One thing about blogging is that it leads to a series of false epiphanies, or maybe real epiphanies which nonetheless fail to take root. It’s not just blogging; you can sense this need to end with a big revelation in essays, certainly. There are some essayists who you feel are always going to be announcing a big thing they’ve discovered about how the world works, and barring some interesting evolution in self-knowledge you will continue to get these big announcements in installments, and they’ll always be presented like this: feminism doesn’t want to admit this, but taking a little walk to clear your head is good for you. OK, sure.
In my case, the cycle of fake lessons learned usually runs down these lines:
I am not very happy.
I feel rundown and bad.
I don’t like being a “sick person.”
I will just accept feeling bad as my baseline state and get on with other stuff.
I am not getting on with the other stuff?
Then the answer is oh, you need to take care of yourself, which I dutifully accept and then privately reject as soon as it seems possible to do so.
Or it goes:
I am not very happy.
I am a little too isolated.
I will get better at driving so that I can go places and visit friends.
(I don’t get better at driving.)
Etc etc etc.
Probably my most intractable personal problem is sleeplessness, which has remained my problem during periods of my life when I used to get up at five to do crew, periods when I am out in the sunshine, periods when I’ve tried storing my electronics across the room, and generally seems indifferent to whether or not I am doing “lifestyle” things that are supposed to make you better or worse at sleeping. I have cycled through many responses to sleeplessness and right now I think I’m back at resignation: maybe I can’t sleep, but at least I can set up my phone and my laptop so I can’t idly scroll through Reddit while I’m not sleeping, and then I’ll do something else while I’m awake, like read.1
Whenever I’ve felt sort of at loose ends and depressed this year, I’ve ended up reading short stories by Caitlín Kiernan (who has come up a few times of late and doubtless will again). Kiernan has a huge number of story collections, for their equally huge number of stories, so I feel I’ll be able to do this for a while.2 Full disclosure for the Kiernan-curious, reading one story after another while you’re lying in bed, which is what I am doing, is a terrible way to read their stories. They have certain stories and structures they use over and over, and if you sit down to chainsmoke these stories, you end up going “oh, sure, another girlfriend with a tail.” Still, I keep reading them in this admittedly suboptimal way. I don’t really mind that the stories have a kind of dreamlike resemblance to each other. Sometimes artists write the same thing over and over and it’s bad, but sometimes it means there’s something that emerges out of the larger body of work you could not get from a set of twelve completely different stories.3
Despite the darkness of their stories, I find Kiernan soothing when I’m in this specific late night, ground down depressive state. One thing is that we share the same terror of falling upward into the sky. I have mostly gotten over this fear as I’ve gotten older but as a child I would become very afraid under the night sky, and also in buildings, like concert halls, with high enough ceilings that it triggered whatever fear I had of such things.4 Anyway, I have never encountered somebody else with this specific fear, though it does feature in a Calvin and Hobbes strip, and I stopped trying to explain it to people. (Sometimes they thought I had stolen a joke from a Calvin and Hobbes strip to make myself seem special.) The last attempt I can remember came in some church activity. We were all supposed to write our worst fears on pieces of paper and put them in a hat and I can still remember the incredulous voice with which the group leader read “falling… up…?”5 In Kiernan’s stories the sky is always malicious and frequently called “carnivorous,” and even though I don’t get freaked out by the night sky anymore, and I don’t think I was ever afraid of the daytime sky, it’s just interesting to see somebody capture what it’s like to feel like the sky is somehow your enemy.6
Another reason: Kiernan is a paleontologist, and so these stories are infused with an interesting sense of their own irrelevance.7 Being aware of how big time is and how old things are can feel like being aware that the sky can eat you, except that those things are actually true. Even in stories in which a person comes to some sort of good end, there’s no larger resonance beyond their personal happiness.
So when I’m awake and can’t sleep and depressed and I read these stories, the message I get is: whatever it is, it doesn’t really matter. I used to read a William Bronk poem called “Forget It” to achieve this effect, but I wore it out. The truth is I don’t believe it doesn’t really matter, or at least, not for every possible “it,” but when I feel bad, it’s the only thought that reliably winds me down. I guess this is another kind of false epiphany, in the sense that it’s false, or at least I think that it is, but it’s useful in the moment.
Inspired by this tweet.
NB, Kiernan goes by both they/them and she/her, but (per this post I found through Wikipedia) prefers they/them. So that’s what I’m using, but both are fine.
If you want an entry point, at this point I’d recommend the novel The Drowning Girl, which I think is great. (Also, it has certain features in common with Emily McBride’s Queen Mab, so if you like one, read the other.)
I still have problems with concert halls some of the time, depending on how it’s constructed and where I’m sitting. I once basically crawled out of my seat at what I think was David Geffen Hall to the exit and spent the rest of the concert in the room where they send people with babies. If I’m in the nosebleed seats, I often feel both afraid of being somehow sucked upward and I become obsessed with the idea that something will cause me to hurtle to my death below. “Pick a struggle,” you’re thinking. No.
I think the idea here was that they would all be pinned to a picture of Jesus, like, “Jesus can handle anything.” But not “falling up” apparently.
From “The Dissevered Heart”:
Whatever undefined quality of the firmament grants our merciful illusion of past, present, future, our fixed perception of time as flowing, riverwise, from was to will be, that quality is unknown (or in short supply) in the country of dreams. So there is no surprise whatsoever that I am no longer standing on the dirt road or sitting in a cottage without a cat. So it is that I have not yet even departed the apartment I share with her. The car is still parked by the curb, and she stands at the window, the draperies pushed aside, cautiously watching the autumn sky, which smothers the city as efficiently and with the same undisguised malice that it smothers the paved and white-striped desolation of the highway and the wood.
“Lots of people with good directions get lost, regardless,” she says, and she could be addressing me, or that carnivorous sky outside the window. “A map is never a guarantee. There are damn few lies as treacherous as the false promises made by maps.”
From “Lovecraft and I”:
For me, conceiving of vast gulfs of time and space had become part of my everyday life, though I was aware it was something most people seemed never to pause to consider. Here we are, an infinitesimal speck in a largely unknowable and entirely indifferent universe. Here we are, only a momentary incarnation of matter and energy. Eternity and infinity stretch away all around us. We see it in the stars, and in quantum mechanics, in rocks that were already ancient before the evolution of multicellular life, and we see it in the profusion of plants and animals that inhabited this world before us, preserved now as fossils. We see it in the coming of our own species, and all the ages of human history. For me, this awareness of what geologists call “deep time” was both mundane and marvelous. Still, I wasn’t that accustomed to finding it in literature. But here it was in Lovecraft, and here it was in spades.