Insomnia Page 2
Given that I know that this purging scan is under way, why do I never wake up the next morning feeling mentally refreshed?
The other night, awake again, I began composing a letter in my head to a courier company on the other side of the globe that had failed to deliver a book to me while I was traveling. The company had e-mailed to say that the driver had not been able to find the (foreign to me, local to him) address. Now, in sleepless monomania, I imagined drafting a letter of quiet fury. In it I would ask why the driver had had such trouble locating the place, when I, a non-native, a mere visitor (and someone with a notoriously bad sense of direction, to boot), had succeeded where they had failed. I would inform the company that other book-delivery services had found the place. That I was staying in a house bursting with publishers, writers, and booksellers, all of them ordering books; that white Jiffy bags had been piling up in the hall and I’d been inspecting them daily, wondering when my book would come. The more solid my case became, the more refinements I thought to add. I felt the courier company ought to know that the book was critical to my research, as well as hard to find secondhand: I had been counting on them! Yet by the time they’d even thought to send up a flare in a last-ditch attempt to reach me I had already been home several days. Never mind that throughout the wakeful working hours of the week that I had kept watch for the book I had never once thought to contact them.
It occurred to me only later that perhaps an additional question ought to be posed—one more pressing than why the book never arrived. The question is this: What if waking life is incapable of adequately attuning us to the needs of our unconscious minds?
Lately I have been experimenting with earplugs to shut up the birds, but beyond the hush they create—the welcome muting of the carnival noise beyond my window—earplugs open up a strange inner world of mysterious echoes and thickening silences. If I listen hard along this internal register I can tune into the dull thud of my heart treadmilling in its cage and sometimes I pick up the coarse whooshing sound of vital fluids sloshing, or wind spiraling through the ammonite tubes of my inner ear. Who knows (and who cares) whether this is just a trick played on us by the senses—an inventive way for the body to fill up the void with something other than nothing. Whatever the cause, it affords us some glimpse into the insomniac’s sensorium.
To feel assaulted by the sounds of night is an odd experience for someone like me, who struggles to hear well by day and for whom deafness is part of her genetic destiny. Birds sound like warbling hand-held devices. Radiator pipes clang and choke. Water trickles in improbable places I cannot identify. I hear rodents—or bigger—scuttle and scratch as they set up home behind the baseboards and in the rafters. This reacquaintance with hearing feels like a novelty. It makes me wonder if I will begin to look forward to the orchestrations of the night as I continue to grow harder of hearing.
My father, vain man that he was, flatly refused to wear a hearing aid as he grew deafer and deafer with advancing age. He hated the idea of visibly parading his deficit. But his aversion to hearing aids was, equally, part of his larger refusal of the world; he preferred the atmospheric pressure on the inside of his head just as he preferred the reality screen produced by his own internal projector, throwing up images against every blank wall. My father, the waking dream factory. My mother, now in her mid-eighties, is more profoundly deaf than he ever was. Recently she spent several thousand pounds on an alien-looking apparatus that sits inside her outer ear, invisible to all but the most discerning eye. It sprouts two little antennae over its perforated plastic surface, like a spy device. But it picks up more noise than anything else. I am struck that my parents found such different ways of navigating the world of sound loss, my father judging deafness to be advantageous; my mother giving in to the white noise, losing herself in the buzzing soundscape as the flow of sense washed over her, so that she learned to care more for Being than Meaning.
I would prefer to hear nothing than not enough. In fact, part of me is fast acquiring a taste for the particular kind of sensory numbness that earplugs confer, tuning out the birds while tuning into inner space; stoppering up the world in order to be more attentive to the dark.
Zzz got there long before me. Congenitally deaf in one ear, he hears every sound in mono. Every crash, squeal, thrum, laugh, roar, or—to me—barely audible boom-box bass line from a midnight rave two streets away gets sharpened to a focused pinpoint of sound, penetrating his eardrum like an acupuncture needle. But mono sound is also nondirectional: in a world of surround sound, Zzz hears everything as a single-ear assault. When ambushed by loud or intrusive noises he gets confused and defensive, mistaking a slamming car door for an intruder, a smashed bottle in the street for a sally against our barricades. I feel for Zzz in the nighttime, when sounds that are merely amplified for me become intolerable for him, not just loud but omnipresent. By day I am less sympathetic, since I have noticed that deafness, even half deafness, can be a way to import a bit of contraband sleep into daytime.
Then again, deafness, like sleep, can tune us in to the needs of our unconscious minds.
In Venice’s Guggenheim Collection there hangs a painting by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte that speaks to my customary state of mind. It depicts a large lamplit house, partially shrouded by a crop of leafy trees silhouetted in darkness. A pair of upstairs windows glows invitingly, like a pair of mooning eyes, tempting you to picture the comfortable domestic scene unfolding within: children scampering about before bedtime, an elegant woman at her toilette, and because this is a painting from a certain era, some androgynous character in a smoking jacket enjoying a casual cigarette. At first you miss what is disconcerting about the picture. Then, with a creeping sense of becoming alert to a worrying dissonance, you notice that the sky above the shadowy tree line is blue as day and dotted with cotton-wool clouds. The painting, in other words, is bright with contradiction.
Magritte’s “Empire of Light” paintings (there are at least three of them working the same theme) are designed to be profoundly unsettling because they disrupt a fundamental organizing principle of life: the categorical separation of night from day. Each brings day and night together into vivid confluence. Nothing is as it should be. Sunlight, ordinarily a source of clarity, causes the kind of confusion and dis-ease we normally associate with darkness, while the insomniac sky serves to intensify the shadow world beneath, making it more inscrutable than ever. The house, in particular—home, haven—is rendered cryptic.
All the time I’ve laid claim to a home of my own, I have felt as though my body somehow mapped its extent, point to point, as if by a geometry of dotted lines belonging to a penciled exercise in the art of projection. With its secret corners and lit apertures, its functional zoning, its boundaries and borders that are sometimes open, sometimes closed, my house mirrors my sense of myself as storied and many chambered, public and also private: a place of ingress and egress. Perhaps when we talk about truly inhabiting a house we are really talking about that feeling of streaming into and around space, dissolving self and other.
In insomnia my sense of tenure can tighten its grip, as I prowl my domain, tracing every lineament of this mutual mapping. But it can also evaporate, as though my mental leasehold on my house had expired. And then, instead of dissolving myself through familiar expanses, contiguous, free-flowing, and at one with my surrounds, I am confronted with features grown suddenly hulking and alien. Everything is transfigured by darkness. Masked in menace.
It sounds crazy but there have been nights when I have felt certain that my house was alive, as though its walls contained a million eyes, and the very fabric of its structure was expanding and contracting around me, inhaling and exhaling me.
Zzz says, “The other night I dreamt that we would never have sex again.” Then he says: “When I woke up I thought that I would rather die than shut down so vital a part of myself.” But I have my earplugs in. Perhaps I should tell him that my sense of myself is no longer solid, that I am like a marbled
steak that has felt the blade and been finely sliced into feathery slivers. And yet I say nothing. In my inner world, the menopause is coursing through my veins and arteries like a chemical rinse. Another system scan. Allow the program to finish before restarting.
Night is dependent on day, as day is dependent on night. But night and day are yin and yang, north and south, anode and diode. They never appear on the same stage at once, and if they do, as in Magritte’s paintings, we are confounded. Except in insomnia, which is a wicked kind of trespass.
The mighty Nyx, Greek goddess of the night and mother of primordial darkness, inhabited a staggeringly sublime abode. Enveloped by blue-black fog, her cave squatted at the edge of the ragged cliff overlooking the bottomless abyss of Tartarus, a place where, as Hesiod describes it, “the origins and boundaries of everything” are juxtaposed. Twice a day, at dawn and at dusk, Nyx would greet her daughter Hemera, goddess of day, at the door to this cave. They would converse awhile on its ebony balcony, but they never entered the cave at the same time. When one passed out to fly around the world in winged rhapsody, chariot churning up the sky, the other descended into its darkened chambers to wait out her opposite’s reign.
As to the rhythm of these comings and goings—its endless replay—we must truly be dolts to believe that every night will be reliably followed by a new day. What if we are wrong? What if we unexpectedly find ourselves stuck in an endless ordeal of night, the dark night of the soul, condemned to a life of perpetual reckoning? Worse, we might be sucked into the eternal night that waits to ensnare us at the end of our days, and from which there is no escape. It seems only fair at this point that I remind you that Thanatos was the brother of Hypnos, and that the relationship between death and sleep might be considered filial. This explains the way death and sleep stand in for each other as metaphors or prefigurings. It also explains why the new light symbolized by dawn is not just an awakening, but a rebirth.
The philosopher David Hume believed we could never know with certainty that a new day will arrive on the coattails of night. We can only infer it, based on our uniform experience of their unfailing succession. Yet inference hardly qualifies as watertight reasoning. To put matters as straightforwardly as I can: even a perfectly observed correlation in the world of events—a 100 percent pairing of this with that—tells us nothing about the mechanisms of cause and effect that might lurk behind the appearance of succession. What is more, when we grasp for those underlying mechanisms we resort to all manner of wild speculation: the hidden hand, a particulate aether, invisible forces and power fields. We imagine finely tuned cosmic mechanisms as intricate as clockwork. But really, who is to say whether one day, in the midst of some almighty huff, the deity might not simply pull the plug on all our celestial tomorrows? And if you live in a spirit-free universe, consider that we might be blindsided by some unscheduled astrophysical calamity that snuffs out the sun like a candle. Either way, that would be that. Eternal darkness. Once and for all time.
Hume knew there were no guarantees underwriting our taken-for-granted diurnal expectations, so he recommended that we make our peace with uncertainty.
We are pretty good at doing this, as it happens. Not just because we are complacent about lazy inference but because we are acquainted with uncertainty by other means. Not least the figure of the absent lover, which is another form of eternal darkness. Take the stoical Penelope, sitting at home in Ithaca, lonesome, bereft, waiting and longing for her husband, Odysseus, to return from the Trojan War. His absence stirs her desire, but then her insomnia curdles that desire into despair. I like to think that Penelope is wide-awake in every sense of the term, aware of her predicament across a range of registers, somatic, psychic, emotional. Yet try as she might, even she cannot penetrate the darkness of not knowing.
When I wish I could do something useful with my fretful nights, I sometimes think of Penelope, who seeks constantly to renew her hope that her missing husband will suddenly reappear. By day, she spends her time weaving a funeral shroud for Odysseus’s father, Laertes, fearing that Laertes should not survive were his son to perish before him. But by night Penelope unravels the threads again as a magical act of replenishing her hope. It is true that she also co-opts her sacred funereal task as a cover to deter unwanted suitors jostling to take Odysseus’s place by refusing to entertain them until she has completed it. But it is the weaving and unpicking that interests me (not the pretext), for as long as the shroud remains unfinished Penelope can carry on waiting and hoping, suspended in uncertainty, defying death.
The weaving of hopes and fears, dressing up the truth and spinning yarns: this is women’s work. So, too, is remembering and forgetting.
Anxiety is women’s work as well. I learned how to worry from my mother, for whom anxiety is a proxy for desire: my mother knows she is alive not because she wants but because she worries. Most days she calls me, expressing her concerns. Am I getting enough sleep? Eating properly? Is there sufficient work coming in? When I say yes, yes, and yes again (I mean, why feed her more to stress over), she confides that she is not sleeping. Her sciatica is playing up. Do I think she ought to see the doctor? On second thoughts, scrap that. The doctor will only string her along, tell her she’s in perfect health and prescribe medication that two days in she will decide to stop taking. The way he’s so dismissive of her symptoms—it is beyond a joke. What is more, she says, she is convinced that she has suddenly become allergic to the fish she has taken to buying to whip up easy suppers. Such small-scale anxieties torment her. But my mother’s approach to them is wonderfully Kabbalistic: first she names them and so diffuses their power, then she casts them out (mostly onto me) like a rabbi exorcising a dybbuk. Only then can her mind settle. You could say that my mother is temperamentally insomniac.
In her marriage, my mother bore the full burden of anxiety, whereas my father, like a child, worried about nothing. She made it her job to anticipate his every need before he recognized, much less named them, and in this way he retained a kind of willed innocence throughout the fifty-odd years they spent together. My mother provided meals, transport, cash management, affection, emotional support, social distractions, and commonsense solutions to their various material problems, while my father simply floated—sleepwalked—through the world from day to day, inferring the bounty would last. This kind of trade-off is part of the unequal exchange of marriage.
Curious to know if it is possible to sleepwalk by day, I look it up. And in theory it is, if you accept that the essence of sleepwalking consists in the shutting down of certain parts of the brain that generate conscious awareness of a person’s actions and surroundings. In sleepwalking, the “emotional brain,” governed by the primitive limbic system, is active. So, too, is the dumb but tremendously effective motor system. What is switched off is the “rational brain.” It follows from this that sleepwalkers might just be insufficiently vigilant.
Penelope’s marriage, like so many templates handed down to us, written in stone, likewise skews unequally. Odysseus unquestionably gets to be the hero of the piece. Larger than life, more idol than man, he fights wars, travels the world, and beds nymphs, while Penelope simply frets. That is to say, she battles the darkness of his absence in her insomnia. Oh, and there are frets in weaving as well.
It seems unfair. Doesn’t Penelope qualify as valiant, too? Actively, vigorously, she rejects one suitor after another: suitors who keep coming at her like armed soldiers crawling out of enemy trenches; suitors who would usurp her beloved, drink from his cup, wear his mantle, and sleep in his bed. Against this menace Penelope’s resolve is practically superhuman. Especially when you consider that she has been abandoned in Ithaca for twenty years and that the suitors paying her court are half her age (which is surely somewhat tempting). Also, there are legions of them: 108 according to Telemachus (tittle-tattling on his mother), but one scholar I’ve read counts 191. I would like to allow that the long-suffering and faithful Penelope is heroic in her own way, for she is defiant, self-denyin
g, determined, and capable of enduring great hardship and sorrow. It is not my kind of heroism, that is for sure, but the alternative is deeply unpalatable. Most critics of classical literature fix on the shroud that never gets finished to insist that Penelope’s chief quality is wiliness or cunning. In their book, she is just another woman who weaves lies.
I want to say more about insomnia and love, in that both are states of being that pitch us face-to-face with a stinging absence. In insomnia, we crave oblivion—that escape from consciousness, which sleep appears to confer on everyone but us—and in so doing we reaffirm our uneasy relationship to the world of material necessity. Lovers, meanwhile, assert their fealty against the complete absence of any certainty about the future, as though love were a concrete thing that might be thwacked ahead of ourselves like a hockey puck to stake a claim on new ground.
“Love like sleep requires immeasurable trust, a fall into the unknowing,” says one scholar of sleeplessness. But let’s bring the two into more intimate proximity. In insomnia we encounter the very heart of love’s darkness: the essential otherness of the beloved.
When Zzz and I began regularly sharing a bed together after that first restive night, our sleep dovetailed into perfect accord. It was harmonious. We were like the ancient landmass of Pangea, fused into a single state of being. But then, slowly, incrementally, a continental drift set in and we began to separate bodily, imperceptibly at first—one complaining of overheating, the other of needing their own pillow—and before we knew it, each of us, me and Zzz, had become continents in our own right: miniature tectonic entities, separated by a swathe of night.