#11
For everyone you’ve spoken to of late, the daily ask of bravery has been overwhelming. A dear friend demonstrates the different ways in which turbulence lurks underneath stillness, as if at any given moment, if the weather were to turn blue, all the bodies around you would start shaking and melting, and would pool onto the floor in unison. In moments of intense scattering, another beloved friend has clasped your hand and gently squeezed it, as though wringing the grief right out of your lungs. (This helps.)
So there is respite. You recently performed this qawwali with some very lovely, very warm people. You didn’t even breathe, it was just an immersion with a plunk and then no resistance at all. The moment the music begins, honesty colours the entire shape of you. (You’ve left a sliver of your heart in that moment for ever.)
It was difficult to fall asleep that night—you simply couldn’t shake the shawl of that moment off your shoulders. And even though it was soft and lovely, sleep requires you to shake everything off and defer to the dreamworld. This past month you’ve slept so terribly that strict decisions have had to be made for the sake of your wellbeing. When you’d finally realised that such decisions will have to be made, you went, obviously, on the internet and read some essays. In this essay, Karen Emslie makes a case for segmented sleep—waking up at three or four AM, working for a while, and then going back to sleep in the morning—and argues that it fuels creativity and brings dreamlike imagery to her work. She writes, “My brain works differently at this time of night; I can only write, I cannot edit. I can only add, I cannot take away. I need my day-brain for finesse.” This is true for you as well, and the night offers possibilities inconceivable in daylight. Considering the particular coordinates of your life right now, however, this argument doesn’t sway you in spite of the benefits. As Melanie McGrath writes in this essay: “For me, insomnia’s greatest gift is the uninterrupted time and mental space it allows for reading and thinking. There’s a freedom to the night, an unconstrained permissiveness. Under cover of darkness, anything goes. Being awake in the night feels like stealing a march on time. Senses sharpen, so does the memory. The air stills and it is as though you have passed into some other, more magical dimension in which earthly rules no longer apply. There’s an exploratory feeling to the night, a special magic, as anyone who regularly stays awake through it knows. The night’s sounds, smells and sights are exclusive.” This is all very tempting, and it is so easy to cling to the I and all its beliefs, especially when you’ve found company equally tied to the effort, but you’ve decided to stick with discipline for now. Rubin Naiman writes in this essay about the necessity of surrendering our waking sense of self and willingly giving ourselves to sleep, arguing against “crashing” into sleep out of exhaustion. For him, sleep is a gift. It once had a “personal, transcendent and romantic” nature. He writes, “Letting go of the waking self is an act of humility.” Most importantly, sleep is “something we had to be willing to stop working for.”
Entirely enthralled by this painting by Laura Berger:
The other day, you were reminded of this episode of the podcast Designed This Way that you’d listened to about a year ago, in which type deisgner Kimya Gandhi relates the story behind Sharad Typeface. Mr Sharad Deshpande was a prolific Marathi copywriter who lost his ability to write in his later years, so his sons gifted him this design—a typeface of his handwriting. The story moved you to no end. What a gift! His handwriting will exist forever! Gandhi has written about her process here.
Re: gifts—poet Alice Fulton speaks about her meditations on gift-giving in this interview in response to a question about the line “… Giving it away / doesn’t make a thing a gift” from her poetry collection. She says,
Sometimes I’ve tried to make gifts speak for me, and this can result in miscommunication. One friend said I gave things I wanted myself, and that was true. I needed to work on that. On the other hand, it wouldn’t have been good to give things I didn’t want myself. Still, I needed to more adequately imagine the life and needs of the person I was giving to. I’ve given gifts so wrongheaded that in retrospect they’re almost funny. [...] A gift given under duress isn’t a gift. Gifts also fail if they’re chosen in an offhand, thoughtless manner; if they’re a leftover, something the giver didn’t want herself; or if they’re in any sense stingy. A true gift conveys affection, trust, and esteem. It can say, “I know you, and I thought you’d like this,” or, “I love this, and I wanted you to have this because I love you.”
You’ve been thinking of repetition a lot. For instance, what the repetition of a line does in a poem or a song, or what repeating the same moves in a dance sequence while learning or practicing it does for you, or what repeating the same story in the same manner to various people means, and so on. In today’s newsletter, the word “moment” appears six times, “sleep” appears nine times, and “gift”, fourteen times.