Insomnia and Death

Sleep has long been perceived as a metaphor for death. Just as Hamlet blurs the lines between death and sleep while describing his anguish over his father’s murder:
To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause
When contemplating suicide, Hamlet conflates sleep and death.
I recently read the article “failing to fall” by Siri Hustvedt, that led me to trace back my first pseudo-insomniac fit—conscious and somnolent. I was perhaps seven years old, when hanging clothes rustled in the dark, which triggered images of shadows with twisted faces emerging out of the dim light creeping out of the closet door. My imagination ran and I could not catch it until the break of dawn and the cock-a-doodlings came alive. Thankfully, my imagination decided to rest in my dreams. My next encounter with insomnia occurred when my family and I arrived to Canada; I was around the age of nine, almost ten. What triggered my insomnia then was a fear of death, albeit not my own death, but that of a family member. I had to ensure that everyone was asleep before me. But once they had fallen asleep, I would fear that they were sleeping without dreams. I would listen carefully for a sign of life. At that age, I aware that sleep resembled death so closely, that I would embark on a search for that seemingly lost consciousness of those asleep. This became a deadly habit.

As the dark spaces of night unfold, my mind’s eye flickers with images. My hands clasp the end of my memory, the end of my pillow.

those eyes

among the hysterically bland crowd, there are those eyes
armed with quick, broken – violin strings unstrung — glances
they glisten with phantoms of a distant emotion — mysterious, melancholic, metaphysical—
things are left unsaid, but your soul is touched with assumptions.
they dance and dance until feverish
then collapse into your memory — dead lovers, barren music, twisted plots-
and you cling to those eyes.

dream

it was right in front of me--loud, captivating and irreducibly mine.
it crept out of the broken mirror
i tried to touch it, but it became a cloud between my bleeding palms
i know the rules, inside out--they go in circles in my mind
viciously intact, instransigently real.
now the dream's behind me,
blanketed by fog

subsequent painting to former post

It's difficult to be cleansed by rain when we're carrying umbrellas.
The following is the painting "Rain Storm, Union Square," by American impressionist painter Frederick Childe Hassam, that I feel is fitting to my former post.

an imagined cleansing

I thought growing up meant a sort of cleansing
no more clinging to the bones of our ancestors
more cleansing
we can break an entry into heaven
more cleansing
we can let ideas fall, rise like tides, and crash against walls
more cleansing
we can speak of history’s eternal flame that challenged man
more cleansing
but, today it is raining
and no one is dancing.

Hope in a cocoon

It’s time to move beyond my facticity and acknowledge the possibility of any thing which, ipso facto, radically includes absolute nothingness. In other words, I exist, and it’s time to move beyond the now what. I want to push myself beyond the shadows that faintly stroke my conscious mind and beyond questioning the purpose of being and beyond reason—and unto the steps that lead to the moon. It’s time to allow for the irrational spirals that dot my unconsciousness to breach the gap between no thing and every thing. I want to believe that hope is indeed in a cocoon—silky, soft, safe and silent.

facticity of life

There are always moments when the facticity of life strikes me as strange, meaningless and, ultimately absurd. We buy mnemonic devices to remind us that life is... life is ...life is full of fragments or fragrances or figments or narrow arrows or dismembered membranes or ... Our facticity is book ended with facts, insurmountable conditions, but even the fluid in-betweenness can be full of loss, wrecked promises and dull forgivenesses. In those moments—-mud sinking moments--cruel memories taunt and assault us and remind us that life is dying and, if anything, full of doubt.