"Has the world ever had more insomniacs than it is does now?" I asked my sleepmate teddy bear as, at 2.41am one morning last week, I got up and went to my desktop to finish reading James Parker's new article An Ode To Insomnia.
Yawning, my teddy bear (with his species' innate talent for slumbering) went back to sleep.
Thus I was left alone to reflect on how, in these times, there is a great deal to be kept awake by.
No wonder, then, since sleepless in suburbia one has no choice but to live with insomnia, the title of James Parker's piece in The Atlantic entices. If insomnia is ode-worthy, then perhaps it is not the beast we thought.
Before getting up to go to my desktop at 2.41 am I lay wide awake for an agonising hour thinking miscellaneous thoughts. This is totally contrary to Parker's advice.
There is coronavirus, then TAD (Trump Anxiety Disorder, further stoked by serious informed analysis now of how he may win or burglarise a second term), then CAD (Coe Anxiety Disorder, a phobic fear of Alistair Coe's ACT Liberals winning October's Assembly elections). Then there is the general worldwide environment of statue-toppling and mayhem.
No wonder, then, since sleepless in suburbia one has no choice but to live with insomnia, the title of James Parker's piece in The Atlantic entices. If insomnia is ode-worthy, then perhaps it is not the beast we thought.
Before getting up to go to my desktop at 2.41 am I lay wide awake for an agonising hour thinking miscellaneous thoughts. This is totally contrary to Parker's advice.
"You must get up," he orders.
"So now you're up. You've reclaimed a little dignity, a little agency.
"That's the first thing. Don't just lie there and let it have its way with you. The sea of anxiety loves a horizontal human; it pours over your toes and surges up you like a tide. So verticalise yourself. Leave the bed. Leave its maddening mammal warmth. Out you go, clammy-footed, into the midnight spaces. The couch. The kitchen.
"So now you're up. You've reclaimed a little dignity, a little agency.
"You're shaken, though. You make yourself a piece of toast; it pops up like a gravestone. Insomnia is no joke. The thoughts it produces are entirely and droningly humourless. Failure, guilt, your money, your body. Someone else's body. On and on. And over there, look, the world: the whole flawed and shuddering and horribly lit life-and-deathscape ... At 2:41 a.m., everyone who's awake turns into [someone in] a Hieronymus Bosch painting."
"Daddy!"
I was on a waterways cruise in Copenhagen when the little girl on the lap of a woman sitting next to me gave an excited shrill of recognition. She pointed a chubby little finger at a statuesque man standing, naked, on a quay we were cruising past.
Tourists within earshot of the cherub had a chortle at this, because the cherub was mistaken. In fact the man on the quay was Copenhagen's bronze replica of Michelangelo's marble David in Florence.
Why was the cherub deceived? We fell to wondering if it was that, this being sauna-loving Scandinavia, the child had seen Daddy naked and was reminded of him (perhaps thinking him the only naked man there is) by David's manly nakedness.
I have some sympathy with some of the statue-topplers and it always does my iconoclastic heart good to see a pompous statue a little de-pomped, if only by something as simple as having a seagull (the most iconoclastic of birds) stand on the statue's head.
In Glasgow's CBD an otherwise pompously unScottish equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington is relentlessly decorated with an orange traffic cone on the Duke's head. The authorities have given up bothering to remove it (overnight, iconoclasts climb up and re-cone the Duke) and now the cone-improved statue is thought a symbol of something iconoclastically Glaswegian about Glasgow.
Still sort of on statues, and still lying awake on my bed in my Bosch, I mused that one of the several horrors of the election of a Liberal government in October will be that almost all commissioning of public art will shrivel. Liberals hate the arts and have always, especially in the days of Jon Stanhope's enlightened chief ministerships, made political hay with philistine voters' rage at money being "wasted" on public art. Has Alistair Coe ever even been to the opera? Does he know his arts from his elbow? Cultured Canberrans demand to know.
But back to James Parker's ode to insomnia. It takes as its theme his idea that the worst thing about insomnia is the insomniac's sense of loneliness.
Lying awake in my personal Bosch I found myself thinking, in these statue-toppling times, of statues. As a newspaper reporter I have palely loitered at a galaxy of statue unveilings. As a peripatetic, sculpture-loving traveller I have ogled statues everywhere. Here are some of my statue-based memories, dreams and reflections.
"Daddy!"
I was on a waterways cruise in Copenhagen when the little girl on the lap of a woman sitting next to me gave an excited shrill of recognition. She pointed a chubby little finger at a statuesque man standing, naked, on a quay we were cruising past.
Tourists within earshot of the cherub had a chortle at this, because the cherub was mistaken. In fact the man on the quay was Copenhagen's bronze replica of Michelangelo's marble David in Florence.
Why was the cherub deceived? We fell to wondering if it was that, this being sauna-loving Scandinavia, the child had seen Daddy naked and was reminded of him (perhaps thinking him the only naked man there is) by David's manly nakedness.
I have some sympathy with some of the statue-topplers and it always does my iconoclastic heart good to see a pompous statue a little de-pomped, if only by something as simple as having a seagull (the most iconoclastic of birds) stand on the statue's head.
In Glasgow's CBD an otherwise pompously unScottish equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington is relentlessly decorated with an orange traffic cone on the Duke's head. The authorities have given up bothering to remove it (overnight, iconoclasts climb up and re-cone the Duke) and now the cone-improved statue is thought a symbol of something iconoclastically Glaswegian about Glasgow.
There is a strong likelihood that the ACT powers-that-be will want to install a statue of me in Canberra (after all, I have given Canberra all the best years of my life, writing books and plays and columns in her praise). So a clause in my will insists that the statue cannot be topple-prone pompous, but to amuse must have some absurdity about it, perhaps a bronze seagull standing on my bronze head.
Still sort of on statues, and still lying awake on my bed in my Bosch, I mused that one of the several horrors of the election of a Liberal government in October will be that almost all commissioning of public art will shrivel. Liberals hate the arts and have always, especially in the days of Jon Stanhope's enlightened chief ministerships, made political hay with philistine voters' rage at money being "wasted" on public art. Has Alistair Coe ever even been to the opera? Does he know his arts from his elbow? Cultured Canberrans demand to know.
But back to James Parker's ode to insomnia. It takes as its theme his idea that the worst thing about insomnia is the insomniac's sense of loneliness.
"[So take solace] my sleepless friend ... you're not alone. Even as you twist in these private coils [worries about guilt, failure, bodies, etc.] you are joining a mystical fellowship of insomniacs. We are all out there, keeping an eye on things ... We're like the Night's Watch in Game of Thrones, except there are millions of us. Above the city rooftops it shimmers and flexes; it tingles over the leafy suburbs: the neural lattice of our wakefulness."
Alas, I found the thought that I might be sharing a "'neural lattice" with other Canberrans so very intellectually stimulating I was unable to go back to sleep.
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6800298/staring-into-insomnias-yawning-abyss/#gsc.tab=0
Alas, I found the thought that I might be sharing a "'neural lattice" with other Canberrans so very intellectually stimulating I was unable to go back to sleep.
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6800298/staring-into-insomnias-yawning-abyss/#gsc.tab=0
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