My little love Indie has been having a hard time of it. Pancreatitis perhaps; an acute case. Hard not to feel contempt for the neighbors and the compost pile they insist on throwing salmon on. That’s what it was last time anyway – three day old salmon. I don’t know what he got into this time – if anything. It started Sunday night when we walked along the Hudson River and he drank that too. Hudson or otherwise, whatever it was, it was spoiled and rancid. Yesterday I bought him a mini-muzzle. It’ll be amusing to walk him and Jacques side by side, the pitbull unfettered, the chihuahua sporting a muzzle.
Last night was the fourth sleepless night in a row. Every 1.5-2 hours Indie pleads desperately to go outside and a tumeric tinged mucus expels from him. This illness has changed his patterns entirely. My little dog who otherwise sleeps soundly through the night, who has to be coerced out of bed in the mornings, now cries pitifully, is restless, nauseous, and wakeful. His behavior is foreign. Once outside, he races to places to defecate far beyond the range of his usual bounds.
Night is its own place, qualitatively charged by a character of inhabitation different from Day and entirely its own. It is temporally close but spatially foreign. The intimate acquaintances of Day are absent at Night. The night is no place for the vulnerable, the infirm, the wounded. Indie hides his illness away. He seeks out the shadows, the recesses, the underbrush – and I stumble behind him, beneath it, because he is small and vulnerable and because I want to see what his sickness looks like: its degree, its colour; if there is blood.
My own vulnerabilities come to light in the darkness. These last few days I’ve been up a lot at night. I have only an abstract consciousness at night; my inner geography is scrambled and it is hard to know who you are when you don’t know where you are.
I too feel a sickness lately at night.
Back in bed, indoors after chasing Indie, the sleeplessness exposes the fragilities of my mind. How vulnerable the human mind has become! This pinnacle of human achievement; this strong but ultimately weak and sensitive organ. How maladapted it is to the environment we have built. The metabolic costs of being constantly assaulted by stimuli and tasks – shifting priorities and distractions – are so high. Our minds burn up oxygenated glucose and we are left exhausted, disoriented, anxious. At night I realize we have created a world we cannot live in; I have built a home I cannot live in. I try to sleep but the hum of the heat pumps is a splinter in my brain. I was told by the manufacturer that the heat pumps “operate at ultra-quiet sound levels,’ but still they emit a timbre toxic to my mental health. The vibrations usher in like a disease and reverberate in every cell. I cannot ignore this sound that is so inimical to the serenity of the maple trees just 10 feet behind my bed.
The planet pulses with the throb of our electronic appliances – like plants that listen to the constant rhythm of the earth alive around them, of the things that give them sustenance; so my mind grasps onto the sounds of the machinery that sustains my way of life. But it makes me sick and I am beset by nervousness at night. Life evolved in an acoustic world. Plants can change their metabolism in response to sound. I feel mine change too: a quickening of my heart rate, a pounding of my blood. I feel like a foreigner in this mechanistic landscape. Scattering occurs when sound waves propagate through the atmosphere and meet a region of inhomogeneity. I am that region of inhomogeneity. My body and my mind are a localized collection of matter that isn’t homogenous with the larger uniform mass in which it occurs. I detect and deflect the sound with the totality of my body surface. It is somatic hearing. I absorb it and resonate anxiety. I feel it change my cell cycles, I feel it vibrate me down to the protoplasmic level. It intrudes rudely, abusively; it exerts a malevolent mechanical force.
And all the while I am just trying to sleep.