Nothing (20 page)

Several instances involving the acquittal of pending rape charges provide the same reasoning as in the cases of homicide: that the sleeping men did not realize they were raping, that they could, inside their sleep, perform daily acts without knowing when or where or against whom.
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These behaviors are almost across the board the result of “provocation or close proximity” in regard to the victims, true for 100 percent of acts caused by confused arousal (like sleepwalking, but not leaving the bed), and for 40 to 90 percent of those caused by actual sleepwalking (which is defined as the second an unconscious person’s foot touches the floor, and can range from “slow wandering” to running.
¹⁴⁷
Triggers in the cases of these incidences include sounds outside the body “such as snores or internal events such as apneas, hypopneas, or leg movements,” some of the most common complaints of wrecked sleep, which again recall Marcus’s distress signals from the self inside the self.

Violence against one’s own self, often by accident and resulting from dumbed motor skills, is also not uncommon, and can be manifested by “tripping over objects, falling down stairs, cutting oneself with a knife, or burning one’s hand while sleep eating,” the flesh stretched to the point of ripping. Though the average rate of success of a suicide by overdose in the United States is only 1.8 percent,
¹⁴⁸
those involving Nembutal, a former active agent in sleeping pills, have been reported as 100 percent successful throughout 840 documented cases when coupled with antiemetic drugs.
¹⁴⁹
In some, the self-destructive sleep behaviors might become so complex they result in involuntary snuffing, such as in 2010 when thirty-five-year-old conceptual designer Tobias Wong hanged himself while sleeping, the last in a series of strange unconscious behaviors that included holding business meetings, selling things on eBay, designing costumes for his cats, and mistaking his lover for a murderer. Another frequent parasomniac, Michael Cox, hanged himself inside sleep in 2001 after watching
Schindler’s List
before he went to bed.
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Others have jumped from windows, walked into traffic, mishandled guns, dealt damage by bumping into walls hard with the head. Though some have tried to debunk the common advice that you should not wake sleepwalkers in the midst of their procession, countless studies have shown that those shifted dramatically from the sleep-state action to the waking light are violent and negative, confused particularly in the sudden shift of self inside of self to self in direct contact with the other, crossfed with hidden terror, a translation of the night. Even in sleep, then, we are someone, waiting. We are full of our blood, and we have hands. Reality becomes then a silent question of where do the many of me in me and the kinds of air around us overlap; where might time and place inside the body be negated, turned otherwise alive.

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The French surrealist writer René Daumal died at thirty-six in 1944. Up to the day he died, he was working on a book. The book remains unfinished, left open in the fifth of a projected seven chapters. The book, titled
Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing
, concerns the reckoning of a mountain concealed on the earth, a mountain whose “
summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible
,” and which traverses the “
path uniting Heaven and Earth
.” The mountain is, as well, subject to certain rules. It “must be able to exist
in any region
on the surface of the globe,” hidden, for the most part, “not only to ships, airplanes or other vehicles, but even to the eye.” The mountain might exist “
in the middle of this table
without our having the slightest inkling.” The texture of the opening to this mountain remains invisible to everyday eyes by a
curvature of space
, in the same way that stars remain visible from certain positions even when they have become hidden in eclipse. The space around Mount Analogue continues as if it does not exist, manipulated by the context of the curvature, the deflection of light. “To find a way to reach the island,” writes Daumal, “we must assume on principle, as we have always done, the possibility and even the
necessity
of doing so. . . . At
a certain moment
and
a certain place
,
certain people
(those who know how and wish to do so) can enter.”

The novel, after defining this event of voidspace, follows a small crew of eight people who set out in a ship called
Impossible
to locate this opening unto the mountain. By deduction, waiting, and repetition, they are able to open, in the sea, a fold of air unto the place, locating in our other air, in fact, the presence of the glyph. They find, upon the mountain’s base, a small society whose currency is based on
peradam
, a crystal of such density “the unaccustomed eye hardly perceives it,” a blanket of secret money, in the face of all things, buried, awaiting he who would dig, or look, or want—money not as object of replication or signifier, but as the product of the search, some small reflection of the self projected from the self.
Mount Analogue
, the novel, ends therein in mid-sentence, at a comma, just as the expedition begins to ascend upon the mount—the narrative sucked into the white space of its ending, transported from the page into the blank. Daumal had been working on the sentence the day tuberculosis took him out, snuffing his mind inside his body, as if the text had stopped him, or better, as if the novel continued on into himself. As if he, in his body, had come unto a hole.

Around such a hole, the potential world looms in every object. Any surface could be turned into a door, unfolded by some focused mode of self activated to locate the space between the spaces—buttons, windows, a vibration—all of which at all points wait watching, surrounding the self ’s center, a potential to be invoked. Their presences, whether unveiled or left to stay hidden, demand psychic attention to the self stuffed within self—a simultaneous creation and erasure in each moment that passes as common days do, bypassing both destruction and invention in every step, in world moored upon world. In sleep one might brush against these spaces, if reflected in the other kind of Other windows half-open or half-closed, hid in the head; while awake, the hummed, negating sound that comes off the massive walls of color of a painting or a field of text or a wall or photograph or speck might seem to be speaking; any inch waiting to open, to become invoked, or likewise, to fold in and disappear. The signal-slur of increasing sleeplessness in which the senses begin to mix and fold into deforming might be seen as a matching folding of the vision, opening unto the air laid on the air. Between these dual-made states exists the self—each of us at all times all surrounded by both the forward going and the approach of death; the space of present breathing and the air beyond. Each object is defined by its potential, its connection to each other, “the transitions as well as the ruptures . . . and even the fact that one world disappears in favour of another,” creating an over-opening and mega-mapped structure of limitless hallways, doorways, and weird light, where “there is always something else implicated which remains to be explicated or developed. . . . Everything happens as though
the Other integrated the individuating factors and pre-individual singularities within the limits of objects and subjects
.”
¹⁵¹
These moments, ideas, surrounding, buried—endless vertices and incidental collaborations of the self against the self—suggest small doors or contexts for direction set in all things, to whatever length they can be approached in youth of mind—a sleepless light that feeds its own sleeplessness in approaching, or in complex waking. The location of
the mountain
—or whatever form of transcendent location the self might crave—
eternally nameless
—remains on the middle of a common table, or inside the bedroom closet, or in the slur of space unseen behind the head—a connective tissue generated and generating, buttons blistered on the several bodies inside the self contained and uncontained. To find the mountain is not even the goal here, really—it is the space surrounding, the want developed in the flesh that changes the flesh of self from a mirror to a conductor—a body among bodies meshed into a web into a massive body of media and memory and hours, the breadth and mass of which we will never see from where we’re standing—though we can breathe it—we can permeate the void.

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“All people’s pictures,” wrote Clarice Lispector in 1963, “are portraits of the Mona Lisa.”
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That same year, Andy Warhol produced
Thirty Are Better Than One
, a work that portrays thirty Mona Lisas photocopied, black-and-white and errored, like a hive—the thirty ghosts of versions of us watching, of one body, collaged via machine. The effect from afar of the many utterances of the classic painting build en masse toward a blank field, a flattened void—the many heads together, instead of gathering one’s glown aura from the rest, form a kind of wall. “I wanted to paint nothing,” said Warhol. “I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing.” His nothing, like Lispector’s, comes from the folding of an image, blurring the space between where the individual body ends, and where all the others begin. Or vice versa. It, like any instant, seems to both confine itself and permeate the space around it, like a brain searching in itself for where it is, hiding from death. The void surrounds and stays unseen.

Lispector and Warhol, respectively, died aged fifty-six and fifty-eight, in beds that were not theirs. The message of their passing spread through mouths through wires and into more machines, leaving, past the body, only their image, word, and name—their forms aggregated as flesh into soil and water—their beings each as an idea humped as icons in the sprawl. Pictures of them now, like anybody no longer living’s pictures, seem to contain a horde of hidden self behind their eyes—locked windows to terrain never again creating or destroying, sleeping or waking—like the Mona Lisa they look and look into the viewer never blinking, always still there when the one alive still turns away.

In his eight-hour film
Sleep
, made the same year as
Thirty Are Better Than One
, Warhol exhibits a cut-up series of looped reels of his sometime lover John Giorno, transformed, as Warhol aimed, into a “star” while all unconscious, his body speaking in the absence of its controller. Warhol repurposed this human body in the same manner he had the commercial object, the copywritten. In the ribcage-rising-falling silence, rummaging over the landscape of the man, the camera remains poised, oddly electric in its capture of what many would call as close to
nothing
as you could ask for in a film: an automatism; a conscious kind of light, even asleep. “It just starts, you know,” Warhol said of the film, “like when people call up and say ‘What time does the movie start?’ you can just say ‘Any time.’ ”
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Using film to mimic and thus extend the images and shapes that pass by in most instances unrecorded, to herein possess and subject them to be replayed in confined time, seems to model the brain keeping the body stuck awake, and thereby tortured in what it cannot have, and also must continue having, the absorption of thoughts and air, even when one no longer wants to, shaping time’s passage with an artificial frame.

The result of such extended waking, and in the film, the long, repeating shots, is a surplus of time where time itself degrades in value, life in diminishing return, toward death, and in the wake of death a slowly tapering hallway wherein the space between death and life itself, and waking states and artificial measures, seems deforming, making copies of an act held not quite right. “Seeing everybody so up all the time made me think that sleep was becoming pretty obsolete,” Warhol predicted, “so I decided I’d better quickly do a movie of a person sleeping.”
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The underlying projection herein being that with such repeating mass and endless feeding, one day there might become among our minds a state in which we can no longer differentiate between sleeping and waking, between the doppelgänger and that from which it has been cast. The film
Sleep
itself, now almost fifty years in the past, in retro-viewing seems already somehow alien, controlled—even at times blurry, more like moonscapes or mannequins than something ours. It seems to suggest that the nature of our sleep itself each night is shifting right beneath us without notice, each day becoming something else, more ruined and malformed, alien even from this body spread in silence not so long ago, on screen. “I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts,” said Warhol.
¹⁵⁵

Even in the most benign of objects, in days fleshing, there are map notes toward potential holes between the extant and the perceived. There is a bigger body made up of the bodies, hulking in night of light and light of night, and which, when strung together, might open wide enough to enter, as in its affect of seeming sleeping without sleeping, insomnia might begin to wear around you as a house inside the house—a second, sheltered skin above the skin you’re in and beneath the ceiling or the sky, both holding out and holding in. In this way all houses could be the same house, connected in all the films and all the books, all of one air: the hotel in
The Shining
, in which no characters are pictured sleeping, whose walls and carpets lead the visitor through and through them, among the residue of who has been inside them all those years; the ballet school in
Suspiria
, where two students realize the instructors leave at night not by walking to the left, where the doors make exits, but to the right, heading deeper on into the house—a discovery which, after making an aural mental map of the building by counting footsteps, one girl is murdered in a room full of white wire, and the other, center figure (after pouring the sleep-inducing food she’s being fed into the toilet) finds not only a confluence of witches, but a door into the mouth of hell.