horrors to deal with; and often a vastly unconquerable unhappiness stands in our way—so we had better be limited—limited in terms of knowing anything—limited in terms of fidelity to abstract truth since, then, lying has special importance.
Because then the truth is testified to by the lie, by its, the truth’s, not being what the lie is. It exists then.
It doesn’t though. A possibility. An immediacy. Are unlike. This is among my comparatively absolute truths, this is there inside the torment of them, the insistence that time is a curtain; and on the other side of it is a God with a bellying paradise or a scientific simplification, something mechanically reliable—as nothing is; and the lie representing human will then—human cleverness, Promethean, willful, sly—the lie as the only possibility of representation of truth, in its capacity to startle and freeze me and make me wait in patience and in terror—I choose to stake my life, my sanity on immediacy. It moves in the moments, immediacy and truth: it does, like a lion in an old story, with a rippling pelt and bony ribs: the truth is made of moments and holds or carries or pushes or pulls me now and scatters my wits and eats me, eats my shadow. I had never had an image of stillness no matter how I pressed myself to—or one of timelessness; I have never had an image of eternity—only of this-stuff-going-on a while longer. I think people lie about what they think they see. Nature sets it up that we must be important or we have no reason to be alive in real time.
To go to sleep is to launch a canoe on the dark of liquid noises, and the forces of the currents carry you into a merciless transience of light that proposes itself as stillness and absolute meaning and as theater in a display of such plausibility I believe it is real and am afraid to wake, thinking that waking might be death or lunacy. That is how I go to sleep. The nursery rhymes I was told persuaded me I was part of the family of everyone. That is how I go to sleep, among the biological absolutes and into a brotherhood and sisterhood of sleep that can be taken from me. My sight and the light it sees by cannot travel in stillness, in stilled air, among eternally unchanging particles. I can’t in true stillness know I was separate from the air or that I was, in such a state of stilled, or dissolved, identity, unlike what I saw. I feel it as error. I have to lie to myself if I am to manage to escape from a sense of the motion of everything. And when I do, as I said, I have no sense of motionlessness—I have only a sense of universal motion which means I am awake and not dead, which means that I exist and that imperfect consciousness is not all I am. I do not necessarily die when someone else dies or when I sleep. I will die, though. It—the death in me—tugs and pulls at me, a kind of unamphibious, unambiguous ascent to a kind of realization about myself: it is that sort of thought that keeps me awake; it is like being a bare-legged and barefooted child of seven or eight and sitting in a doorway; the vestibule is the vestibule of death. Mine. Only mine. The unifying node in me, the pinprick of personal light in the universal rush of time, will, when I finish my treading water and my swimming in the realities of present moments, that pellet of light on the cathedral floor (sort of) will be extinguished. I don’t want to foresee my death. I doubt that I can, anyway. I think Benjie and Casey and Daniel and Isobel will have lousy lives. But they will have lives. I want to do no harm but I want to live, too. I want to have as much life as they have.
I am buried here in an Egyptian tomb with gold ornaments, a Scythian tumulus, a Red Indian mound.
And it is a Chinese burial chamber with terra-cotta armaments, and terra-cotta soldiers, my army of the dead. My own army.
In this room in the house of quite rich people, one is sleepless differently from those rare times one was sleepless in St. Louis. I am rarely sleepless at home. There, if one suffers—and sweats—at night, it is mostly because of others’ sufferings—my father’s, or people in the war; suffering that is theirs, that impinges and becomes one’s own suffering without ever being equivalent or the same. I don’t mean a contagion of ill luck. I don’t mean a contagious sympathy. I mean the forearm bone of certain actions affecting others then twists your arm or hits you in the forehead, or whatever, like an atom jumping in quantum mechanics.
The nighttime air has its own noticeable reality such that it seems to me obvious that everything is realer than I am or is less compounded of errors-of-will and of accidents of circumstance. If I do not blame the world, I cannot find myself, but I blame the world and money; and then here I am; I think, The air in here is too warm. I hear the ceiling fan creak and I see in the dark it bends on its stalk with its own turning; familiar and bodiless fingers of air from the motion of the fan touch me—this is like my morning prayer. I have stripped myself, the sleepless orphan among the changes in this tail end from my waking life, in the half-thought that this sort of prayer might happen. Benjie has said, You-all are a villain, honey. That was one time in a conversation which included talk about my genitals. And I ain’ta just clacking my gums. If I set the switches and gauges and valves in myself to stay here, and if I set them after that to rescue Daniel or to placate Casey, it is as if I am two trains or as if I contain two trains rushing toward a collision. Nothing will quite work out. Save Daniel by letting him find some sort of sexual triumph on my skimpy body? My genitals are here . . . And so am I. In this moment of turning outward in the dark in the hope of a useful thought, in the hope of sleep, in the hope of having a destiny that will make the events of my life seem WORTHWHILE.
The Conclusion of the Soliloquy
The differences in lives—whoof. Whuh. Ahhh. To say a life is the SAME as another tends to be an absolute to replace the ancient rhetorics of God and the state. The cipherization. The statisticization of the soul. People get really odd and emotional about it: You are like us . . . You are not different from us . . . mean Our absolutes hold for you, too; people get violent about that. But the differences in lives becomes truly painful until the sense that this is my body and not Daniel’s (he has a better body anyway) and that his money and his attention are not mine is like being whacked over and over—ow, it hurts.
The naked boy in bed is somehow also among a grayish diffused light among clouds. Ah, he is asleep. The thought of differences in lives freed him. Exhaustion came . . . In his dreams, the differences in lives—and his theories about these matters involve the police and a woman he loves in Czechoslovakia—the country of money (of checks) and of sanity (checks and balances)—and of slow vac(ation)s—i.e., Slovaks. The secret police are hunting me. I cross a very large piazza in quite grand yellow-and-white sunlight. An enormous cathedral is lit in an immense way. It is set in an immensity of light—as if thoughtlight encompassed it (rather than that nature held a pellet of light which was the central node of my consciousness). Now I am on the curving dome of the cathedral. Men are chasing me, other lives, they have guns, he, I have a gun, we all fire; I kill many; they will kill me soon; I am wounded; a small plane is coming angelically to spirit me away; but I am shot dead and the immense crowd shouts in the grandeur of light in the piazza; and the naked body screams, mildly, into his pillow, shy about his terror, shy in his terror, and is wide-awake again in the strange house of the rich relations (by adoption) who might save him yet.
Stay with your mouth in the pillow, he tells
himself. The bed is shaking so much from my convulsions that it rattles on the wall. Benjie, in the next room, who spies on me—and why not?—came to the door of my room and said, jocularly, and not without kindness, “Are you jerking off, Wiley?” Then: “Is every little thing okay?”
“My dad used to say that.” (He must have gotten it from his mother.)
He took a step nearer the bed and held out his arms and said: “What the hell—are you having a bad time? Honey, we’re your people.”
“Don’t put your arm around me—please. Benjie, go away . . . GO AWAY.”
A real self, phallic and oppressed, might use and hurt him in some way that we will not easily recover from.
“Don’t be oversensitive,” he says.
Partly to amuse him and partly knowing he would back away and not wanting to say, I would like to tell SOMEONE, I said: “God, I am tired of people loving me.”
He backed off and said, “Oh, you are FEROCIOUS . . .”
All at once, I am far more crazed than Casey was in the garden. I say to Benjie—without warning—“You cocksucking piece of shit, you momma’s boy; asshole; you’d double-cross anybody without thinking twice about it—”
Convulsions rack me with dry sobs. I hate this shit. I’d rather die almost than endure it.
“You’re a rough, harsh, thorny person,” Benjie says, somewhere on the other side of my seizure. He may have said something else; this is what I thought I heard.
The Runaway Soul Page 66