Since I began using a sleep tracker app I've paid more attention to what I can do that produces a sound, restorative sleep. The ridiculous disco lightbulb, if I set it to a low mild orange and read by that light, seems to really help, as does not going to sleep too early in the evening. A few simple observations like that, and here we are: sleeping half as much again as I was this time last year, and without the assistance of any kind of drug.
I recently signed up to participate in a study on how Covid affects our minds. For this I report my night dreams and daydreams (you have to set aside time to daydream) every day for at least a fortnight. It's a lot of work and my dreams, so far, are embarrassingly stupid. I am definitely dreaming more. This morning I was deep in a heavy dream when I woke. The pink blocks are dream state sleep and even for me this is a very dream-intensive night.
I know I write this a lot but daily waking life is now so much like a dream, in so many respects, that I question whether isolating special states of mind and attending to those is not sort of missing the point. How dreadfully arrogant; I don't mean to say that those scientists designing and running their study don't know the nature of what they're investigating. It's just a question I ask here because I can.
In the supermarket yesterday afternoon I looked (again) at all the people walking round totally normally but wearing face masks. I look at this all the time on the street too, when I'm walking. The mask is the mark of calamity and everyone walks round with it on their faces as if nothing has happened. At this point I now feel cocooned inside / behind my own mask. I feel invisible, looking at other people.
This morning brushing my teeth I thought (again) that the uncanniness of the virus is that spread itself across the whole world, inexorable, omnipotent, unified, microscopic, fragmented, mindless, and it made no concession to anything or anyone. It has total power to affect and change everything, and it has this absolute power without intelligence or consciousness. This is not frightening, but it is very strange. Possibly I only think this because I never bothered to get a scientific education.
David came over this morning and made pancakes for breakfast. This was delightful, and novel rather than strange. But the pancakes themselves were strange. I asked for mine to have a face on it and I definitely got what I asked for.
The torment of this work week and its too many meetings every day: four meetings today, on three different video call platforms, and three personal calls. A colleague is having a birthday tomorrow and, you know, I sincerely hope it's as happy as it can be - but I felt I couldn't come up with a pithily phrased piece of well-wishing to contribute to the collection which is going onto the 'card' that he will receive by email tomorrow. I should've just written 'I hope your birthday is as happy as can be'. Instead I Googled for a line and was punished / rewarded with a website of phrases plucked from the linguistic corpus of a parallel world I can almost imagine.
I had an idea for a sustained drawing project. People have suggested 'a children's book'. This is a book idea but not for children particularly. It's an album of pictures of the things Victorians have been fined for doing contrary to public health orders. Two women were eating ice cream in the street at 2am etc. For months we have been supplied with these little glowing wires of images of what's going on out there in the night and the distance. We are given these stories for political reasons and Victorians have been issued with more than ten million dollars worth of on the spot fines, but the stories themselves are so curious and evocative. A man went to Gruyere to buy a vintage car. A woman said she was going to work, but she was in her pyjamas and had two dogs in the back. I made a big list.
Then I set off for an aimless walk. After a bit I thought I might as well go to Piedimonte's, although to myself I kept saying it was Pellegrini's and this was exasperating, because I know perfectly well that it isn't. (I stood in front of closed-up Pellegrini's a few weeks ago, when I went into the city to give blood, and stared into the dark while a friend on the phone told me she had found out she must have her breasts and ovaries cut away to avoid getting cancer.)
As I got closer to Pellegrini's I mean Piedimonte's I saw loads of posters on houses whinging about how Piedimonte's is going to be made taller, and I felt a disreputable, shabby, mean little stab of savage pleasure that the inmates of these lovely warm interesting tactile houses and streets are shameless and selfish enough to squander their complaining energy on complaining about the local shop instead of, oh, just about anything else
Fore completeness' sake I had better note that a short while ago Chanticleer rolled onto his back and stretched his paws up past his ears and let out a deep full-throated uncatlike groan of a yawn, most unlike him really. I tried just now to reproduce the sound he made, in the interests of describing it more accurately to you, and I woke them both up, which is only fair since they wake me up every morning.
I'm not going to say '2020' any more, because I have a feeling that this freakeigh kinda business is here to stay, in one form or another. Well, goodnight. I'm going to close my eyes now and listen deep with my heart to this record playing now, Pour Down Like Silver by Richard and Linda Thompson, the opposite of weird, clarity and sincerity of sound and purpose, and drift off to oblivion somewhere unmoored in the dark between 1975 and now
2 comments:
I love all those weird stories too. Like a spotlight shone briefly on each of us at our most furtive.
Beautiful writing Laura.
I have an unseemly curiosity about young Edward Bourke (and his name is so much like Edmund Burke John Howard's hero). He has obviously photoshopped himself so much in that photo. I see a particularly odd specimen of a damaged child and I'm full of curiosity about his family background.
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