This is a strange post, written under a strange compulsion, inspired by a strange night. It exposes me and it expresses me, but it also hides me, for as I write I’m hiding within the people I’m writing about. I don’t know what point there is in writing it. Why have I spent my morning writing this, when I have so many other things to do? I have no answer and no explanation, maybe there is no point, but here it is.
In the past I rarely experienced insomnia, but when my days were busier and my time more controlled by other people’s schedules, I used to dread the occasional sleepless night. I had a capacity to sit in bars at conferences enjoying the craic until the wee small hours and to get up bright-eyed and bristling with ideas the following morning, but nights of tossing in bed and trying to sleep were depleting and depressing. Now, I have little capacity for wine-sodden late nights, but I have many more sleepless nights. Rather than trying to sleep, I put on my music cozy (the perfect accessory for insomniacs with sleeping partners) and listen to undemanding radio programmes—Private Passions on Radio 3 and Desert Island Discs on Radio 4 have vast archives and make soporofic listening.
But this is last night.
It’s three am. I’m wide awake, and emotionally hollowed out. The darkness echoes with whispers of mortality and endings, grief and fragility. A woman’s body drifts in the river and the fallen tree holds her in its arms until her body is found. A mother. A lover. A daughter. A sister. A family sodden with loss. A woman’s last living act is to birth a daughter amidst the rubble. Some say it’s a miracle. They called the baby Aya, which is Arabic for a sign from God. A friend’s son is suspended between life and death, comatose. We pray for a miracle. I long ago stopped asking why. We must learn to live without answers, to be disconsolate, for the now of being alive is more miracle than we can bear.
I resist the temptation to check Twitter, which is the worst way to spend a wakeful night for it triggers so many reactions. Instead, I check my emails. (Yes, I know.) I subscribe to podcasts and lists that interest me, though I’ll never catch up with the daily inflow.
My inbox has a link to an interview with Ada Limón by Krista Tippett. I’ve recently discovered Limón’s poetry through Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound podcasts, which have become one of my favourite sources of reflection and inspiration.
I click on the link. I enter a world. The waves of sound rise and fall around me. I try to catch the phrases and ideas that brush up against me like small fish in a flowing stream, before they are lost to the evanescence of night. There are no punctuation marks in listening, no line breaks in what we hear. Here is the flow of the words I hear and know I must hold on to until morning when I can read the transcript.
the mystery of ourselves and the mystery of others the adventure we’re all on that is by turns treacherous and heartbreaking and revelatory and wondrous to give answers would be to disrespect the gravity of the questions even when you’re talking about the natural world we are of it not in it how are you how am I you could really go to some deep places if you really interrogated the self the caesura and the line breaks it has breath has silence built all around it when you open the page there’s already silence what am I supposed to do with all that silence when was the last time you just sat in silence with yourself to be made whole by being not a witness but witnessed poetry has breath built into it a trauma of the pandemic was that our breathing became a danger to strangers and beloveds between the ground and the feast is where I live now
There are moments when the flow is interrupted, when my understanding differs from theirs and I quarrel with them in the darkness. Poetry doesn’t recognize our wholeness it helps us to live with our lack and our yearning. If Ada Limón’s voice is of insistent honesty and wisdom and joyfulness how can it also be of wholeness? What is wholeness? How would I know it if I discovered it? I don’t want wholeness for the mosaic of living is beautiful when made with fragments and shards allowing silence and space for all that is broken all that is lost all that never has been all that might yet be all the cracks that let the light filter through.
The interview ends and I emerge into restlessness. I read Pádraig’s weekly newsletter which is also in my inbox.
He quotes Pascal: “In times of difficulty, always keep something beautiful in your heart.” (I’m reading not listening, so there are quotation marks, and punctuation, and line breaks.)
That’s what I’m doing tonight, keeping something beautiful in my heart, giving shape to the world’s desolation by the gifts that are being given to me in words, and oh there is such beauty in the sorrow, such radiance in this darkness as I read these words about reading:
I read Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster years ago, and there’s a line I’ve always recalled: ‘We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.’ That line was a permission for me. And radiate — what a verb: to shine, to emit.”
I am alone but not alone for these intimate artists of language are my companions of the night, and the darkness is radiant.
And then this:
PS: Apropos of nothing but the broad topic of memory, I recommend Maria Stepanova’s book In Memory of Memory (translated magnificently by Sasha Dugdale) to you. It was up for the Booker a few years ago. It’s a dense 500-page essay about mediocrity, memory, reliability, truth, and family. Utterly compelling.
I’m drifting into idle browsing now, for my soul is pregnant with unbirthed ideas that must be nurtured until they are ready to be born. One can have too much beauty, too much wisdom, too much radiance to hold until morning. I should sleep now.
I go to check if Stepanova’s book is available on Amazon so that I can add it to my wish list to remind me to read it. (Yes, Amazon. Guilty as charged). Oh. It’s on Kindle Unlimited. It’s free for me to read. I begin to read, feeling sure that this will send me to sleep because reading in the middle of the night always does.
But now the radiant night comes alive with dancing images and I abandon any attempt at sleep. I am awestruck with the treacherous and heartbreaking and revelatory and wondrous gifts that are flowing towards me from some wise, mysterious source that is orchestrating the universe around me so that its music is all for me and I am the gathering point for all the lonely voices of the night speaking of the miracle and the mystery of what it means to be human, the fragility, complexity, and unpredictability of our lives, our stories, our futures.
I am wide awake and making notes on Kindle, highlighting phrases and passages I want to return to, savouring that joy which comes when a metaphor or phrase makes even the most ordinary sentence glisten. When you read on Kindle, you can cut and paste complete with line breaks, punctuation, notes, references. So many ways of welcoming words. So many ways of remembering. So many forms of language.
Her apartment now stood silent, stunned and cowering, Stepanova, Maria; Stepanova, Maria. In Memory of Memory . Fitzcarraldo Editions. Kindle Edition.
The woven fabric of language decomposes instantly, never again to be felt between the fingers: ‘I would never say “lovely”, it sounds so terribly common,’ Galya admonished me once. And there were other prohibited words I can’t recall, her talk of one’s people, gossip about old friends, the neighbours, little reports from a lonely and self-consuming life. Stepanova, Maria; Stepanova, Maria. In Memory of Memory . Fitzcarraldo Editions. Kindle Edition.
I’m fascinated by the other sort of diary, the working tool, the sort the writer-as-craftsperson keeps close at hand, of little apparent use to the outsider. Susan Sontag, who practised this art form for decades, said of her diary that it was ‘an instrument, a tool’ – I’m not sure this is entirely apt. Sontag’s notebooks (and the notebooks of other writers) are not just for the storage of ideas, like nuts in squirrels’ cheeks, to be consumed later. Nor are they filled with quick outlines of events, to be recollected when needed. Notebooks are an essential daily activity for a certain type of person, loose-woven mesh on which they hang their clinging faith in reality and its continuing nature. Such texts have only one reader in mind, but this reader is utterly implicated. Break open a notebook at any point and be reminded of your own reality, because a notebook is a series of proofs that life has continuity and history, and (this is most important) that any point in your own past is still within your reach. Stepanova, Maria; Stepanova, Maria. In Memory of Memory . Fitzcarraldo Editions. Kindle Edition.
That last paragraph strengthens my resolve to write what I’ve read and heard during this long sleepless night as soon as I wake up. I don’t keep a diary because I’m never sure who I’m writing for, but Substack is liberating me, and as I read so am I beginning to write. You are the reader I have in mind, and you are utterly implicated.
But now I must try to sleep, even if only for a couple of hours. I put away the Kindle and go to BBC Sounds. There’s a new episode of Private Passions. I hope it’s somebody reassuringly dull, somebody who will lull me to sleep with gentle anecdotes and soothingly familiar musical choices.
Sometimes, the famous people on these programmes astound me with their achievements, their determination, their ability to know who they wanted to be from childhood and to pursue their dreams to fulfilment with resolute and sometimes ruthless ambition. They make me feel inadequate, frustrated by my lack of focus, the time I waste, the distractions I’m prey to, the slow drift of my life through time.
The guest is novelist, journalist, and bereavement counsellor Susie Boyt, daughter of artist Lucian Freud and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. This guest is not going to send me to sleep. Here is a life of interiority that I can relate to, the story of a human who knows that the greatest journeys we make are not outward but inward, and that the creativity that we birth from those journeys is the loose-woven mesh on which we hang our clinging faith.
Stepanova describes reading the diaries which her Aunt Galya wrote every day with meticulous attention to detail:
The diaries documented the time she got up and when she went to sleep, the television programmes she’d watched, the number of phone conversations she’d had, who they’d been with, what she’d eaten, whatever else she’d done. There was a minute and virtuosic avoidance of content – how she’d actually filled her hours. It might say ‘read’, for example, but with no mention of what the reading material had been or what it had meant to her – in fact everything in her long and exhaustively documented life was the same. Nothing indicated what this life had been for, there was nothing about herself, nothing about other people, only the fastidious details, the fixing of the passing of time with the exactitude of a medieval chronicler. I kept thinking that surely life would rear its head, if only once, and reveal itself in all its colour. Hadn’t she spent her life reading – wouldn’t that alone have provoked intense reflection? There were also the constant slights and grievances that my aunt clung to, and only reluctantly relinquished. Surely something of this would be preserved and laid out in a final furious paragraph, in which Galya would tell the world, and us, its representatives, what she thought of us – the unexpurgated truth. But there was nothing of the sort in the diaries. There were hints and semitones of meaning, folds in the weave that denoted emotion, ‘hurray’ written in the margin against the note of a phone call with my father or with me, a few opaquely bitter comments on her parents’ anniversaries. And that was it. It was as if the main task of each and every note, each completed year’s diary, was a faithful witnessing of the exterior, and a concealment of the authentic and interior. Show everything. Hide everything. Preserve it for ever. Stepanova, Maria; Stepanova, Maria. In Memory of Memory . Fitzcarraldo Editions. Kindle Edition.
Susie Boyt offers a counterpoise to Aunt Galya’s diaries. The story of her life is told as an unfolding journey of attentiveness to passions and emotions, of the textures that give the soul its weight and its substance. Facts and events appear as shadows cast by the feelings they evoke.
Her first musical choice is Beethoven’s Sonata in B flat major, which she says is stately and proud in its grief, and offers a new way into things that might help those who are proud to grieve. Oh, think of that. To help those who are proud to grieve. How much of the world’s bitterness, hatred, and violence might be attributed to the fact that we are too proud to grieve?
Her second choice is from the first act of Giselle, whose life says Susie is over almost as soon as it’s begun. Let me call her Susie, because her soft, careful voice, her sense of humour, her emotional courage, make me want to be on first name terms. She speaks of how dangerous love seems to be from the perspective of a young child. Like Susie, I grew up with a passion for ballet and for ballet music. Listening to that hauntingly familiar music from Giselle as she emerges from girlhood into the deadly vulnerability of adolescent desire brings surging back traumatic memories of my early teenage years, of a life that was for a time almost over as soon as it had begun. But I resist allowing this anguish to claim the night, for this darkness is radiant with the fragility of hope.
Susie speaks about privacy and friendship, about loss and grief. We can hold our losses very dear to us, she says, or feel that without them we might have nothing to our name. Grief undoes us. Grief assaults the personality. She talks about a culture of productivity that allows no time for grief and sorrow, that disenfranchises grief. She speaks of the idea that you might sit down with a box of letters and commune with the person who has died. How am I listening to this when I’ve just been reading Stepanova’s account of reading her dead aunt’s diary? I really couldn’t make this up. The fiction I’m writing would never risk this strangeness, for it would seem contrived.
And now Susie is talking about Henry James as someone trying to lay bare the landscape of human consciousness, all the things that haunt us. The world of Henry James is never a good place to be a child, she says. How am I listening to this when I’m trying to sleep? Where are these links, these connections coming from? I’m making the connections, but something is being given to me.
I’m a little afraid. This is a dark gift. It compels me to stay awake, to listen, to learn. When I wake up it will drive me to neglect all that I should be doing for the idleness of crafting language around ideas and not knowing who will read this, or why, or how. But I must be faithful to the gift, and to do that I must write.
Susie loves Judy Garland because she communicates completely unadulterated feeling. Garland helps her to see that her childhood affliction of being very sensitive was perhaps the great thing about herself. I think of my grandson who is sometimes afraid of his “big feelings”, and I hope that one day he will see those as the great dark gift that they are. I sometimes tell him that our feelings are not too big, it’s the world that’s too small. When she sings Kurt Weil’s “It Never Was You,” Judy Garland is singing about something that isn’t there and was very likely never there says Susie, the sense we have now and then that the strength of the absences in our lives might count more strongly for us than what we’ve actually got which is an unbearable feeling and how do we bear the things we can’t bear.
The programme finishes with Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C major. I let it lapse into silence and take off my earphones. It’s five thirty am.
Should I get up and walk on the beach to see the sunrise, to let the night’s listening soak into my soul and saturate me with possibility and promise? I fall asleep and awake too late for the sunrise, knowing that I must write my night before it dissolves. I must share that semi-dreamlike state of encountering other voices, other lives, and of allowing my life to be changed by them. Writing about such ephemeral experiences is a way of materialising them in ways that might be kept, even if only as echoes of voices that spoke in the night, as shadows of insubstantial bodies that passed through the darkness, as memories of memories that found the only form that memories can find as they search for their lost selves, their elusive meanings, their departed lives—language.
In my last post, I quoted Hélène Cixous and wrote of picking up a book in the dark and discovering a world that was mine and not mine, a world that brushed up against mine so intimately that it became part of me, a name hidden between the covers of a secondhand book that suddenly burst into consciousness.
Last night I listened in the dark. I felt the hollow night billowing with a space that was not now empty but was waiting to be filled, with new experiments in writing, with new possibilities of reading, with new friends—for, like the books that choose us, the voices that speak to us in darkness are our friends. Sometimes those friendships are more intimate than the closest personal relationships. Only in darkness and solitude do strangers know us inside out, whispering to our deepest yearnings, our most inarticulate longings and fears, giving them shape in the form of words that await a vast silence in order to be heard.
This morning I was going to edit the novel that’s near completion, and then spend time writing a talk I have to give. Instead, I have taken a butterfly net and run through the first hours of the day, chasing those fleeting insights and fading moments of awe before they flutter over the horizons of forgetfulness and lose themselves amongst the lost children of darkness, the children we failed to bring to birth because we lacked the patience to gestate, to linger between the ground and the feast long enough for life to grow.
Words are the strings of the nets that contain our stories, our identities, our lives, but they are full of holes. So much that is precious leaks away into darkness, but darkness is fertile if we’re patient, if we sit in silence with ourselves, if we allow time for the butterflies to emerge from their cocoons. Sigmund Freud knew that. So does his great granddaughter. So do Maria Stepanova and Ada Limón.
why have I written this? Maybe Stepanova helps me to explain, or maybe there is no explanation.
Notebooks are an essential daily activity for a certain type of person, loose-woven mesh on which they hang their clinging faith in reality and its continuing nature. Such texts have only one reader in mind, but this reader is utterly implicated. Break open a notebook at any point and be reminded of your own reality, because a notebook is a series of proofs that life has continuity and history, and (this is most important) that any point in your own past is still within your reach.
Thank you. What a compelling piece & beautiful words. ‘The now of being alive is more miracle than we can bear’. This has such resonance for me.