Marina Benjamin sets out in Insomnia to query her own sleepless condition from multiple perspectives: mythic, scientific, historic and literary, but most notably through personal experience. As she writes at the outset, “When I am up at night the world takes on a different hue. It is quieter and closer and there are textures in the dark I have begun paying attention to … In sleeplessness, I have come to understand that there is a taxonomy of darkness to uncover, and with it a nocturnal literacy we can acquire.”
Although most of us regard insomnia as an affliction, Benjamin insists that it may prove creatively beneficial for a writer — a conflict without a contradiction: “I feel held back by night because I am convinced that the hidden mystery of our beautiful existence might be found in its very bowels. I am looking for insight, a nugget of value to carry across night’s border into morning.”
Wakefulness, insomnia’s antithesis, aptly describes the book’s gestures and rhythm. Brief paragraphs, separated by pauses, act as voltages of insight between blank spaces. Throughout the narrative, Benjamin interrogates the ancient mystery behind insomnia, reserving judgment about the possibilities of renewal from what might be considered a curse.
Although she is lured by the mysteries of sleeplessness, her husband, whom she refers to as Zzs, provides a counterpoint: “We have shared countless beds down the years and across continents, Zzz and me, under mood clouds fair and foul, and we continue to commune by night, in code … in the way we relate to each other day by day.” The more sleep is withheld, the more the insomniac longs for it. As she writes, “I pursue sleep so hard I become invigorated by the chase.”
As the book unfolds, Benjamin weaves together insomnia’s origins and implications. Drawing from various disciplines, she traces insomnia’s roots in myth to contemporary psychology. For as long as it has beset the psyche, there have been cures for it, but Benjamin speculates that insomnia may contain its own hidden rewards: “What if waking life is incapable of adequately attuning us to the needs of our unconscious minds?”
Each reference to the opposition of sleep and wakefulness leads to more insights into their interdependence. Benjamin peers into artworks such as Magritte’s and Burnes Jones’s paintings, Charles Simic’s poetry, Robinson Crusoe and The Odyssey for what they reveal about the dialectic. She ponders how the physiological experience of not sleeping has influenced thinkers such as Vladimir Nabokov who, while appreciating how insomnia made him feel “joggy, jittery, and buzzy,” also “dreaded, more than anything else, absolute darkness.”
Referring to her struggles to conquer insomnia since girlhood, Benjamin unpacks her fascination with passive, sleeping princesses (or those who could not sleep such as the princess in “Princess and the Pea”). She notes that feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, diagnosed as a neurasthenic and subjected to a nineteenth century “rest cure,” was deprived by her doctor of any freedom of thought or activity by forcing her to be passive. He bored women into aestheticized states equated with recovery, a regimen that caused Gilman to lament, “No one can ever know what I have suffered.” To drive a distressed woman into an idealized sleep state is to subjugate her – an observation that brings us back to Penelope’s predicament about her inert marriage bed and not wanting to move it for fear that would “bring the house down.”
Benjamin’s struggles with insomnia and her own marriage bed propel her toward finding some practical method to help her to sleep. She joins a CBT group at the sleep clinic and tries expert advice to improve her sleep hygiene. But her attitude toward therapy is skeptical, and she feels the experts don’t “really appreciate the workings of the insomniac mind.” The techniques seem antiquated and unable to account for the modulations of the mind encountering, and then not encountering, a respite of sleep.
Suspecting that her creativity and insomnia are related, she asks, “If my writing is ultimately neurotic, then when I finally do rediscover the art of sleeping, will the wellspring of my creativity run dry?” Linking creativity with neurosis and even, as Kay Jamison posits in her own memoir, The Unquiet Mind, with manic depression, causes the artist to question the sacrifices made in the name of art. But the deep reservoir of the night, with its surplus of darkness, is a place Benjamin is preternaturally drawn to. Her insomnia’s “visions and intimations” give off “the faintly detectable buzz of a cosmic hum that was there before human beings came into existence and will be there until the end of time.”
In the latter part of the book, Benjamin critiques the enterprise of mindfulness which necessitates the eradication of conscious thought. “Mindfulness,” she quips, “is about as edifying as praying to a toilet roll.” She is also unconvinced by the Buddhist quieting of the mind to sleep-like cessation. Hence, one of her closing metaphors for sleep and its undoing comes from Scheherazade who must weave her tales as a way to stave off her own death sentence through infinite suspension of the narrative: “By mastering the night, she masters time.” Benjamin then invites the subsequent comparison: “The only drawback is that Scheherazade is an insomniac — and must be in order to live. Sleep would literally be the death of her.”
Concluding with a look at Burne-Jones’s depictions of sleeping maidens, Benjamin settles on a transcendent symbol of paradox. Insomnia will no longer be her nemesis but her ally; a friend to instruct her on welcoming change. “I want to flip disruption and affliction into opportunity, and puncture the darkness with stabs of light. This is the song of insomnia, and I shall sing it.” I was reminded of Keats’s nightingale, heard only after sleep has been foiled, a passport to vision and flight, concluding with paradoxical sleep and waking. “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music — Do I wake or sleep?”
Insomnia is ultimately a book about the contradictions that permeate our natures. Having enjoyed it and been edified, I will look differently upon a sleepless night and will invite the light that stubbornly refuses to diminish while illuminating the darkness.
[Published by Catapult on November 13, 2018. 144 pages, $18.95]