Insomniac

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole ---
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue ---
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

The italicization is mine. The words assaulted me, compelling me to see the truth in them. A while ago I was thinking of work and the fun I am having; but I know I am brainwashing myself into thinking that what I am doing is of immense importance and I am having fun. Else, what faces me is an endlessly stretching meaninglessness, a vacuum, a vacuous life that I shy away from. I don’t want to recognize it; recognition is to accept, is to admit and acknowledge. I strive to convince myself that by being in control, by being focused, and goal oriented, I am doing what is right. I am doing a good job at being what society wants me to be; I am conforming; I am losing my identity. That is such a safe thing to do; if I have no identity I have nothing to fight for, I can just go on from one day to the next, each a repetition, like a zombie without feeling the despair of loss, of missing something, of purposelessness.

Plath, as always, wrenched me from my comfort zone of false self satisfaction where I had lulled myself into this somnambulence, compelling me to see the vacuity of my existence, a void too hard to explain. The nothingness is terrifying; so, I try to pin this existence onto a familiar, society-established structure of work hard, enjoy work, give your best, etc. etc. etc.

But I can’t escape the sleepless nights, “the desert pillow”, the bed as wide as an ocean stretching incessantly, the eyes stiffened wide open over which I have no control. I can’t escape the memories either--they leave no room for privacy, they are shameless intruders, brazen trespassers. What is it that I want? Not to be brainwashed into a safe existence, to lead a contented life where contentment is equivalent to non-feeling, anesthetized to feel nothing, like Eliot’s “patient etherized upon a table”.

How familiar are the parental faces—alternately stern and tearful—coaxing me, taking over my life, making of me a mere observer of a life suddenly put on a high-speed roller coaster where the mechanism to stop it has broken down.

In the way common to memory and intertextuality, the line “Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed” triggered off a scene from a Satyajit Ray film, Hirok Rajar Deshey, where the citizens of a particular place are brainwashed by the king (who uses a scientist to do this for him) to believe the king is the best and it is their duty as good citizens to slog in the diamond mines for a pittance. How far removed are Plath and Ray in every possible way and yet…

This is what I am doing too. Slogging for a pittance because of commitments to everyone but myself, slogging till I lose sense of my self, my identity, trying to prove myself to people whose opinion I care a damn for, driving myself, “eyes mica-silver and blank”, so that I won’t have to accept even to myself the meaninglessness of my existence.