On Insomnia
Begin with insomnia. On the night of July 7 or rather in the early morning of the 8th, insomnia intrudes thoroughly and suddenly after decades of voluptuous, nourishing sleep with its accompanying dreams. My two great sustaining talents exit, and like a wilful, opaque animal insomnia takes their place. I note its arrival in my notebook in the dark. It’s 2:17 am and I lie irritably and uncomfortably in the heat listening to the sound of parties drifting upward through the open windows in the amplifying inner court of the ancient building. Hiphop bass and laughter with chaser of stale cigarettes. This is my inauguration to sleeplessness. It will never end. The distance of day feels like the distance of youth. What is the meaning of this rude interruption? I had been telling myself futilely how I preferred the earlier girl I had been, how I missed her, missed the urgency and spaciousness she animated, dreaming obsessively again of her ideals which were like amusing lustful infatuations. I had been recalling her slapstick urgency with a sense of loss and of sadness, and with the impossible and therefore ridiculous desire to go back, to enjoy her girlish awkward energy of mind and her strength of will in shaping her life otherwise. She had believed truly unflaggingly in the mysterious other shape of a future life. In spite of all the fizzles and mishaps and also the grand errors, her great inchoate discipline had long held to the strangeness of that other shape until the shape became the cellular fact that I now am. And her fidelity then for the unstable lifeshape that she would eventually occupy transmuted, I speculate in my sleeplessness (I will call it speculation when my mind ventures into such quizzical theorizing), into my deepening query of form and formal abundance. What she once desired for a future life I now receive energetically as the inklings and feints of aesthetic experiment. Lying here itching in the night to the sound of the young people’s parties, which are filling the shared inner court, all our windows open to receive the relative coolness of night, I suddenly perceive a curious shift in the sad regretful emotions I had been coddling and fretting with private embarrassment. I felt now keenly in my new sleeplessness that the girl was not in the distant past—forty, forty-five years had gone by since the time of my mind I yearned for, not a wholesome time but an innovating gleeful time—but that she was present in the night, that I had carried her mutely in me and with me until this very instant of unsought aesthetic psychic revelation entered through the window, and the immense gratitude I felt for her naively bungled prescience had become, now at 3:27 am to the accompaniment of the drifting-upward summer parties, a wild gratitude that expanded like the night, that would continue to transmute inside me. It was not that an important part of my inner life was at a furthering and estranging distance. Rather I needed to perform a small and precise inner operation like the opening of a window that admitted, invited, the mind of the girl into the insomniac night to accompany my thoughts. I would be her tending host now, because she merited my tenderness. Her errant, stubborn insistence had given me my life. Now it’s time with her oddly present nocturnal mentorship to go deeper into the shape of fear, the form of rivers, the story of age. Fear is not harmful; it points to an absence. Sometimes for a long time the story one needs to tell with one’s life stays hidden. The city’s story also; hidden. Then mentoring night asserts its physiologically copious perspective, which is not day’s. The insomniac perceives day from within the amplifying medium of partying night and in this way expands the night’s parties. But how can she carry the disfluent recognitions and dictions of night, of the recalcitrant and evasive girl, forward into day? This is my present query.