Insomnia Read online

  It is at moments like these, when I sense the void migrate from the perimeter of my existence and begin to pervade its center, that I start to question what I am about. Why am I in this house, this bed, this marriage? Why, when I look back over a string of formative selves, all those era-defined embodiments of me pulling in different directions, do I find myself on this path and not on any other? What time-bending tricks has life played on me? I have honored every emotional contract I was signatory to and yet I seem to have lost myself. At moments such as these, everything that is closest to my heart, that generates the impression of gravity in my world, gets rudely pitched across the universe.

  Unable to calm myself, I tiptoe down to the basement kitchen to bide my time with the dog. In the bone-white light of almost-dawn we snuggle up together on the sofa, fur against skin, warming each other up, and he huffs his satisfaction, indistinguishable from an old man’s sigh. It sounds delusional, but in those night-waking hours spent with the dog I am convinced that he understands me. Perhaps he intuits that because I spend all my days transmitting, at night I wish only to receive.

  This being the case, I wonder if it is even possible for messages to communicate themselves across the void. Can the universe thrum its reassurances over a distance from which everything molecular, everything that has substance and mass and meaning, has been expelled? I wish I knew.

  This morning the dog kept his distance and I can’t say that I blame him. Bloodless and inert (more vampire than zombie), and drained of wants, I sat at the table coddling a mug of lukewarm coffee. As I felt myself shrink from London’s thin gray light, it occurred to me that were I to fix myself to the spot as the sun gradually burned through the cloud cover to focus its bright rays on the panes in my kitchen window, I might well fizzle into an inky puddle of smoking dung, too sour even to be of use to the garden.

  The nightmare that woke me was like all the others, authored by anxiety, barely worth recalling. In every one of this species of angst-driven dream I am variously thwarted: handicapped, delayed, misread, felled by illness, accident, or violence. I am endlessly diverted and distracted, trapped in a mirrored hall. Every time it is the same. Happenstance foils me, my voice gets scrambled or I am thrown obstacles I cannot surmount. These dreams never fail to trip my pulse and make me breathe hard and shallow. Frequently they are more exhausting than the missed sleep that arrives in their wake.

  By my own diagnosis, my neurotic tendencies have run amok across my dreamscape, infusing tension and upset into the simplest chain of events, breaking the chain, disrupting the flow of causality, frustrating intent. My dreamspace is an untrustworthy place. At any moment it might fold up on itself along invisible fissures, like speeded-up origami, creating new and disturbing portals and vistas. Or else it dissolves away in front of me, holes flowering open onto darkness the way acid corrodes cinematic tape. My dreams show up the seams of my reality, and sometimes they split open its skin like a burst fruit.

  I know that in our dreams night and day are in conversation, arguing point and counterpoint, hammering out the problems of existence. But still.

  At least our dreams are social. At least our neuroses are shared. I take some comfort knowing this. I also take comfort from the knowledge that our most important dreams and perhaps, especially, nightmares tend to recur, for as Gertrude Stein famously said: “there is no such thing as repetition, only insistence.” Sometimes the unconscious just has to be heard.

  A shrink I know once told me matter-of-factly that people tend to fall in love with their neuroses. That must be why they come to see you, I remember telling him at the time: they want to be cured of this wayward love. But now I think that being in love with our neuroses is what makes us human. It lends us our individuality and distinctiveness, our particular angles, edges, and quirks.

  Because I am able to look at my own insomnia (not objectively—who can do that when it comes to so subversive an experience?—but critically) I recognize it to be the product of excess. An excess of longing and an excess of thinking. Of course, my insomnia is to a large extent also a first world, postcapitalist artefact, although knowing this is of little use to me. What does help, what does ease the overdrive, is when I try to leach insomnia’s power over me by siphoning off my looping nighttime thoughts and straightening them out into ordered words on the page, physicalizing them. I get up, in other words, and I write.

  But then the fear that presses in on me is that my work might be fated never to transcend the neurotic. The very idea that this may be the case is so profoundly disturbing, so unsettling, it is as if the ground I walk on had begun to bubble and liquefy. Writing for me is both compass and anchor.

  Writing is also one of the few observances—sleep being an obvious other—that gets me beyond myself. Gets me “out of the way,” as we say in creative writing classes. Some people meditate, I write.

  However, if my writing is ultimately neurotic then when I finally do rediscover the art of sleeping will the wellspring of my creativity run dry?

  This is where a taxonomy of darkness comes to the rescue. It starts by acknowledging all the strange things that can be seen and felt in insomnia, not just its frights and distortions but its visions and intimations—the frayed thread-ends of one’s own existence, to instance one of its ambivalent gifts. Or, just sometimes, just maybe, the faintly detectable buzz of a cosmic hum that was there before human beings came into existence and will be there until the end of time.

  How can I characterize those frayed thread-ends for you? (Where not even the Fates could find enough to work with in spinning the future.)

  It is tricky. As soon as you reach for them, they retract. However, in glancing fashion they reveal themselves along the fringe-tips of your perception or they encroach stealthwise upon your bodily extremities like a sudden chill. In such moments you sense with absolute clarity exactly where the reliable plotlines of your life terminate. You are dangling over the precipice and it feels like falling.

  Or you become supremely aware of the particular way that your exposed head, poking out from under the duvet, confronts the uncertain night air. Your breath escapes in warm puffs into a nothingness you cannot apprehend and that offers nothing in the way of resistance; and yet a proprioceptive sense of precisely where your head is located in space, all the pressure points acting on it, where it weighs heavy on the pillow, where it brushes against the edge of the sheet, is so painfully acute it is as if your entire being had taken up residence in your cranium. All of you imbues a singular Now-ness that has amplitude and mass, and nothing else exists.

  Approached another way, the sense of precarity I am trying to convey might manifest itself as a feeling of otherness in the ankles or the underside of your feet, arising at those times when you are lying awake unable to find any tolerable posture of repose. Your extremities become hypersensitized, agitated, but also lumpen and foreign. Rationally you comprehend that these outlying appendages belong to you, are part of you. But at the same time you are exquisitely aware that they somehow need reclaiming from the night.

  We are strangers to nocturnality much of the time, and not merely because we absent ourselves from night. We want to believe that natural magic and not the permissiveness of darkness strings spiderwebs across the bushes, or leaves trails of slime on the windowpane and mouse droppings on the sill. Or fabricates mists suspended like wreathes across the sky, opaque and milky as frog spawn in places, but filmy enough when backlit by the moon as to appear almost granular, like a loose collection of glistening, water-swelled spheres too buoyant to fall to the ground.

  And we are strangers to sleep as well. Even those of us lucky enough to get it. We have an inkling of the work that sleep achieves—rest, repair, renewal, memory-fixing—and the way it takes a sonar sounding of our unconscious minds. But because this work takes place invisibly, shrouded in darkness, while we ourselves, submerged beneath our own delta waves—trapped inside a deeper darkness of our own making—are unable to witness it, we can never
fully apprehend its purpose.

  As the cultural historian Eluned Summers-Bremner reminds us, “sleep’s benefits are gained at the price of our not knowing them.”

  It follows that the payment that sleep exacts from us, in relieving us of consciousness, is trust.

  The ancients understood far better than we do the necessity of being alive to the mysteries of darkness in order to find enlightenment. The earliest Greek oracles were “shrines to night.” Ancient heroes who wished to see things for what they really were had to pass through underworlds, or they dwelled in caves; sometimes, like Oedipus, they could see clearly (or more deeply, which is to say with insight) only once they had been blinded. After Athena blinds Tiresias for spying on her when she is naked, she gives him the gift of augury. And let’s not forget the seer Phineus, who chooses blindness over sight. In each case truth, not light, is the source of illumination for the darkened seer.

  In ancient Egypt, seekers after spiritual guidance could spend a night in incubation, which was a special institutionalized sleep undertaken in the temples of the gods precisely in order to descry meaning in the dark. There these supplicants lay, on consecrated ground, like human lightning rods, hoping to receive messages and revelations that only the priests could interpret.

  In incubation the sleeper enters a liminal realm, where the permeability of dreams allows both divine and demonic elements from the world beyond to visit the dreamer in this world. Incubation, in other words, involves crossing a threshold, replete with all the dangers of trespass that attend those much sought-after “inner awakenings” that stand as symbols for the attainment of higher knowledge.

  When my child was small her Canadian grandfather gave her a Cree Indian dream catcher, a spindly contraption made of thin twigs of willow, loosely braided into a hoop and hung with colorful feathers and beads and with rainbow threads crisscrossing here and there. It resembled a giant dangly earring. Zzz and I pinned it to the shelf above her bed, hoping that it would catch good dreams and channel wonder and delight directly into her sleeping head.

  All these years later when I walk into her bedroom and chance upon the dream catcher I am moved by its talismanic qualities. Ritually, I touch the feathers, finger the cotton threads. I marvel that something so simple should channel the mysteries of the universe. Like the ancient Egyptians, the Cree Indians know that dream seeking is an art, because what you are really seeking is the understanding that lies on the other side of the dream. The dream is just the trafficker.

  There is something so peaceful about the dream catcher, its circular oneness, its effortless contiguity, that it seems an apt metaphor for the becalmed mind, a mind empty of worry—a darkened void across which tufts of feathery fluff or light-spun dust motes gently drift, signifying nothing. This image is the very opposite of the multipronged fidget spinner that comes to mind when I attempt to visualize the loud and boozy party train of senseless thought that careens across my own night-waking mind.

  Perhaps one of the lessons I can take from my insomnia is that its interest lies less in what it is that we see when we are wide awake at night, prickling with longing and with an enervating need to hunt down truth, than in how we see. It is about paying attention to what lies at the peripheries of our being, or just across the border: or, if we can bear to look, in the abyss, where Hesiod’s “origins and boundaries of everything” are juxtaposed.

  When Freud wrote about the way the conscious and unconscious minds trade insights, he, too, was attempting to fathom this matter of how we see, exposing its mechanisms, but also the way that seeing, by necessity, incorporates blind spots. What Freud says is that during the day we “drive shafts” into our fresh chains of thought and these shafts make contact with “dream-thoughts.” This is how day and night fertilize each other. This is how creativity is born.

  It cheers me to note that because psychoanalysis works to excavate the brain’s nocturnal effusions and then drag them into the light, it is essentially an insomniac practice. Perhaps that is why I am drawn to it.

  If I think on how driving shafts between different thoughts can link them up imaginatively, or cross-pollinate them, or juxtapose them, invariably I arrive at the idea of collage. Dreams are collage-like. The way we grasp things is collage-like: the mind gathering in material from the outermost reaches of the senses and fusing it together into definite shapes. And writing, too, is a kind of collage, insofar as it involves a constant interaction, a millisecond-by-millisecond calibration between processing the ideas we receive and acting on those received ideas. Writing holds input and output, contemplation and invention in dynamic tension.

  In a slim and most elegant appreciation of the artist Joseph Cornell (a book that is itself written in fragments), Charles Simic suggests that the collage technique that Cornell, artist, curator, scavenger, made so inimitably his own—“that art of reassembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image”—is the most important innovation of twentieth-century art. Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades: all abolish the separation between art and life. “The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen,” he writes.

  I am inclined to agree, because the commonplace—rightly seen—is composite, contingent, unique. At best, it is transcendent.

  In 1839, Henry David Thoreau witnessed just such a commonplace miracle, at the top of Saddleback Mountain in Massachusetts. Thoreau had climbed the mountain’s steep and wooded slope in twilight, so there was no chance of getting down again before night fell, and so he slept on the summit. Bedding down on rocky ground at the base of the Williams College observatory, he built a fire, read scraps of newspaper, slept fitfully under some wooden boards, and in the morning he saw God.

  As he describes it himself, at daybreak he discovered “an ocean of mist” risen level with the base of the tower that “shut out every vestige of the earth, while I was left floating on this fragment of the wreck of a world, on my carved plank in cloudland.” As the light increased, a shining new landscape revealed itself, for there was not a chink in the mist through which Massachusetts, or Vermont, or New York could be seen. Instead: “All around beneath me was spread for a hundred miles on every side, as far as the eye could reach, an undulating country of clouds answering in the varied swell of its surface to the terrestrial world it veiled. It was such a country as we might see in dreams, with all the delights of paradise. There were immense snowy pastures, apparently smooth-shaven and firm, and shady vales between the vaporous mountains.” This newborn world of white bore no “substance of impurity, no spot nor stain,” while the earth beneath it had become “such a flitting thing of light and shadows as the clouds had been before.”

  Says Thoreau: “I found myself a dweller in the dazzling hills of Aurora.” It was both miracle and privilege; to be in the “very path of the Sun’s chariot, and sprinkled with its dewy dust, enjoying the benignant smile, and near at hand the far-darting glances of the god” was at once aggrandizing and humbling. It made him sorry for the earth’s inhabitants below, only ever able to see the “dark and shadowy under-side of heaven’s pavement.”

  Thoreau’s everyday miracle was a chance occurrence. But it was also the product of a willingness to look at the world at a tilt. Which propensity, in turn, might be the key to unlocking the artistic mind, since where you choose to place the magnifying lens gifts you your particular vision: the oblique take, the hewing close to the margins, the subverting of norms, the tunneling down beneath surface appearances. And this skew, this tilt, is what collage teaches us too.

  Collages are scattergun, random, associative. But they are also curated, controlled, and generative. Like Freud’s driving shafts, they remind us that the how of everyday seeing is just as important as the what. Not least, they draw our attention to seams. It is for these reasons that whether based on visual juxtapositions or literary ones (I am thinking of William Burroughs’s cut-ups and fold-ins, for example), collages have epistemological worth.

  I think that love mak
es composites out of reality just as effectively. It fits people together, folds their lives one inside the other, reshapes our intimate worlds.

  In my own composite existence, Zzz is the New World, forward-looking and thrusting, and I am Europa, full of the old anxieties and guilt. He is organized and pragmatic, whereas I dither and brood; he is inventive, I careworn. Where he is instrumental, I search out the layers beneath the layers of life’s myriad layers. We are day and night to each other. We accommodate each other. We are complementary.

  The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy conjures up these mirrored relations very well in interrogating the meaning of sleep, when he writes of “the sleeper huddled inside the waker” and “the waker circling inside the sleeper.” They are enfolded together like lovers. This is what I want to communicate to Zzz, that his essence is enfolded within me.

  I have long believed that mindfulness has its limitations. It overvalues the present moment and neglects the way the human mind wants to knit together past and future, lived experience and speculation, so creating conditions for narrative thinking or autobiographical orienteering. With its resolute and faithful focus on a single object of thought, or on doing away with thought altogether, mindfulness is about as edifying as praying to a toilet roll.

  When I think about mindfulness, I cannot rid my head of the stock image of a shiny-headed monk. Of Far Eastern origin and saffron-robed, he is seated with his legs knotted into a lotus, hands quietly folded. It is an image of absolute stillness. The monk is both in this world (there is substance and solidity to him: he is as well fed and well tended as a healthy shrub) and yet, at the same time, he is above the world, utterly immune to its everyday cares. He looks as if he has been sitting like this forever, with his eyes closed and his shoulders slightly stooped, his features—unfurrowed brow, the merest trace of a smile—expressing an exquisite peace.