The Shapeless Unease Read online

  7.30 a.m.:

  Here is the pile of yesterday’s clothes on the floor. I pick them up. Or, if bedtime superstition corralled me into folding them roughly and stuffing them in the cupboard, then I take them out again and put them on the bed.

  I get into them in the precise reverse order I vacated them the night before: bra, top, jeans, jumper. Always, something unbearable about this process – the process of getting dressed in the morning after a night of no sleep, getting into the very clothes you took off the night before when you embarked on the ritual of bedtime as if such things as sleep applied to you any more. The pile of clothes is an open rebuke. I want to say they mock a lost innocence even though I know this makes no sense, but more and more I make this unconscious association between innocence and sleep.

  I suppose it isn’t a new association; it’s one I made myself when I wrote that opening line in my novel: I sleep the sleep of angels. It’s one we make from childhood – the sleeping infant, untroubled by conscience or the weight of the world, or in the fairytales that have people slumbering for a hundred years or rendered inert through the petty evil of others’ potions and spells; it’s there in Shakespeare when he writes, in Romeo and Juliet, ‘where care lodges, sleep will never lie’, and in that line in Macbeth: ‘innocent sleep, sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care’. ‘Balm of hurt minds’, he calls it. ‘Chief nourisher in life’s feast’. And there it is in death, the ultimate surrender and eternal rest, the dreamless sleep, the reconciliation, the forgiving annihilation, the letting go no matter what. No matter what your life was, there comes this final benediction.

  Sleep. Sleep. Like money, you only think about it when you have too little. Then you think about it all the time, and the less you have the more you think about it. It becomes the prism through which you see the world and nothing can exist except in relation to it.

  In yesterday’s clothes, I go outside and traipse up Solsbury Hill with overworked heart. This morning is grey but not dull. January light is unlike December’s, already it has the beginnings of that clarity and expanse that culminates in spring. The snowdrops are little acts of resistance. The dogwoods are wine-red. The sloe bushes turn the hedgerows pale blue. Beautiful, surprising blue; a colour reserved more for water and sky, you don’t see blue that much otherwise in nature. The hazel has a mass of ochre catkins hanging in busy vertical marks like they’ve been made by a typewriter. The branches of that tree there, whatever it is, are frilled with lichen that has its own inner sunlit luminosity. A dog tries to eat my scarf. The sun has just come up from behind the opposite hill and nudged open the grey, and now the hilltop is momentarily orange. Then gone again. I find myself crying.

  What is it we’re supposed to make of life? There is so much suffering – my own is a tiny stitch in a vast tapestry and many, many people suffer so much more than I have. What is it that keeps rising up in us even when we feel crushed? What keeps putting one foot in front of the other, or looks at the vague blue smudge of a sloe bush and is reminded of a truth that doesn’t even have a name? What is that? It isn’t me. It isn’t me that gets me up this hill each morning, but rather an irrepressibility that must be called life, life itself, a force working independently of my brain, body and mind. I don’t know what it is.

  I hoist myself up to sit on the trig point and look out over the city. I know and have walked every inch of that city. What is it that is leaning forward in me now, towards the world? There is a prayer flag tied to the branches of a tree just below me, like the prayer flag I have at home. What is it that dares to want to get back down this hill and go home and write? Or that wants to find out why things in nature are rarely blue. What is it that triggers the synapses that call to the muscles to work the body and keep going on? What is it that still insists on being happy? What is it that refuses the call of defeat?

  Cure for insomnia:

  Take a river, lake, ocean or other body of open water; a swimming pool will do if cold enough and outside. Fresh air is key; cold is key. Get in regardless and in any attire, unattired will do if privacy or not-caring allows. Get in. Jumping or diving is best but any approach suffices if the end result is in and so long as head is submerged soon and completely.

  Swim against, against, against. Swim into the waves or current if there are waves or current. Thus allowing the body of water to assert itself over your own body and to overwhelm the thinking mind, for it is the thinking mind that is so foregone with thought that it forgets there are things in the world which exist thoughtlessly. Be as often submerged in the thoughtless water as possible. If the river is the Avon, the Frome, the Wye, the Tarn, the Lot, the Aveyron, take time to look around at the thoughtless landscape: the banks, meadows, willows, boulders, limestone gorge, sandy river-beach, granite outcrop, conifered hillside. This is the present world and excludes all others. If a thought should emerge that is otherwise or otherwhere, head under, drown it.

  Swim with, with, with. Swim as the waves or currents go, if there are waves or currents. Thus allowing the body of water to assert itself as an upward and outward force, for it is the downward and inward nature of the thinking mind that brings on the recursions and iterations of sadness and madness. In this English or French river, or this little Wiltshire lake, or this great Atlantic, look about at the spacious air, noting that there is more space than there are things in space, and that the space gives no resistance or argument to anything in it. Nor does the light arbitrate between which things it should fall on and which things not. The light falls and space unfolds. If a thought should emerge that is overly small or turning inward, head under, drown it.

  The principle applies for the lake or pool, for when you kick and pull your arms in breaststroke or crawl, know the pushing back of the water in your hands and be aware that the water, even without tide or current, is working against you and braiding backwards. Feel the slight drag. Then, with the forward stroke, know that the water is rushing ahead of your hands. Feel the slight forwards lurch. For there is wisdom in knowing that we are sometimes the cause and influencer of our own currents and tides, which we make in otherwise still waters.

  In the lake feel the earthy softness of the water, and in the pool feel the bleached crispness, and in the lake see underwater how your hands emerge as ghost hands in the mill of the stroke, only to evaporate when the stroke recedes, while in the pool your hands are shocks of electric white which trail with the diamonds of sunlit bubbles. To the thinking mind, which sinks its anchor in the past and present where no anchor will fix, tell this: no things are fixed. Even your hands from day to day are not the same hands.

  This is the cure for insomnia: no things are fixed. Everything passes, this too. One day, when you’re done with it, it will lose its footing and fall away, and you’ll drop each night into sleep without knowing how you once found it impossible.

  A dream of a huge wave. Standing with my mother at the sea shore and a wave comes, and before we know it it’s the size of two houses on top of each other, so we cling on to one another’s arms and I open my mouth but no sound comes out.

  The wave arcs over us, and as it does its inner surfaces turn into metal panels, so that we are now effectively in a huge domed room which creaks under the weight of water, like a submarine. Its great rolling barrel shifts over us. When it passes we walk out the other side, dry, into open air.

  ___________________

  1 Question these factors as sufficient triggers for insomnia? Deaths not those of people intimate to her. Note patient has been prone in recent past to psychosomatic disorders and Over-reactive Disorder (OD).

  2 Consider Top of the Pops as aggravating factor?

  3 See Fleming, Feldman et al., ‘Proliferation of Pointless Mortality Projection Syndrome (PMPS): a clinico-pathological study of thanatophobia and mental health disorders’.

  4 Note: new manifestation of OD? Consider that patient’s fear of illness and death presents as a contradictory willing of illness and death through constant imagination.


  5 Refer to Smith, Carroll, Walsh et al., ‘Post Brexit Insomnia: the effect of direct democracy on circadian function and the thalamus’.

  6 This and every of Everett’s quotations here is from his paper ‘Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã’. If you find the Pirahã interesting, this, and his other writings, are very worth reading and so much better at illuminating the tribe’s culture and language than my attempts could ever be.