Machinations Of Attention
A Condensed History of Night
Until about the last 150 years, human comprehension of sleep had largely been blank science, lost in the trough of by what methods the end of our waking day comes on. We all know we lie down. We close our eyes, the blood slows with the breathing: the body letting go, unto a state of no time, walled with collages of words and images held deep. There must be, between these two spheres, some median of click-out: a point of A at which we are aboveground in our minds, and a point B at which we’ve entered somewhere gone.
Those who could not sleep soundly, we thought for so long, must be otherwise diseased, held of an error in the body, akin to coma, stupor, looming toward death.
Fourth leg in the continuum of deep-seated human physical instincts, and perhaps even more so than what one might call the other three — eating, shitting, fucking — sleep seems the one room always overhead, of its own will. Sleep is the start and end of any set of hours, bookends on voluntary motion, the eyes through it most always closed, set instead to the flashing, patterned panel waiting always underneath the lids. To be dormant, quiescent, or inactive, as faculties. To be careless or unalert.108
The Old Testament frames sleep as a metaphysical commodity, located only through the grace of god: “In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat — for he grants sleep to those he loves” (Psalm 127:2). Once granted, though, it is a state not to be dwelt in, or overused — there must remain an attentiveness to life’s toiclass="underline" “Do not love sleep or you will grow poor; stay awake and you will have food to spare” (Proverbs 20:13).
In sickness, as in sleeping, the body wants the bed. As early as the Neolithic Age (~9500 BC), the first mattresses are made of grass and leaves wrapped in skinned hides. Later, in Persia, beds are goatskins filled with water; in Egypt, palm boughs piled into the home; in 200 BC the rich come to prefer feathers, plush linings stolen from living fowclass="underline" the dress of bodies borne for flight. Other early beds are bags stuffed with wool or straw or reeds or hay or down. It’s not until the mid-eighteenth century that anything resembling the flat, stitched, and bordered fiber boxes most common at the turn of the twenty-first century appear.
Regardless of what the beds are made of, there are those whose bodies shake upon them, stricken waking, open to the night. Many go uncounted. Days then contain the same duration as days now.
In early Egypt, for those stricken sleepless, there is bloodletting, dream interpretation, enema, opium, magic, prayer to angry gods.
In India and China, there are vegetables and herbs.
In Greece: attention to architecture, water, light, and nature; balance of body fluids; medicines from snakes and geese.
The Greek god of sleep is Hypnos, son of Nix, the god of night; brother of Thanatos, the god of death; husband to Pasithea, the goddess of hallucination. When Hypnos and his wife touch, godflesh to godflesh, it was written, “from slumber woke all nations of the earth.”109
In Rome, the god of sleep is Somnus, said to have one thousand sons, many of whom could assume different forms.
Likewise, the houses, as the beds have, continue to evolve. Architecture teaches these rooms more solid ways to keep the outside out and inside in. Roofs are slanted to let rain roll off and soften earth for farming. Pipes carry heat and water from other buildings beneath the house, into the house, lacing the walls. The bodies within the morphing surfaces carry on.
Around 400 BC, Hippocrates first specifies the state of dreaming as a medical condition. “Sleep is due to blood going from the limbs to the inner regions of the body,” he suggests, characterizing the resting body as a volume drawing inward, absorbing cells and warmth toward its hub.