Insomnia. Marina Benjamin
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