Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: Tossing and Turning in ‘Insomnia’
Anyone
who has ever struggled to rest throughout an entire night — which I
imagine is all of us, at one time or another — will sympathize with
Marina Benjamin, who plumbs the agony of her own sleeplessness in her
new book, simply titled “Insomnia.” In it, Benjamin describes the
different varieties of middle-of-the-night dislocation — nights when
“the thickening, sense-dulling” darkness “hangs velvety as a pall,” or
the “luminous moonlit nights, lurid nights, when everything feels
heightened.” She recounts her own experiences and frustrations, but also
calls on the works of a wide range of others to illuminate the subject,
like the poet Rumi, the painter Magritte and the philosopher David
Hume; as well as fictional characters, like Odysseus’s wife, Penelope
(“his absence stirs her desire, but then her insomnia curdles that
desire into despair,” Benjamin writes). Below, she discusses the
particularly bad bout of insomnia that inspired her to write the book,
the recurrent image of sleeping women in classical art and more.
When did you first get the idea to write this book?
It
grew out of experience. I’ve been an insomniac all my life. In
childhood, it was much more a refusal to sleep, because I didn’t know
where we went to — the usual kind of terror of night. Insomnia comes
very much more from the outside now; it feels like an assault.
At
the start of 2017, I was experiencing a particularly rough bout of it.
It started intruding on and disrupting my sense of reality. I had
various family problems detonating around me, blasting up from nowhere,
it seemed. It felt that life had become very, very unwieldy, as though
day and night had been turned upside down. Nonsense mingled with sense. I
was exhausted, limping through the days.
I
decided I wanted to write about it. Because I began writing from this
distorted place, the first 5,000 words kind of gushed out; it was almost
like automatic writing. Being in my mid-50s has felt unmoored, which is
a very fruitful place to be, partly because it’s liminal — middle life
is a transition moment, by definition, and so is insomnia: You’re
precariously balanced between two worlds. I like the idea of being in
that place and writing from that place, and to write a whole book in
that strange way, with ambiguity and uncertainty, so we get dropped into
my altered state.
What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?
I
was struck by the recurrent image of sleeping women and vigilantly
wakeful ones — like Penelope — in literature and art. I had never
thought of the various meanings that might attach to slumbering women,
or what it was they meant or symbolized. The sleeping women I looked at
were in mainly two areas. One was paintings; there were lots of
classical women depicted as sleeping. And Silas Weir Mitchell’s rest
cure was another fruitful area, where women who were exhibiting anxiety
were basically put to bed for days and forbidden to get up except for
bodily functions. It drove the writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman to the
edge of madness. In my reading about that, these depictions of sleeping
women seemed to embody the malaise of an entire society that was sated
on the comforts of capitalism but alienated from its own wants; a kind
of decadence, if you like, but in its worst manifestations.
Another
surprise was how active premodern people were at night; how common it
was for them to perform at night functions that we associate with the
day: chatting with friends, getting haircuts (sometimes in bed). The
luxury of privacy was very rare, and many people didn’t have bedrooms
that were separate spaces that were private and individual. They might
have a divan in the living room or often in their office.
In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?
What
changed was its scope. When the first 5,000 words spilled out, they
came largely in the nature of personal complaint — a way of venting my
own frustrations with not sleeping. Then I got interested in
philosophical and psychological perspectives: why we contrast darkness
to light; how we navigate thresholds; how, with insomnia, we need to
reckon with our own inner darkness — you feel that very palpably when
you’re awake at night starting at the ceiling, drowning in a well of
uncertainty and longing.
The form of
the book gave me certain freedoms that grew as the book progressed. The
digressive associative style, designed to mimic the insomniac
experience, allowed me to expand my inquiry so I could bring in bigger
themes: capitalism, the use of stimulants and the experience of other
insomniacs, so that it’s not just an interior, experiential inquiry.
Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?
I
visit a lot of galleries when I look for inspiration. If I had to pick a
single artist who I find inspiring in this way, I’d pick Edward Hopper.
It’s partly because he’s drawn to interior spaces, to rooms rather than
landscapes. The people he paints are often alone, like the insomniac,
lost in contemplation, looking out the window. Apart from the lushness
of his work — the gorgeous palette of colors — there’s a real humanity
there that I’m pulled to. But also a cheekiness — wanting to spy on
people and learn their secrets.
And
at the last retrospective of his work that I went to in London, I was
surprised at the size of some of the canvases, as if he wanted to
envelop you so you have an immersive experience, much like reading.
Persuade someone to read “Insomnia” in 50 words or less.
It
elevates insomnia to see it as more than just a sleep disorder in need
of a cure, or a state of lack. I felt that if we embraced insomnia — the
joys and terrors of darkness — then we could celebrate what it means to
live life fully and startlingly awake.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Follow John Williams on Twitter: @johnwilliamsnyt.
Insomnia
By Marina Benjamin
133 pages. Catapult. $18.95.
Insomnia
By Marina Benjamin
133 pages. Catapult. $18.95.
No comments:
Post a Comment