The Shapeless Unease Read online

For the theory as a whole to be wrong, so many of its component observations would have to be wrong. In the end, it makes far less sense to disbelieve it than to believe it. In the end you would have to resort to irrational thought to maintain a lack of belief in the objectivity of physical matter. You’d have to thwart the scientific process which has seen and proven the existence of all those building blocks that bring matter into being. Wide-eyed with wonder though science is, it is wonder at those things it’s discovered, things it can barely believe itself, but which, like I said, it has more reason to believe than to disbelieve. Says my friend.

  Reason, I say. Always that word: reason.

  Reason, he says. Reason.

  Reason versus faith.

  Exactly, he says. Reason is the adherence to things that appear true by observation and experiment, not by a desire that they be true.

  Truth. Desire. Here is William James:

  Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other, what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives.

  And on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives. In the pursuit of truth, which comes from nothing more than a desire for truth, we fight it out. We think, says William James, that ‘there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other’. We think that the things we believe must be pointing, not just at something believed, but something believed because it is true. If all our beliefs point in the direction of the physical world being real, then we think it must be true, or we wouldn’t believe it. We have arrived at the belief using the tool of reason. Belief, reason, truth. The mind’s great trinity. So my friend thinks.

  Do I feel consoled? Has my friend consoled me with his belief in the monolith of reason? I don’t feel especially consoled. I’m wary of it. I can cling to the titanic of science no more than I can cling to the titanic of God. I don’t see much opposition between science and faith – isn’t science just another form of faith – the faith in reason? It struck me once that I can never be faithless, I am always putting my faith in something – be that agnosticism, atheism, violence, kindness, money, cynicism, writing, love, politics, compassion. Faith is a precondition for science, a precondition for everything. We must be willing to believe, else we wouldn’t, and we must look for things to believe in, else we’d never find.

  If a scientist tells me that light travels at 186,000 miles per second, I believe him because he believes it, and he believes it because he and other scientists have used experiments to verify the fact. But I have no way of measuring it for myself. If he tells me that, in theory, nothing can travel faster than light, I believe him. What else can I do? I can’t check for myself. I believe him because he and other scientists have used theory to falsify and verify the fact. And what has brought him to have trust in his theories and experiments? His faith in reason as the basis for scientific enquiry. William James again: Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

  Religion is faith in a deity, science is faith in reason. The more I look at the two, the less difference I see between them. The more the believer in science holds up reason as the arbiter of all things, the more that reason starts to look like a god being worshipped. Reason is a thing that proves only itself. If you use reason to work out what is valid, you’ll find that the only valid things are those you can reach by reason. These things we call ‘reasonable’. So what? If you use God as the measure of what is valid, you’ll find that the only valid things are those you can reach by God. These things we call ‘godly’. This tells you nothing more about things in themselves, only about your process of arriving at them.

  I think of my friend in Tennessee and the grounded way she walks, her feet slightly turned out, her runner’s legs tanned and strong, and she is certain. She has what James calls ‘a believing attitude’. God is like a lover to her, with all the passion, devotion and concern a lover provides, and an almost erotic power of presence. She is his. No matter how her mind strays she will always be his; she was born to be and will die being. When I lie in bed and feel the mattress and try to convince myself that the ground is rising up to meet me and that there’s earth into which my roots go and that it’s nothing, this hysteria which seems to spiral like an electric charge from the top of my head is nothing, then I want only to throw myself into some passionate and immovable belief, and I cannot.

  And as the night struggles on one hour after another and I’m awake to see them all, awake and exhausted, I crave that feeling you get just before you go to sleep, when everything gives in. The fight ends. The fight of our thinking lives. Something bigger and stranger than yourself takes hold. Rest awaits. The relentless ticking clock of your conscious awareness prepares to be smothered, your limbs prepare to go slack, the things that hurt will stop hurting, the whole frenetic circus of it all is about to collapse. There’s nothing for you to do, or work out. The priests and the scientists are made equal. They are made equal with the wild boar and the bat. There’s nothing for you to assign your faith to but this one inevitable act of animal grace that is yours for the taking.

  All the scientists in the world are looking for the beautiful order and logic that opens up in that silken path towards sleep. All the religions in the world were invented to express that mercy and grace that comes in the moments before we close our eyes, and go under.

  The insomniac is taking a swim.

  She has a passable front crawl; it could be better but it gets her from end to end.

  July. The sun is strung up near the top of the sky and blasts unEnglishly on a yellow meadow and a lake. The meadow grass is pierced with incisions intended for drainage – hard to believe when there’s a drought and there doesn’t appear to be a drop of water in the world. From above, even the lake doesn’t seem wet. With the sun directly above it shines like a medal. And the parched grass is an old tatami mat, the drainage incisions are stitches in its fabric.

  The insomniac is on drugs. A sedating antidepressant has brought her two nights of good sleep in a row and she’s up, out, into the sun, swimming in a small lake in a meadow in Wiltshire. The sleep is normal, not the blunt anaesthetised dreamless coffin-like oblivion of sleeping pills, but a spacious sleep with dreams, and she’s waking up bright, with bright thoughts, and energy that reminds her of how she was before.

  Night three, night four, night five, she sleeps. She’s there every day at the lake, a tiny speck from up here, going from jetty to jetty with propelling arms. One-two-three-four-breathe, one-two-three-four-breathe. There are so many layers of space between us and her, and all of that space is alive. Up here there’s thin crisp air, and down a bit there’s a cloud, just one, just hanging. Below that the birds, which are as big as her from this perspective – buzzards, pigeons, crows, magpies, swifts, all swimming at their own depths in the sky. Then there are the insects – the gnats, the midges, the mayflies, the banded demoiselles, the emperor dragonflies, the stone-flies, the mosquitoes, the net-wings. A swift plummets and plucks one off the water’s surface just a foot in front of her windmilling right arm.

  Everywhere, dragonflies, swifts. Dipping about in the air. Below the surface there are water fleas and nematodes and giant water bugs and scuds. Some small fish and tiny crustaceans. Even with goggles the insomniac can’t see any of this through the water, which is the amber of brewed tea that’s been lightly milked. She stops mid-lake to float on her back and look up at the dragonflies and swifts and magpies and buzzards and can find no words for how extraordinary the world is and how inexplicable and gracious is life; she can barely find the thoughts for it. From up here she’s like a seed-head that’s been wind scattered – pale, insubstantial, resilient and journeying. She goes from one end and back
to the next, and then a lap around the three buoys before she gets out and sits on the bank. There’s clay on her feet, it’s good sculptable clay. The breeze rustling the dry leaves, and the distant clink and chatter from the café across the meadow and plenty of heat in the sun and so much of the day left. No river shiver, no lake shake. So warm, nothing to fight or overcome.

  Night six, she sleeps, night seven too. She comes swimming. This is how the world used to feel, like there’s space between her joints, like her thoughts aren’t metal grinding against metal, like it isn’t an effort to breathe; this clarity of mind and this lessening of fear and this feeling of possibility again. Like losing a disability, finding that you can walk again all of a sudden, or see again. Night eight, night nine, night ten.

  In truth, the sleep doesn’t come so convincingly now – a slight tolerance to the sedative already – but it comes and it’s enough; she’s used to very little and can make do. She must come swimming while she can and she must ride her bike and get on with work and get her mind straight while she can. We see her sometimes over in the café with a notebook, writing, writing. Night eleven comes, and nights twelve and thirteen.

  She’s swimming up and down. She can’t help but see herself as if from above, because the thought is that there is something up there waiting to fall. The thought has been there since she began taking the drugs. What if they stop working? It’s hard to trust in something so external and so apparently miraculous. She was brought up never to trust in drugs. Look outside yourself and you will fail. The cure for all illness is found in yourself. Have a cold? Meditate! Have a bladder infection? Meditate! Have cancer? Meditate! Have a broken heart? Meditate! Up and down and then around the buoys, and swim as much as you can, she thinks, swim swim swim while you can.

  Night fourteen is patchy; sleep comes but only after hours, and is gauzy. Night fifteen is the same. Never mind, keep going, it only has to last long enough to regain some trust and diffuse the terror. Every night is a small victory. Night sixteen there’s little sleep and a panic attack. Never mind. Little sleep is still some sleep. She stops cycling to the lake and drives instead. As long as she can get in that water, which is the place of all freedoms and the antithesis of the dead dark night. She only has to hang on for long enough to outpace this. However fast the sedatives wear off, she’ll gain strength and hope faster. Then she won’t need the sedatives anyway.

  From that imagined high vantage point, she’s a swimming thing that’s smaller than the buzzards, and she wonders if she could be small enough to go unnoticed by the watcher. Or anyway, to not be worthwhile quarry. There is that line in Tess of the d’Urbervilles about the gods having finished their sport with Tess; maybe they’ve finished their sport with her too? She doesn’t really know what the gods are; surely not malevolent beings, perhaps just an aggregation of forces – inner and outer – that have, over time, come to work against her. Bad luck? Why is it that bad luck feels so much like failure? Never mind, swim up there to that buoy and around the buoys and back, one-two-three-four-breathe, repeat.

  Night seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty; the sleepiness that used to come so quickly when she took the drug, and then came less quickly, now doesn’t come at all. Zero-sleep nights are back, along with the routine panic. That levity in her limbs is gone and her joints feel clamped and sore and her head is a swarm of wasps. Keep swimming. It doesn’t take much to get your head under water and move your arms and you must keep going. Don’t give up on life. Affirm it. The dragonflies and swifts. Lie on your back and look up at them charging around. Glorious life, look at its speed and purpose, bombproof and beautiful.

  From above, this pale starfished figure is like a piece of bait. She turns onto her front and crawls slowly end to end. It’s brightish today but less hot and the water is darker and wind-chopped. There’s panic between breaths and an illogical sense of being out at sea and alone and in danger. Stupid, there’s no danger, it’s just a lake in a meadow, she could stop swimming and float in half a minute to the edge. Stupid. But the sky is falling in. But it isn’t falling in. She does another lap to prove how scared she isn’t, and tells herself how exhilarating! how brilliant! paradise! when she comes up for breath. The breath a little snatched.

  She thinks that we’re watching her from above. We’re not. We don’t exist. She thinks there’s an axe waiting to fall and that we wield it, but we’ve never seen an axe nor would we have any means of wielding one, since we don’t exist. She gets out of the lake and dries off and feels the renewal of this pressure on her head, neck and shoulders which is the weight of whatever force has decided to crush her. Myself, she thinks. I am crushing myself. My doing. No heavenly forces. Any normal person can sleep; basic human function, not the work of gods. But that doesn’t alleviate the pressure on her head, neck and shoulders, it only introduces a new pressure into her chest.

  Never mind. Come back tomorrow. Try again. Night twenty-one, a little sleep, night twenty-two, zero sleep. The unbuffered days have piled on top of each other, her heart tries to beat itself free. Vague pain in kidneys. Walking across the hot meadow, a rapid shadow above makes her flinch and she covers her head – a buzzard flying at her. When she looks up there’s no buzzard anywhere. She thinks we’re out to get her, us above, eyeing her as prey. At the same time she knows we don’t exist. The chase and the defeat feel all the more crushing for being perpetrated by something non-existent. Never mind, swim. Head under water into the cool milky tea, up to the far buoy and round and back. From above she looks like one of those wind-up toys for children. She feels sorry for herself and cross at herself for feeling sorry for herself. There are still the dragonflies and swifts, and on the rushes and grasses by the bank there are countless blue damselflies; the swifts have come from Africa to be here. Someone’s dog is flying along the lakeside, its feet not appearing to touch the ground.

  Night twenty-three, night twenty-four. The world gets drier and drier. Every time she goes back to the lake she wonders if it’ll still be there. Everything screams for rain. And yet the lake awaits, always awaits in its little meadow. Swim, swim, regardless. It doesn’t take much to mill your arms and rock your body and kick your feet, the water does the hardest part. Head under, one-two-three-four-breathe.

  I haven’t slept since Sunday night, I say.

  I say this only after I have managed to dig my head out of my hands where it fell the moment I sat down. I have never cried in front of a doctor before, but there she was, straight backed, prim and discouraging. And I, unslept since Sunday night. Today is Friday. I can think of nothing but sleep. I would kill somebody if it meant I could have theirs.

  This is a surprise, she said, and I sat and cried. Is it a surprise? I wanted to ask. She meant: you were only here on Monday. With her blessing, I’ve taken myself off the sedating antidepressants given that I’m not depressed (sleep-deprived, desperate, mad, but not depressed) and they’re not sedating me any more. Since then, Monday, I haven’t slept. Four nights in a row without sleep. I have looked on the internet to see if rebound insomnia is an effect of coming off them, which it is. The advice is to do it gradually, not at once. That wasn’t her advice. Thus, here I am, once again a child with folded hands. This time a child in tears.

  I need some sleeping pills, I say. She stares at me as if my tears have appalled her, or somehow confused her. Please, I say. Instantly I regret this because now the power is with her; now my night’s sleep is a favour she can grant. And yet it is. And if it would help to fall at her feet and supplicate myself, I would.

  Her face is stony, her demeanour sphinx-like. She hands me a prescription of fourteen pills; she offers no advice, no support. I take the prescription from her and leave without a word.

  There’s a metaphor I heard a long time ago when I was a philosophy student: an actress is on stage in a theatre when she sees a fire in the wings. She tells the audience there’s a fire and that they must get out. The audience thinks this is part of the play and they ignore her instruction
. The more animated and urgent she becomes, the more delighted they are by her passionate and brilliant acting. There’s nothing she can do to speak beyond her role as an actress; every attempt only affirms the role.

  I think this metaphor was part of a feminism course, but its wider resonance has never left me. Its relevance to life often applies. Here and now, in the eyes of the doctor, I am just neurotic and self-obsessed. The more I do to be listened to as a human being, the more I strengthen my role as neurotic and self-obsessed. The less she listens to me the more I tell or show her that I’m suffering. The more I tell or show her I’m suffering the more she thinks I am neurotic and self-obsessed. Each time, my role is reinforced and my role overrides my humanity. I become less human in her eyes. I am a type. I annoy her and waste her time, because all I need to do is sleep and I’m cured, whereas she has patients with real illnesses that can’t be cured, certainly not with sleep.

  No part of me wants to go to the doctor. I’ve come to dread it, to feel in it an absolute humiliation. I see her about insomnia as seldom as I can and when I go it is always for something specific; a prescription or, as before, a blood test. I know there’s nothing in general a doctor can do. This time, almost four months after the last visit – a whole year now of having insomnia – I’ve come to ask for another blood test because I’ve seen a nutritionist who wants to check for any deficiencies, any thyroid problems, anything that might be contributing to my lack of sleep. The nutritionist is surprised that these tests haven’t been run before. There’s every chance that the tests will find nothing, but then at least I’ll know. So I go in. I shake off the supplicant; a business transaction. I won’t prevail on her for compassion or for understanding, I’ll simply ask her for something practical she can give.

  I wondered if it would be possible to have another blood test, I say. Everything I read about insomnia says you should rule out any underlying medical cause, and that hasn’t been done. I know it’s a long shot, but it would help me. Just to eliminate other causes would help me.