Places Imagined in Sleeplessness
The Rain Lullaby
I’ve been having trouble staying asleep recently. This might be the most sleepless period of my life so far. Too often, I find myself racing away, worrying about something insignificant at 2 or 3 in the morning. I am stuck repeating the questions or the voices of the moment, and I rejoin the world with a rush of noise. It’s heartbreaking. I know you know what I’m talking about.
Recently, I have been reading a wonderful book that I might playfully describe as “the philosophy of a house,” a book titled “The Poetics of Space”. I find much of the ideas and language fresh and charged. This is a fun quote I’m taking from it, in paraphrase:
Insomnia is the philosopher’s ailment (1958, p. 48).
I seem to be accelerating my initiation.
Maybe you’ve heard of the term “revenge bedtime procrastination,” a decision to delay going to bed and instead do leisure activities as a way of re-asserting control over your time. To catch up on having time with yourself, you end up staying up later than you should and sabotage your next day. I think of this at this moment because I think there is a connection to sleeplessness in that I am snapping myself awake to finish processing all the things on my mind in the same way that procrastinating going to bed claws back time for oneself. One is perhaps less voluntary than the other, but they feel similar.
The Hour of Initiation
The other night, I snapped awake, laid in denial a while before caving in and checking my phone. It was 00:50 AM. I don’t know how to describe the quiet furry that plumed from my heart then.
I’d already come across articles that recommended you should eventually just get out of bed. As 1:45 AM approached, I decided it’s time to try something different. I moved to my table and started to read. I’m enjoying a book of poems by Gabriel Okara, a Nigerian poet. I stared at the page a while, boiling as I thought ahead to the long day slouching my way.
Some of the poem’s imagery caught my eye and paused my anger. I would be reading anyway, I thought. This is what I would want to be doing at any point in the day. This is simply more time with what I want to be doing, though it is difficult to embrace in this form, in this moment.
I saw this sleeplessness as a kind of spiritual recoil, stemming from something similar to “revenge bedtime procrastination” so that I could process my day and have time with myself. I thought of the earlier line from “The Poetics of Space” and decided that my insomnia is my calling beckoning me to start again, to go deep again on this day, now. And so I committed to reading then.
Rain Lullaby and the Place of Leaves
What brings me to tell you this in my “year of talking about places” is a poem I found in Okara’s book that night. Poetry is a beautiful genre for many, many reasons, but one way to suggest reading it is the same way you would observe a painting. With a painting, you typically take it all in at once, often (perhaps) without knowing you are following the intentional placement of directions and redirections the artist used to shape the work, like line or color. Then, often, you zoom out and have the moment to take in the parts that speak the most to you, take the flavor of a section and wonder about it and appreciate it or trust the work and let it begin a reflexive journal entry in your head right then.
Poems can operate like this as well. Most often, you read a piece in the order it is presented to you, obeying the line and break and rhythm of each line as you take in the whole piece. Then, after you read the poem, you have a list of lines to reread and wonder about, a new vernacular to hold in your mouth in reflexive thought on why that part is interesting to you.
And so it was, with this piece that I found a place I never been to in my life. Here is his poem. I transcribe it in full here:
Rain Lullaby
Soothe me not to sleep gentle rain
with your lullaby on eager
yam and cassava leaves and on
pan roof drumming beats of love
For now is not time for sleep or love
or tender emotions of days gone by
When the earth, sun and moon
juggled night and day in my head
which now is home for vampires
and silent bats flitting from wall
to wall preying on my essence
Now is the time to record wickedness
bursting far and near by day
and the hum and rhythm of bravery in mercy
high in the sky at night dropping
milk in drops into open mouths
open like baby birds waiting
for feed from mother birds.
It is the rain, the leaves, large and light, shuttering under each raindrop over the earth in its pure color. And I hear the rush of the water battering down in a tinkling rush. The stillness of this image is balm to me. The image is total. Its roots are real. I don’t know this place, and yet I understand it intimately.
How many windows have watched me hold the rain in my eyes? How many albums of my hours are about the instant stillness that can follow a start to a good rain? And then there is the scent of the earth rising as the first water patters down.
I read this poem. I read this place over twice more. My anger gone. My rest returned.
And I moved to bed to let sleep begin with no regret for the time awake.
More soon,
Trevor
Now-reading affiliate links:
"How many windows have watched me hold the rain in my eyes?" - so moving.