But with insomnia—unlike what happens with dreams—there are no special effects. There are no living who depart or dead who return or omnipresent spirits. The only particularity, in his case, is the sporadic shift in the tone of his mute voice. A voice he imagines with a switch of typography, with the character and characters (American Typewriter) of an old typewriter. The same font as the first typewriter he ever had. That one he struck at top speed and ceaselessly until he erased the letters from the keys and the fingerprints from his fingers. A device—that font, always preceded by an asterisk—that he once imagined as his deus-ex-machina voice. His words and commandments floating above everything and everyone, above the wakeful and the sleeping. His voice inserting itself effortlessly into their lives, after having fantasized about taking a Swiss particle accelerator by force and there disintegrating in order to be reintegrated into space. To be the most singular of Singularities. To bring an end to, without delay, with absolute certainty, the Uncertainty Principle. To pass from one state to another like what they call (he loves the name, sometimes the sciences hit the mark in such an enviably literary way) exotic matter. From solid to gas. From visible and minuscule to invisible and infinite. A having returned after having departed. A coming back transformed into a triumphal entity and delighting in taking the revenge—after years of not being read—of rewriting everything in his image and semblance and style and syntax and, ha ha ha, submitting everything to the torture of thinking like writers think, of dreaming like writers dream, of not sleeping like writers, and—damn you all, don’t even think about blinking, lightning and thunder and seven plagues on all your houses!—of falling asleep listening to him or reading him.
But that all-powerful and messianic illusion doesn’t last long.
And the plain old insomnia remains; something that for him has been expanding and reducing his sleep and his dreams from vast and successful fantasy sagas in which he roared like a capricious and destructive deity to terse chamber nouvelles with a little man nobody believes in.
From miniatures where his figure is more reminiscent of those little figures drawn by Franz Kafka, of supposedly ingenious microstories and, in the end, of random lines and more or less connected observations, of unconscious or entranced nonsense.
From the irrefutable truth of insomnia nothing seemed certain or verifiable or credible. So, to keep from killing himself, he killed time unmasking everything, down to the unattractive fertilizer of all seductive flowers. To the point of even delving into the origin of counting sheep jumping over a fence. An activity he saw for the first time in comics and cartoons from his ever so remote childhood where—the day-to-day of childhood was a little like this—with each new adventure, everything seemed to start over, as if the characters were waking up from a succession of dreams, one inside another inside yet another. An activity, since it didn’t work for him at all, whose origin he had time (he had so much time, the elastic time of the night) to research. And it didn’t take him long to find it. Because since the beginning of the new millennium, it was so easy to track down the roots of everything. And thus he discovered—with a quick dance of his fingers across the convoluted keys, where each matter had multiple raisons d’être—that the whole thing had to do with boredom. That boredom supposedly makes you sleepy and there are few things supposedly more boring than counting sheep. That, probably, the similarity between the sound of sheep and sleep—the electricity in the letters connecting one word to the other—was related to the supposed ease and rather relative effectiveness of such an activity. And that, of course, there was also the inevitable, more legendary version: Morpheus losing the ability to make the mortals fall asleep and going down to Earth and discovering nobody was sleeping because everyone was too worried about their waking lives, always being shaken by the capriciousness of the gods. And Morpheus setting out in search of a solution. Morpheus trying everything—white magic and black magic—to no avail. Until one morning, desperate, he lies down on the side of a road and watches a shepherd counting his sheep as they leapt over a fence. One by one. And there are many. And, bored, Morpheus’s eyes close. When he wakes up from a deep sleep, Morpheus understands he’s been given a solution. If you can’t sleep, you should convince yourself the world is boring and dreams can be so much more exciting than a life counting sheep. In your dreams, the sheep can even count you. And leaping over that same fence, also, somewhere, he’d read that the ancient Greek root of the word “tragedy” came from the word tragos whose meaning is “sheep” (or was it “goat”?) and that it gained its dramatic meaning when that animal, preferably one with black wool, was sacrificed to appease the wrath or whims of the always-drowsy-after-all-that-orgy Dionysus. But the method transcended the English or the Greek language. And Don Quixote (in which, near the end, the hero finally falls asleep and when he wakes up, resting and having regained lucidity, he keeps his eyes open and reasonable only long enough to write his will and to die) also alluded to counting (not sheep but goats) based on certain Islamic texts. And as you can see: the truth is that nothing makes him more awake or more alert than feeling bored. Counting (numbers) was for him the admission that there was nothing left to recount (letters). So, then, after a brief countdown, the yawn like a voice. Hazards and shades of his ex-occupation. Uneventful boredom was the place where so many things always, eventually, occurred to him.
So many things that might work for him somehow or in something, he thought, while, in the background, the Aria mit verschiedenen Veränderungen vors Clavicimbal mit 2 Manualen, better know as the Goldberg Variations, played, over and over.
He’d heard them so many times—he’s counted them on so many nights—that he no longer needs them to play to hear them inside the musical chamber of his head.
† Music supposedly composed by Johann Sebastian Bach (a composer who, for a time, during the time of The Boy, was very popular after getting run through the filters of a Moog synthesizer) and at the supposedly magnanimous request of a supposed noble who had problems falling asleep (and who liked to have his lead organist play it extremely softly). Centuries later, music popularized by the performance of a verified and true insomniac Canadian pianist, addict of all kinds of pills. Music that was later repurposed as soundtrack or background music—as once had been the case with the slow concertos of Tomaso Albinoni or the counterpoints of Johann Pachelbel or the miniatures of Erik Satie—for almost everything and everyone: accompanying the orbits of interplanetary and multitemporal pilgrim veterans (Slaughterhouse-Five again, indeed), to the crimes of exquisite serial killers, and the melancholy of misanthropic magnates.
It’s true that piano didn’t help him sleep (ironically and paradoxically, decades before, it’d been one of the sounds that most and best helped him type, wide awake, on his keyboard and screen, along with Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here and the mercurial verse of Bob Dylan circa ’65-’66), but it did, apart from reminding him of times of creative fertility, conceal now the distant yet immediate tinkling, like ice cubes in a marble cup, of The Intruders’ piano, in the house next door. And it was music that made him breathe in quick breaths and sharp words. Words in his voice, but immediately implanted like elephant tusks in the little mouths of others, of his characters. Little good it did now; because long ago it’d been proven that dreaming was an aid to creation. And that not sleeping hindered all inspiration, provoking only the exhalation of almost empty sighs. And he was the most wide-awake of sighers. True, there were the defenders of creative insomnia, the self-styled “owls” standing in opposition to the “larks.” Like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who claimed to reach peaks of creativity “When I am … say, traveling in a carriage, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.” Like Fran Lebowitz, who coined the aphorism “Life is something that happens when you can’t get to sleep” (but who spends decades trying write a novel). Like Virginia Woolf (who was mad). Like some of his friends (writers who broke themselves) who loved to write a
t night and went to bed at dawn and didn’t get up until after midday (and who died so young, their organisms aged from all those nights of staying awake). Like when Leonardo da Vinci points out in his notebooks that “I myself have proved it to be of no small use, when in bed in the dark, to recall in fancy the external details of forms previously studied, or other noteworthy things conceived by subtle speculation.” But Leonardo was, it’s known, a race apart. And, no doubt, Leonardo even built his own mechanical sheep to count: sheep that spit flames or flowers from their mouths or that flew over fences. And Leonardo wouldn’t even pause to consider arguments about how the idea that you can come to understand foreign languages or mathematic formulas while sleeping by wearing headphones has already been shown to be a fallacy. And much less to think about the idea that, when you sleep badly or don’t sleep well, it’s been proven that the brain begins to create false memories. Cryptomnesia, they call it: the paradox that the impossibility of dreaming leads you to invent yourself a dreamed life, a waking-dream past that ends up swallowing the nightmare of the real. Or that while sleeping, everything that really happened is fixed for your preservation and consultation. And he remembers that epidemic of insomnia that strikes and shakes all the residents of Macondo and forces them to label everything around them to keep from forgetting the names of things. There is nothing more admirable artistically than the recreation of memory, insisted the sleepless. There they are, so content in their torment. And, yes, he thought, not in vain did the visionary William Blake recommend, “Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.” And that Leonard Cohen was right when he claimed that “The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.” That was not his case, that was not his thing, he wasn’t so good at convincing himself of a bad thing. No pride. His memories were forever faithful and never promiscuous and much less cryptomnesiac.
But such an idea—the faith of the waking illuminators, in what they wanted to vainly believe in—provided him in its moment with another list in the dark, another flock of sheep to count off. The list is the favorite sport of those who neither sleep nor dream of being an athlete. But who nevertheless can, for a while, become obsessive and controlling champions at raising the exemplary banners of participants in the sport of not sleeping. It’s already known: you always go looking for some external glamour to make up for your own internal disgrace. Saying the same thing happened to him or to her that happened to you. Feeling kindred in the worst possible way, but, in the end, kindred all the same. To get in line, but far behind, farther still, of …
† Renowned insomniacs / Abraham Lincoln (who took long waking and sleepless walks around a sleeping White House). Bill Clinton. Winston Churchill (last words: “I’m bored with it all”). Margaret Thatcher (who claimed that “sleep is for wimps”). Queens and kings, too many. The King of Rock ’n’ Roll Elvis Presley (in one of his final notes, in big and childish handwriting, surrounded by his collection of teddy bears, the performer of the hit “[Let Me Be Your] Teddy Bear” writes: “I feel so alone sometimes. The night is quiet for me. I’d love to be able to sleep. I’ll probably not rest. I have no need for all this. Help me Lord”; his last words are the first words so well known for any insomniac: “I’m going to the bathroom to read,” and the book Elvis takes to his final throne is a manual of astrological signs in conjunction with sex positions; his fiancée, Ginger Alden, says “Don’t fall asleep in there,” Elvis responds with a curled lip: “Okay, I won’t”). The King of Pop Michael Jackson (who, at the end, paranoid and unable to remember the words to songs or to memorize dance moves, spends sixty days without reaching the depths of REM sleep, due to liters and liters of Propofol producing an artificial sleep that wasn’t regenerative for cellular and muscle tissue). Madonna and Britney Spears and Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus and Penny Pop and Anorexia y sus Flaquitas (all of them, together, really? is insomnia an endemic malady for this kind of artist?). Albert Einstein (who postulated that everyone knows how to kill time but nobody how to resuscitate it; above all in the dead of night). Jimi Hendrix and Prince (they say that the morning he died he’d gone six nights without sleeping, that he died in an elevator in his house/studio/world; wondering if the autopsy report included the datum of whether that elevator was going up or coming down in the moment of his death). Eminem. Dylan Thomas (on the rocks) and Lord Byron (his last words were “Now I shall go to sleep. Goodnight”), Ludwig Wittgenstein (last words: “Tell them I have had a wonderful life”). James Matthew “Peter Pan” Barrie (his last words were “I can’t sleep”) and Peter “Jim Yang” Hook (who, he just now realizes, in his insomnia, correcting the books of others, really should have been named Hooked and not Hook) and Ray Davies (great writer of insomniac songs for interminable and sleepless nights like “All Night Stand,” “There’s Too Much on My Mind” and that hymn fearful of thinking too much about the darkness that, paradoxically or not, bears the title “Days”). Vincent van Gogh (who brushed his pillow with camphor as a kind of sleeping pill). Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe (pills and more pills and a 1961 letter to her therapist: “Last night I was awake all night again. Sometimes I wonder what the night time is for. It almost doesn’t exist for me. It all seems like one long, long horrible day”). Tallulah Bankhead. George Clooney. Groucho Marx (who, when he couldn’t sleep, called strangers on the phone to insult them) and Karl Marx (“author of Das Capital, the fruit of insomnia and migraine,” according to the insomniac Vladimir Nabokov who, interviewed by Bernard Pivot for French television at an hour when “I am usually already under the eiderdown with three pillows tucked beneath my head,” explained that it’s then that “the inner debate begins: to take or not to take a sleeping pill? How delicious is the affirmative decision!”). Oscar Wilde (“Life is a nightmare that prevents one from sleeping”). The race of insomniac philosophers: Plato (“When a man is asleep, it’s no better than if he were dead”) and Clement of Alexandria (“For there is no use of a sleeping man, as there is not of a dead man”) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (who claimed that the wise owl of the wise Minerva never flies by day) and Friedrich Nietzsche (“The need to sleep does not dwell in the spirit, because the spirit knows no rest”) and Emmanuel Levinas (“Philosophy is nothing more than a call to infinite responsibility, to an untiring wakefulness, to a total insomnia”) and Maurice Blanchot (“In the night, insomnia is discussion”).
† A new paragraph for the Transylvanian (nocturnal nationality if ever there was one) E. M. Cioran, who, they say, didn’t sleep for fifty years. When he turned twenty, Cioran stopped sleeping “and I consider it the grandest tragedy that could occur … Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture … At all hours I walked the streets like some kind of phantom. All that I have written much later has been worked out during those nights … When you came, Insomnia, to shake my flesh and my pride, you who transform the childish brute, give nuance to the instincts, focus to dream, you who in a single night grant more knowledge than days spent in repose, and to the reddened eyelids, reveal yourself a more important event than the nameless diseases or the disaster of time! … What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights! What rich or strange idea was ever the work of a sleeper? The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep.”
But, once all of them were counted, he wasn’t that impressed. That is to say: none of them (apart from the philosophers who theorized about it) had done anything particularly practical with their insomnia, through their insomnia, for their insomnia. For him, all of them were, simply, celebrities who had trouble sleeping, shutting down. The majority of them, probably, had limited themselves to turning on the TV or drinking or taking drugs or updating their social media profiles or inviting over some professional companion to put pressure on certain pleasure centers, the exact location of which only certain gurus and shamans from Alhambra, California, or from Patagonia, Ariz
ona know.
None of them having anything to do with what his sister Penelope (writing as one possessed all through the night, as if possessed by the ghost of her beloved Emily Brontë, carving her oeuvre out of insomnia) and two of his idols had achieved.
One of them was Vladimir Nabokov, who understood insomnia as a positive or at least powerful influence on his work (and on the work of some of his creatures like the King of Zembla or John Shade in his “Pale Fire,” feeling dead one open-eyed night—tormented because his daughter who committed suicide isn’t tormenting him—and remembering his “demented youth,” when he suspected “a great conspiracy of books and people” was hiding an absolute truth from him. The knowledge of a secret he wasn’t privy to, the key to survival after death, and the instructions to call those back who live there, and he was going to recite it here just to bother all the botherable, the truly bothersome: “And finally there was the sleepless night / When I decided to explore and fight / The foul, the inadmissible abyss, / Devoting all my twisted life to this”; “Instead of poetry divinely terse, / Disjointed notes, Insomnia’s mean verse!”; “Life is a message scribbled in the dark”; “But all at once it dawned on me that this / Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme; / Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream”; “It isn’t that we dream too wild a dream: / The trouble is we do not make it seem / Sufficiently unlikely; for the most / We can think up is a domestic ghost,” etcetera).
The Dreamed Part Page 39