Good idea or lack of sleep?

It could well be the lack of sleep that's behind this idea, but I am really taken with it.

One of the theories about what was so unnerving about hysteria in the 19th century was that it disrupted language, so that signifiers and referents would become blatantly unhitched in the mouths of the patients. This relationship to language was part of the reason I wanted to write the series of poems in the first place. What better than poetry to deal with this sort of fear?!



I've struggled off and on with insomnia for my as much of my life as I can remember. It wasn't really until I was older, though, that it started to make me panic when I couldn't sleep. As a child, it just seemed like one of those things that sometimes happens - and it allotted me time to myself that was still and quiet, something I've always already needed anyway.

I hardly slept at all last night, maybe and hour and a half - 5:30-7:00 a.m. It's 9:44 p.m. right now.

Halfway through this morning I had the idea to start of cycle of poems only written when extremely exhausted. Exhaustion unhinges my ability to use language (I can't tell you how hard I am concentrating now to write this!) just enough that interesting things begin to happen. I'm not certain that the poems from these cycles would end up finished in themselves, but they are certainly things I'd be hard pressed to come up with in other states.

So, here's the idea that makes me excited. What if I created a new section of the hysteria/Charcot book based on these insomnia poems? They certainly mirror the radical disjunction of the language the patients used (at least insofar as how it's represented in the medical journals).

It seems like a really good idea now. I shall have to put it to the test when I've slept.

Et j'ai crié, "Regardez, regardez!" Et alors, il a salué.

More than anything else these days, I have been craving time to write. And I can see it in a lot of what I do.


Silent films look like photographs of hysteria patients.



I can see it in the way Andrew Bird looks like some illustration by Cruikshank come to life (although, I suspect there is far less vitriol in Bird's being than in Cruikshank's).



I can feel it in the way I read. It's shifted (as it does from time to time) from analyzing the text to analyzing how the author structured the text.

On Tuesday, I watched Man on Wire. There's a part in the documentary where the director splits the screen so that on the left, there are photos and footage of the construction of the World Trade Center and on the right there are photos of Philippe Petit as a child.

It's even seeped into the way I do my job. Last weekend I listened to Nuruddin Farah suggest that when we donate something, when we give someone aid, we are not doing it for the benefit of our beneficiaries. We are doing it for ourselves, because that person who needs our aid is a metaphor for ourselves.

Saltpeter

Until somewhat recently, Saltpeter was a smell-with-no-name to me, that part of the remnants of fireworks that seemed to singe the inside of my nose.



When I was a girl, it was my father on every July 4th who would position himself at the dampened Volleyball court where he and Bob would set off fireworks. I knew from early on that what they were doing - these men, one my father and one a father figure - was illegal. I can only assume that it was the general affability of Bob and Merrill that caused the Town fire department to turn its back on the display. And I knew it was dangerous, although I probably imagined it to be more risky than it actually was. I was a reader and I think that's part of the reason I was such a dramatically-inclined little person, always playing out the worst scenarios I could imagine for every situation in which I found myself.

After we had all sung the anthem (usually followed by John Prine and Phil Ochs), after we had oohed and ahed our way through the display (me with my fists balled, nails into palms), my father would find me and pick me up and his hands smelled of saltpeter.



I've been meaning to write more about saltpeter (from which the Salpêtrière where Charcot worked took its name) for some time. The week of Guy Fawkes Day strikes me as the perfect time to do so. In 1999 on November 5, I was perched at the top of Primrose Hill with my mother and brother. We were drinking mulled wine and I was desperately hoping that none of the embers from the fireworks would fall into the Regent Park aviary.

I've had a poem milling about in the recesses of my mind that would weave together several quasi-histories of saltpeter. One is that administrators of places where lots of young men cohabitated (British public schools, naval ships, prisons) packed their meals with the stuff in the hopes to fend of excessive onanism and homosexuality. Another thread of this poem would link fireworks in Paris to the more martial history of the Salpêtrière (it was a gunpowder factory before it was a hospital). The final strand of the poem is saltpeter's use in hoodoo, which removes the substance from its typical aggressive context and uses it for self defense.


by Renée Stout

I know. This sounds scattered, but I think there's a way of looking at each of the threads in relation to supression and sexuality.