Beautiful dreamer

"How do the angels get to sleep

when the devil leaves the porch light on?"

-- Tom Waits, "Mr. Siegal"

Sleeping angel 9-5-13

"A pillow for thee will I bring,
Stuffed with down of angel's wing."
 

--Richard Crashaw

"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."

-- John Lennon

Giving insomnia the finger (actually four fingers because I hate it that much)

“Every time you come in yelling that God damn "Rise and Shine!" "Rise and Shine!"
I say to myself, "How lucky dead people are!”

-- Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

Fingers with cutout faces, one in stitches 7-8-13

“Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? 

There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. 

A second that is you, without memory or experience,

the animal warm and waking into a brand new world.”

-- Jeanette Winterson

“I didn't want to wake up.

 I was having a much better time asleep. 

And that's really sad.”

-- Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

Hold on

"I like to use my hands and make things ...

It might seem pretty stupid or  pointless but that doesn't matter ...

Some of the most interesting work is the stuff that starts like that --

out of a raw need for activity."

-- Bruce Nauman

Self portrait in polymer clay 7-7-13

“I don't want to be the one who says life is beautiful.
I want to be the one who feels it.”

-- Marty Rubin

Love me tender

"Oh, she may be weary
Young girls they do get weary ..."

-- Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"

Self portrait 5-31-13

“And then I remember this morning and I wonder 

if it really happened or if I dreamed it. 

It was nice. And weird. And tender. 

I'm not used to tender. It's a fossil, that word. 

Conditions changed and it died out. Like the woolly mammoth.” 

-- Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution

Nighthawk

“All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. 

No matter how great my weariness, 

the wrench of parting with consciousness 

is unspeakably repulsive to me. 

I loathe Somnus, that black-masked headsman binding me to the block; 

and if in the course of years I have got so used to my nightly ordeal 

as almost to swagger while the familiar axe 

is coming out of its great velvet-lined case,

 initially I had no such comfort or defense.”

-- Vladimir Nabokov

Self portrait 5-20-13

Somnus is the Latin name for the Greek god Hypnos, 

a son of the goddess Nyx  (night) 

and the personification of sleep. 

His palace was a dark cave where the sun never shined. 

His dwelling place had neither door nor gate 

lest he be awakened by the creaking of hinges.

4 a.m. blues

“There is a dead spot in the night, 

that coldest, blackest time 

when the world has forgotten evening 

and dawn is not yet a promise. 

A time when it is far too early to arise, 

but so late that going to bed makes small sense.”

-- Robin Hobb, Assassin's Quest 

Polymer clay face 5-15-13

"I could hear the roots of loneliness 

creeping through me when the world was hushed 

at four o'clock in the morning.” 

-- Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Night is the hardest time to be alive  ...

It lasts so long, and four a.m. knows all my secrets.”

                                    -- Poppy Z. Brite

Only if for a night

 And it's breaking over me,
A thousand miles down to the sea bed,
Found the place to rest my head.
Never let me go, never let me go.
Never let me go, never let me go.

-- Florence + The Machine, "Never Let Me Go"

Self portrait 5-12-13

“Self abandoned, relaxed and effortless,

I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; 

I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, 

I felt the torrent come; 

to rise I had no will,
to flee I had no strength.”

                                                                                              -- Charlotte Bronte, Jayne Eyre
 
 

I slept.

All night.

Somehow I cracked the code.

Probably it had something to do with the fact that I had slept less than 2 hours in the previous 36. 

But still ...

I am rested and alert -- a strange feeling for sure -- all buzzy and tingly. Scrubbed. 

When I woke, I wanted to marinate -- no, to drown, in the beautiful buzziness. 

I wanted to sink further into it and soak it up and to never get out of bed again lest I break the spell -- that magical convergence of fatigue, hope, hopelessness, the planets, the gods, and pure dumb luck that mercifully pulled me under and held me beneath the surface, only if for a night.

I know the spell won't last.

All magic spells are momentary, breakable, un-doable.

There is always a reversal, an anti-spell. 

But for now I will accept this elusive and magical gift that comes along but once in a very blue moon, before it slips away and is eventually and inevitably, undone.

Can I buy a Z?

“Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.”

                                                                                             -- George Orwell, 1984

Polymer clay face 5-10-13

“You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel—a hunger and thirst.”

                                                                                     --H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes

Soooooo tired.

After an all-too-short sort-of hiatus, my insomnia has stalked me down again, with a vengeance.
Just when I thought I was making some miniscule headway, crawling out of the dark and tangled forest a sleep-drug-free inch at a time, insomnia reached out and snatched me back into its spiky, spiny briars.
And not just the "it takes a long time to fall asleep" kind of insomnia. Oh no. It's the "wide awake all f***ing night, a 42 mile bike ride, two Ambiens, two Unisoms, a fistful of melatonin and valerian, white noise machine, sleep hypnosis CD, all the chamomile tea in the world can't touch it" kind of insomnia.

Forget about catching Zs. I can't even buy any Bs or Cs.
Go big or go home, right?

I frequently, seriously and hopelessly wonder if it will ever get better, or if the rest of my life is going to be this -- this search, this struggle, this quest for something that is supposed to just naturally happen, that is one of the most basic functions of being human. Or maybe it's not so much as a "quest for" what should be happening, as it is a wish to "escape from" what actually is happening, this mean and terrible thing.

Either way, it's a tug and pull that is grinding me down, hard. A lifetime of it looks pretty bleak.

Not sleeping can crush a whole day -- just pulverize any possibilities and potential into a dry pulpy dust.
So as a result, I don't make plans.
I don't look ahead.
I don't commit to anything.
I don't "hope for."
I don't make promises.
I don't go anywhere.
I have no great expectations.
I have no not-so-great expectations.

Because chances are I won't be able to show up or follow through anyway. And I hate having to back out of things and cancel stuff all the damn time. An uninterrupted string of empty blank squares on my calendar is soothing, a comfort. If I don't make plans, then I don't have to worry about letting anybody down, because nobody is expecting anything from me. It's easier to just say no, and to isolate myself, like I'm under quarantine. At least behind the self-protective closed door of my life I'm the only sufferer.

And behind the closed door, I have this 365 days project. And I will not let insomnia ruin this. Because right now, this seems to be the one thing that I can plan on, look forward to, commit to, hope for and expect. It's someplace I can go. It's the only promise I seem to be able to keep. So I will cling to it.

I tried to shoot a self portrait today, but for the first time all year I just deleted every photo, every file.
I looked ninety eight.
And not a good ninety eight.
I haven't played with my clay in a while, so I sculpted this exhausted little face as a stand-in for my own.
My fingerprints are all over him, though. So I guess it is a self portrait of sorts.

Or more accurately, a self portrait out-of-sorts.

Sigh.

Twinkle, twinkle

“Rather nice night, after all. 

Stars are out and everything. 

Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.” 

                                                                          -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

Night face, 4-1-13

“Could it be that the planets are castaway heads.”

                                                              

                                                             -- Visar Zniti, The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry

"Insomnia" the movie

Today's face is my first ever animated video face!

It is a special kind of self portrait -- a sneak peek into what it's like inside my insomniac head when I am desperately seeking sleep. Even in the deepest, deadest silence of the calmest, darkest night, it can get pretty noisy up in here, here inside my restless, wide-awake mind.

I mean, I want to hear the calm and blissful harp, but it seems as though all my mind can conjure are crying babies, beeping alarms, blaring sirens, crowing roosters and ticking clocks which, at 4 a.m., might as well be f***ing jack hammers.

If you've ever struggled with chronic (or even occasional) sleeplessness, you have my deepest sympathy and understanding. If you sleep regularly, deeply, soundly and undisturbed, don't ever take for granted how lucky you are. Oh, yeah, and also, I hate you.

Insomnia sucks donkey balls. Big. Fat. Hairy. Donkey. Balls.

But then again, without insomnia, there would be no "Insomnia the movie," now, would there? Without insomnia, half the posts on this blog wouldn't even exist. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe it's just a thing.

Hey. I can't sleep. Give me some slack.

And while I am pretty experienced and well-versed about the subject of my own insomnia, I admit right up front that I am a very extremely amateur stop motion video artist. Very extremely amateur. My work is rudimentary at best, I know. But I am trying to learn.

There are folks out there who do amazing things with this super fun visual medium.

I am not one of those folks.

But that does not mean I can't still play with their toys.

Beginning again. Again.

"The beginning is always today."

                                                 --Mary Shelley

Polymer clay face with egg shell 3-17-13

Going, going, gone

Drifting off to sleep,


I thought about her.


How nobody is perfect.

How you just have to


close your eyes


and breathe out

"Drifting," self portrait series 3-15-13

and let the puzzle


of the human heart


be what it is.

-- Sue Monk Kidd,  

The Secret Life of Bees

To sleep: perchance to dream

Ay, there's the rub.

Polymer clay sleepy face (2) 3-9-13

I sculpted this little face during a long car ride yesterday following a string of difficult nights of very-little-not-til-the-wee-hours sleep, and fresh (or not so) on the heels of a night that yielded absolutely no sleep at all.

Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. None.

I rode in the rear seat and passed the time there and back pressing and molding and smoothing and rubbing the egg-sized lump of clay in my hand until this sleepy guy emerged.

He is my second sleepy head this month (see also March 2). Maybe in my desperate quest for sound, regular slumber (who am I kidding? At this point I'd settle for any quality of regular slumber) I am subliminally (or not so) shaping sleep totems for myself. Maybe by making sleeping faces I am trying to conjure magic or some kind of spell for myself that will hold the sleep stealers and insomnia bandits at bay. I don't know. But at this point, I'm willing to try just about anything.

He looks peaceful, despite his earnest little furrowed brow. He makes me feel peaceful. He is resting on my pillow. And I did finally sleep better last night. So maybe some drowsiness really did seep out of him and into me.

Maybe not.

At any rate, sculpting clay is a lovely way to pass time in the car. I highly recommend it.