The Phantom of No Sleep

What is this bare horror that comes around like clockwork, and yet unexpectedly? Unexpectedly because I did not prepare, somehow I thought this time would be an exception, and I didn't foresee it. And yet it came, the bare horror. It came at night, as it usually comes, at retiring-time. That is when the monster makes itself known, when it's time to sleep. This horror, this monster, is felt and experienced as a void, a frightening space, a lack. This absence is almost felt like a presence, something which has intruded into the room, but also, somehow, something which has always been present, and was merely covered, as with a flimsy bit of cloth, which time itself naturally dislodged in the course of day-to-day events, revealing it suddenly and starkly.

It is cyclical. This horror, this monster, this ghost, this phantom, is frightening and yet not ugly, not ghastly, not exactly ugly. She isn't an ungainly black dog. She's a sweet void, a smiling ghost, a mocking phantom, a terrible demon. She comes unbidden at night and enwraps me in arms which are no arms, and kisses me with horrible air kisses, that miss their target. She is the woman that does not come, whose presence is felt as an absence. And the tiniest bit of anguish I can wrench from within allows nothing to show on the surface.  

How does she affect me, the woman that is not there, who doesn't visit? Simply, I find myself unable to sleep. The night bothers me, the night itself, not the darkness, but something about the night irritates me like an itch, its void, its silence. Perhaps its emptiness. 

What do I need then? And what will stop this influence from flowing in, from ebbing in like a murky tide? I need incident perhaps, to be kept busy. Glad voices and cheerful faces around me. And sincere faces, soulful faces, voices capable of feeling and expression and truth. All that can put the phantasm to flight, she becomes jealous, restive, and finally she dwindles to nothing. It is the emptiness that makes her strong, and the silence that embodies her. That emboldens her to give me that embrace which is no embrace. 

I go to bed. I turn on my pillow. My pillow suddenly seems hideous and unbecoming. I know quite clearly that I shall not sleep, I have known it for hours. But whether it is a decision that proceeds from me, or some response to external stimuli, or some physiological consequence of having ingested something or other, I do not know. Perhaps it is worry, worry over work left undone. But I thought I had reached an age when I had conquered that, and I think I have, largely. I am not prone to stress, and it is not stress that keeps me awake. It is the persistent and worrying feeling that I haven't lived. It is the subjective feeling that haunts me, that something has been left undone, and with that feeling comes doubt, plaguing doubt, and on its wings, multiple and multiplying thoughts. And she is there, the phantom of No Sleep, she is there again as usual. 

She never leaves me alone for long. I thought I was rid of her, having suffered from her presence in the summer, and struggled through many nights of suffering and wakefulness. But we're a month into autumn now and she has come again, inevitably, though I didn't foresee it somehow. Somehow I never do. For a few nights, she is there, sitting on the bed, standing in the corner, silent witness to my tumultuous thoughts. What is she? She is a lack felt as an object, she is an absence felt as a presence. She is the space where the phenomena ought to be, the banal phenomena that makes life liveable. How I loathe my own susceptibility to such weakness, to so many clichés, how disgusted I am by the banality of my dreams. Can it be that I, I, who have conquered life, who has figured it out, who was so independent and so haughty, and with every good reason, can it be that I have fallen into the contemptible weakness of solitude, an affliction I cannot afford to suffer from?

And I turn upon myself, as upon a stranger, and see this contemptible weakness declare itself insistently. Just like a common mortal, I am afflicted after all, with petty, mean wants, that I can't quite forgive myself for entertaining, as though I had found myself to be infested with lice, or nits in the hair, after all susceptible to the common ailments of the common herd, and what's more, I was so prideful and stuffed-up and conceited that I haven't taken the time to build up a resistance to these common ailments, which some superstition tells me could have been accomplished by a letting go of ego and a common humility, but instead, I immured myself behind walls, walls of selfishness, and deceived myself into thinking I was free and independent. What a thought: I shut myself off behind walls, mocking the crowd, and afterwards suffered for it when the crowds finally departed, leaving in their wake a vast silence. 

This silence! What is in it? 

Metropolis 6

Of course the logistics of such a project are absolutely mind-boggling, and perhaps the Movie will never be one-tenth of the way completed. The Director, in his pitch to the studios, failed to account for the problem that the Movie is in effect Neverending and infinitely extendable in any random direction. The studio bosses refused to countenance the lunacy of the idea, a movie version of all human life, especially since the project seemed to cancel out the idea of finished product. The Movie's central idea was that it was a thing to be *made*, accomplished, enacted, and not necessarily a thing to be watched.
So this is what constitutes our wish-city, our Metropolis. But it is only one incarnation. The movie intruding, and becoming sharp and anxious. No doubt the movie will require numberless departments and subdivisions, to handle the re-enactments of certain periods of history. The director was at the moment madly keen on the re-enactment of the late 20th century. Here he was, sweating and cursing, always in a rush to finish the scene, morbidly anxious to get it exactly right, now and again leaping up and glowing with such transcendent, cherubic joy that the actors could not help bit pause and watch, moved and still, thinking the whole enterprise suddenly worthwhile. They admired the director, who formerly had been a lowly director of skateboarding videos. Lacking backing from the studios, he had decided to fund the immense project himself. This to some seemed like a heroic decision. Others asserted that the director was absolutely far-gone in derangement.

Metropolis 5

For this is the most ambitious film project ever contemplated: Nothing less than The Neverending Movie. The Movie starts at the very inception of mankind, indeed at the very first word uttered. From then on it attempts to show every event, large and small, that ever happened in the history of the world. We want not just the affairs of princes, kings, and heads of state, but the middling forgettable conversations and non-sequiturs, quips and meaningless puns from long-forgotten years of dull centuries.
The film is to be triumphant and arrogant in its tediousness, a remake of the Life of Man, all-reconstructed, in blazing technicolour. What Christ said upon the cross, the oaths of Caesar, pillaging Vandals and Vikings not faceless but as clear as soap opera characters, Joan of Arc, Luther nailing his theses to the church-door, Columbus embarked upon the shore. Lincoln and Kennedy assassinated, man on moon, screaming births and long drawn-out deaths.
Imagine a secret recorder of all action and all speech and thought worldwide. Imagine it recording humanity for an eternity. Imagine then the movie reconstruction!
Endless and endlessly involved, with billions of characters, subdivided into numberless screens, each life startlingly played out, authentically set-dressed and scripted, but with an extra Hollywood gloss.
It is instructive to watch actors who are reading not scripted lines but real dialogue... Look at a made-for-TV biopic or true crime story. The actors are always more glamorous and sharply-defined than real people. They always bring immediacy, largeness, precision. All the qualities lacking from real life, with its downbeat vagueness and lack of certainty.

Metropolis 4 (The Director)

Now the director reveals himself. He looms suddenly from a sidestreet, producer, director, conductor of a mad symphony. Conductor of cacophonies! He's a fat grizelled American, and you know how Americans like to yell. This kid has taken upon himself a most ambitious plan, for what he has touted to the studio as The Neverending Movie.
He has long brown tresses, skateshoes, shorts, a Slayer T-shirt, sunglasses tinged with red. His forte hitherto has been shooting skate videos for Thrasher. He'd been hoping to branch out into extreme sports. He wouldn't look out of place in the mosh pit, plunging feebly, rolls of fat shaking, dropping curses.
Maybe he's running out of time or over-budget, it seems that way. He's continually stressed and excitable, yelling at everyone in sight, in fury and love,- "No no you're not doin it fuckin right, we gotta get this straight goddammit!"- His passion, his temper, his sweats and flip-outs, always seem to threaten to culminate in an inferno, a spontaneous combustion burning out from the inside. He sweats himself inside out in an orgy of violent creation.
And you can bet he believes in this movie like it was a sacred mission handed to him by God, with such religious fervour that he may at its completion drop dead from sheer exhaustion, from universes of expended energy.

Metropolis 3

As if my soul were a film projector, casting forward into the dark places of the city a sinister shadowplay, son et lumiere. Revealing the denizens of the city as ugly and bestial, embodying archetypes, personal and painful to me, un-called for notions becoming colours and objects, expressed in an unexpected alphabet, writ large on walls. I can see most often the incarnations of sexual desire, who are flighty and independent, like cats, and as yielding and proud. What the butler never dared to hope that he would see, is revealed to me in flashes. Sex as power, as dark as lipstick, joy inverted. All in the liquid movie-city, full of bestial agitation and incredible variety, engulfing a continent!
Ghosts made concrete, phantoms encased in flesh. 3-D, fully rounded, super-animated, as though formed from perfect clay, and appearing everywhere in clustered beautiful and frightening shapes and deep tinges of sudden colour.
Ghosts, too, imbued with independent thought, random, vast, tending always toward action. For your dream-phantoms therefore is growth and with it despair and joy. Your hopes become traitors, your ambitions full of pride, your scarcest wishes in combat with one another. How shocking to see fantasies spilled out before you, like babies mewling for milk. And it goes without saying that your hopes must also know a kind of death.

Metropolis 2

This movie is currently in production. The streets of this Metropolis are the eternal film lot, and you know how things are transformed by having a Hollywood camera pointed at them. That shout of "Action!" begins the ritual; harsh, serious and solemn, one eye always on the clock, the director, a perfectionist, always clenching his fist in anxiousness. Even for the free-form movie, the city as stage, the street as theatre, mysterious director calling the shots (or not)- Who in the crowd is the director, can he be lost among the extras? Is this a movie set? I never heard the click of the clapperboard!
So if your mind gives birth to girls they wander across the screen, appearing significantly on set. The kind of midnight girls that you have fallen in love with too often, in sidestreets, on busses, unsmiling like Animas or secret ideals. The electric Americans who embody the future, and who glide, cool, dark, encapsulating sex and magic, in and out of shot... A goth girl goes by, her eyes electric blue, her nose studded with a diamond...
I want to seize her and bit her lip... It is as though my thoughts have reared themselves up in architecture, and have created cloudy, blooming forms that throng and sprout from the earth, crystal towers and gothic spires, glittering an icy, sharp and triumphant forms, as dark as sex.
This is the Babylon-Jerusalem, where the blood of the citizens is liquid gold, riches pour like vomit from their mouths. My dark scriptures have been printed on crisp white paper, and are being passed among the students. To think that the noble priests are suffering on the corner, and the starving cardinals are moaning, transfixed, trying to summon down God to redeem the earth.

Metropolis 1

Imagine a Metropolis...

A capital of all the dead empires, an inexhaustible city, a movie set which is hyper-real and indestructible. A new Babylon perhaps, greater than New York London Paris Rome, an accumulated Mexico City, breeding place of huge rumbling discontents, acres of scrap and sex, delighting in a continuing rebellion, an affirmative refusal!

Vast dark city that, like a videogame, can be moved into in theoretical space, except endlessly, so that you move like a blip on a screen within no confines. The virtual metropolis, a game of wish, so that by traversing dream-alleys you could encounter manifestations of other selves, frightening incarnations of buried desire, gangs of sex-workers doomed and jubilant.

Your wishes come true. Sour, ugly, disappointing, biologically blooming around you like a filthy chaos of spreading crystal. 

This is our labyrinth and our dream-city, to which we must surrender our hearts. Have you ever felt the truth that there is an anti-Jerusalem and a newer Babylon, where you will be expurgated and purged?

Would you step into the depths of a city where all the secret thoughts of your heart were instantly, ominously made flesh? Would you watch the secret movie of your desires, mixed and mingled with angst and trepidation? Your dreams imploded and reversed, set in negative form, your wishes imparted with a breath of life, free to move and feel pain.

Your breath, outflowing, is the guarantee. Forming the particles and atoms of the sharply-embodied citizens of the Metropolis. Identical with the old mystery religions.