And The Boy already intuits that his next vital leap as a reader will be like moving from a bathtub to a river. One of those rivers with views out to sea. And no: his episode at the mouth of that river and the entrance to that sea where he almost goes under never to float again hasn’t left him traumatized. Just the opposite: he dreams only of feeling that again. When he could read without having yet learned to read. When he realized that there was something more than reading and that other thing was another form of reading, a way of reading what isn’t there but should be: writing.
Now, back then, when he isn’t reading he goes along daydreaming all the time about writing when he grows up; when he’ll still be The Boy, yes, but in a larger and perhaps more respectable container for containing the most childish of vocations. Something you tend to decide as a kid, without thinking about it too much and is there anything more basic and intrinsically childish than the idea of working to make come true things that are not? It’s a vocation even more childish—though just as sacrificing and long-suffering—than that other one that drags so many who are unaware of having decided, at the irrational age of three or four or five years old, into wanting to live for and through ballet. But his thing will involve leaping and pirouetting and crying and cramping and enduring sleepless nights for so many more years on the stage of battle than a ballerina: the literary vocation. Working not with swans and fauns but with eagles and chained Titans whose guts are eaten by the eagles. Unhurried and unceasingly. And now he has time and has times. And nothing—in a now that seems an always-has-been and always-will-be—has more times and time than he has now.
He has insomnia.
Or insomnia has him, either way.
He has—or is contained—by that word that evokes for him the name of a Greco-Roman god and that was cribbed from the Latin in (“not”) and somnia (“sleep”): not a negation of sleep but something different.
An is not asleep, yes. Neither is it being awake.
It’s something else and located at that location where the three times coexist at all times, the night (the A-Side of insomnia) and the next day and the day before (the B-Side that, sometimes, includes the best and most daring tracks).
Insomnia like something as enumerable and listifying as the past (and as difficult to leap over; the first is very long the second is so high) and here he goes again, recounting and writing in a biji notebook, saying hello when he would rather say goodbye.
The interpretation of insomnia as something far more unforgettable and precise and revelatory and personal and faithful and original than the interpretation of dreams. Something far more interpretable.
† Insomnia that says goodbye to sleep like in one of those old movies. On the train station platform. Insomnia that says goodbye to sleep the way you say goodbye to so many things. The way you say goodbye to the romanticism of running alongside that train car as it pulls away, taking with it your closer-than-ever beloved whose love, nevertheless, is already beginning to feel like some faraway thing. The way you say goodbye to daydreaming.
† Insomnia that, also, opens the train car door and throws sleep off as the train travels ever faster and ever further. And sleep lands badly and breaks all its bones as if they were glass.
† Insomnia that’s more black and white than any dream. The black and white of insomnia is so expressionist.
† Insomnia like that shared code, that complicit wink, that recognizable handshake that—sooner or later, later or sooner, it doesn’t matter what hour or moment, with insomnia it’s always the time of insomnia—all writers share. List within a list. Everyone was, is, or will be there. Insomnia like Vietnam (the only narcoleptic he knows: Henry David Thoreau, maybe because he spent the whole day running around). Poets abound perhaps because the exact rhyme stays wider-awake than le mot juste. And Franz Kafka (“During last night’s insomnia, as these thoughts came and went between my aching temples …”) dreaming he wakes up every fifteen minutes and jumps out the window to land in the street and the trains run him over again and again and, then, he decides it’s better not to sleep than to dream he wakes up and commits suicide. And Charles Dickens (who always slept facing north, because he thought it increased his creativity and kept the insomnia, which forced him out on long nocturnal walks, in its place). And Sylvia Plath (“My mother told me I must have slept, it was impossible not to sleep in all that time, but if I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green and luminous course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through their circles and semi-circles, every night for seven nights, without missing a second, or a minute, or an hour”). And Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Hardwick. And William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman (who both went out walking at night). And the Brontë sisters (who paced around a table to wear out the energies that kept them awake) and Dorothy Parker, at the table of the Algonquin Hotel (“How do people go to sleep? I’m afraid I’ve lost the knack”). And Thomas de Quincey and Percy Bysshe Shelley (who got addicted to opium to escape that place). And Alfred Tennyson and Francis Scott Fitzgerald (to alcohol and barbiturates). And John Updike and Haruki Murakami (“It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination”). And W. B. Yeats and Joseph Conrad and Edith Wharton. And Joan Didion (“To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves”). And George Eliot (“In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive”).
They cannot sleep and so they invent not to remember and they write not to dream.
Studies on the subject theorize that what keeps so many writers awake is the anguish and fury confronting such a poorly written world. Then, tossing and turning in bed or making their chairs spin, they rewrite it, they correct it, not always for the better. And, then, adding and throwing into the witches’ brew the Macbethian guilt: the king who bids farewell to all “innocent sleep” insisting in the third person of the sleepless who “‘Sleep no more! Macbeth is murdering sleep …’ Sleep that soothes away all our worries. Sleep that puts each day to rest” sounding almost as if the name, Macbeth, were a brand of powerful amphetamines.
† Insomnia like a dislocated location where you think about what comes to pass and what came to pass and what will come to pass.
† Insomnia like—great expression, as precise as it is inaccurate—being passed sleep: sleep like something that came to pass but no longer comes to pass.
† Insomnia like the impossibility of getting (that terrible verb often used to affirm in the negative: no agreement was reached, he couldn’t get to sleep) to sleep.
† Insomnia that teaches you quickly and efficiently—and makes you learn by heart and from memory—that daydreaming and insomniac-dreaming are not at all the same thing.
† Insomnia that is the shadow of sleep, its negative, its dark side. Paradoxical-idiomatic-semantic-signification oddity: to say I am sleepy does not mean to possess sleep. To be sleepy, with any luck, is nothing more than the preliminary movement in having sleep possess us, consume us, devour us, dream us (sleep does dream) making us dream of it. When we’re sleepy but sleep decides not to take us, to reject us, to abandon us, what we end up having is insomnia. Insomnia lets us have it. It’s all ours, “I’m all yours, I belong to you,” it says, with a yawn and a smile.
When we have insomnia, we are indeed masters of something that’s nothing other than the inability to be asleep, the ability to not sleep.
Trying to connect all the foregoing with another lexical rarity that’s intrigued hi
m since childhood: when you stayed awake (and it wasn’t easy not to fall asleep) to watch a late-night movie; when you said “to watch television” when you looked at the screen of the TV. As if the television were something inside the TV. The genie in the bottle, the ghost in the machine. As if the television were a dream dreamed by the TV that, when it was turned off—another paradox—remained awake, insomniac, nothing to see, without anyone to look at it. That white point in the center of the black screen that took forever to disappear.
† Insomnia like something that seems mean-spirited. They say it steals sleep, but that’s not true; what steals sleep from us isn’t insomnia, it’s something prior to insomnia. Insomnia is, in its essence, quite generous: something gives us insomnia first so we have insomnia later. The same thing happens with that close and rather histrionic sibling of the rather laconic insomnia: fear. The fear fear gives us so, then, we’re fearful. And often that fear—which comes in a variety of exceedingly personal flavors—is the fear of insomnia.
† Insomnia is like the Hound of the Baskervilles while sleep is like the Cheshire Cat. Insomnia never stops barking for no reason, while sleep meows occasionally and only approaches you when you pretend to ignore it, though you’re thinking about it all the time.
† Insomnia like a symptom/sign of the times that some people associate with the uncontainable tsunami of freewheeling capitalism, which will do everything possible to keep you from sleeping. Because when you sleep you’re not spending and, as such, you don’t count. You can’t type or input your password or credit card number on the screens of those phones that glow in the dark. When you sleep you neither consume nor consult and don’t contribute to the growth and perfection of your personal algorithm/robot portrait that needs to be monitored more or less periodically by databases of security agencies and stock exchange. And so, late capitalism like the only economic system that never sleeps. Like sharks. More information in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary. Crary explains: “The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of stimulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism … within the globalist neoliberal paradigm, sleeping is for losers.” Thus, a new physical-existential concept, already acknowledged in the pages of the Oxford Dictionary, known as lifehacking (or “a strategy or technique adopted to manage your time and daily activities in a more efficient way”). The idea, in the beginning, is good, or beneficial for someone: to better diagram your life, to squeeze every drop out of it. But—as happens with Frankenstein’s monster—the best inventions have their dark flipside. And not in vain has man always required doses of something called nothing, of the dolce far niente from which on more than one occasion springs the spark of genius. Now no: now rest is beginning to be understood as “dead time.” Thus, the sadism of TV channels scheduling multiple-episodes of a series to play late into the night. Thus, the young German banking intern collapsing in London City after working seventy-two hours without sleeping in order to earn bonus points, to retain his spot on the eternally flat starting-line with no way out. Thus, the Pentagon research aimed at creating victorious soldiers who no longer need to sleep. Then, you know the story, friendly fire and collateral damage and side effects, and a/another young veteran who—unable to distinguish between waking and dreaming—walks into a shopping mall armed to the teeth, pupils dilated, time for sales and discounts and total liquidation.
† Insomnia where everyone is equal but each in his own way. And where there’s no value to the consolation of learning that in the nineteenth century, when the darkness was more difficult to penetrate and fell so much earlier, it was common to sleep twice in a night with a period of activity between the one and the other: a space, in the first place, to check if the predatory beasts had gotten too close, and, later, an interval when it was accepted and acceptable to converse or talk to yourself or to make love or to compose sonnets or even to go out and visit some future friend or to fight a duel with some ex-friend. An intermission between dreams in which to waking dream. A time between times. Times of going to bed much earlier because there was very little to do. The world had shut down with the setting of the sun. And so, then, understanding it as the most normal thing in the world (because it happened to everyone in the world), to lie there: in the darkness, for two or three waking hours, and stare up at the ceiling and think about everything and nothing. Back then, insomnia was part of sleep. It was its obligatory and waking non-fiction prologue you had to pass through first in order to subsequently be able to understand and enjoy the fictions of sleep. Insomnia was the hypnotic countdown before launching on the long voyage through the space of the night.
Insomnia was a giant step before that small leap.
† Insomnia arrives doing little hops, down the hill, hand in hand with depression and challenging us—what came first: the chicken or the egg?—to guess which of the two is the older sibling. And to pick either the One who gets depressed and has insomnia or the One who has insomnia and gets depressed.
† Insomnia that ends up translating into the thinness of a condemned and infirm man who has lost the fatty stuff of dreams and the musculature of wishful thinking. And no: it’s not that he loses weight, rather that, not sleeping, he loses the heaviness of dreams, heavy dreams.
† Insomnia that spells the end (maybe as a result of a redistribution of blood flow, flowing from the genitals to the brain) of all those formidable erections he used to wake up with, like a flagpole whereon to raise the flag of a new day. Now, not so much. Now, at most, half-mast, distress signal, but never resting in peace.
† Insomnia that’s the most minimal and most economical form of the nightmare you end up missing the way, they say, the prisoners of Auschwitz and its subsidiaries missed their nightmares: because no sleeping nightmare could ever be worse than that waking nightmare. So you would never wake up the people who were having nightmares in the concentration camps, but allow them to enjoy them, de-concentrated, until the sun rose on that blinding and re-concentrated reality.
† Insomnia that’s solid while dreams are liquid.
† Insomnia that expands as sleep contracts.
† Insomnia that—unlike dreams—is unforgettable.
† Insomnia—transparent opaque thing—that abides no interpretation. Nobody will ever write a book entitled The Interpretation of Insomnia because there are no two insomniacs alike or systemizable. Nobody will ever tell their insomnias nor will they say, “you’ll never guess what or whom I insomniated last night.” Nobody thinks their insomnia holds any interest for anyone else and, besides, it’s embarrassing to bring it up: having insomnia is the closest thing to making that dream of discovering you’re naked or your teeth are falling out in public come true, with the particularity that, there and then, the only audience is yourself. There’s no more extreme way of looking at yourself than with the look of insomnia.
† Insomnia that has no eyelids and whose pupils are like stones.
† Insomnia so difficult to track (Pliny tells us that the Thracians had the custom of placing black or white pebbles in an urn for each good or bad day; and thus, reaching the end of their lives, they knew if they’d been happy or not; but Pliny says nothing about how the Thracians had explained what to do and how to calculate the black-white nights of insomnia)
Find gray stones.
† Insomnia is a terrible and absolutely realist thing. Thus—during its somber reign—it forces spasms of thought, and fluxes of consciousness, and fixed ideas floating through the air to thereby become more bearable.
† Insomnia that speaks not the language of the free association of ideas but that of the imprisoning association of ideas: dragging steel balls and chains, like those ghosts (ghosts more frightened than frightening, with those booos closer to wailing with sadness than fear) who no longer remember who they’d been when they were alive.
† Insomnia that’s avant-garde prose (without punctuation or capital
s and all in one single long sentence for pages and pages) while sleep is free yet rigorous verse.
† Insomnia that, when it comes to being creative, so unjustly, has so much less glamour and cachet than sleep.
† Insomnia that, the legend tells, is the result of you appearing, awake, in the dream of some other, sleeping, person. If this is true, recurrent insomnia would be the consequence of being very present in the thoughts of others (of Ella?). For good or ill. For sweet dreams or bitter nightmares. (Doubt/possibility/terror: that the dreams of people in comas are one, single dream that repeats over and over on a loop / Penelope’s husband / Maxi Karma / fly-by-night encounter in a bar in B. / Maxi Karma wanted to be a writer / that love-hate look of aspirants at those whom they aspire to be / Maybe Maxi Karma, in a coma, dreams all the time of who he wanted to be and never was.)
† Insomnia like irrefutable proof that not sleeping doesn’t mean not having nightmares.
† Insomnia like that nightmare you can’t wake up from.
† Insomnia that—like certain dangerous liquors and certain volatile explosives—isn’t safe or advisable to shake or stir.
† Insomnia where and when you feel drunk, dizzy like on the deck of one of those ships inside a bottle, message-less, adrift, and more alive than ever, raising a glass to the health of all your dead.
But, ever more explosive and shaking and bubbling, not sleeping was now, for him, like a concentration camp, of maximum concentration, on himself: being there, eyes open and bags of such density under them they could harbor entire civilizations, thinking of a thousand things and of none. Thinking in the language of insomnia, which is the language of deafening silence, the oh so eloquent muteness of the dead. The sound of insomnia like the sound you hear inside a seashell, that sound that’s not the sound of the sea but the sound of something that, like the sea, never sleeps and is never entirely still. Insomnia like being underwater and, at the same time and in the same place, where everything seems as if suspended in the air. Where everything took a long time to get started and nothing was ever entirely finished. And, sometimes, feeling how his mind seemed to be on the point of melting down from the pressure, ready to be blown to bits so all those things he’d seen there would be lost, like rain in the tears or something like that (yes, he was recalling that movie and bad joke and bad play on the words from that final monologue where the android finally shuts his eyes, and from there who knows where, from there to …).
The Dreamed Part Page 38