Sleep
It has been so elusive that I thought I'd better beckon it sweetly in the hopes that it might come back and cuddle me a little bit, again. When it does precipitate down onto my mind it does so with a heaviness that is crushing, almost brutal, and vanishes almost the instant it settles itself; some noise - real, imagined or otherwise, always seems to prompt its unfortunate retreat.
The dreams are growing thick and syruppy, I keep getting stuck in them and have the feeling of being pulled apart slowly, sickly, and with much ooze slopping out at the wounds. It gets enveloping, an honest to goodness wet blanket, drenched and dredged, dragged to the bottom of slumber and left there, dreamless for a moment, until an avalanche of dailiness and its dreaded minutiae descends rapidly atop until the pile is too heavy to lift. It works like this: before falling asleep the mind will focus on a single pinpoint of thought - a word: "Minutiae" for example. Small, trifles. It repeats, bouncing off the walls of a strangely emptied brain: small, trifles, small trifles. Which inverts itself: smaller, tiny little things. Moments that are minute, life distilled. Trifles, they hardly matter - the brain has picked its word and is fixated and will not let go of it. Eventually the lids grow heavy and the eyes pull their little covers back, but the word won't stop it's bouncing! Trifles, petty details. Maybe sometimes though they are pretty details. No, if they are a true trifle then they are never pretty. They are always small. Smallness is imperative. Minutiae, my new shh uh. My, new! Shhh, uh. This is how the word unfolds. It is very annoying. Eventually the mind sinks its stupid hooks into the meat of it: the dribbling drivel spat from the mouth of the minute. Finally, a nice sentence, or part of one, wrought from the dead-seed of a single word: a relief despite it's tininess. Through the gauze of the day, the haze and din of a lived-through afternoon, perhaps even the mellow delight of the evening, through all of this sleep breaks. Through the dead tired, and even just the dead and the just very tired, when minute after minute has piled on so many pebbles of minutiae, sleep comes. Sleep, with its trifles carried over from the day, with its words and sounds, sleep - finally and smally. The tiniest parts of a fingerprint.
Sleep enters.
The S slips into the lilting L before passing into the repeated EE only to be abruptly clipped by the P. The sounds made within the inner of the word are lulling from start to finish, mirroring the physical thing that the word represents. The tongue remains dormant through the S allowing for breath to pass through entirely unnoticed (asleep) only to jar the tongue into movement (halfsleep) before finally crashing into reality with movements of lips and tongue slumping out the P sound (awake, now.) The curling shape of the S is yet again mimicked in a physical way by the body when deep in the throes of slumber, see it curl and bend at the waist then bend again at the jointed knees so that the feet circle inward as the arms grasp outward in a sort of coiled shape, while the EE could possibly resemble the form of two bodies spooning. When handwritten, the repeated Es resemble the recurrence of dreams: two in a row seemingly identical yet when looking closer, and closer still, one sees slight differences between each of the Es. This one is top heavy while that one is a bit short. With the capital S, lowering down to the L, before lowering still for the two Es, only to drop off the bottom of the line with the P -- again, a portrait of sleep can be seen: the waking mind represented by the S, tall and awake, then traveling downward along the spine of the word before dropping off at the P, with its downward pointing tail. Sleep. A word that mimics its definition.
The photo above, as unremarkable as might seem, is the last real vision that the eyes have before falling to sleep in a supine position, on my couch. The head is tilted slightly, aided by the softness of a pillow or two, so that it is not pointed directly at the ceiling following a perfectly vertical axis but is angled down just so as to provide a bit of a view out the window and of the corner of the room. This is my favorite corner of the apartment, it has the most angles, and is where several gradations of shadow appear throughout the day and night thus creating a visually impactful sight. The window terminates on the left, the wall folds inward, then outward then inward again making a step turned on its side. Around the room is a small crown moulding, and the uppermost part of the walls turn to curves and become the ceiling - this transition is important: right angles have deeply psychological effects on the mind and to be in a space containing too many of them causes a streak of panic in a person and he/she begins to feel too boxed in, too jailed. The curved transition, as opposed to the usual 90degree one, provides the eye a nice bit of relief as it blends and vanishes completely along the vertical face and becomes the horizontal face. The concave cove feels more like arms that are spread in the gesture known as a "hug" as opposed to the rigid armed "grab", they embrace rather than repel. I know, it is only a small architectural detail, but when one relies so heavily on sleep one must also rely very heavily on the surroundings that melt away into that sleep. The walls do melt into the ceiling and the lack of a jarring break (where the one becomes the other) is soothing in a purposful way. The detail on the ceiling, the "garland" crossed with Xs, provides another perfect tool to the insomniac: something to count. In the almost 8 years I have inhabited this space, I would be lying if I said I hadn't counted each and every leaf on that garland-detailing; yes, I have, more times than I care to admit (for some reason I almost wish I never counted them, because that means I have no trouble sleeping) and I can even embarrassingly state the exact number of either individual leafs, amount of Xs crossing them, and even how many flaws in the paint there are. Yes, the knowledge may stem from a pretty sever problem (at times) but in the end I am happier because of it: I know this space more intimately because of it. I can also report on the exact number of tiles that line the walls of my bathroom, but that is for another entry entirely. The cut-paper belongs to a friend named Leslie Kulesh, who I do need to write a biography about soon (and it has been germinating in the dirt of my mind for about a month, growing in some aspects but still not enough to properly pin down just yet,) it is a quick and economic wall-covering that happens to look pleasing to the eye as well. The bags hanging from the hooks: the yellow one is mine and has been on my back, cinched tight to my chest, since the day I got it while the green one is mostly for keepsake purposes as it belongs to a friend who left it in the apartment several years ago and has not yet been reclaimed. While the wall-to-ceiling transition aids in the smooth metamorphoses from wake-to-sleep, the bags are helpful in toting across that border some imagined scenes. Yes, for me and me alone, both of those bags hold inside of them a hefty boon of good times that are useful when trying to train one's mind on a single "nice thought" before going off to sleep - but I wonder, though, what someone else sleeping on that couch might stuff into those bags before crossing that border. Even for me, sometimes, as much as I try to pack my bags with smiley-things, laughy-things, loving-things, an ample portion of minutiae manages to bleed its way in. Sleep, sleep, come on, please come.
(14Dec2008, Sunday night between hail and rain and thinking of this first piece for this place, and rearranging it slightly.)
