Sleep no more

This was first written in July 2020 but lost and abandoned due to sleep deprivation. I may have once had vaulting ambitions for it, but here it is.

Most years around this time, I’m digging out my Macbeth notes and introducing another wide-eyed bunch of fifteen year olds to the Scottish play. In my early years of teaching I asked a colleague how I should start and she very generously stopped what she was doing, swivelled her chair over and explained her entire approach to teaching Shakespeare lesson by lesson. I’ve been doing it this way ever since:

We read the play together as a class, stopping for clarification and amazement at the use of language. We note down the references to sleep, notice how death is compared to sleep, how lack of sleep causes madness and hallucinations; how after the Macbeths murder Duncan, we rarely see them again in daylight, suggesting that perhaps they are ranting and scheming all night. They’re not sleeping. Although Macbeth’s first hallucination comes before the murder — the dagger of confirmation bias that leads him to commit the deed he claims to be in two minds about — after the murder these ramp up. Right away he swears he could hear someone say “Sleep no more, Macbeth hath murdered sleep.” And then sleep no more he does.

My job teaching Shakespeare is on hold for a while, but my current job is making me an even deeper analyst of the themes of sleep.

Every morning for the last 6 months I’ve been subconsciously adding up the sleep I got over the previous night. At first I would crawl into bed so exhausted I had no trouble falling asleep, but later I would lie awake waiting for our baby to wake and need me. Most nights I was clocking between 5 and 7 hours though, albeit in snippets. I would fall asleep with the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star roving around my brain, or the steady chant of the first two pages of Goodnight Moon. Babies crave routine, they tell me. Routine makes the days blur and bleed into each other, indistinguishably. In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon, damn spot.

A Facebook post about my lack of sleep garners responses from parents far and wide, “they all have ptsd” my partner says. A friend calls and tells me how useful controlled crying was for their first. We switch to video so he can see my baby trying to crawl and he sings a waiata to her. She bursts into tears. A few days later another friend sends a long message about the complete opposite approach his family used. I don’t even know if I’m confused anymore.

Some nights our baby doesn’t sleep because she wants to be in someone’s arms and how can you blame her? How can you refuse? She’s so very few months out in this vast unembracing world. Other times she’s just wide awake. I hold her and sway in that baby-holding way, while her big eyes glisten in the shafts of street light that find their way through the venetian blinds. She stares at the patterns it makes on the wall, scurries her fingers over my chest or moves them through the bedroom air. She’s calm in these moments, but I have no idea how to get her from awake, alert, curious and calm to deeply asleep in her bed. 

Parents’ group share their brief frustrations with sleep in our Whatsapp chat, but it’s always attributed to a scheduled sleep regression, teething or the catchall cry of “wonder weeks!” No one’s admitting that sometimes babies defy the structure of night and day, sometimes they’re in shitty moods, sometimes they’re just amazed to be here and want to see it all for themselves.

The less sleep I get the more scheming a Macbeth I become, trying to cover the tracks of my absolute naivety in parenting. We wake and debrief, add up the hours and make a plan for the next night. How can she not love sleep? we ask no one. We crave the coaxing and cuddling, the singing and swaying for ourselves. We crave the sleep she’s refusing. Oh sleep, Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, / The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, / Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, / Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

Until eventually, we dream of it.

Bio

Mostly it’s easy, the days I mean

text book teaching senior biology

free periods in the staffroom. It’s a good life

I state as fact, not like saying, ‘she’s lovely…’

an epigraph to the gossip I write.

 

Suspicious of superlatives, endlessly

but hard-wired for romance

tell me I’m capable, resourceful, reliable

adore the way I follow through with things I say I’ll do

let my eyes be an after-thought.

 

And I’m probably on the brink again

because what else is there to do with this

flesh-covered universe we call body?

System of lungs and blood and gravity

tugging at us to love.

 

Anyway, turn to p80 that picture of the genome

looking to you like Dante’s hell

long-limbed chromosomes

tumbling headless towards a fiery cell

because you’re still sixteen

and haven’t understood any of this.

 

 

The Persistence of Fiction

I’ve been insisting on the non-autobiographical nature of my novel for ages, but now I think I might actually be turning into my character. It’s okay though, she’s pretty cool. Yesterday I bought a second-hand Epiphone Les Paul Standard in sparkly blue and cream and although Paige in Lonesome When You Go is actually a bass player, there are substantial rumours circulating that there’s a sequel in the works in which she makes the switch to lead.

I’ve even found myself being ever-so-slightly more assertive, refusing to put up with histrionics in the staff room and flicking the hair from my eyes pointedly to signal the end of a conversation.

And of course I’ve been a long time plagiariser of Blood on the Tracks lyrics.

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Photo by Richard Wise

Perhaps this is proof that my fiction writing is just one step ahead of my real life desires, or perhaps life really is imitating art. It does happen. People look to literature – as readers and writers – for a better understanding of the world and themselves. I’ve always learnt something about myself through my own writing and, in lieu of safe, trustworthy and compassionate adults to talk to, people – especially young people – often look for emotional support by reading fiction.

I don’t think this means authors bear the burden of providing therapy or a safe and perfect world in their novels to which people can escape. Nor need they ensure their characters are ideal and consistently positive role models, but we do have a responsibility to keep in mind if we truly believe in what we do as writers. Otherwise what’s the point?

When I’m not writing or buying sweet axes, I’m a teacher. I have been for years. It’s given me a broad view of the world and an understanding that not everyone has the benefit of feeling safe all the time.

Sometimes I get to teach analysis of great literature, introduce students to writers and concepts that will hopefully stay with them as they take on the adult world. Often I get the pleasure of encouraging a young person to write something they never knew they were able to write. Other times I just read them books that help put feelings into words, their own emotional vocabularies so limited.

Always I stress the importance of language to our sense of self and well-being, and one day, maybe, I’ll even tell them about my secret life as a teenage rock star; how life is just an imitation of art imitating life.

Yard Duty

I’m teaching again. Students smile at me and say hi as we pass in the corridor. Sometimes they ask how I am. When we’re practising writing they might ask me the name of that feeling like butterflies in your stomach, but not excitement. It’s anxiety I tell them. Oh, anxiousness, they say.

On Monday and Wednesday lunchtimes I’m on yard duty. I have to shoo all the students out of the corridors and I have a walky-talky that I assume works, but have never used, except to pretend to call for back-up when someone’s trying to ask too many questions of me. I hold it near my mouth and make a fake static noise. Kkkkkk. They get the idea and move on.

Today a bird was trapped inside. There was a warm breeze and the sun was out, but that bird was obsessed with the unopenable window at the top of the stairs; wouldn’t move from the windowsill. It fluttered its wings like the butterflies in our stomachs, oblivious to the door we’d opened at the end of the empty corridor.

Digging – Writing, Work and Sci-fi Stereotypes.

At the start of last year I was sifting through some old posters in the English department, trying to make the classroom walls less grim, and found a laminated copy of Seamus Heaney’s ‘Digging.’ Perhaps a poem about potato farming wasn’t quite the thing to liven up the walls, but it was a nice reminder of my love for the work of the poet who had just died a year and a half earlier. I felt strongly it was a poem I needed to share with my classes.  It was my tenth year of teaching (a fact I found many opportunities to proclaim with both pride and astonishment) and, as it turned out, my last. For now at least. Teaching is hard work.

I’ve used the word “work” twice there very deliberately, of course. And I’ve been thinking about Digging again. There is such respect in Heaney’s poem for the hard labour of his father and grandfather, who “cut more turf in a day/ Than any other man on Toner’s bog.” It’s not the kind of work the poet will do, but it’s purposeful, necessary and skillful work nonetheless “Nicking and slicing neatly,” – there’s a craft to it.

The comparison between physical labour and intellectual / creative pursuits is pronounced in this poem and it’s easy to feel defensive of the latter as equally worthy, even if the results are not always as palpable.

Recent Netflixing of Sci-fi films brought up a discussion point in our house that the scientists, analysts, intellectuals and academics in movies are often portrayed as either very rigid in their thinking or a little bit unhinged. They have social anxieties and neuroses and we could attribute their obsessive interest in their particular field back to some childhood incident that needs resolving, rather than a sheer love of it. There’s little respect for curiosity and wonder.

Meanwhile, the ‘heroes’ of the films tend to be the working class – soldiers, tradespeople, the deep-core drillers who are the only ones who can save the world from an in-coming asteroid with their highly-trained and specific skills. They are physically, not intellectually, strong and they’ll need to be – combat is key to world-saving. It’s a triumphant uprising of the blue-collar as sparked by 90s Hollywood. These characters have hardships too, but they toil, construct and contribute. Science is both mocked and idealised as the final victory lies with the most ordinary, humble and unassuming character who’s just doing his job the best he can. Albeit with highly sophisticated, carefully researched, meticulously designed technologies.

Of course Sci-fi films are known for their extremes and Hollywood notorious for unrealistic and unfair portrayals of all kinds of members of society. It almost seems pointless to even bring it up, except that it feels like a constant and powerful theme.

Perhaps this is partly why I often find myself trying to justify the importance and effort involved in the work of the writer and end up reading all sorts of reassuring articles about writing, such as these ‘non-rules’ for writing by Elizabeth Percer. The third of her rules seems to fit nicely with what I’ve been thinking (daydreaming, wondering, lying around contemplating): The idea that writing work looks different to other kinds of work. Percer says,

About 80 percent of the writing I do looks nothing like writing. It looks like reading, or daydreaming, or driving, or drawing, or listening to music, or lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling.

Many other authors have discussed their ideas about writing as work (e.g. Ford, Eugenides) and often approach it as a desk job or nine-to-five. But to Heaney’s father it must not have looked like he was very busy at all, with much of what he did being possible from the same seat all day and hardly sweat-raising stuff.

As my students read Heaney’s poetry last year they discussed ideas about the importance of writing especially during difficult times, as Heaney was doing; writing as a craft or calling as worthy as potato digging when potato digging needs to be done; and that constant voice in our heads trying to tell us that what we want and do is just as valid as what anyone else is wanting or doing with their time on this earth. It was a fine moment for an English teacher to ‘retire’ on.

Heaney ends his poem with the decisive lines, “Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests. /I’ll dig with it.” It moves me every time.

When so much in the world is Hollywood constructed, media-manipulated, target marketing and just plain inauthentic, to find moments where people are doing what they do because they genuinely love and believe in the value of it – well, it keeps me digging, “down and down / For the good turf.”