Читать книгу Insomnia - Marina Benjamin - Страница 10
ОглавлениеSometimes the rattle of a clapper sounds over your bed. Or a ghostly draft lifts the hairs on the back of your neck, cooling your skin; or there’s an upstroke, feather light, along the inside of your forearm. A sudden lurch, maybe just a blink, then a sense of falling upward and it is there. So are you.
If we insist on defining something in terms of what it annuls then how can we grasp the essence of what is lost when it shows itself? And how can we tell if there is anything to be gained by its presence? This is the trouble with insomnia.
When I am up at night the world takes on a different hue. It is quieter and closer and there are textures of the dark I have begun paying attention to. I register the thickening, sense-dulling darkness that hangs velvety as a pall over deep night, and the green-black tincture you get when moisture charges the atmosphere with static. Then there is the gently shifting penumbra that heralds dawn and feels less like the suggestion of light than a fuzziness around the edges of your perception, as if an optician had clamped a diffusing lens over your eyes then quizzed you about the blurred shapes that dance at the peripheries of your vision. In sleeplessness I have come to understand that there is a taxonomy of darkness to uncover, and with it, a nocturnal literacy we can acquire.
At the velvet end of my insomniac life I am a heavy-footed ghost, moving from one room to another, weary, leaden—there, but also not there. I read for an hour, make myself a cup of tea, and sit with the dog. We stare at each other with big cow eyes and I marvel at his animal knack for sleep. Curling in beside me on the sofa, he is out within minutes, legs splayed like bagpipes, his warm little body rising and falling. If I so much as twitch he snaps awake instantly but without any sense of alarm; he just lifts those liquid brown eyes toward mine, wanting to know if the world is unchanged.
On nights like these I leave a trail of evidence behind me to be discovered and remembered in the morning: my reading glasses upturned on the coffee table, carelessly cast off like a pair of party shoes, an open book facedown on a chair, food crumbs on the kitchen counter. Sapped by fatigue, I stand in the middle of the living room in the dusty light and pull my dressing gown around me. I am trying to puzzle out the clues so as to reconstruct the events of the night before, but I keep blanking. The mise-en-scène of morning starts to resemble the scene of a crime. All that is lacking is the body shape outlined on the floor: the missing body, wakeful when it should be sleeping.
There are also luminous moonlit nights, lurid nights, when everything feels heightened and I jerk awake with a fidgety awareness, my mind speeding. In the grip of an enervating mania, I creak my way down the stairs and switch on the computer, scrolling for bad news from places where daylight reigns: an exploding bomb, the wreck of human carnage, floods, fires, terrorist traps. Ordinary disasters. I pace and fret, railing at the dumb news, racing with emotion. I feel held back by the night because I am convinced that the hidden mystery of our beautiful existence might be found in its very bowels. I am looking for insight, for a nugget of value to carry across night’s border into morning.
But where is the hidden value in this spinning carousel—a flash memory of my daughter hula-hooping, Earth, Wind & Fire singing “Ah-li-ah-li-ah,” a presentiment of abandonment: Am I or am I not loved?
Insomnia (noun): a habitual sleeplessness or inability to sleep. It comes to us from the Latin insomnis, meaning without sleep. The insomniac complaint was known to Artemidorus of Daldis, one of the Western world’s oldest interpreters of dreams. In his second-century treatise Oneirocritica, Artemidorus distinguished mortal dreams that arise out of the dreamer’s life experience, and conjure with symbols drawn from the raw materials of his or her desires, from prophetic dreams, or oneiroi, which are gifted or sent to us. But the Greeks had another term to denote sleeplessness: agrypnotic, from agrupos, meaning “wakeful,” which in turn derives from agrein, “to pursue,” and hypnos, sleep. Insomnia, then, is not just a state of sleeplessness, a matter of negatives. It involves the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing.
What do I long for? I ask myself this question in the witching hours because it cannot be asked by day. On certain turbulent nights this longing is so great and deep and bald it swallows up the world. Defying comprehension, it just is. And I am a black hole, void of substance, greedy with yearning. To be without sleep is to want and be found wanting.
Mostly, though, I long for benevolent Hypnos, dreamiest of the Greek gods, to swoop down over me, scattering his crimson poppies, and drug me into a sweet insentient sleep. Hypnos reminds me that the bestowing of sleep comes from above. It is literally a gift from the gods.
When you cannot get sleep you fall in love with sleep, because desire (thank you, Lacan) is born out of lack. Perhaps there is an inverse relationship here, between the degree of lack and the corresponding degree of love. How much do I love sleep, I wonder. And can sleep love me back? The medieval Islamic poet Rumi seemed to think the relationship might be reciprocal. In “The Milk of Millennia” he wrote: “every human being streams at night into the loving nowhere.” I find it comforting to think that we might stream beyond our bedroom walls at night, like a crystalline liquid (or like data), as though our avatars were flowing toward, then alongside those of others in surging formation while our bodies were at rest. I find it reassuring that nowhere can be a loving place. Although when I am revving in the night hours, Nowhere does not feel especially loving.
These days my prime time is 4:15 a.m., a betwixt and between time, neither day nor night. At 4:15 a.m., birds chirrup, foxes scream, and sometimes, when the rotating schedule for landing and takeoff from Heathrow Airport collides with my sleeplessness, planes rumble overhead. The quality of the dark is not as pure at this hour as it is earlier. It is porous around the edges. In my bed, I flap and thrash like a grouper caught in the net, victim to an escalating anxiety about the way the darkness appears to be yielding to the idea of retreat. (I don’t want it to yield; I want it to last so that I can sleep.) Unable to settle in one position for more than a few beats, I try them all out in turn: the plank, the fetal curl, the stomach-down splat—as if I’d landed on the mattress from a height. Each of these poses is contrived insofar as it corresponds to an idea I have of what relaxation looks like. Some nights I trawl the whole alien repertoire of self-help. I try breathing deeply and slowly like a yogi, my fist pressed into the chakra under my rib cage. I try to stay my galloping pulse, tripped by fretful thoughts I would like to banish, by thinking of water or mountains, or fluffy sheep. I tell myself I am heavy, heavy, heavy. I pursue sleep so hard I become invigorated by the chase.
Through it all, I am aware of a slumbering form beside me, a still mound under the duvet, heaped up like a rock formation under the sky. I peer at the shadow-shaped mass across the bed, my rock, my stay, straining to detect any hint of movement in the dark. Let’s call this sleeping form Zzz. I am loath to wake him, knowing that he, like me, is exhausted to the point of defeat. I also know that if my thrashing does wake him he will snarl and shift; occasionally he swipes at me, a big cat in his lair lashing out with a heavy paw. There is a sleep-charged force field around Zzz and woe betide me if I disturb it.
Zzz and I have a history of beds we have slept in together. Hotel beds with silky sheets and too many pillows; beds so old we’d end up rolling into the middle; tufty beds with broken springs in cheap rented flats where we popped corn and watched scary movies through finger fences. In our shared history of sleep there have been beds of character and beds of convenience. Beds that spring out of sofas, supplied by relatives happy to accommodate our long-distance visits, and twin beds (supplied by relatives lacking fold-out options) that create an austere, prohibitive gulf between us, and bring on fits of the giggles. There have been state-of-the-art mattresses we have bought and regretted (especially the orthopedic kind once believed to be best for backs, but which I now think belong only in jails), and beds we have drooled over on the Internet but cannot afford—beds made out of “memory foam.” We have shared countless beds down the years and across continents, Zzz and me, under mood clouds fair and foul, and we continue to commune by night, in code and often in counterpoise to the way we relate to each other by day.
To share a bed with someone is to entertain a conversation played out in the language of movement and space.
There have been times when this conversation sparkled, I can tell you. Like those weeks we spent in Italy, not long after we first met. I’d been awarded a six-week writing fellowship, which we fattened up with vacation, training south from Milan and Venice, then stopping off in Florence en route to Rome. It was the first time either Zzz or I had seen Italy’s golden city. Each day, we wandered ancient twisting streets until our feet hurt, squinting into the sun as we took in architectural triumphs and follies. We guzzled pastas we’d never heard of, shaped like tiny stars, pigs’ tails, and miniature money bags, and ducked in and out of churches, hunting down artworks we had read about in books, before threading our way back to our pensione for a daily afternoon nap. Glutted with art, ice cream, and wonder, we slept with limbs entangled, our breathing synchronized, foreheads touching, and when we awoke we had sleepy sex. Such glittering conversations are hard to sustain over time.
You don’t need a bed in order to sleep with someone. But the first time I shared a bed with Zzz I was insomniac. At least I refrained from asking him to get up and leave so that I might stand a chance of sleeping, which request had lost me a boyfriend or two in my time. But I suspect that a precedent was set.
Like travel, insomnia is an uprooting experience. You are torn out of sleep like a plant from its native soil, then shaken down so that any clinging vestige of slumber falls away, naked confusion exposed like nerve endings. Sleep, in its turn, is a matter of gravity. It pulls you down, beds you in the earth, burrows you in. In sleep you connect back to the bedrock that provides nourishment and restorative rest.
Rubin Naiman, a psychologist at the University of Arizona’s Center for Integrative Medicine, reminds us that when we turn to sleep aids we often reach for gel-filled eye masks and weighted blankets, to “swaddling” that acts to counter the restive states of arousal we experience in insomnia. I have noticed that my teenage daughter, in her own struggles with sleep, loads up pillows on top of her head to acquire that longed-for sense of gravity. “It’s not about sleeping on a cloud. It’s about sleeping like a stone,” says Naiman.
The body must be grounded to sleep well. I think this is a lesson for the ages. It must be earthed in its own garden bed, or, unmoving, sunk at the bottom of time’s river (for when you are asleep time stands still). In her poem “Sleeping in the Forest,” Mary Oliver writes of tumbling into the earth’s wondrous embrace, its maternal reclaiming of her, as she falls asleep on the dank and mossy forest floor, slumbering heavily, like a stone on the riverbed. Hypnos would be proud of such a sleeper. Not merely drugged, but comatose.
In the grip of insomnia I am constitutionally inconsolable. Out of humor. It is not just a question of physical disquiet—not just about flapping. Or even existential disquiet (a fish out of water, a plant ripped from the earth), because insomnia is about temperature as well as motion. On nights when I am consumed by the flames of my own thermo-cellular generator, my skin prickles and oozes, the heat radiating off me in waves, the sheets dampening beneath me. If the lights were suddenly to be turned on, I would be glistening. Coated from head to toe by a film of sweat, I would flare red, like a warning.
Ancient physick would most likely designate me a choleric. The basic characteristics of this personality type are hotness and dryness, and its corresponding humor is yellow bile. People of a choleric temperament have appetites that are sharp and quick. Check. They are frequently overcome by ravenous hunger. Check. They are lean and wiry, with prominent veins and tendons. Check. Their metabolism is keen and catabolic, which is to say they generate a lot of heat. Even their urine can be hot and burning. They are prone to anger, impatience, and irritability, but then they are courageous and audacious as well. Check. They are individualists and pioneers who like to lead and to seek out exhilarating experiences. Check. However, their stools tend to a yellowish color (the bile) and emit a foul odor. Choleric types are notably poor sleepers. Check. Restless at night, they are assailed by indigestion and stress, or by violent dreams that jolt them into states of feverish or fiery readiness.
Fevers notwithstanding, in insomnia it is usually my mind that is on fire. What does a mind on fire look like, I hear you say? Like a Formula One driver tearing up the asphalt. Like a shimmering shoal of restless fish, darting forward together with fleet, quicksilver movements. Like a vacuum cleaner draining juice from the outlet and spinning off around the room of its own accord. My insomnia often feels like this: turbocharged. It is not one idea that teases and prods me awake, a finger tickling me in a single spot, wriggling my mind into consciousness. It is as if all the lights in my head had been lit at once, the whole engine coming to life, messages flying, dendrites flowering, synapses whipping snaps of electricity across my brain; and my brain itself, like some phosphorescent free-floating jellyfish of the deep, is luminescent, awake, alive.
In the first book of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Marcel muses on his insomniac experiences, on how he finds himself confused, as if he has been dropped fully conscious but unsuspecting into someone else’s waking dream. In his perplexity, he imagines that he has been reading a book about his own life and that his thoughts about himself come secondhand from print; but then he realizes that actually he is not in the book but in his bed, and that he cannot separate his recollections from his imaginings. Even so, Marcel can picture an ideal kind of insomnia for himself (the one he yearns for but does not get) in which he wakes at night for just long enough to appreciate the unsullied darkness that envelops him before falling peacefully back to sleep.
The matter of what to do with an overactive brain determined to forge ideas and connections in conditions of sensory blackout troubles me.
I know that the human brain is not a computer and yet computing metaphors are difficult to avoid when what is going on in your night-waking head feels like an electronic event. I’ll give you a for-instance. On nights when I cannot easily will myself back to sleep because the switch has already flipped to ON, I begin to sense some unknown part of my brain, some lower-order, engine-room, grafter gland, busy itself running an hours-long system scan. Lucky for me, wakefulness has given me an unexpected window onto its operations. Patiently, systematically, this biological algorithm roots through my store of mental files, searching out broken bits of code—ideas that refuse to link up, shards and stray threads of mental activity—and desperately tries to join them. Then it scans for duplications, thoughts that double up and play over needlessly. All these duplicates and shreds qualify as junk to be cleared out, along with half-formed memories, non sequiturs, ideations stuck in unhelpful configurations, and coiled notions that spiral fruitlessly, going nowhere.
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-denying, 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.
