sleep – Page 2 – mariaology

This month of intense transition, brisk walks after dark in a state of delirium. This PhD is all over me. My screen is so white and it glares all day. The moon is so white it’s almost offensive and so is the carton of milk which sits by the homeless man at Charing Cross. He rolls cigarettes and watches the traffic. I rarely see him smoke, but he is often rolling, and watching. Rolling and watching, as if the two were entwined and utterly necessary. I am watching too as I walk, but I walk fast and make of all features a blur. I run out of routes. I take the park at night to see the stars spread out on a sky of blue velvet. Nothing is nameable this way. It grows colder.

My feet look for a path but often find the grass instead.

Days pass, immersing myself in the journals of Gilbert White for a sense of the seasons, and how they manifest in the Earth. All the dead leaves of centuries swept. Then also Derek Jarman’s garden, so lovingly noted in Modern Nature.

To have such connection to the land, documenting its events. White:

Baker’s hill is harrowed-down after these great rains: it was no easy matter to subdue the clods at all. Some of the olde elders round the garden are almost leafless. Wallnuts are this Year innumerable. The white-apples are fit to make pies. Grapes, peaches, nectares very backward.

This is in August. Arboreal fruits and other riches. I ate a lot of apples in August, because there are always apples at conferences, nestled on paper-linings. In air-conditioned rooms, you crisply attend to knowledge. Something tart and sweet that activates the acid of many collective stomachs.

Mostly White’s journal compends the minutiae of fruits and vegetables grafted and grown and harvested in the garden. Little discoveries named in both English and Latin. The beauty of regularity and daily rhythm. But there are glitches: talk of ‘vast rain’ in the night, eerie events that just happen and remain unexplained —

A great light seen, & a vast explosion from y S: about a quarter past nine in the evening: the Cause unknown. It shook peoples houses very much. It seems to be meterous.

(White)

I write this on a Sunday morning, just as the bin men are creating a cataclysm of the garden. On Wednesday morning, the cleaners come early and the sound of the mop hitting the wall wakes me up from insomnia’s half-formed slumber. I dwell in these rhythms of other people’s labour, and consider my own, fingers on keys.

I have been thinking about data and how we access climate change as both event and ontological condition. What kinds of data do I attend to on a daily basis? I do not check the fluctuating air quality of my city, although Google allows you to do this. I rarely check the weather, at least beyond a cursory search as to whether to prepare with waterproofs or not. Checking the weather reminds me of the days of the week and all I have to do, and how the days are just units and thus the struggle of cramming things into them. I stay up very late because I am anxious about the days ahead, the things I am supposed to do in them. I remember a period of my life where I’d stay up all night all the time with friends, and when they’d lament the loss of their imminent day I’d say, no but this is great, it’s like cheating time! I did not realise they would sleep through the day, while I would ride wild on a sleep-deprived high, seeing the world as through frosted glass. The wee hours came, then the sun, and they would roll cigarette after cigarette in televisual flickers.

Summertime draws to a close, and dusk acquires a drama of light that demands photography. I skirt around Park Circus, following the curve of the streets, the incline. Ruffles of deeper darkness. How many memories are concentrated at the top of Kelvingrove Park, with the lights spread in ribbons of gold and red and glimmering distance. Collect my intensities, try not to think too hard. The air in my lungs reacts and is hot and sweet. The clocks go back and what a pleasure it is to flip straight to 1:01 again. Where does the hour go that is lost? It shaves a little light off my evening, for which I lament. Last year I was working until 3am when the clocks went back, and I was scared I’d have to work the extra hour unpaid. This is something we never talk about, the impact on those who pull night shifts. Luckily, there was a system. But customers did not understand. It got to 2am and we were kicking them out and they demanded we stay open till 3. The way it was on their phones, which automatically reset in electric synchrony. We were open till 3am that night; just on retro time, the time of before.

So tired I fall asleep with the light on, my face in some book. The luxury of curling into yourself and disappearing until all the dreams come.

The moon this week was consistently incredible. As in, cloaked in a halo of rainbow; magnetic, amphetamine rush of staring at it. Walk walk walk with the moon above, so below. The white pools of light that fall on the street. It gave me this charge or energy. I couldn’t sleep because I was full of the moon. Some lunar reaction inside me. I wanted to be more alone.

A friend describes my poem, ‘A Beautiful Video’, as ‘an autumn harvest of internet trash’, which I like a lot.

Adulthood means getting your bike fixed, over and over. Testing the brakes. It means learning to say no to things. It means being responsible for this and that. The ontological condition of email, with its beautiful intermittence — the sway of send and arrival. Kindest of wishes. I have been trying to start a letter all week but there are so many things I want to say to you. It’s been so long and I have no idea how you’re living.

It hurts to write ‘now’, like the lostness is already always.

On Hallowe’en, I’ll see Grouper play in Mackintosh Church.

The month began with me listening to Leonard Cohen, and ended in electronic abyss.

Spooky as the air is, filling the wood.

In my diary I seem to write a lot, ‘I feel sick at the thought’.

This is the month I leave my job of five and a half years. I have a lot of separation anxiety and maybe one day I’ll be back. Strange to have such emotional dependence on a place and its people. To measure yourself against the pace of its shifts, the demands of others. To love and love and love unconditionally. I miss everyone already; I did the very moment I set foot in the door for my last shift. We played a game of flexibility and were lovely to everyone, got good tips. A table of Texan tourists, the last people I served, told me: ‘you’re so pretty…you’re like as pretty as this glass of rosé wine’. The wine in question was our house, Angel’s Tears, so I said, ‘and I’m as sad as the tears of the angel’, to which they laughed uneasily. They meant it earnestly and I checked on the menu and a large glass was £7, so I am happy that my apparent ~~attraction~~ matches my second-favourite number. It was a cheap thing to say but I kinda liked it.

There have been these twangs in my chest, like someone pulling the strings of a harp too hard. I have not been sleeping too well.

Maybe I don’t miss the lush excesses of summer’s end, but I miss the extra light.

The way it feels to cycle downhill in freefall, giving yourself to the traffic, choking on the fumes of the cars around you. Red light upon red. Watching a film about homicidal ants. Messy situations and Skype conversations. Virtual reality and the value of objects. The enchanted beings appear on Byres Road, glitter-eyed at the crossing. Have written a sonnet a day for a week.

When I write in my diary it always begins so tired, so tired, or a variation of. I feel like I’ve done everything and nothing, and there’s so much still to do, to write into.

I watched The Garden until five in the morning and my eyes burned red all through the day. Something extravagantly eccentric about the manner of epic. Rub salt.

Erase yourself for rain and call it extinction. People have a lot of things to say on the matter.

So I sit here polishing pairs of shoes. At least I have something to walk with.

Begin again ordering rounds of Guinness. Almost asleep in the taxi, river-cross, the motorway morning orbits a thought. The mattering treacle of darkness. The air so cold it is almost sticky. When you see the abyss but take it anyway. This is such a soft short story to write in the library.

I lost my keys in the litter and leaves. I lost something in the hills, along time ago. Finding the words to say it.

Pinegrove – Rings

Angel Olsen – California

Red House Painters – Grace Cathedral Park

Sharon Van Etten – I Wish I Knew

Half Waif – Every Animal

Big Thief – Capacity

Karen Dalton – It Hurts Me Too

Haley Heynderickx, Max Garcia Conover – Slow Talkin’

Fleet Foxes – Icicle Tusk

Kiran Leonard – Working People

Leonard Cohen – The Partisan

The Innocence Mission – Lakes of Canada

Cocteau Twins – Summer-Blink

Arthur Russell – Losing My Taste For The Night Life

Sun Kil Moon, Jesu – You Are Me and I Am You

Oneohtrix Point Never – Love In The Time Of Lexapro

Lo Kindre – Torment Of One

Hiro Kone – Outside the Axiom

Low – Words

Mazzy Star – Mary Of Silence

Sibylle Baier – I Lost Something in the Hills

Nico – Afraid

It was a moon-scape she saw, peering into the mug in her mother’s study. Yes, a moon-scape with little lumps of perilous blue and grey, seeping into one another. Or maybe it was another kind of space terrain: she imagined the ground of Pluto, with its eye-like holes and fissures. She gave it a shake, and watched the particles break up and drift away, flotsam on some unreal ocean. A polluted ocean; maybe the earth’s oceans in a hundred years’ time. They told her in school that the world was filling up with waste and one day everything would melt away, like those paintings of dissolving clocks she saw when her mother took her to the museum. You could already tell it was happening, her teacher had said, the way that it gets so warm these days. The mildness of winter. It wasn’t right.

Well, the moon wasn’t right either that night. No; she could not stop thinking about what she saw in that mug. Another world, was it? She wished she could go back and count the dots, knowing that if she did she could start to chart this new universe, and in knowing it better she could sleep. She could enter its landscapes, drift across it with the powers she had in her dreams. Her mother put a sachet of lavender under her pillow and she could smell it through the cotton, soft and sweet…but it was not enough distraction. She needed to know what she had seen. But her mother might hear her and send her back to bed. It had to be worth a try. Sucking in her breath, she tip-toed back into the study, closing the door quietly behind her and flicking on the light. It was an energy-saver bulb, that took ages to properly glow. So she stood in the dull orange light, watching the wall till it got brighter. Then she would pick up the mug and see. Then she would know again.

Finally it was bright enough and so she went to pick up the mug…but this time, oh how the smell caught her! It was sharp and evil like the stench of seaweed, only worse, like the most rotten thing in the world, slowly fermenting. Yes, she smelt it and was knocked backwards almost. But it was fascinating. She let her nostrils quiver and sniff deeper as she held the mug to her nose. The she looked into it again and saw how the dunes and lumps had mushroomed and the blue was turning greenish, or maybe that was just the duller light. Still, these were definite changes. And she was thinking of the clumps of toadstools she’d seen in the school playground, while they were out measuring soil quality and watching the teacher bending in the grass with a thermometer. They were big brown flat things, ugly and intriguing, and she knew that some of them were poisonous, and some of them if you poked them let out a puff of steam. She wished she could touch these mushrooms but the thought of putting her finger in the mug was repulsing. It was kind of like a horror movie, she thought, where they showed you somebody’s festering wound, only it never looked quite real. Still, you would not like to touch it, it was just sort of funny to look at. No, she would not touch it; instead she shook it again, and this time the dunes did not dissolve, but she could see little fissures rippling across them. Her stomach turned over as if emptying something, and she felt a surge in her gullet. She put the mug down and breathed in deeply, trying to rid herself of the awful smell that clung to her like a disease.

She wondered what it was that these microbes loved so much about her mother’s tea. She considered if they’d accept her into their colony. Like them, she was partial to a glass of milk, but maybe not tea, unless it was laden with sugar. She wondered how they’d order themselves, scattered about as they were like that. Bulbous, growing over each other. It would be a ruthless economy. She sat down on the comfy office chair and span around slowly. The queasiness was leaving. She liked how all the objects rushed around her, melting into long white and orange lines. She stifled a giggle; she must not wake her mother up. She whispered stories to the mug. Telling them about the boy she wrote a letter to once in class and the time she left her homework on a bus. Soon she would say goodbye to her mother. She knew that it could not be long before she was ready to join them. They would be like ants, or the tiny people in Gulliver’s Travels – Lilliputions – running all over her body. Only, they were so small you could not see them. You could just imagine them, growing and multiplying, all over her skin.

They made the moon rocky and bumpy, like that boy whose skin was cratered with pimples. She had seen on television once two fat ladies in white coats scrubbing away green things from the corners of a bathtub. She and her mother didn’t have a bathtub, but sometimes she saw things come out of the plughole in the shower. Great streams of wiry hair that poked out, or smeared themselves upon the porcelain. Once a huge spider. She heard its legs patter and she screamed, and her mother tried to lift it out with a gardening trowel. Sometimes there were little black seeds all over the bath, and the first time she thought maybe a plant had vomited up all its babies (in class that morning she had been drawing diagrams of sepals and stigmas and filaments and seed-pellets), but then her mother told her it was just exfoliating beads from some lotion she had. She tried the lotion and it made her skin burn, but it was not unpleasant; kind of like the scratch of dry sand. It left a pinkish blotch on her legs. She was wondering if the moon was like that: all pastures of dry sand. Were there lakes or ponds or waves? Trees, even? In the mug she could not see any trees, and the only waves were from when she rippled the sticky liquid with the swirl of her wrist. She thought maybe if she lived there she’d have to invent some more things, to keep her interested. There would be a gift shop, for one thing. You could buy t-shirts with maps of the land on them, with close-up details of the blue-green growths and the tea-stains that ringed the china walls. It was like a whole continent splayed out, with all the countries slotted together, their landmasses enveloping each other. A strange thing.

She would take the mug into school on Monday, for show-and-tell. It was the right thing to do. Everybody else would bring in their cinema tickets, their remote-controlled helicopters, Pokemon cards, a book they had read over the weekend. And they would talk about themselves, nattering away about this thing that had brought them their childish joy. Then she would take to the stage, like the prime minister on the telly, clasping her precious mug, and she would tell them how she had found the moon. At first they would laugh, she recognised that, but then they would realise how clever she was. How amazing was her discovery. She giggled just thinking about it. But I must let it rest, she reflected. After all, she needed to let her colony expand, for the spores to pile up higher upon one another until they were spilling over the edges of the mug. She wanted her colony to be huge and impressive. I mustn’t let them escape. She took a postcard from the wall – it was a painting of a lemon and a teacup by Francis Cadell – and she placed it over the mug. The moon was safe, and its surface would continue to bubble and grow in their new warmth and darkness. So she tip-toed back to bed and lay awake, her mind floating around this wondrous space. Each star was a point of contact, a possibility.

And she spoke to the stars, even as she jumped between them, as you jump between chairs and tables and sofas when you play ‘The Floor is Lava’. Each one told her a story, and she basked in the glow of all those words weaving a tapestry around her. Soon she could slip into sleep, soon, soon, soon…she closed her eyes to a new darkness, felt the warmth of the space beneath the sheets. The smell of mould dissipated from her brain, and now there was only silence, the scent of lavender, wafting in delicate waves…

When tomorrow arrived, it was Monday, so she got dressed for school and went downstairs. To her horror, she saw the mug up-ended on the draining board. What on earth…? Mummy? Her mother came down to boil the kettle and make her porridge, but was startled to see her daughter crying so early in the morning. What is it, darling? She was already late for work, and starving. She threw her handbag on the table and brushed down her jacket. What is it? she repeated. The child was pointing at something next to the sink. Mummy! she wailed, you’ve killed the moon!

Tag: sleep

Playlist: October 2018

Mould

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