coldhearted scientist وداد

PROBLEM: HOW TO CONVERT THIS INTO LUXURY, CALM, AND VOLUPTUOUSNESS: HURRICANE IKE IS A CATEGORY 4 STORM NOW AND IS EXPECTED TO BE A MAJOR HURRICANE WHEN HE REACHES THE CENTRAL GULF THURSDAY EVENING. HE COULD MAKE LANDFALL ANYWHERE ALONG THE LOUISIANA OR EASTERN TEXAS COAST, TO EXTRAPOLATE FROM CURRENT PROJECTIONS. PEOPLE NEED TO START THINKING ABOUT PLANS. THAT IS TO SAY, EVEN I OUGHT TO DO SO, GIVEN WHAT HAPPENED TO MUCH OF BATON ROUGE IN GUSTAV, AND IN THE EVENT THERE SHOULD BE MANDATORY EVACUATION. I WILL SLEEP ON THIS QUESTION FOR TWO DAYS. THEN I WILL PRESENT A BALLOT ON THIS ISSUE, AND YOU WILL VOTE.

Written on one of the few sunny days we have had since my return from Peru: Really, I think a more idiomatic translation of the Baudelaire line would be luxury, calm, and pleasure, but I find ‘voluptuousness’ to be more precise. My garden is overgrown; I am weeding it and cutting it back. I do not get enough outdoor exercise and gardening is wonderful. After an hour or two the very color of the air seems to change, glowing with life, and the slanting sun comes in through every pore. Opulence is standing in bee-buzzed air not mixed with vehicle or factory smoke.

Written during post Gustav roof repairs: I so wish the sun would come out. I so wish I had greater savings. But whether the sun comes out or not, and if I am to create larger savings, I must, must learn to sleep. I do not sleep and it is on purpose, it is not insomnia but some strange, clearly destructive strategy. I see, however, that speaking negatively of it does not help.

I wonder what positive thing I am trying to accomplish by this, and how I might accomplish it more efficiently. I have considered the question of what I may be trying to avoid, but the hypotheses led toward hortatory paths I have traveled before to no good end. What I am rebelling against and then how to rebel in a more direct and positive way would, I suspect, be the more useful investigation.

Excursus on sleeping: I know what some yoga teachers would say: do not try to understand why you refuse to sleep, just sleep. But it always helps me to identify the stone I wish to move from my path, so that I can find the lever which really will remove it.

I have a much longer post coming up about this some weeks from now. It traces my refusal to sleep back to the first days of assistant professordom. I have just flashed on two much earlier moments, though. One, my decision as a toddler not to take naps. My reasoning was that depressed people slept, and they called it giving in. Since I did not want to be a depressed person or to “give in,” I would not sleep.

The next moment was in early graduate school. The first semester of graduate school. Before I figured out that graduate school was fun. That semester I did not like my courses. The entire enterprise appeared to be covered with dust and mold, to have one foot in the grave, and to be imbued with duty and drudgery.

I began to keep odd hours and then while away the afternoons in a somnolent state. A housemate said, “You refuse to sleep.” This woke me up.

Luxury, calm, and voluptuousness: Until that distant day I had not realized it was I who was refusing to sleep. I had thought I was simply not allowed. But then, as now, and as when I was a preschooler, not sleeping was a way of not giving in. One was therefore safer not sleeping. Sleep was a symptom of illness, and one was better off not “giving in” to that.

Yet sleeping is a hedonistic pleasure. I have been rebelling against regimentation and fresh-faced goodness by not sleeping, but perhaps sleep can be construed as revolutionary. And at this moment Lucille Bogan is singing that she “stays drunk each and every worried day,” and Morpheus is one of the better gods.

Axé.