Another of his pro-insomnia heroes was Marcel Proust (what would’ve become of Marcel in the days of Twitter and selfies? Would he ever have written anything or would he have limited himself to telling what he had to tell in short sentences and little photographs and to wasting time spying on the profil social of his acquaintances?), who suggested that “a little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness” and who accused all those who, night after night, let themselves fall unconscious and like a ton of lead into their beds, of not daring to daydream of great discoveries or small observations.
But it was clear to him that those two—the Frenchman and the Russian—were exceptional beings whose experience was nontransferable. Two Leonardos of writing. The cork panels lining the walls of Proust’s bedroom to isolate him from the outside world that he put into writing were, in his case, the cork panels lining the walls of his brain into which ideas no longer entered. And the resplendent and inspiring butterflies of Nabokov were the opaque and bumbling blowflies buzzing around behind the half-closed curtains of his eyelids. According to Plato (all he could do now was quote and quote and quote), “when the eyelids, which the gods invented for the preservation of sight, are closed, they keep in the internal fire; and the power of the fire diffuses and equalizes the inward motions … But when night comes on and the external and kindred fire departs, then the stream of vision is cut off; for going forth to an unlike element it is changed and extinguished … The eye no longer sees, and we feel disposed to sleep … sleep comes over us scarce disturbed by dreams; but where the greater motions still remain, of whatever nature and in whatever locality, they engender corresponding visions in dreams, which are remembered by us when we are awake and in the external world.”
All that come to him now are embryos of plots and aborted storylines: nothing but a character’s style of dress that will never be his own, just the title of a never-filmed movie to be shown in a film club in some story, ever-ready enumerative lists never settling for the white monotony of sheep when they could count and recount so many other things of so many colors: waking lists that kept him from sleep until it was already too late for him or too early for the rest of the world. Or distant memories, tears in the rain (now, yes, he was quoting it correctly; for he’d already quoted it incorrectly) or threads of a mind that was going. Then he felt a little like HAL 9000, a little like Nexus 6. A sensitive and lyrical machine. An ingenious calculator, not counting to exhaust himself with an answer, but enumerating and adding figures as a way to remain alert in an attempt to systematize the world. In the darkness, recounting random verses or evoking far off landscapes that had taken on the tenuous quality of a scene or of a paragraph read or witnessed by a person he no longer was. By person who, yes, he’d once been, but whose DNA had been modified by time and by the more or less failed act of remembering and (he already thought it and already conjugated that verb; nothing more repetitive than insomnia) unmaking memory. An act that had nothing to do with that other verbal act: memorizing.
An example to ponder and bleat and add now: Uncle Hey Walrus shouting “As I’m the black sheep of the family, I count sheep black as night to fall asleep! Goo Goo G’Joob!”
Uncle Hey Walrus. The voice of Uncle Hey Walrus. Uncle Hey Walrus whispering “I never gave you my pillow …” and “… and I will sing a lullaby,” Uncle Hey Walrus asking and bellowing “Oh yeah … All right … Are you gonna be in my dreams … tonight?”
And, ah, even dreaming of Uncle Hey Walrus would be better than thinking of Uncle Hey Walrus while awake …
† Uncle Hey Walrus’s many notebooks / Incorporating them as appended material. Uncle Hey Walrus’s journal. His notes and sketches as the basis for a novella about Uncle Hey Walrus’s stay at Apple on Abbey Road to be titled The Beatle (like that, with the s crossed out, singularizing the plural), telling of his trip to London and his nights and days in the life among The Beatles, who appear in his pages first as Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr; later as John, Paul, George, and Ringo; and finally as J., P., G., and R. As if they were dissolving in his mind as they are disintegrating as a band. Telegraphic prose but a lot of information to make use of, to cannibalize. And again: his nutritious family had for him always turned out to be exceedingly rich in protein, painfully entertaining. And he’d always counted on that pain that was always so easy for him to chew up and digest.
There’s a lot of material there.
There are many guest stars.
At one point, Pink Floyd appears, to record in one of the Abbey Road studios.
They invite Uncle Hey Walrus to bark on their album.
† Songs by The Beatles that drive Uncle Hey Walrus crazy (and from which his alias comes).
The free stream of (un)consciousness of “I Am the Walrus”: childish lines from J.’s childhood (that candidly uncouth “umpa, umpa, stick it up your jumpa” ascended and ascending into a Sioux-Tibetan chant), Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and J.’s desire to confuse and repel and also feed the compulsive and pathological interpreters of songs. But, in truth, it’s the most lysergic and playful protest song ever composed, featuring a J. who is already beginning to throw back his head and release his primal scream.
The same thing with “Hey Bulldog,” with its winks at T. S. Eliot and already veiled accusations from J. to P. Walrus barks and dog barks and Uncle Hey Walrus barking when he hears them and winding up in an insane asylum (“family tradition,” comments Penelope) the day The Beatles break up and—highs and lows and highs and lows—escaping it forever the night John Lennon is assassinated.
And this is true though it seems a lie: at a birthday party, when he’s about ten years old, Uncle Hey Walrus is hypnotized by one of the guests and made to run through the most obvious routine of the (in)voluntary participant in the performance, responding to that “for my next trick, I’ll need a volunteer.” And so, he orders little Uncle Hey Walrus to keep his hand raised, convinces him that it’s very hot (and he starts to strip off his clothes to the panic and delight of his little girl friends), makes him believe he’s a dog. And just then, the hypnotist suffers a heart attack and dies right there in front of everyone. And he never dehypnotizes the little Uncle Hey Walrus, who only comes out of the trance with the force of three or four or five or six slaps from his father. But, in short order, little Uncle Hey Walrus realizes that somewhere in his mind, he’s still a dog: fits of moon howling, lifting a leg to piss on a tree, lapping at his food. And, most disconcerting of all: already an adolescent, Uncle Hey Walrus loses his mind every time he listens to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, at the end, after “A Day in the Life.” And soon thereafter, reading an interview with P., the mystery is explained: The Beatles slipped a 15-kilocycle sound, only audible to dogs, into that song. And every time he hears it, Uncle Hey Walrus gets down on all fours (hands and knees) and begins to spin around, as if trying to bite an invisible tail, when it reaches that part of the album (and those who know him stop him and remove the LP from the record player before that drawn-out note of multiple funereal pianos ends, when the last song has concluded).
Uncle Hey Walrus travels to London and stands guard in front of the door of Abbey Road Studios and one morning intercepts P. and tells him his story and P. laughs a lot and feels somewhat responsible and offers him a job doing “something.”
And so it was that Uncle Hey Walrus became The Beatles’ mascot.
(A joke, whose wordplay—dog in place of God—doesn’t translate into Spanish, included in a novel by that same author who had told him that other joke—which he was able to translate, in several ways—about the past and the present and the future walking into a bar: “what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic? … You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there’s a dog.”)
† Holy relics that Uncle Hey Walrus brought back (stole?) from the altars of Apple. The or
iginal manuscripts of “I’m Only Sleeping” (handwritten by J. on the back of a mail receipt informing him he owes twelve pounds for a radio/telephone for his Rolls-Royce) and “I’m So Tired,” with more prolix writing and which lacks the “stupid git” line. Both of them folded in quarters (“like the painting of the Brontës that Branwell painted and erased himself from and that they found in the upper reaches of his wardrobe,” commented Penelope) under Uncle Hey Walrus’s bed, on top of which rested the dead body of Uncle Hey Walrus—heart broken over The Beatles breakup and the assassination of one of them—when he finally realized all you need is love, but money can’t buy it.
† Another example: a while back now, he’d opted for counting beds, which, in a way, have about them a kind of onomatopoeic bleating (baaaaah …): of the shrieks sheep release as they’re sheared and from whose wool are woven the sometimes light and almost always stifling blankets of the past you hide under, with a small flashlight, to read, while rewriting, the pages of the novel of your life.
The bed is always the scene of the crime, of the crimes.
You were born there. You reproduce there. You die (if you’re lucky and after catching a glimpse in one corner of the room the hallucination of a “horrible big fat woman dressed in black,” or of that hallucinatory “distinguished thing,” or of “a certain butterfly already on the wing,” or of an indefinite “What’s that? Does my face look strange?”: Proust, James, Nabokov, Stevenson) there.
There—like he is now—you are, alone and staring at the ceiling. Often the ceilings over hospitable yet restless hotel beds (even if it’s one of those luxury hotels that includes a menu of pillows of varying taste and texture) where you never sleep all that well. Because it’s been discovered, based on neurological readings, that, between unfamiliar sheets, the left hemisphere remains alert and atavistic in the face of the unknown.
There, if possible, you await sleep, lying on your side (because they claim that this position helps to frighten off neurodegenerative diseases) in the fetal position from which, they recommend, we should stretch ourselves out forcefully and enthusiastically when we rise, so our day expands with health and doesn’t stagnate in a passive and embryonic and even aborted attitude.
There you end up understanding that it’s far healthier and better to sleep alone than in more or less good or bad company (the statistics reveal men sleep better with company and women sleep better alone).
And, in the end, there you lie, thinking of being born and of multiplying yourself and (Exit King, king-sized bed) and of dying, already almost outside of space and time; like Lear on that bed in the twilight of midday after dining in the morning.
It’s no coincidence that the majority of people, when asked how they would like to die, answer: “In my sleep.” In bed. A living death like the last and oh so lucid dream. A final dose of Dimethyltryptamine (note the participle phonetically equivalent to “trip” in the middle of the name) stored in the pineal gland, provoking that ultimate vertigo of “your whole life passing before your eyes in a matter of seconds” or of “opening the third eye” to a view of the Great Beyond. A summary of publications with no (to be continued …), maybe dreaming you die and never wake up to say, “It was all just a dream.” If the orgasm is le petite mort, then death is the eternal sleep, the rest in peace, the end of the war. That devout “If I die before I wake …” that many take for a fearful prayer is, in truth, an expression of desire: that death be a dream and dreams be death and goodnight for the last time.
† Death. Death—the act of putting into practice all that theory, memorized throughout a whole life of waiting around for that final exam—that lasts barely a second. Death like a dark punch-line to a blackly-humorous and sad joke. Death like an unfinished assignment that always gets turned in and always receives a passing grade. Death like an easy final exam. Impossible to give the wrong answer to the question. The question is “What’s going to happen to me?” and the answer is “Precisely this.” And on to something else and next in line. And yet, it’s so easy to fail the lesson of how to anticipate and bear the idea of your death. A death that can ask at any moment for you to come up front, though you haven’t raised your hand and you’re retracting your head between your shoulders, like a turtle, begging not to be chosen. A way to find consolation and some peace (never enough) is to remember that opening of Nabokov’s in Speak, Memory: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is headed for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).” And so, facing this final abyss, saying to ourselves we were already there, at the beginning of everything, in an initial abyss. Repeating to ourselves that we were already dead, that we’re returning to the place where we came from, and that our passage here has been but that of a tightrope walker on a high wire. (Having been born dead should be of some added utility in all of this.)
† When you’re young, death always comes from far away, from outside, from on high: like that meteor that, they say, wiped out the dinosaurs and almost all other life on the planet, but allowed for the appearance of the evolutionary mechanism that would culminate in the human being (though it’s always preferable to imagine and rewrite big reptiles and humans coexisting and killing one another, like in some kind of primitive theme park, because that keeps it all much more entertaining and turns out to be much more interesting). Anyway, at the beginning of our lives, death is always something that happens to others. And every so often, it happens to those young people who, with perspective, when everything has been consummated and they’ve been consumed, are remembered in a grave voice and saying things like “There was something in them that made you think they wouldn’t live that long … Like a kind of sadness … Like a melancholy not for what they had lived, but for what they would never live.” On the other hand, when you’re no longer young (when you start to be seen by newer and carnivorous specimens of boys and girls as a dinosaur that can only feed off of bland herbs) death seems to burst forth from the insides of the Earth. Death is like the fiery yawn of a volcano, death is the earthquake of tossing and turning in bed, awake and alert, knowing half of your life has already slipped away and all that’s left in front of you are shudders, shaking, the incessant aftershocks of bad news.
Here comes another one.
† While romantic love helps you believe the lie that you’re immortal, because you need to and do convince yourself that love will last forever, the truth of constant and eternal love for your children produces the paradox of all the time thinking you might die at any moment. (Note: there’re no beings more aware of time and its passing than pregnant women or the dying.)
† The terrible paradox that, as less and less time is left in life, the days pass more and more quickly; and that, when we’re children and we have everything in front of us, time seems to crawl, slowly, or to waste its own time, lying on its back and looking up at the tempera painting of the lights and shadows dancing across on the ceiling. There’s—as for almost everything—a more or less scientific explanation for the phenomenon. What slows down or speeds up time, they say, is either lack or excess of experience. During childhood, everything is new, everything requires analysis and study and assimilation. When you pay more attention to something, the brain works more and annuls and slows down everything around us to prevent distractions. Thus the occasional zombie-Zen focus of some children. As we grow up, things surprise us less, situations repeat, and—with the exception of those catastrophes that freeze us where we stand or pin us to the ground like the electrified nail of a lightning bolt—events precipitate more automatically. And we do things almost without noticing what we’re doing, including making declarations of the “I love you” or the “I’m going home” variety.
† The time of children—for whom the past is so brief and the future so immense—is the time of pure present. This
is the time that some old people return to (being pushed around in little chairs with wheels once again, crying at the slightest provocation, uttering words incomprehensible to everyone, and having true difficulty controlling their bodily functions) knowing that the future is no longer inviting them to its party. And that the celebrations that the past puts on are attended by ever more dead people or the memory of too many others that it’s better not to think about it. And so, stay and recover, one last time, an absolute now. A day by day and a night by night. A don’t make too many plans for tomorrow because you never know and, so, sleep less and never dream again.
† Suddenly understood, just once, watching The Time Machine on television with Penelope’s son: the time machine has already been invented. The machine that makes you go back to the future or into the past. The time machine is called Son.
† Models of Fathers/Writers:
The one who, in a house fire, rescues his son.
The one who, in a house fire, rescues the manuscript of his novel.
The one who, in a house fire, rescues his son, gets him to safety, and goes back into the flames to rescue the manuscript of his novel and dies in the attempt and leaves his son an orphan.
The Dreamed Part Page 40
