The Small Death of Sleep

Oct 27 2018

The small death of sleep

is how I make sense of them.

The fugitive dreams

that slip from my reach

in that hypnagogic haze,

the 8 hours

of total absence

when I vanish each day.

I lie motionless, and try to reconstruct the plot

but am defeated by its madness.

The images blossom and fade

like watercolour paint

on thick absorbent paper,

the light touch

of the tip of a brush

as colours coalesce.

How much the same

are those first years of life,

which only exist

in the fixed impressions that survived 

time's hectic passage?

Like the black-and-white photos

in an old family album

where the dates and subjects were lost.

And which aren't black and white at all,

but shades of grey

and a kind of sallow pale

that leaves them looking bloodless,

gazing out

through permanently open eyes.

And given how slippery memory is

even these glimmers are never the same.

Like the familial tales

and the stories we make

to make it make sense.

I know I was alive back then

as I know I slept through the night.

But only notionally

because I must have been.

And because I have photographic evidence

of this small child

who bore my name

and lived in this house with us.

We all fear dying

and most of us fear death.

Yet so much of our lives

we might as well not have existed.

An automaton, and his unconscious dreams.

The small child, who learned how to speak

as if it came to him

in his sleep, one day.

Just as the vastness of time

before we were born

is bred in the bone,

the stories we've been told

as real as own.

Perhaps the time to come, as well.

Because the fundamentals of life

are everlasting,

and in any given moment

posterity abides.

I though it was Shakespeare, but apparently “the small death” in reference to sleep is attributed to the Buddha. (Nevertheless, Shakespeare conflates death and sleep as well, perhaps most notably in the lines “the death of each day's life” (Macbeth) and “for in that sleep of death what dreams may come” (Hamlet).)

There are many things I could say about this poem. But in this case, I prefer to let it speak for itself. I will note, though, that the immediate inspiration was a piece in the New Yorker (Oct 22, 2018) by Janet Malcolm called Six Glimpses of the the Past – Photography and Memory.