Insomnia Page 8

  This monk is the very picture of enlightenment as a kind of majestic imperturbability. When I imagine the inside of his head, I see a one-stringed instrument: pluck it and it sounds a single note, pure, unwavering, everlasting—in perfect tune with what the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, in a poem called “Looking for Each Other,” terms the “one-pointed mind.”

  Do I find this vision of complete contentment attractive? Yes, and also no. However much I am drawn to Buddhism’s idealization of enlightened peace, I cannot help worrying about how closely that peace appears to resemble a glorious blankness. As if the highest possible state of mind we can aspire to is the preternaturally still one that finds its homely parallel in checking out. As if attaining meditative nirvana were tantamount to a good spring clean. As if wonder had come full circle to meet stupefaction. As if transcendence meant—merely—to overcome.

  I have come to the conclusion that mindfulness is much like tidying the house. It is focused and satisfying in concentrated spurts, but it lacks a direction of travel. It seeks to keep things as they are. It leaves the world unchanged.

  Not like mind wandering. Which is how the mind entertains itself when it arrives at the limits of boredom. Or how it behaves, skipping, inattentive, when it is lit up in the darkness of night or, in more fruitful guise, when we dream by the light of day. Mind wandering free-associates and innovates. It overreaches wildly and pulls you along, eager in its wake. It is fleet and light and connective. It opens doors and pushes thoughts through colorful prisms. It noodles, trips, and blusters. And it roams: respecting no boundaries, it transgresses. Perhaps this is something the conscious mind can take from insomnia.

  My own little sailing ship through time, my family of three wanderers, appears to have made an unspoken pact to disrupt borders. So it seems, at any rate. While I fudge and fumble my way through the hours, muddling up and stepping over night and day, Zzz journeys back and forth across the Atlantic, detonating cultural bombshells in each nation’s backyard. In his newfound revolutionary zeal, he cannot help himself. Our teenager, meanwhile, has discovered the fertile borderlands between one gender and another and declared herself expatriate.

  I still yearn for the replenishment provided by sleep. I yearn for the saving limit to sanity that lies beyond consciousness’s end. All the same, I want to be sensible of the act of border crossing. I don’t want to slip unknowingly from being into nothing, but to be party to the drift and transgression, and alive to the excitement and danger that entails. It is a knife-edge business, that is for sure. And it demands that I embrace uncertainty.

  I used to think that Penelope was emblematic of this border-crossing bravery. And she is. But perhaps a better representative still can be found in the heroism of Scheherazade—fabled princess of the night, her intelligence primed by darkness. Whereas Penelope’s challenge is to find a way to simply endure (the emptiness of the passing years, but also the inscrutable darkness of uncertainty and abandonment), in The Arabian Nights Scheherazade steps up to an altogether bigger challenge, and takes on time itself.

  You know the story. The Persian king is on some genocidal mission to deplete his land of womankind. Every night he beds a new virgin, but then in an act of vengeance against the infidelity of his former wife he has his new love beheaded at dawn. In Scheherazade, who volunteers herself for this deadly succession, he more than meets his match. Each night Scheherazade eases the king into sleep by spinning a marvelous new tale, and each night she leaves it unfinished in order that the now-captivated king, eager to know how the tale will end, is obliged to spare her life. Night upon night, for a thousand and one nights, she spins her stories, until the king of Middle Persia concedes defeat and marries her. (By this time they have also managed to have several children together.)

  Where Penelope has her cloth, the making and unmaking of which stands as a symbol for hope, Scheherazade fills night’s dread blankness with another kind of weaving. She unspools a train of dramatically colorful tales, drawing them from the distaff of her own inventive mind, and she thwarts the death sentence scheduled to arrive each dawn by suspending narrative succession. Her tactic is genius. She messes with the diurnal cycle and inserts disruption where there ought to be continuity. In this way, she masters time.

  The only drawback is that Scheherazade is insomniac—and must be so in order to live. Sleep would literally be the death of her.

  In alchemy there is a term for bringing something out of nothing. Specifically for bringing the philosopher’s stone out of the various ingredients (who knows what?—lizard tails, hobnail boots, chicken blood, base metals) mixed inside the alchemist’s crucible. That term is nigredo, meaning “the blackening,” and it describes the putrefaction of the prima materia. Nigredo is said to be “blacker than the blackest black.” When it manifests itself you cannot believe anything good can come out of it. But just as putrefaction precedes purification, so nigredo gives way to albedo, or the birth of light.

  Carl Jung spent long years elaborating the underlying psychological meanings of alchemy, the dark art that he understood as a symbolic language for the process of individuation—which itself is a kind of awakening, is it not? Jung took nigredo to refer to the importance of shadow work, which is the labor of understanding what you project onto others and, more important, becoming aware of your own darkness.

  It takes a restless spirit to thrive on the antihypnotic aspects of night, to resist the lull and pull of sleep and to work instead toward becoming dark-adapted.

  A restless spirit like Nikolai Astrup. Astrup is the early twentieth-century Norwegian painter renowned for his color-saturated, quasi-primitivist paintings of rural Jølster—the sparsely populated region of western Norway that was his childhood home, and to which he returned as a young man, jaded by his studies in Olso, Berlin, and Paris, where he had felt paralyzed by the influence of other (he thought better) painters. Restored to his rural paradise, he remained there until his early death at forty-seven. In Jølster, Astrup painted the dramatic landscape of mountain villages and fjords obsessively, mostly by night, producing an oeuvre of haunting paintings. He captures the glacial sheen of lake water bathed in moonlight, fields of yellow marigolds oddly radiant in the dark, and shadowy haystacks that resemble hunched and furtive humans. Everywhere Astrup’s crepuscular palette succeeds in rendering the familiar strange, yet also strangely magical.

  Astrup was a lifelong asthmatic for whom each night was an insomniac gauntlet of nightmares and a choking struggle for air. He habitually slept half-upright in a chair in the hall, his head slumped to his chest, only to wake in fits of “choking seizures.” More often, he simply got up and prowled outdoors. In letters to his friend Per Kramer, Astrup hints at how he busied himself by the light of the moon, planting trees and mulching their roots with fresh soil, fishing for trout in the lake, fixing his radio, or walking through the empty town, where he took study notes on the green of the spruce trees and the quality of the light and long shadows.

  I feel a strange kinship with this peculiar painter, so unlike me in every way, impossibly tall and thin, with a parson’s stoop and a child catcher’s pointy nose. I warm to the way that night made a metaphysician of him.

  His subject, as befits his art, was color and mood. Astrup became fixated by the almost supernatural way that colors morphed in the dark. Blues and grays acquired a silvery intensity. Greens deepened, whites were dulled, while darkness itself became a property that arose from tangible things, like trees and stones: the moonlit sky, for its part, shone. As one scholar has remarked, Astrup understood that “the dark allows nature to glow with its own mysterious light.” Here was a study that Astrup judged worthy of a lifetime of effort, and he indentured himself to its pursuit.

  But what of my own restlessless? Where might it take me, and what kind of dedication will it demand?

  The honest answer is that I don’t rightly know. But when I think on the question I keep returning in my mind to that visit to Buscot Park and to what Edward Burne
-Jones was trying to do with his soporific paintings.

  Yet how soporific were they, in fact? In the Faringdon family an apocryphal tale survives of how Burne-Jones had been quite insistent when the paintings were installed that they be exhibited in northern light. He didn’t want direct sunlight from the south falling on them, but light that had been reflected off the sky. Such light, known as “gray” light, was the kind he worked by in his studio, since it was more faithful than direct sunlight. (Even today Kodak produces a gray card for photographers as a way of getting perfect renditions of color and tone.) He also stipulated that the saloon at Buscot Park should be mutely lit with hanging lamps to create an air of mystery and expectation. Burne-Jones wanted viewers to spend proper spells of time in front of the Briar Rose paintings, to encounter them in a demi-gloom that forced them to engage in a mode of seeing that called for discernment. The more their eyes grew dark-adapted, the more of the work they would eventually see—more color, more detail, more nuance—leading to a layered understanding such as Keats might have had in mind when he praised “slow time.”

  There is plenty of nuance to catch: multiple allusions to time and eternity, for starters, scattered throughout the paintings. An hourglass whose sand has ceased to flow. A sundial that faces away from the sun. And there are peacock and swastika motifs, symbolizing immortality and time’s infinity, woven into the decorative features of the princess’s bower. All are coded reminders that in this enchanted realm time has come to a halt. But then, along a different register, in two of the paintings there lurk tiny, half-hidden windows, painted into the background, beyond which the real world—the waking world—goes on, fully illuminated and fully alive. So there is a beating heart in the frame, after all. But what was Burne-Jones trying to tell us?

  In 1890, coinciding with the paintings’ popular unveiling, Punch magazine published a piquant cartoon. Titled “The Legend of the Briar-Root,” it purported to be a “companion subject” to the Briar Rose series, and in each of its four scrawnily drawn frames the same set of characters are slumped, lost to an opium sleep. A couplet echoing William Morris’s verse about the sleeping handmaids trills, “The Maidens thought the pipe to fill: They smoked, and now they all lie still.” The cartoon’s wicked humor (which relies on its audience knowing that the hard, woody roots of the Briar Rose were commonly carved into tobacco pipes) implies that Beauty’s enchanted sleep is actually a drugged one. This was the age not just of the rest cure, but also of chemical anesthesia and laudanum treatments—an age when slumbering women of one kind or another came to symbolize the malaise of an entire society enslaved by material culture, closed off from imagination and living off its nerves.

  This is the world Burne-Jones wanted to shake up. And who can blame him?

  The briar rose, or dog rose, is seldom cultivated domestically, as a garden plant, because it is spiky and woody and aggressive, but also because unlike other, tamer varietals, it flowers for only two weeks of the year. During its brief bloom the plant is garlanded with delicate pink flowers, cherished for their sweet apple-like fragrance and much-prized in wedding bouquets. Look again at Burne-Jones’s canvases and you see that his briars are exploding with blossom. Everywhere you look, there is a profusion of flowers, flicks and flecks of pink, confetti-like and joyous. But is the plant flowering (waking up!) because the prince has arrived to claim his bride? Or is it perpetually flowering, as a reminder of the world beyond, holding out its eternal light?

  Perhaps the suggestion is that there is an awakening nestling or curled up within every enchantment, prefigured somehow, presaging a revelation.

  Burne-Jones’s unconscious mind may well have seeded meanings in his work that resonate far farther afield than he intended. But I like to think the process of dark adaptation that he wanted viewers to experience was planned. Because this way a trap is set, so that each viewer, however fleetingly, might experience an awakening of their own, which, if taken to heart, might allow them to wake up to themselves and their potential; to rally and organize and agitate for revolution; to embrace uncertainty and welcome change.

  This is what I wish to effect in my own life, so I might better discern the flicks and flecks of pink so casually strewn across my fields of vision and experience. I want to flip disruption and affliction into opportunity, and puncture the darkness with stabs of light.

  This is the song of insomnia, and I shall sing it.

  Sources

  INDISPENSABLE SOURCES

  Elisabeth Bronfen, Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, New York, 2013).

  Eluned Summers-Bremner, Insomnia: A Cultural History (Reaktion Books, London, 2008).

  DEEPER SOURCES

  Gwyneth Lewis, Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book About Depression (Flamingo, London, 2002).

  Tom McCarthy, Satin Island (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2015).

  Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Wave Books, Seattle, 2009).

  Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy (Ecco Press, Hopewell, N.J., 1992).

  OTHER SOURCES

  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958). New edition (Beacon Press, New York, 1992).

  Gennady Barabtarlo, ed., Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 2017).

  A. Marshall Barr, Thomas B. Boulton, and David J. Wilkinson, eds., Essays on the History of Anaesthesia, International Congress and Symposium Series 213 (Royal Society of Medicine Press, London, 1996).

  Matilda Bathurst, “Northern Light.” Review of Nikolai Astrup exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2016, Apollo Magazine, vol. 640, no. 1, pp. 196–97.

  Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation, 1933–1939 (1966), translated by Adriane Gottwald (Aquarian Press, London, 1985).

  Elizabeth Bishop, “Crusoe in England,” from Complete Poems, with a new introduction by Tom Paulin (Chatto & Windus, London, 2004), pp. 162–66.

  Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (Verso, London and New York, 1997).

  Claes Blum, Studies in the Dream-Book of Artemidorus (Almqvist and Wiksell, Uppsala, Sweden, 1936).

  Roberto Bolaño, “The Worm,” in The Romantic Dogs, translated by Laura Healy (New Directions, New York, 2008).

  Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, with a new introduction by John Christian, vol. 2, 1868–1898 (Lund Humphries, London, 1993).

  Blake Butler, Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia (Harper Perennial, New York, 2011).

  Susan P. Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, London and Toronto, 1987).

  Nancy Cervetti, S. Weir Mitchell, 1829–1914: Philadelphia’s Literary Physician (Penn State University Press, University Park, 2012).

  William Gervase Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik, eds., The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500–1989 (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2003).

  Stephen Cushman, “Make the Bed,” in Cussing Lesson (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2002), p. 22.

  Cynthia J. Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 2010).

  Galya Diment, “Nabokov and Epilepsy,” Times Literary Supplement, August 3, 2016, www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/sudden-sunburst.

  Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime (W. W. Norton, New York, 2005).

  Sigmund Freud, The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, translated and edited by James Strachey (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1971).

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (1935), introduction by Ann J. Lane (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1990).

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, vol. 1 (1879–1887), vol. 2 (1890–1935), ed. Denise D. Knight (University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, 1994).

 
Gayle Greene, Insomniac (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2008).

  Sasha Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2016).

  Homer’s Odyssey, ed. Lillian E. Doherty, Oxford Readings in Classical Studies (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2009).

  J. Donald Hughes, “Dream Interpretation in Ancient Civilizations,” Dreaming, vol. 10, no. 1 (2000), pp. 7–18.

  Carsten Jensen, “Life’s Detours: A Portrait of Nickolai Astrup as a Comic-Strip Character,” in Nikolai Astrup, Dream-Images, translated by John Irons and Francesca M. Nichols (exhibition catalogue, Gl. Holtegaard) (Narayana Press, Copenhagen, 2010), pp. 114–19.

  Maria Konnikova, “Why Can’t We Fall Asleep?” The New Yorker, July 7, 2015, followed by “The Work We Do While We Sleep” and “The Walking Dead,” also in July 2015.

  Peretz Lavie, The Enchanted World of Sleep, translated by Anthony Berris (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1996).

  Anne Leonard, The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700–1900 (Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago Press, 2011).

  Penelope A. Lewis, The Secret World of Sleep: The Surprising Science of the Mind at Rest (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2013).

  Øystein Loge, Nikolai Astrup: Betrothed to Nature, translated by Francesca M. Nichols (Det Norske Samlaget and DnB NOR Savings Bank Foundation, Oslo, 2010).

  Rowland Manthorpe, “Mind-Wandering: The Rise of an Anti-mindfulness Movement,” The Long+Short, December 10, 2015, thelongandshort.org.