Nothing (19 page)

These hours in front of boxes in the thick throes. Feeling out the hours others in years before had learned through bodies or through waiting, herein expressed in digits fed into our house by the phone line, the diffuse glow upon my skin at all hours of the night. One learns not to see the clock there on the desktop. One learns to click in common ways, as if entering, through a browser, into a house of the familiar. More hours typed than hours spoken. Weaning off the social days of digging among mud in sandboxes and games invented, flooding into space where space was mine. Was (h)ours, in goofy rhizome, regardless of how blank, using the signifier board of signifier buttons for signifier characters that build up into signifier words, or fragments of signifier words, approximations of new breathing or sex sounds, signifier speech to express and/or induce arousal through the wires relayed betweens machines, creating hyperlink connections over long air to induce a state of ecstasy via things further signified, translated from the machine to the meat brain in a causal stream of messages relayed in code, producing, perhaps, at least an increase of blood tone at one or both ends, perhaps orgasm, and for sure a surplus of zoning time, spent staring into light and pixels, hardly moving, while also at once likely absorbing further cells, further veiled information splurged into the brain cracks for cementing and manifestation of the mind into a state, where, after all, you are still sitting, silent, surrounded by your air of a conduit of body. Every hour looking for more holes and more ways in, where herein I would sit around and seethe with something that came from inside the machine, humming light. Suddenly, the palpable world seemed less and less to need to exist. The replicators varied. There were new screen names in the rooms. Such strange energy through the wires unto nowhere in a room alone, surrounded. New fields of text or doors of photos wobbling to the surface where I clicked and clicked. Words, in silence, rained. The machine asked me nothing, unless I asked it to ask me. I played games and banged at buttons. The sleep rooms for many masses became that much more partitioned, pre-reserved off, less distinguishable between day and night. My home held count of stuff, full hard drives and gone floppies and replicated CD-Rs in piles denoting further hours I will not remember, encoded in digits left to digitally, and eventually physically, decay.

Even in thinking and speaking all of this—in the
awareness
—I am no different here today—if anything, I’m worse—as now, the hysteria learned into me in my leanings through all these days, my inborn dependency for online realms remains so thick that often in temporary disconnection I cannot sit still. How now when the signal goes down, even for minutes, even just a particular wanted site taking its time loading in my cache—and it is always the site you need in hiding—
need
—each breath seems heavy, and my blood will tingle and fill with slowly rising heat—very much in the same way not sleeping does, I’m sick to realize—or as if whole sections of my home have been blocked off, some precious objects locked in rooms abandoned—the nameless, endless sections, nowhere but in there—without idea of when or where it will come back, if this time in crashing the browser will be off forever and those reams of rooms forever crushed into code and fed and wanting on and on and into me, reminding every instant that I am not endless, really, in time or dimension—how I too am failing—and yet the endless unfurl of selves shaking me awake every night—the true center of that unsleeping being not that I truly have no clear horizon, have no center, but instead that the me inside my body is always immediately right there, my bulk of thoughts as blank as anybody’s, stuck on e-mail, on repetition—human—dying—the very inches of me any instant all compounded, aging every instant no matter how I eat or breathe or move my head, no matter where I go in this long waking of the machines or the daylight, whether I ever sleep or not again.

Fear of Space

“Insomnia is not defined as a simple negation of the natural phenomenon of sleep,” wrote Emmanuel Levinas. “Sleep is always on the verge of waking up; it communicates with wakefulness, all the while attempting to escape it.” Insomnia, then, is also not simply a continuation of the self as Same, but the waking presence of the Other, “coring out” the self in conscious periods, the same way the Other works to core out the self inside of sleeping, while active defenses are down. There is a constant inner pressure of a presence there inside the self, pressed against another, outer pressure of what the self is not, beyond. Hegel refers to the Other as the alienation inherent between bodies, wherein “each consciousness pursues the death of the other,” complicating the waking state as constant vying, wrangling, definition in contexts of spheres of light. For Sartre, the Other is “the indispensable mediator between myself and me,” a feeling of shame erupted from the image of the self as we “
appear
to the Other,” forming an at once symbiotic and friction-making system open on all ends, in all lights. Lacan goes on to credit this infernal feedback system as the site of creation of language and speaking, a generative engine carried in our blank: “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.” For Levinas, this haunting of the surrounding selves within our own singular waking creates a spiritual location, something beyond the nexus of flesh and thinking. Insomnia does not demand, within the self, a form, and therefore “signifies the absolutely noncontained (or the
infinite
).” It invokes “a soul that is ceaselessly woken up in its state, its
state of soul
.” Thus, through being forced to reckon with such forces that would normally be absorbed in dream or memory-removed ways, insomnia brings the self to face the coring selves and worms of Other there inside it, awakening, in distemper, something otherwise beyond.

Not sleeping most often does not feel transcendent, however—whatever stretch of spiritual lucidity might come over is most often accompanied by shades of aphasia, oppression, frustration, anger, ache. In the sled of not sleeping, colors lose their color, take on other colors, acquire sound. Senses learn their other senses, somewhat, if in a way complex logics in a dream might seem everyday—the intuitions or received impressions of that hidden space once pulled back into the human light again suddenly seeming far gone, or disappeared. Objects, in extended waking, seem to possess objects. Light is angry, licking your head. Communication struggles with its machinations—the speech and beeping of people and machines both softer and louder at the same time, communication’s multi-languages both more pulled open, brighter, and harder to hold in the mouth, invoke—
this is not my tongue
.

And yet, when charged with that idea of the other light, it is these selected spaces that can become the most terrifying when in certain lights they seem not quite what they were inside your mind—such as when being alone in a room you’ve lived in for years suddenly feels different when the light hits the walls a certain way or someone is knocking or there is sound inside the house you cannot name—or returning to a song, a place, a person you’d remembered fondly in such a way as how it’d shrouded in the mind, only to find it changed there, not yours, and even more malformed in presence in the image held in your idea of what it had once been. Fear drawn out of the familiar—instead of, say, a strange street—often feels that much more horrendous for it—
this is not the place I always thought it was
. The way these natured objects change (or do not change, but seem shifting inside, masked with faces you might mistake for home) in coalition with the self and its surrounding, developing a continual vortex of appropriation despite the appearance, on their outside, of permanence. Every moment up against every other moment that it is not, continually, forever—every moment never really held. The keyhole of the eye.

Meanwhile, in the body, when finally under, the effect of dreaming works in certain modes like experiencing any other kind of stress: heavy pressure on the chest, difficulty breathing, high blood pressure, a paralysis of limbs—and, in some, sleepwalking, tossing, chewing, automatism, gibberish—all mechanisms of simultaneous confinement and hyper-sound, unveiling repressed body. In some the terror might become apparent—aware of being trapped inside the self, and of being aware of being trapped, in certain angles, and of watching, from that body’s hold, as the trapping is going on—a meta-state much like that, perhaps, in claustro- and agoraphobias, or, on the other hand, the lure of autoerotic asphyxiation, smothering, and other, of a doom—of an overwhelming form impending—an approaching—other sound—new balloons. The body remains in throes desperate to communicate with the world around it, even while buried, caught between two states, fully in neither.

Between states, the body floats between the states of self—always bodied in the palpable present, but piloted with a mechanism that must coexist, and in the shift operate inside of methods that send signals between the versions—flares sent through skin. In his quasi-novel
The Age of Wire and String
, Ben Marcus defines the mode of snoring
¹⁴⁰
as another sleep-speech mannerism, ejected from bodies making more, or “language disturbance caused by accidental sleeping, in which a person speaks in compressed syllables and bulleted syntax, often stacking several words over one another in a distemporal deliverance of a sentence.” Marcus offers, of the nature of these disfigured words, a direct translation: “Pull me out, they say, the water has risen to the base of my neck.”
¹⁴¹
Here the sleeping self, who will likely not remember or only remember portions of what has happened in conscious absence, can only communicate to the environment of human speaking in what seem malformed utterances, learned in life by most to drown out or disregard. The language of the self inside the self, spoken into an operant human receiver, is essentially gibberish, conducting only in its wake irritation in response to what Marcus interprets a gesture of pure fear, a metaphysical transmission of the self ’s anticipation of its own death held inside it, obliterated between fields.

In Kabbalah, such speaking might be considered employed in answering a
dream question
, asked of angelic escorts in the ascent of the soul: answers hidden in this product of the blank space, a furtive message. “The early medieval master Hai Gaon notes a method for attaining a dream question involving fasting, purification, and meditation on a text. Based on comments by Abraham ibn Ezra and others, scholar Moshe Idel has identified this text with Exodus 14:19–21, each verse of which contains 72 consonants alluding to a mystical series of Hebrew letters said to represent the true name of God.”
¹⁴²
God here, in gibberish to humans, exists among a nameless language strung in chains among a life, held in the image of the bodies of those in repose of their will. The pronouncement, perhaps not surprisingly, is similar to that anticipated in the occult, such as in Aleister Crowley’s rite of Eroto-Comatose Lucidity, from 1924:

Finally the Candidate will sink into a sleep of utter exhaustion, resembling coma, and it is now that delicacy and skill must be exquisite. . . . The attendants will watch with assiduity for signs of waking; and the moment these occur, all stimulation must cease instantly, and the Candidate be allowed to fall again into sleep; but no sooner has this happened than the former practice is resumed. This alteration is to continue indefinitely until the Candidate is in a state which is neither sleep nor waking, and in which his Spirit, set free by perfect exhaustion of the body, and yet prevented from entering the City of Sleep, communes with the Most High and the Most Holy Lord God of its being, maker of heaven and earth.
¹⁴³

The gate, from both ends in these instances, invokes the higher state of self available in which the self ceases to control, can be manipulated into seeing, at last, what had been at all times just right there—a vessel in which the self serves its own reflection—a space inside the self that extends beyond the self. Through this window, and by bringing it into the day via an insomniac state, one might find oneself in the fold of somewhere else—at last, perhaps, invoking access to those keyless, faceless rooms hidden in any day. Somewhere between want of everything and pleasure of nothing.

Or one might simply go crazy. The line between the real and unreal here grows thin. Automated in sleeplocked manner, by law an active sleeping person might no longer be responsible for his or her acts. Law has historically protected those found in unknowing operation of their bodies while committing capital offenses. Simon Fraser, of Glasgow, had recurring dreams of a monster that entered his home in his unconscious. One evening he dreamed that a white creature came up through his floor, and he beat it to death against the wood. He woke and found he’d smothered his infant son. He was acquitted, under the condition that he would thenceforth sleep only in rooms alone with the door locked.
¹⁴⁴
In 1987, Kenneth Parks, a twenty-three-year-old father, testified to having had no consciousness, to having been fully asleep, while he drove twenty-three kilometers to his in-laws’ home and murdered his mother-in-law by stabbing. Parks’s extremely unusual EEG readings, coupled with lack of obvious motive, and his testimony of knowing nothing between going to bed and arriving at a police station saying, “I think I have killed some people . . . my hands,” in sum led to his acquittal. In Manchester, England, in 2005, a man, Lowe, beat his father to death via a series of attacks in three unique locations of the father’s home, on different floors and on the front walk of the house, resulting in ninety different physical injuries to the body. Both were very drunk, and had gone to sleep in different rooms. Though the spread-out and repeating nature of the assault was found not consistent with usual sleep-violence behaviors, the court acquitted him of all charges.
¹⁴⁵