Insomnia. Marina Benjamin
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.