April's Is The Insomniac Moon

All this week the full moon has been bad-neighbor noisy and began waking me up overnight back on Monday. It's been like living with a ghost out of somebody else's imagination come calling night after night, and is disorienting, too. When I say the moonlight is noisy I mean I wake because I think I'm hearing something. The light pours in through the blinds--despite them--on the south window of the bedroom and I lie there blinking in it for a moment, trying to remember whose voice it was I heard, what it was we were just talking about. And then it's just me and the moonlight again, and is going to be that way for the rest of the night. Unlike Scrooge, for instance, who you knew was going to get the message eventually, I never arrive at morning with any clear idea what it is the light wants from me.

The first night I was annoyed, and after that I got resigned, and since then this string of sleepless nights hasn't been so bad. Like anything else, it's what you do with it, and anyway, it makes me think of life back in my little New Hampshire town. There, most of the people I knew started getting up by about four in the morning, lots of commuters, everyone anxious to beat the traffic into the city, and their spouses getting up then too, figuring they might as well. I spent most mornings in those years at my writing desk, my husband having left the house by five, the kids still asleep, and I could guess when my friend Frank's truck was driving up the road on the other side of the woods behind my house, and I knew his wife was up doing her paperwork, and a quarter mile away my landlord was awake tinkering in his garage, his wife starting laundry. Across the road from me, the gay couple who owned the landscaping company were awake, one outside in the garden, the other tending to his daily hangover. The farmers were all up by then, of course, and the retired people who had just always done it that way and never thought to change. We had some odd habits in that town, I suppose. For instance no one thought a thing about walking around outdoors in their nightclothes, and sometimes even in their underwear, which is how I used to find my next-door neighbor, watering his flowers after supper on summer dusks. I never bothered to get dressed first, either, mornings when I went down to the road to fetch my Boston Globe. Another thing we all had in common was never using our clothes dryers; we all hung laundry outdoors even through the winter, since we figured most days it'd reach above freezing at some point. I still prefer it that way; clothes that have hung out all day have a more soulful way of being worn than they do after they've been stuck rolling around in a dark, overheated cylinder somewhere. I knew a woman who owned a lobster boat, and she taught me the trick of adding salt to the rinse water to keep the sheets from freezing on the line on bright January days. In my new neighborhood I'm the only one who uses her clothes line, although I did notice on the day after Thanksgiving last year, when I was hanging out all my table linens, several other households had done the same, and so you could see how pretty everyone's dinner must have looked the day before, with the backdrop of those cotton napkins and harvest-colored tablecloths.

That short, warm day last November is a long way around the sun from where I am this week, though, and my outlook has gone a long way around with it. Right now I know a lot of people who say they aren't sleeping all that well and mostly, it's work, or it's worry, or it's shifting hormones that's making them sleepless. For my part, I find I'm not minding it so much although sometimes I think it's just too damned bad that we can't find a signal to send to each other when we're all laying awake in our beds like that. I'm thinking a system of pagers we could rig up beside our beds, and when you wake up at night you can press a button and a light will come up on everyone else's pager, and if someone is awake and wants company then they can call-light you back. If everyone else is still asleep that little unobtrusive glow won't disturb them. And if you're awake and don't mind being alone with your thoughts there's no need to grope your way to your pager at all, it having no opinion one way or the other as to what it is you should be doing with yourself at that hour.

One of literature's most self-aware insomniacs is Charles Halloway in Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, and an early scene in the book finds him on the edge of his bed, immobilized by despair, caught between his sleeping wife on one side and the void that is the hour of 3 a.m. everywhere else around him. I copied over that passage for a friend recently, and as always it made me want to weep. This is how it is for Charles: But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that's burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. I recognize the panic from my earliest experiences of insomnia, which came to me in adolescence. The certainty I had in those years that life was nearly over, or was going to turn on me like my own immune system gone haywire, turn murderous and try to snuff me out. I'd roll over and watch the night from out my bedroom window then, smoking sometimes and wondering how it was I'd come up for sentry duty this way. What it was I was supposed to be watching for. Historically, in the middle of the night, despair was the appropriate--was the only possible--response to that wakefulness. It is what we all have experienced as the standard.

Curiously, that despair now resists all my efforts to summon it.

I turned that idea over in my mind for a long time this morning, because of course through the wakeful night there is plenty of time to tell yourself a story this slowly, sentence by long-considered sentence, getting each one just so before memorizing it the way you hear prisoners do, or anyone else without means to write things down. And knocking it into place with your rubber mallet before moving along to the next one. It's a paradox, to be so crackling busy in the head while the body remains so motionless, pressed to the night sheets in the dark; it's a paradox too, needing both to be sleeping and to be awake. I am writing while I dream--that is what I'm really hearing, when I think the sounds of conversation are what woke me--and then I dream while I am writing in my head in the dark-and-light of the middle of the full moon night, letting the sentences unwind the way they want to unwind and always, as in a dream, watching but not directing where the next scene will go.

In Welsh the word is huil and in Irish it's imbas--there is no word for it in English but the concept is translated as "fire in the head" and it means something like inspiration--but, the full-body inspiration that seizes you first by the hair and then blows through you and leaves you, all lit up and shaking, in its wake. Lately that is what my insomnia feels like, waking up eager, waking up wanting, and not caring how tired I may be later in the day or whether my fatigue will show overmuch in my face. The other day I wrote so furiously that the imbas bloomed there, causing my daughter to ask later how I got a sunburn. Thus rouged, I no longer imagine that the night is pressing on me like a board and I may be dying beneath it. Curiosity wakes me, and there's something I'm looking forward to without being able to name it that keeps me glad I am awake there, enjoying the anticipation of it. I think myself through these peculiar nights with their peculiar fire, and then after a while I get up and drink coffee, and watch the gray light of the morning begin to come up while the moon slides off to the west and there, a little to the south and through the tree branches, Jupiter gleams in the twilight of dawn.