On the night the congresswoman wore her ballgown emblazoned with TAX THE RICH and the left muttered, Eat the rich, I dream of being a cannibal.
We’re on the move, not to shut down the port or expel Patriot Prayer—no, we’re dropping down onto the roofs of billionaires to dig out chunks of flesh from their backs. There is no affect around this action; it’s grunt work and cults are dull. A chef serves us crudités slathered in pink caviar: persona foie grata. Am I dreaming the dream that capital has incubated in me? Grow your brand.
On TV, Guillotin discovers the nobility are infected with a virus that drives them to feed on the peasants. In reality, the plutocrats devour many and feed slowly on others, like parasites clever enough to keep their hosts just barely alive. Austerity is the cure that displaces the sickness so that greed can mutate with ever more virulence.
§
One morning we woke and it was night, it was nighttime all day, the sky orange with wildfire smoke, the bridge and the skyline shadow puppets cast by an absent sun.
In Aurélia, Gérard de Nerval imagines the earth knocked off its orbit, wandering through the firmament like a dismasted ship.
We are becalmed. The virus passes over the land, then passes over again. We suffocate in a leaking boat, bake under a tyrant sun. There is no horizon. All is horizon.
Insomnia is epidemic, we say, symptomatic of “dark times.” But what is a symptom? The etymology points to a falling-together or a falling-at-the-same-time. In the incubation cults it meant the coincidence of a supplicant’s dream with a priest’s dream, which signaled the time was right to go into the dark. The symptom was the sign to enter the closed part of the dormitory, the place “not to be stepped into.” The symptom tells you to enter a structural impasse to gain knowledge about the condition that has stranded you in impasse.
Insomnia is symptomatic of what is asymptotos, what does not fall together. The asymptote is our common symptom. We wait for what we know will happen, yet resist knowing. We watch the approaching limit.
As if to sleep would be a moral failure: to abandon the watch.
As if to sleep would be to tell yourself the blight of the world can always be transferred to the page, the way bandages were hung on trees. That the blight will not show up in your heart, your lungs, your gut. That you can pass through.
And yet to sleep would also be to see what is done in your dreams. To allow the open acts into the dark.
To be symptomatic is to align your body with the common plight. And we do not want to have the same dreams. No one wants to share symptoms. The pandemic’s contagion is an inconvenient reminder that we still take physical form, the way Edgar Allan Poe needed characters to work out his vectors of metempsychosis.
§
Tell yourself that tale—the one that begins with the ship going down—on the brink of the whirlpool—the narrator—on the brink of going over—voice breaking off—and yet—the manuscript is in our hands—we’re reading a tale written—by the one whose heart must have stopped before the towering shroud—the one who must have plummeted within the walls of the sea—the one whose principal grief was that I should never be able to tell.
Poe wanted to watch the ship go down while on the ship, stay conscious through the descent into oblivion. Matter would return to its source through katabasis but always there would be the anabasis, the comeback—to tell the tale, win the prize, reap the fame.
Insomnia insists on presence, staving off the wreck. And insomnia comes after, anticipating the next act against nature, slow death under the sun.
