On Insomnia

When i say, "i suffer from insomnia" to someone, they always look for reasons. In diet or in habits or in mood, in obvious places, in well-surveyed areas. I rarely meet someone who can grasp that there is no cause for night-time restlessness.

The restlessness inhabits and infects one, it propels one to lurch up from the mattress, to cast the clothes on the floor, to fight and wrestle with the pillow.

Is it depression? No, it is something deeper and more vast than anything implied by that word. That word implies a restful, dark hollow, a valley that one can slowly traverse, never raising one's eyes to the horizon. My experience is rather a dreadful, punishing activeness that grips the body and poisons the mind, so that thoughts are not thought and let go, but regarded and over-regarded, monitored and over-monitored, in duplicate and triplicate to an unbearable infinity of infinities, each thought interrupted by shoals of others, flitting like dull, lumpen fish in a filthy ocean enfused with the mud of over-familiarity.

Because the inside of my brain is sickeningly over-familiar, because that interiority and that subjective pause, represented by the pre-sleep stage, are somehow appaling and overwhelming, because my limbs apparently still want to wrestle, my legs still want to twitch ceaselessly like those of a man shot in the belly...

Because of all this i cannot sleep.

Fragments:
The chick who went on a killing spree. By some pallisade or sidestreet, beneath a terrace.
As always happens on these occasions it seemed unreal. The goths were still joking, for a full minute after the shooting had already begun, not noting the import of it.
Sylvia the goth girl was halfway through a joke, and her cracked laugh bit down on it.
To realise as though half-seriously... the chick had already drawn a snubnose from a purse and began firing pointblank. Quick, like a scorpion sting. Manic, n we only came in here to shelter from the rain.
Car backfiring. Firework. Some prankster, bored, is letting off a firecracker.
Artschool. The chick who came into to look for folios along the shelves at the edges. Tall, brownhaired, somewhat geeky with protuberant front teeth, breasts stretching top.
Excitable. Can't move close to her.
Who was she?

(Below the streets of Edinburgh are a loathsome race of vampiric creatures- they live in hollowed-out vaults.)
Meeting Pete a small blondeish boy in a pastel suit when on an anxious night errand in the west end of Edinburgh-
An old school mate. Somehow i get enveigled with him and his mates, a bunch of hulking bouncers, fashion plates, lads....
Down we go into a cavern for a drink, a kind of a cellar.
Me rather anxious and wary. Before i even ask for my customary pint of lager one materialises before me- yellow pale stuff. Which i sip.
Well now down here in this cellar is no ordinary pub. For a start admittance is only permitted for the young and fashionable. A Fashion Theme pub! Where the young ladies, fashion students, cut out textiles with cloth-scissors, squares of houndstooth fabric, cotton reels, smell of finance and sniffishness. So i feel rather out of place.
Fashion-Pub, Fashion-Gathering, Fashion-Enclave underground!....
Dark like an Italian bistro.

I hope, then, that this my ontology, in being constantly self-referential is not turgid and grey, or on the other hand wishy-washy and overly indecisive. It is about what lies beyond cynicism and irony, what landscapes and vistas are on the other side.
It is about a stubborn (but flexbile and shifting) subjective eye, an eye open to the subtleties, magic and poetry of the everyday. The soul itself is sometimes, rigid, monotonous, recurrent, it dwells often on the same thoughts, but it also tires of these and seeks vivid contrasts, playing before its unchanging ardour like flames before water.

"When you go again that weary journey from negativity to affirmation, and find after the lows and highs stretches of interminable blank terrain, frightening in its loneliness, would anyone be blamed for feeling nauseous, for rejecting the phenomena as they come, or welcoming them hesitantly?
Maybe i have been guilty of excessive gloom. It's clear enough that you can purchase nothing concrete with a noble soul. But your own freedom can be an unperishable commodity, resisting all buffets and shocks, and can lead to insights jewel-like and sparkling in their preciousness, their small, giddy moments of splendour threatening to burn a hole in the monotony of being."

I have searched for meaning everywhere, in the cemeteries and parlours, in mirrors and monasteries, in palaces and cowsheds.
I think i have seen beauty in glimpses. I am not an unhappy man except momentarilly, but it is this momentariness that disturbs me.
It implies a sickly rollercoaster alternation between highs and lows, sickening obstacles, steadily palling contrasts between patches of colour boring through over-familiarity, like mildew or decay. All the clever philosophés tell us that the purpose is in the purposelesness. Always seemed to me too adroit, a circular argument of sorts.

And if flashes of panic occur, as they must do, this old equilibrium can, with patience and with rigour, balance out its worst features, or transform them, like a slow rolling ocean eroding rocks, though their essential matter remains in some form, dissolved though the atoms of terror might be, to a slurry of apathy rhythmically marked by time.
Here time isn't felt as oppressive; it entails no distortion in an everlasting present.
The past is groped for as a waker gropes for the details of his dream, his sour or pleasant dream, his guilty, inevitable past. All my actions in the past seem to me now compulsive and inevitable, as if another man had done them, an insubstantial ghost, whose inner workings and motivations i cannot guess at. He sees other worlds than me, that man of a year ago. And of course i envy him his naievety.
But when one has the present on one's side one has a lot. Bring one perspective to bear on everything, radically diverse and divergent, facile and profound, giving birth to metaphorical beauties and basking in the qualia, in the rich bath of phenomena whose waves caress and flow through you, attack and depart from you with a painfully slow but inevitable rhythm, pushing you here, pulling you there, adding to and eroding you.
Is it meaningless, you ask?
Completely. The pinnacle of this metaphysics is the loosening of the point and the disruption of the line. Its tedious slow dispersal. All that is commonplace enough.