currently reading: The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits
books bought:
The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits
books received:
Something Bright, Then Holes by Maggie Nelson
books finished:
Motherhood by Sheila Heti
hey you,
I didn't put it in the subject line – I'm sorry to betray you, and so early on in this message, too – but in addition to The Folded Clock I'm also reading Insomnia by Marina Benjamin. More accurately I am trying to read it. It's a little book, nonfiction, about Benjamin's experience with, you guessed it, sleeping perfectly well and throughout the night every night and the blessed and peaceful life she lives because of it.
It sounds like a joke but it isn't: I've been way tired to read Insomnia, a book I'm actually really excited about. It has long and beautiful sentences and complex and thought-provoking metaphors and a broad array of cultural references and I can't follow any of them because my brain doesn't work because I cannot sleep and I haven't for years and I spend my whole life walking around in a fog. It's chill. It's 3:51 in the morning as I write this.
I have the kind of insomnia where I fall asleep OK but wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep for hours. I don't remember when it started. My instinct is to finish that sentence with "so it must have been slow," and then I'd reference that myth about the frog in a slowly boiling pot, but I think it's more realistic to assume it happened all at once and I didn't pay attention because I thought it'd go away at some point. (This is exactly how I dealt with the pain in my shoulder that turned out to be tendinitis.) But now it's been so long that it's part of my personality. Isn't that awful? Something as boring as a sleep disorder is a not-small part of who I am as a person.
I am particularly looking forward to reading Insomnia because in all my years as an insomniac reader (so like, between two and three years) I have come across only one true thing written about it, in Alejandro Zambra's book Multiple Choice, and it was this: "Insomnia wounds and accompanies you." That's it! That's the one true thing I have to say to people! What I am looking for, I guess, is language. Insomnia deals so explicitly in an absence – and, as Benjamin points out in what I have managed to read so far, specifically in the absence of something you really, really, really want. I am desperate for language to fill the absence. I am wounded, yes, and accompanied, sure, but what else?
(Well, Ani DiFranco coined the phrase "insomniatic spree." That's been helpful, too.)
I can tell when doctors think I'm lying about it. There are three things that, as a rule, doctors don't believe me about. The first is when I tell them I have only three or four drinks a month, which is the truth. (God only knows how I do it!) They almost always try to correct me – "Per week, you mean."
The second thing that doctors don't believe is that there is nothing that keeps me up at night, no thoughts I'm worried about, no plans to implement grand visions, no overwhelming stress, no nightmares, no mania. I just wake up and generally I don't think about much in particular. What I mainly think is I hope I'm tired soon. The insomnia hours might be the calmest part of my day. But doctors – and non-doctors, regular people too – are often convinced there's something underneath, some trigger or stressor. ("Maybe Zoloft?" I tell them.) Benjamin's insomnia seems more like what my doctors are expecting:
My insomnia is like this: turbocharged. It is not one idea that 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 her case, as far as I can tell, the trigger seems to be her own brilliance.
The third thing doctors don't believe me about is that I don't want kids. They are sure that I will change my mind. There are a number of reasons I don't want kids, many of them immutable, but no matter! Once I had a particularly unpleasant appointment with a urogynecologist (it's never a good thing to have to see a specialist you didn't even know existed). The possibility of surgery came up the doctor said no, was adamant. "I understand there are risks to surgery," I told her, and she said yes, of course, but what made her so unwilling to consider it was that one of the biggest risks would be to my fertility. "I know you're thinking I'm a 22 year old kid and I don't know what I want," I said, "but this is something I've been sure of for a very long time."
"With all due respect," she said, "You are a 22 year old kid."
Apparently there was no respect due at all! None!
Before I left that appointment I asked her if there was anything else I should know. "If you're in a lot of pain, go to the emergency room. And in the future, try for at least six months to get pregnant before you see a fertility specialist."
Motherhood is a strange and beautiful book, and I'd heard good things about it before I read it, but to tell you the truth I picked it up because I don't understand how one can be ambivalent about having kids. The idea of really, really, really wanting them is foreign to me, of course, but I at least recognize the certainty and the desire. Thereisdesire in what I want, too, the inverse desire – I desire notto have children. I still don't fully understand such ambivalence, and I probably won't, but what became obvious to me is that Sheila is open to imagining so many different futures for herself, and seems OK with leaving behind a few ex-lives. And in many ways I think my failure to understand the ambivalence is a failure of imagination – without meaning to sound too dark, it's not that I can't picture more than one future for myself, it's that I don't really picture any futures at all. I know what I don't want, but my brain doesn't really fill in any details around that.
Then I think,Are you really sitting here trying to understand ambivalence?
Then I think, What does it matter whether or not you understand?
The Folded Clock, likeAutoportraitlast week, feels more like what I need thanInsomnia does at the moment, or at least what I am more capable of. I picked it up one day while I was working because I realized I didn't have Insomnia on me as I thought I did, andThe Folded Clockswas listed as a comp title, and also I seem to be making my way through much of the publicly-lauded literature of 2015 anyway, so why buck the trend? It's a series of diary entries from two or so years of Julavits's life, and they're not in chronological order, or really any order (except maybe the one that reads the best?). And thank god – I can't focus on a narrative! I can't be expected to read more than three pages at a time!
There's a funny sort of parallel with the way the entries seem, in some ways, unmoored from time. In insomnia I feel sometimes like I exist outside of time, and everything becomes blurred together and episodic instead of narrative. That's part of the problem with my reading this week, though – the structure ofThe Folded Clock makes me think of insomnia and then I feel so, so tired, and then I put the book down and stare at a wall. It's possible I would enjoy it more if I wasn't reading it so badly, or if I weren't reading it after Motherhood, which is a tough one to follow.
In the spirit of Motherhood I will pull a tarot card for you this week – hold on.
You got the Star!
It's mostly a card of inner peace. It's not that you've necessarily gotten everything figured out, but – how do I put it? When I'm home in New Jersey I tend to feel particularly worried about the image I have of my future, which is, as we've touched upon, not really an image at all but more a sort of "footage not found" screen. But when I think about the stars and the cosmos and the universe, I remember how utterly insignificant I am, how meaningless every endeavor is, and that in the long run it doesn't matter how bad I fuck my life up. We are all going to be dead soon enough.
That's my idea of inner peace, apparently. Maybe ignore that and instead just make sure to take a look at the stars at some point this week.
your friend,
Smalls
P.S. I'm wondering if it's annoying if I talk about books that don't come out for quite a while? Like, Insomnia isn't out until November. Is that rude? Am I building hype? Do you not care? Let me know if you have strong feelings about this.
*I'm not really sure I'm allowed to post this quote without permission! Please don't put me in book jail, Counterpoint!