Insomnia Read online

  Every now and then, I steal a look at Zzz’s sleeping form, melding into the blackness of the night, blended into virtual immateriality, and I long to buy a ticket to sail over to his continent, away from Snore Awake and Restive Tossing and across to the land of Peaceful Slumber. Intrepid explorer that I am, I would brave the choppiest waters to get there. Willingly would I fall into unknowingness, becoming blind to my faltering steps; gladly would I forfeit my understanding. All it would take is for me to proffer an outstretched hand.

  It’s so simple a tender. Yet you’d be astonished at how regularly I stumble before its prospect: unable to relax into the companionability of night, I am forced to patrol my own borders. It is as if my will has been impounded. Clamped and bound according to the dictates of some higher-order bureaucratic lockdown. The maddening frustration of it recalls those rare and panicked states of sleep when you are awake enough to know a mosquito is buzzing in your ear but you are incapable of swatting at it because a crushing bodily paralysis, pushing down on every part of you, pinning you to your bed, flatly forbids it. The wrong bit of you is sleeping, the wrong bit awake. In such a state it is all too easy to flip out, to feel your head become a pressure pot; your panicky resolve, the steam jiggling its lid from within. Your command and control center is embroiled in internal conflict. To crown it all, for all those agonizing minutes spent fluttering in the bell jar, the oxygen of free will draining steadily away, you are at that goddamn insect’s blood-sucking mercy.

  This is the closest any healthy human being can come to experiencing “locked-in syndrome”—that abominable state of imprisonment (an island within an island) which the late French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby was forced to endure following a stroke, and that he wrote about in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I say wrote, but, in fact, with infinite patience, he dictated the book to a scribe, letter by letter, by moving his eyeball (the only part of his body he could command) whenever she alighted with a pointer on the character he wished to use. Mercifully, not long after completing his testimony—a paean not to suffering, but to love and the richness of life—death arrived to release him from the exquisite torture of being locked in.

  4:22 a.m. Now I come to think of it, it has been a recurring trait in my insomniac experience to embark on insect-killing sprees. Slipper in hand, I slap at this or that crawling, buzzing, or creeping thing: a housefly that is already half dead and stirred into life only by its proximity to my warm body—another living, breathing form—and for which a good wallop with a slipper seems a fitting kind of fate; recently, and memorably, in Spain, an odd-looking flattish centipede, which a quick search on the Internet revealed was “the biting kind.” Yet it squished so easily underfoot, its body releasing a colorless watery fluid and all its legs detaching into floating V-shaped filaments. The creature literally melted away, like a bad dream.

  Problem #1. Insomnia makes an island of you. It is, bottom line, a condition of profound loneliness. And not even a dignified loneliness, because in insomnia you are cannibalized by your own gnawing thoughts.

  Problem #2. On balance, I would rather be an island than have to endure some landlocked state of being, lacking in boundaries and natural definition. I would rather be a landmass unto myself, a sanctuary. And once I get there, please don’t go messing up my solitude.

  From the depths of the benign darkness I call velvet, I often wonder at all the other unseen insomniacs twisting awake in their own beds, across street and town, nation and globe—beacons to my beacon. Individually, we are like those luminous dots on an epidemiologist’s map, discrete pinpoints of consciousness, suffering in isolation, our minds powering away while covering as little fruitful distance as a runner pounding out meaningless kilometers in the gym. Imprisoned within these solitary cells of wakefulness, insomniacs make for a strange kind of collective. We possess geographical presence—which carries its own weight. We boast blustery swatches of global coverage, dense regional clusters and inexplicable but nonetheless wired outliers: we own statistical relevance. No doubt we could easily spew a textbookful of shared anxieties. Yet we cannot commune with one another.

  Some kind of party, this. The incongruity of it clearly impressed itself on Charles Simic, who in his poem “The Congress of the Insomniacs” pictures insomnia as a vast but empty ballroom. Its ceiling is gilded and its walls mirrored; there is an usher with a flashlight, someone is to deliver a no-doubt starry address, and, Simic trills, “everyone is invited.”

  Simic’s doomed congress depresses me. But what other collective noun might we propose as an alternative? A brightness of insomniacs? A flare? A fret?

  The sleepless constitute an unlikely population, to be sure, and yet most reports insist we are a growing one. It is as if the human body has been forgetting in near epidemic proportions how to perform a taken-for-granted task, like breathing or digesting, or producing hormones. (Our global swatch on the epidemiologist’s map is spreading like a forest fire.) This sleep deficit affronts us, much as would a theft, because unlike our historic forebears, accustomed to snatching their rest in irregular bursts, often wherever they could lay their heads, we moderns feel entitled to one long, continuous dive into insentience. With work infiltrating every realm of our private lives we tell ourselves that we have at least earned that much. Yet despite having accorded sleep a privileged space—a room of its own, the kingly bedroom, furnished with darkness and quiet, goose-down duvets and high-tech mattresses—Hypnos continues to taunt and elude us.

  Perhaps we should think harder about this contradiction as we lie restless and awake, islanded in our beds, staring at the ceiling.

  The island. Lonely land of “I.” Sometimes I think there is no better metaphor for despair, for the feeling of being shored up behind your own defenses, cut off from the larger part of humanity and with nothing but your looping dark thoughts for company. In insomnia, my island self floats alone in a sea of night, my bed a sturdy raft, darkness lapping at my shores. Zzz is next to me, but miles away. In those lonesome hours when I fear I might drown in a well of unspecified longing, I sense a danger that my most intimate space might also become my most alienated. Estranged from the night, I am locked out of my own rest. If I reached out to Zzz would I even find him?

  I go back and forth over the virtues of island life, unable quite to shake off a romance that has been with me since childhood. A romance that found its worthy idol in Robinson Crusoe. I first came across the Crusoe story watching an old black-and-white, and (I believe) French-made, television serialization that I realized later was remarkably faithful to Daniel Defoe’s novel. It was broadcast every Saturday morning as part of an energy-packed diet of children’s programming, and even now I can summon the plangent strains of its theme tune, played on violins. The series arrived on our screens when I was too young to have encountered despair. But I was old enough to recognize resilience and I saw its fingerprint everywhere: in Crusoe’s daily ritual of carving a notch on a piece of wood—a measured action that seemed to evince nothing less than a mastery of time; in his building enclosures for rearing goats; and in his determination to stay dry whenever besieged by tropical storms, when he would hunker down under a jury-rigged canopy made of palm fronds.

  Each week I could barely wait to discover what newfangled invention this TV Robinson would devise to nudge his tree house (already rather stylish, in a cane-strewn, island-chic kind of way) into an ever closer approximation of civilized comfort: a pulley-operated ceiling fan fashioned by twisting old vines into rope; a fully stocked bar, complete with brandy and crystal glassware filched from his own wrecked ship. I was completely sold on the idea that if only Robinson could build a good-enough replica of the world he had left behind him then he would cease to hanker after rescue. All that was required of him emotionally, I believed when I was ten, was a bit of fortitude. Now I know that one needs a complete tool kit of emotional equipment to build something out of nothing.

  Defoe wrote his story amid the heyday of a new mercantile age,
working via its simple premise (man marooned, man survives) through every motif that would come to characterize the Enlightenment. Crusoe is the lone white crusader, transporting civilization with him wherever he goes, even unto the ends of the world, where he comes face-to-face with himself, alone. He cultivates the wild with missionary zeal and brings order to chaos. He is industrious, indefatigable, and ingenious. What keeps him awake at night are productive thoughts about what he might make, or do next, or record in his diary the day following. Crusoe does not merely pass the time: he positively consumes it.

  Robinson Crusoe (1719) came on the heels of a century-long campaign that saw Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish merchant ships colonize faraway lands for trade, exporting gunpowder and measles in exchange for sugar, coffee, and gold. In many ways the novel models that century. Defoe’s fictional hero echoes the European trader’s conquistadorial sense of himself as the light in the darkness, and he contains within him all the other “good” qualities that Enlightenment thinkers set in opposition, one against the other, as if at war: consciousness versus the unconscious, day versus night, magic versus reason, and wakefulness versus sleepy ignorance. In Defoe’s novel that quality of dopey ignorance resides in Friday, the savage whom Crusoe takes under his wing and educates. But in reality this sleepiness of mind was embodied in the figure of the slave.

  The sorry truth (and guilty secret) behind European civilization—the unimaginable wealth it accrued to itself!—is that it was purchased on the back of a vast colonial machinery that systematically invaded the “dark continents” and enslaved their peoples, creating an international economy built on enforced labor. The entire enterprise rested on the premise that the black body was unquestionably inferior, both ignorant and expendable; and this so-called ignorance was understood as having kept black people in a kind of perpetual night. But there is a doubling down of darkness involved in this equation, more unforgiveable still, in that the brutalities of slavery were carefully hidden from a growing consumer class back home in Europe, so dazzled by the brilliance of sugar, its medicinal qualities, its ability to preserve foods and ferment alcohol, not least the sheer sweet delight of its crystalline granules, melting on the tongue, that it could no longer see.

  Surely it is no coincidence that the money-spinning products extracted from distant lands to feed the expanding economies of Europe were stimulants, one and all? Tobacco, coffee, sugar: generators of mass insomnia.

  As it happens, I gave up tobacco long ago (nineteen years, but who’s counting) and I can go for long, intermittent stretches without caffeine. But sugar is another story. I will accept it in any form, powder, liquid, granular, solid. I would take the stuff intravenously were it on offer outside a hospital. Plus I have never met a pudding that I did not like—not a custard, fool, tart, or ice cream, not a cake, junket, jam, pie, trifle, syllabub, nougat, brittle, or taffy. And once I have begun, I do not stop. Zzz says that when it comes to me and cake it is a case of death by a thousand slices. In my defense I can only say that, like everyone else, I have been taught to like sugar.

  In Sweetness and Power, the economic historian Sidney Mintz traces the growth of the sugar trade. He explains how sugar was actively pushed on consumers, beginning with the English, where “sugar [was] pumped into every crevice of their diet.” The French followed suit and, after them, the Americans. Mind-boggling profit was to be gained from the sale of sugar; and the cheaper it got, morphing over time from luxury commodity into everyday necessity, the more of it we consumed.

  Mintz quotes an English teacher visiting the “sugar island” of Barbados in 1645, a half-century before Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, who just about puts it in nutshell form. Barbadian plantation owners, he says, had purchased “no less than a thousand negroes” from slavers over that twelve-month season alone: “in a year and a halfe they will earn with God’s blessing as much as they cost.”

  I have talked about the darkness of not knowing, but what about the darkness of not wanting to know? The darkness of blinkered ignorance. This is the sleep that the slave traders, plantation owners, merchant ship owners, and wealthy investors back home (who exerted themselves only in extending credit) counted upon engendering among their countrymen and women in order to propagate their trade abroad, unchecked.

  Most consumers today recognize that capitalism has its dark side (we have all read our pocket Marx). We know about the alienation that results from severing the workforce from the means of production—from land, tools, raw materials, and craft. We know about exploited child workers, sweatshops, and zero-hour contracts. Yet slavery is far darker than capitalism, for in slavery the black body is part of the means of production, a tool or instrument in and of itself. Slaves, you see, have nothing to sell: not even their labor. Instead, like the commodities they produce, they, too, are bought, sold, and traded.

  Women have a better cultural understanding of this exchange than men do. They know what it means when their bodies and their labor represent an unacknowledged capital asset. What is more, women grasp the essence of standing as surety against risk: the risk of love foundering, the risk of not being seen, the risk of not managing to achieve oneself.

  Still, you could say that the evils inflicted upon faraway lands and peoples by the colonial merchant traders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries eventually came back to plague us. Marx summed it up with characteristic bite when he complained that the capitalist production that fueled the voracious new markets of the industrialized nineteenth century “grafted the civilised horrors of overwork, onto the barbarous horrors of serfdom and slavery.” Marx might have added that as we in the West became slaves ourselves, to the clock, the market, the railroad (and later, highway)—to capitalized production itself—it became necessary to consume ever greater quantities of sugar, tobacco, and coffee, if only to stay awake through the long days and nights given up to oiling the gears of the monstrous machine. And so the wheel turned.

  One of the things I love about Zzz is that the older he gets, the more radical he becomes. Much of the time he is too traumatized by world events to bear reading about them: he feels undermined by news the way bodily fatigue undermines me. But then he girds himself and dives in, tanking up on commentary and analyses, because, as he tells me, knowledge is power. To be forewarned is to be forearmed, and all that. I no longer believe that knowledge is power (I mean, just look at the world and its idiot-king leaders). But I do think that knowledge can pave the road to resistance.

  Zzz hates people who insist that enjoying material sufficiency only makes you more avaricious. To spite them, and to make a stand for an alternate morality, he is lavish in his own way, to the point of being profligate. Tirelessly, he spends himself helping out voluntary organizations—schools, literary development agencies, local theater companies, our teenager’s music camp, the neighborhood hospice—and he regularly gives away his money to people who have less than he does. His generosity is reparative. It is his rearguard fight against the money-worship that breeds injustice and inequality. Zzz’s postcolonial conscience is clean. Perhaps that is why he sleeps so well.

  One afternoon, a few years back, an Iranian woman knocked at our door. Zzz happened to be home. She told him about her life in Iran and her attempts to defend her sectarian values against the totalitarian Islamic regime. She and her husband were educated people; they believed in religious pluralism and tolerance and saw no need for different faith groups to shout threats and throw rotten vegetables at each other from across the picket line. Her husband and comrade in arms had been arrested, branded an enemy of the state, and thrown into jail for his troubles. The woman showed Zzz pictures of him squaring up to the camera with defiant eyes, his lips a firm line beneath his bristly black mustache. She wept. Zzz invited her into our home, made her Turkish coffee, and pledged to help her. He donated a generous sum to the woman’s campaign to get her husband released. A year or so later she returned. Her husband was still in jail.

  There is a p
oem that I should love to share with Zzz, for no other reason than that it would delight him. Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England” offers a poetic reimagining of Defoe’s story set on an island that is the very antithesis of paradise. Let us be clear. There are no sandy white beaches lined with swaying palms here: no fruiting shrubs or singing birds, no colorful array of tropical flora, and no ship-rescued booty. Crater-pocked, ashen, and largely barren, Bishop’s island is a rainy “cloud-dump,” smelling of “goat and guano.”

  Bishop’s Crusoe, meanwhile, is a self-pitying dullard who, when not drunk, spends a good deal of his island life dangling his legs over the mouth of a spent crater, counting dead volcanoes. This shitty, sterile island has only one kind of everything: one kind of goat, one kind of turtle, one snail, one man, and one burning sun. There is also only one kind of berry, dark red and sour-tasting, with which Crusoe makes the stinging brew that goes straight to his head. Once intoxicated, he “whoops and dances,” playing his homemade flute and prancing among the goats like a crazed fawn. Sober again, he sinks back into his “miserable philosophy”—the very opposite of enlightened.

  Overwhelmed by a sense of his own inner poverty, this Robinson is unable to bestow civilized values on anything. He berates himself for his inadequate education, for not knowing enough Greek or astronomy, and for only half-remembering the poems he once learned by heart, at school. He is shamed by his deficiencies. Boredom eats at him. He is tired of goats bleating, gulls shrieking, and turtles hissing. One day, to relieve the monotony, he dyes one of the goats berry-red, but then its mother refuses to recognize it. When Friday finally shows up, this Robinson laments that his savage companion is not a woman (another lack, another sterility). Eventually the island gets so deep under his skin, it enters his bloodstream. Nightmares haunt his sleep: