Phoenix of Love

For an activity that fills roughly a third of our hours of life, sleep can be frustrating. Immersed in our deeply cerebral culture, we have trouble letting go of deliberative consciousness, and thoughts run over into every corner of wakefulness and knock against the boundaries of sleep. Meanwhile, we readily bring our analyzing, problem-solving brains to bear on every detail of sleeping. I’ve struggled for years with the question of how much sleep I should get. If I feel tired, am I sleeping too little? Too much? At the wrong time? Is my room too cold or too warm? Or maybe I am trying too hard to sleep—the supreme irony of the whole process.

It’s a perfect example, really, of how the relentless sharpening of our deliberative thought has dulled our senses to the point of near-stupidity when it comes to our own bodies. How can I possibly not know how much sleep I need? Wild animals don’t need to ponder the intricacies of their sleep schedules in order to get the rest they need. To them, it is a completely simple equation. When tired, sleep.

The difficult part is letting go of the thoughts. They armor us from the sensations of our own bodies that would render our doubts about sleep needs irrelevant. But somehow, we are very bad at letting go. We are so soaked with thought, as we are with physical tension, that we have forgotten how to release. Maybe the two—tension and thought—are partly the same underneath the surface.

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

— T.S. Eliot

One of the most striking aspects of the Icefields Parkway, and one that I had not even considered before I was actually standing there on the side of the road, was the silence.

The only other place in which I’ve experienced such total, unbroken silence is in Death Valley. There was no background noise whatsoever. When we turned off the car, it was as though someone had yanked out an audio cable from the universe. It was slightly jarring and really accented the starkness of the sunlit, snow-covered mountains.

I will be driving through the Canadian Rockies for the next few days, so there probably won’t be any posts until Tuesday.

So many processes, so many adjustments, boil down to the resolution of dissonances. I remember once reading an article on Bruckner’s symphonies which described their progressions from start to finish, very broadly, as the gradual resolution of musical tensions declared in the introduction, so that each finale concludes in a sort of harmonic nirvana.

Since reading that analysis, I’ve found myself constantly tempted to see the resolution of dissonances in other facets of life. In the world, as in music, there are rules of harmonic progression. The way to consonance is not through a magical leap, but step by step through the dissonance and often through other dissonances along the way. Somehow, that movement itself—the shift from dissonance to consonance, from tension to release—generates huge bursts of energy, in a kind of spiritual propulsion.

Maybe the culture of this era and this part of the world has become a bit overstuffed with dissonances. We’ve piled up the contradictions, like stacks of unopened mail or festering garbage. We’ve defaulted on our debt of synthesis. We carry throbbing nodes of tension in our bodies, untended contradictions that we medicate with painkillers or (somewhat more constructively) melt away with massage. The Alexander Technique fascinates me because it tackles those physical dissonances directly, and focuses on eliminating the contradictions in how we use our bodies: the ways in which we waste muscle energy by working against ourselves.

We could use an emotional Alexander Technique too. My favourite definition of suffering, which I’ve mentioned before, is also about dissonances and self-contradiction: the dumping of emotional energy into the unalterable part of a problem rather than putting it to work on the alterable part. Changing the focus to the changeable has the same sort of effect as shifting a revving car from neutral into drive.

Evolutionary methods of creating and constructing things have always appealed to me, maybe because they use that same motive power of resolution. Test-driven development, in the software field, harnesses the fixing of failing tests to drive software construction. Every software feature begins as a failing test; the new piece of code makes the test pass; and then the process repeats until everything is finished. Resolution of dissonances.

Ever had a dream? From what I understand of sleep research, one theory of dreams is that they occur as a result of the brain’s method of transferring memories from short-term storage to long-term storage. In the process, our brains revisit the memories, and neurons fire together that would not ordinarily fire together from our sensory experiences. This creates the weird, dissonant concepts in our dreams where we are in our parents’ house but also in Nepal, and multiple people are the same, and things happen in nonsensical sequences. In a sense, the brain tries new linkages between concepts, and the resolution of the resulting contradictions creates our long-term memories of information we’ve received.

Where I think we get stuck is refusing to go through the dissonance in the first place. If I try to circumvent the whole process by shying away from all forms of confusion, contradiction, disagreement, tension, anxiety, what-have-you; and fake a sense of peace by suppressing everything in myself that isn’t yet resolved, I’ll not only lose the propelling force of synthesis, but also allow my well-being to be eaten away by the festering tensions.

Yeah. So be like a Bruckner symphony. That’s all I’ve got for tonight, since I’m off to resolve dissonances for the next eight hours.

“The denial of the self has come, as is natural, to mean in general the making of the self thoroughly uncomfortable. That . . . leaves the self still strongly existing.”

— Charles Williams

When I am feeling relaxed, and I drive down the rough, pothole-ridden streets of Chicago in my bouncy little white Honda Civic, I can feel the most minute ridges and dips in the road as they resonate through my entire body.

It says “Tis da Season.”

It’s always the season.

This is Diversey.

The slightly agonized swoosh of opening doors.

The verbose drunk man sitting behind me keeps talking, with hardly a pause, about the Super Bowl; how he keeps getting caught drinking on the job; how people should be allowed to do what they like on the weekend, because they deserve it, after all, don’t they? They’ve worked hard and they deserve it, don’t they? and how he should have gotten the job the older guy left, but his boss wanted to keep an eye on him, keep him out of trouble, because he got caught drinking, drinking, you know? and he’s drinking right now! He laughs heartily as though he’s sharing the joke with everyone on the train.

Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep. Beep-beep-beep—

A high chime, then a low chime, like an electronic cuckoo.

Doors closing.

The stuttering swoosh of doors again.

A low, barely perceptible hum awakens into a buzz and then a roar. A metal panel in front of me rattles.

Belmont is next. Doors open on the left…at Belmont. Transfer to Red and Brown Line trains…at Belmont.

BUMP-bump.

“four eighty-nine. four eighty—”

BUMP-bump.

BUMP-bump.

The roar quiets down a bit.

Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep. Beep-beep-beep—

The buzz dies down to a hum.

CLUNK.

This is Belmont.—

Stuttering swoosh of doors, whoosh of entering wind.

—Transfer to Red and Brown Line trains…at Belmont.

The drunk man has left the train, and there is a sudden silence behind me.

A pause, then a distant low rumble.

“This is a PURPLE LINE TRAIN to Linden. A PURPLE LINE TRAIN to Linden. Next stop is Howard.”

High chime, low chime. Doors closing.

The doors rattle closed.

CLUNK. Rumble…hum…buzz…roar.

BUMP-bump.

Clattering panels.

“Six cars at Adams and Wabash. Nine seventy-five.”

BUMP-bump.

“Twenty-eight.”

BUMP-bump. BUMP-bump.

The roar continues evenly. Every so often, there is a whooosh followed by a rattle as we turn a corner. With so much rich sound to live on, I wonder, with my eyes closed, what money is really good for.