Among this casual prolonged squashing, we learn to hide inside the sound because we must. Today while bored looking through websites about torture — my own blank often evoking an inert want to see the worst — I notice how many common modern methods used on captives often sound like hours in our cities, if reframed: Forced positions, Prolonged standing, Continuous exposure to bright light or noise, Witnessing torture of others, Cold exposure, Solitary confinement, Threats,1 each practice by now normalized to seem for the most part simply part of the experience of urban life. It is a feature of our survival via numbing, ignoring, contextualizing, counteracting this silent blitzing — by sleeping, eating, drinking, laughing at the jokes — that the more minor daily tortures are made common, incorporated, even loved: skin of advertisements, entertainments, socializing, awe of money, unique objects, motion, the expectation of the wish of wanting more. With the internet now too we can at any hour access electronic versions of anything all at once — speech feeds of the bored or awake or paid or lonely or aspiring or horny or worshipful and more; databased images of explosions and sick and murder alongside the shopping and the family albums and the free games; avatars of family and strangers and friendly fronts of corporations; boundless text and sound and image of what might have otherwise remained covert — and each hour only growing, fed by countless bodies pressing buttons at the flat face of millions of machines.
Over time, in such consumption, the body suffers — in aging, thinning, breaking, building calluses, or bruise — each angle of which serves to disrupt quality of sleep — our only temporary exit — and thereby over time further emphasizes those distinctions through exhaustion. Our attention feeds through totems toward the hole. The product of prolonged lost rest in effect operates against the body again like torture or dementia: Anxiety, Depression, Fear, Lability, Introversion, Lethargy, Fatigue, Loss of memory, Inability to concentrate, Sleep difficulties, Nightmares, Headaches, Visual disturbances, Vertigo, Paresthesias, Sexual disturbances.2 These ruptures gather in gross packets, one feeding another, causing one’s defenses to become numb or dull while still aware, and opening the flesh to sickness or predator, toward death. In the daily gush the waking hours often may seem to feel more like one’s sleeping and one’s sleeping held more shallow, ruined, awake.
It must come in, too, through the blood. There’s something inherent in our human aspect that feeds the will to make and want and make and want and still need more — that same gush that drives us among others to want something where there is nothing, to want calm where there is noise. Often we become bored when the familiar ways no longer seem to hold some unnamed magic — some unconscious chance it might explode or shapeshift right in our hands — glee of the new — though this is also the kind of repetition that makes us feel comforted, lets us rest. The further waking of the wanting comes on often as a product of itself — a taste of the unknown or glee or terror causing in the body the birth of a receptor that now requires it be fed — or to be buried — lacing the familiar with something slippery and alien, driving — the object filling out its name and not the other way around.
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Often as an infant I would not recognize my mother in the night. She would come to me there in my crib and see me screaming, skulking from her as she stood. She’d reach to lift me up and I would cower, a bright terror mirrored in my eyes. Other nights she’d find me walking blank along the hallway, lit unconscious. In the living room I’d stand and shriek, “I WANT MY MOMMY I WANT MY MOMMY.” I am your mommy, my mom would say, in a younger version of her current voice, and yet transfixed inside of nowhere, she was no one to me at all. Other nights I’d wake to find myself having moved inside my sleep to different rooms, or upside-down or backward on the mattress, or underneath it, not knowing what I’d done.
Today, when I ask my mother about my young sleep terror, she reenacts me walking backward from her in the low light, her eyes stretched wide, mimicking mine. My mother in recent years has been getting shorter, her size sinking back into itself. Seeing her perform the reenactment even now to me seems horrific — the idea still vivid enough in her I can almost see who she was then in her eyes. The years have not stuttered her recall. Her skin is paler, her fingers thin. Her silver hair reflects all light. Her eyes are just the same. In my asking how I’d been then, in my sleep trouble, she describes the way I seemed unable to see her there before me, how I seemed to not even see the house. “Terror was real to you and that was it,” she says, her other self there just inside — the other selves of all of us surrounding all of us, each of us at the center of our own being, each aging in our own frame, sprawling forward into each instant going, gone; every minute the most packed minute, the furthest point along the curve.
After explaining my young terror in her language, my mother goes to look more for the baby books in which throughout those years she wrote us down — sentences rendered in her looped handwriting, making claim of what she’d feed me, how I’d laugh. It’s a practice she still has not given up — each evening before bed now ends with her writing out the full day of her life, word by word. She is often up late into what is called the witching hour, sewing, singing, awake alone in the house, as my father has always been prone to nodding out early. My sleep complications, as is so much of me, are likely sewn from her: aura transferred into flesh in bridging time — a pattern printed on the lengths of lymph that make my brain and lung meat, which, if I decide to mate, I may too funnel into another body, here, a child. My mother’s journals — there must be a dozen of them now, each fat with ink and clippings from her hands: I already feel my skin tightening against me at their existence, as my incessant selves insist on realizing how one day, under the event of a thing I will not name here, those pages will become a tunnel back through and into her, her own sleeplessness, her longing, her days in step and click — the words the image of her thoughts and ways and ideas given from her as each day passes, written into text instead of me — as for every instant I am not there, her child, or anything I was not there for her to say, will be another wall that breaks my body in a maze that will not end.
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Whereas sleep may be an exit from the hours, a temporary forgoing of our ability to respond, while unconscious we are alarmless until something breaks the seal. By earliest definition, in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1771, sleep is the body “perfectly at rest, [where] external objects move the organs of sense as usual, without exciting the usual sensations.” Here the body forgoes of the silent suspicions of the terror, such as of the many openings in any home: those we recognize and center around (windows, doors, and vents); those we in certain times attend to, incompletely (entrances for insects, rodents, wet); as well as those we imagine perhaps somewhere, those we never know (dream holes, fantasies like Santa’s entrance, power connected via wires and other air); through these holes come the outer air; the sound and light each night drunken into the prone body, feeding. As well, the house around you goes on unwatched. We assume by default that nothing shifts under our absence, inside our body, still right there — no shift of drawer or door, nothing unforeseen rising up or breaking in among the night. We relinquish all control to sleep, slow pulsed and breathing, off but open, taking in.