The alarm clock of reason

Nothing reveals a fracture in the soul like insomnia. A gap between light and dark into which I fall and twist my ankle. A sideline in the center.  

A monstrous time arises when I shouldn’t know the time; time’s calcified shadow, like a gritted film. The night’s oversaturated negative. A great number of hours should be spent under cover, in a blackness from which nothing emerges. When some of those hours show themselves and the haunting hues on imperiously exposed faces, in a chalk dimmed aura redolent of tombstones turned to powder, my waking thoughts retain the faded gleam of a plastered corpse, vitality abandons me, and I stumble through the day with the weight of a deathrobed light. Neither awake nor asleep, but stuck in the fissure between the two, the cut and its stitch, the stretch of fiber holding life and death together. Wells of ink and pools of shining bile. Open eyes like a crime, a trespassing on the private lawn of blessed repose. Every object in my apartment, the dirty mugs on the table, the glowing lamp shrouded in a thin white curtain, seem the artifacts of a lesser pharoah, and I move through extra hours and among those objects as if I’d been sentenced to living burial, looking upon things meant to dwell for all time in a lightless hole.  

The body sabotages itself, the soul insists on not giving in to its dreams. Each being is at odds with being at odds, and on occasion refuses to pass from one state to another, to uphold a balance between opposites, and instead deepens the fault that holds them apart, extends it so far that the formerly separate states collapse into a ditch. Insomnia is one such interruption of the interplay of complimentary opposites, the sifting of a river of ash.  

Wearing fatigue like overalls made for a much heavier man, a giant groundskeeper of a graveyard, with all the missing weight of his ghastly endowment. In the look of a coworker, a customer, I think I see the intimation of my cryptic nights and a shrinking from the pale strobe of exhaustion in my eyes. No one wants to be told they look tired; no one wants to look at a tired face. The soul tries to perform plastic surgery on the advanced wear of a sleepless smile, and like the stapling operations of California surgeons, transform decay into the dried flower of youth.  

Insomnia repeats the original intrusion of the conscious mind, a bewildering scandal. Out of myths and dreams, gods thundering in clouded heads, the instinct of sleep and wild figurations, there springs a sand-blasted lucidity, a blistering awareness. The world cut in two by a blade of light.   

To lose sleep is to become post-unconscious. No longer submerged in unfathomable depths but fixed on a surface deserted of all dreams, in which all flights have been arrested.  

Automation of ancient labor concludes with the grueling manual transmission of old social and biological givens. Sleep, love, friendship, diet, place, belief, personality; they must be forced, handcrafted, hacked at, proposed and initiated and seen through by grunting, painstaking conscious effort, informed by scientists and sociologists, overseen by experts.  

From what I hear, even meaning is my responsibility. I have to make it. But I don’t know what that means, if not a prescription for insanity. Tasking a lone person with the creation of meaning unfolds like a prank, sends its victim into embarrassing convulsions.  

Public life throbs with the pseudo-insights of a group therapy session, and the inner sanctum has been redecorated with nostalgic kitsch and honorary psychology degrees from defunct universities. I don’t own a home, I rent a room in my head, I read about my personality disorders on the backs of cereal boxes. Sleep and death, the fundamental family tie, the waystation and the final resting place; I have to work to produce my own versions. For Heidegger, death is the only thing that truly belongs to me, that I do alone, that singles me out. (Except when I die, I won’t exactly be there. In consequence, the only thing that happens to me doesn’t happen.) Being toward death has spread to being toward everything; I stand before isolating relations, phantom eventualities.  

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I now work alongside a man who fired me six years ago in a cafe he used to own. From rags to riches, to riches back to milk rags. Except he was never rich, he was always in debt. Like all things now, power is borrowed on credit (both financial and reputational); at some point the bill is due. We don’t talk about the past, nor do we talk much about the present, besides what drink is up or how to make a breakfast sandwich. I want to say he got his comeuppance, that now he’s paying for his bad business decisions, poor leadership, for the heinous act of firing me. But falling from grace requires elevation. Owning a small business put him beneath the public, just like me. He gave orders under the million barreled shotgun of a mass consumer base, under the pigheaded pressure of investors and the strangling directives of government officials. Nothing has changed but the corrosion of organs, withered asses switching seats in a game of atonal chairs.