I'm so tired. I slept badly last night. A couple nights a week now, this happens. If it happens on the weekend, it's not so bad because I can stay abed longer, dozing away the morning, or even sleeping deeply if I have finally sunk into somnolence. This morning, however, I gave it up at four-thirty and rose to get ready for work, after a night of wakefulness.
I have blamed my insomnia on biological causes: too much salt in my diet, too much caffeine before bed. But as I lay there last night, and the voices in my head grew louder and louder, I came to believe, no, it's thinking itself that is keeping me awake. Yes, I hear voices, though psychologically this is nothing different than anyone else hears in the cavity of their mind. At least I don't think it's different.
We all have a running monologue in our heads, some of it more or less gibberish or half-thoughts, much of the time. Sometimes at night, mine is amped up, the way that after dusk, you can pick up that AM radio station in Charlotte, North Carolina, four hundred miles away, a clear stream of sound from another world, away down South in Dixie. Nights when I can't sleep, it's because the monologue comes in crystal, clean and ready for the page on which I will likely never put it. I also hear voices of characters in stories I am writing or would like to write. Sometimes whole stories come to me this way, and I write them down in the dark hours of the night, then stick them in a desk drawer, forgotten. Sometimes I try to write the monologue down, too, but I could stay up the whole night—a few times I have stayed up the whole night—and the next day, I am strung out like I'm coming off a real bender. It's better for me the next day if I don't write, if I just lie there and let the voices speak.
Sometimes I can attribute the clarity of the voices to something that happened during the day or just before bed. Last night, I watched
Fahrenheit 9/11 for the first time, and then before turning out the light at eleven, I read nearly two hundred pages in
The Dark Tower, the final book in Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series.
I am mistrustful of what I felt, watching Moore's movie. I am mistrustful of emotional appeals generally, and F-9/11 is definitely a movie meant to appeal emotionally to people. Moore is a master propagandist. I say that not as a denigration of his point of view, only to point out that in his film Moore is stitching together a narrative, much like a novelist, and the pieces he puts together may be in discord with pieces he leaves out that would contradict the story he is telling. For example, the part of the story about the Bush/House of Saud connections is all well and good, except that since the film came out, one of Moore's chief sources, Richard Clarke, has said that he himself was actually the one responsible for approving the Bin Laden family's hasty departure of the United States.
So as I watch the film, and as I find myself weeping over certain portions of it, for example the audio track-only account of the events of 9/11, I ask myself, am I rationally justified in feeling these emotions? When I watch the scene of American soldiers mocking and abusing the corpse of a dead Iraqi, and I feel anger and a sad pain for how the war has drained the humanity out of these boys, I ask myself, is the emotion I am feeling justified? Can this abuse be seen in another context, one that explains, if not justifies it? Or am I allowing myself to be led along a certain emotional path by Michael Moore? Emotions are dangerous, misleading things, as Yoda would certainly tell us, were he here. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate ... down this path lies the Dark Side.
It's an odd thing to find one's self feeling strong emotion and forcing one's self to doubt the emotion at the same time. Maybe I should just give in to the emotion, but I can't; I am too taken with rationality, which can be a weakness itself I suppose, since it can also mislead and be misled. My reliance on Reason is probably why most of the time, I lie in my bed letting the voices speak but not taking down what they are saying. I need a mental Dictaphone to spin out the pages I write in my head on these nights. I know when I do actually sit up in my insomniac daze and write, what usually comes out is something valuable to me.
So last night I lay there, the voices talking to me, the monologue stringing out like spaghetti, a mixture of literary and film criticism mostly.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a poem in 1795, one of my favorites of his, titled
"The Æolian Harp," in which he describes creative inspiration as like the wind playing upon a string instrument. An æolian harp is a small string instrument folks would hang outside their homes, similar to wind chimes which people hang on their porches today, and for the same purpose, because of the natural music made by the wind across the strings. That poem still resonates with me because it describes how the best stuff that I write, rare as it is, is produced like a breath of wind blowing through me, across the strings of my mind.
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversly fram'd,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?
Coleridge never answers his question. His wife gives him a reproving look which bids him "walk humbly with my God," and so his poem turns to more traditional thoughts of Faith. Women are always getting in the way of male inspiration, it seems!
However, I know what Coleridge felt, because I felt it last night as the voices came to me and spoke of war and the Dark Tower, creativity and death.
The Dark Tower, both the final book in the series and the series itself, is a real mind-bender from a writer who traditionally has written only mind-candy. Beginning in the fifth book of the series,
Wolves of the Calla, King himself begins
to appear in his own book, not in a Phillip Rothian kind of way, that is, not as a character named Stephen King but as himself, writer of the book in which he is also a character. By the end of the book, his characters have discovered that they are indeed characters written by this Stephen King, and in the sixth book,
Song of Susannah, they actually meet their maker. In a long scene of dialogue, King explains to Roland and Eddie, the gunslingers whom he created, how he created them. King leaves it ambiguous that they might be real and he just channeled their story, but he also leaves it ambiguous that he may have actually created them and is narrating their story even as they think they are living it. Ironically, in the
seventh book, in which there are some terrible deaths among the gunslingers, the gunslinger boy, Jake, actually prays to Stephen King to write the story differently so that the deaths don't happen.
A friend of mine, who is working on his Ph.D. in Post-Modern studies, says that King is working through a theme in post-modern literature called "the exhaustion of narrative," in which the writer believes that traditional narrative devices have literally exhausted themselves. The old "suspension of disbelief" (to quote Coleridge again) doesn't work anymore; people see the artifice behind literary
creation, and King is acknowledging that fact, and even playing with the idea.
What I see is also a writer in awe of the act of creation that has sustained him and enriched his life. Are these characters, these voices that speak through creative types actually characters at all, or do they have some kind of reality apart from the creator? And to take the question to another level, we as creations of our God, does
He speak through us and to us, and do we give voice to Him, or in our egotism do we hear the voice and think we are its Creator?
All I know is, sometimes the voices come to me, too, whether more frequently or less, as I grow older, I don't know. More frequently, I think, considering how many sleepless nights I spend with them these days. Question is, what to do about them? I'm lazy, as Stephen King himself acknowledges he is lazy. It sounds contradictory, coming from a man seemingly quite prolific, but in
The Dark Tower he says
that there is a difference between the kind of writing he mostly does, which is safe and shorebound, and
The Dark Tower, which is like swimming out into dark, deep water, out of site of the shore. He is definitely afraid of the latter kind of writing, and puts it off as long as possible. It took him over thirty years to write
The Dark Tower, compared to the few months it takes him to write most of
his stuff.
I'm lazy, too, a procrastinator extraordinaire, who still hears the voices but mostly ignores them, tucks them away until they come in again clear on that crystal radio set in my mind to keep me awake at night. I think we all hear the voices but ignore them. The hard part is always recording what the Oracle says, and then understanding it correctly; this is the part that can keep us awake all night and disturb our daytime self as well. Most people ignore, ignore, until the voices subside, fade, and the radio set goes dark. I wonder if I will be one of those.
