When I was around 8, I received a gift from my mother. It was round and beige, with an electrical plug. My brother and I shared a bathroom, which he didn’t let me use, but he did let me hear it. He slammed down that toilet seat, and often left his door open when he was loudly socializing and complaining about it did no good. Everything he did seemed louder than it needed to be. He barely spoke to me, so this was his communication. This new contraption was a modest purchase at Sears, but it could yield results. English kids of a certain generation were put on Valium if they seemed like they needed it. This orb was a less drastic measure, deferring the inevitable. It was a noise machine. It sounded like a fan, but deeper, more sonorous. Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. It was like a meditation ohm that lasted as long as I needed it, and all I had to do was press a button. I was told that it reproduced the sounds of the womb, based on whoever knew such things. I was an induced labor, pulled out against my will, though I apparently handled it well, finding a pretty nurse soon after I got here, inspiring my first smile.
But it was not all smiles after that. There was the outside world. There were bullies at school and another one on the other side of the bathroom. My new womb was supposed to transport me back, when I was still percolating, with food and shelter provided for, no haters. Hart Crane, who didn’t last long here, knew the feeling.
Where the cedar leaf divides the sky
I heard the sea.
In sapphire arenas of the hills
I was promised an improved infancy.
Improved infancy? The womb machine promised even more. Improved in utero. My home was balkanized, but if I could remember back before that, I could still be transported to a feeling of safety. The womb machine doesn’t always work of course. Sometimes, I try and try and I can’t get to a place of peace. I am still haunted, anxious, and sometimes I feel that I should try to write about insomnia, but I always forget by daylight.
Everyone who writes about sleep knows not to take it for granted. Keats, at 23, two years before death, wrote a “Sonnet to Sleep.”
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the "Amen," ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.
I feel the same way about soothest sleep, but sleep can be an unfaithful lover. I sometimes wonder if it is because of my memory palace. I store things up on the level of pitch, personality, details I don’t really need to remember, but one never knows. Young Philip Larkin was already bleak when he wrote these lines:
Child in the womb,
Or saint on a tomb –
Which way shall I lie
To fall asleep?
I have an idea of my womb position, but my in utero self wasn’t planning on playing piano, typing on a laptop, or anything else essential for the tendons. Sleep can be a double agent. The in utero self lies down one way to prepare for the lying down we do in our grave, so Larkin tells us. What we do in between is what matters, if it matters to us. As long as I can type these words, it matters to me. I was eventually hooked on Klonopin at the psych ward back in 2008 and I’m still taking it. This has worked out fine most of the time, but I do hate needing a professional pusher to do something that, in a more innocent time, only required a simple product from Sears, and less than that before. I have experienced withdrawal before and it is no joke. Improved infancy is for poetry.
I moved to Brooklyn last summer, in an apartment facing, at various times, sirens, loud thuds, car radios at Guantanamo levels, and, when the temperatures dropped, clanging heat pipes. My white noise app wasn’t enough. I now needed layers of white and brown noise—a Bluetooth speaker, an old school machine like the Sears one, an iPad, all to take me to Keats’s sonnet. Maybe it’s hard to forget because remembering things is crucial to what I do. Memory is my currency. “Every single night’s a fight with my brain,” sang Fiona Apple.
Apple also sang a cover of this from the Beach Boys which will forever haunt me.
There's a world where I can go
And tell my secrets to
In my room
In my room
In this world I lock out
All my worries and my fears
In my room
In my room
Do my dreaming and my scheming lie awake and pray
Do my crying and my sighing laugh at yesterday
This room is meant to be safe, the transition to from the womb to a place where you assume the in utero position and turn everything off and forget. Remember, remember, remember, then forget, with the snap of a finger.
“In My Room” makes me cry because it is a seductive fantasy reopening a wound that never heals. There was an artificial womb that was supposed to comfort me in my room. It was mine, but not impervious to the outside world, which will find its way in one way or another. Safety is an illusion. This will all be taken away. We really aren’t here very long.
But then one can still have perspective. I recently interviewed the great Ron Carter, in the Guinness Book of World’s Records as the most recorded bass player, who will soon turn 85. This man has been keeping exquisite time for 60 years, and even he told me he had to shut news about Russia out of his head to get to that place. Quarter notes, half notes, waltz, bowing, variations on a theme, ad infinitum. Some people count their way to sleep. Some people are strong and know that to everything there is a season. That pulse is going on all the time. It’s the heartbeat, something that reminds us that we’re awake, asleep, alive. Carter told me he was still trying to find the right notes, that the variation between each beat was infinite. If it’s all in the service of beauty, coming from such a source of elegant strength, it sounds like something we could strive for, in our ways.
We find our way through being awake and asleep, and not all of it is music. The brown noise, darker and more comforting, and the white noise, brighter and more confrontational, are the opposite of music. It’s the opposite of listening to Ron Carter or anyone else. If it is music, it is an extreme minimalist version of it. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I hear something there, a walking bass line, an Afro-Cuban beat, as if there’s a party there in this other world, a place that is supposed to comfort you with evocations of when you hadn’t gotten here and preparations for when you are here no more. There is no app for the sound of death, though many have imagined it. You could make a playlist that starts with Jelly Roll Morton’s “Dead Man’s Blues,” continues to the Stanley Brothers’ version of “O Death” and take it from there. To be a live human is to know that the blues of the dead await. We have this instant between the comfort of the womb and the humbling of the final breath, and if you spend part of it in desperate need of turning it off, then welcome.
If we are truly aware of the pleasures and pains that await, it is mind boggling. Something will get us in the end, and we will struggle until we can’t. We will eventually be out of time and will need the World’s Greatest Bass Player. We need someone to tuck us in and tell us everything will be ok. Breathe in, breathe out, listen to the sound of layered nothingness and find your way to trance. When things stop making sense, you know you’re getting there. We all need it, and like everything else, it is not distributed in equal amounts. Walt Whitman knew this:
The blind sleep, and the deaf and dumb sleep,
The prisoner sleeps well in the prison, the runaway son sleeps,
The murderer that is to be hung next day, how does he sleep?
And the murder’d person, how does he sleep?
This is from a long poem, and we can live in an even longer one. When I was doing research about Buddhism, I used an app called Head Space, where a man told me to think of every aspect of my life and embrace and accept it. This was probably 10 minutes in and I was in a public place. Dear reader, I thought of this, and I started crying and could not stop.
I never listened to the rest of the app. In art and in life, it is my nature to confront and be confronted. If I tried to live in a way conducive to sleep, I wouldn’t really be living. So I throw the dice every day, and if I have a bad night one night, I make up for it in the next, and I get to continue this experiment of making it through another day and another night that follows it. On a good day, I have really lived, and on a good night, I come up with a successful delusion. “Dream, dream, dream dream,” sing The Everly Brothers in a stunning drone. “In dreams, I walk with you,” sings Roy Orbison. When my son was little, I loved story time, and it was probably more pleasurable to give it than it was to receive it. We can help each other through. We can say good night and really mean it. We can even try to embrace the unembraceable. We can close our eyes and breathe deeply and find our way. It’s all illusion, but, if we are doing it right, we regress into childhood, maybe earlier. We hang on, we let go, and do it again until we don’t, until our little life, says Shakespeare’s Prospero, is rounded with a sleep. It’s not over yet. One day I’ll finish that app. And miles to go…