Elusive sleep

I have a complicated relationship with sleep - switching suddenly from 'good' periods during which I sleep for ten hours a night to 'bad' and unsettled bouts of early-morning waking. Each period usually lasts for about ten days. I don't know what determines the switch and am yet to identify knowable factors that affect my patterns of sleep. Exercise can either make me fatigued and therefore ready for sleep or it can over-energise me, making it difficult to 'switch off' come bedtime. Reading before switching the light off is similarly unpredictable. The only reliable thing I have found to aid my sleep is a hot water bottle placed on the small of my back (I sleep on my front) as I like to lie and pretend the sun is warming me. Otherwise, whether I sleep through the night seems to be a game of chance, and a frustratingly delicate game of chance at that: if I dare overthink the concept of sleep or how to achieve it, the likelihood of it eluding me seems to thrive.

I know I have slept well when I have dreamed. My dreams, when I am settled and at ease during the night, are paradoxically vivid and consuming, and resolve around heavy or unusual atmospheres that stay with me long into the following day. I often dream of death, that close friends have died, or that a potentially fatal accident is close-by. For me, such dreaming is not tiring: it is the mark that I have slept well since it shows I have stayed asleep for longer than three hours at a time. Much worse, much more tiring, is waking at 3am for many nights in a row. This is my clockwork tic: a pattern that can set in for days, or even weeks. My worst period of insomnia occurred last June, when I experienced 24 consecutive nights of broken sleep, sleeping for no more than 2 hours without waking. By the 24th night I felt depressed and bleary, desperate and unable to imagine I would ever enjoy regular bounties of sleep. On the 25th night, I slept for 14 hours and woke feeling overwhelmingly relieved. I don't know what changed between the 24th and the 25th night.

Broken sleep feels like a punishment for something, and it is difficult not to feel envious of those who sleep calmly and soundly every night. Sleep is restorative and balm-like, without it, life can feel difficult and unrelenting. If I wake during the night, it is likely that I will experience a degree of fatigued hyperactivity. Suddenly my brain wants to investigate every one of life's complexities and ponder the outcome of every variable course of action. I replay conversations I have had, conversations I haven't had, jokes I've made, better jokes I should have made, things I should have told friends, odd jobs that I have neglected to attend to, places I'd like to visit, people I'd like to meet with, books I'd like to re-read, the face of my old piano teacher, the feel of carrying a saddle, feelings of indignation, feelings of sadness, warm memories of nostalgia, a cutting remark I shouldn't have made. My head becomes a confusing bric-a-brac of moments, and it is during this time, in the early hours of the morning, that my mind chooses to sort through it - picking over it and sorting it and generally engaging in an exhausting process of re-examining and reconsideration. It is not soothing but punishing, and the night stretches ahead tiringly. It is during such nights that the world feels like a dark and lonely place.

These periods of insomnia are thankfully usually cushioned by periods of well-received rest. These periods are like holidays and I value them more highly than anything else I could experience. I regard healthy sleep as a comforting tonic - a rare balm that is to be respected and cherished - and when I am sleeping well, I look forward to bedtime hours ahead of its arrival. I sleep on my front, prone and straight, with my hands held close to my face. I enjoy the feeling of breathing against my hand and find the action itself incredibly soothing. At the age of 25 I am reluctant to admit to sucking my thumb - a habit I tell myself I have kicked but which in fact I continue to return to - whenever I feel tired and at ease. I also sleep well when I share my bed with any one of a very select few friends and consider my ability to slumber in their company evidence of the peace of mind and reassurance their silent companionship brings me. I thus always sleep heavily when sharing a room with my Mum. My favourite feeling is to wake in the night and to be tired enough to turn my head and fall back to sleep, even better is the vague and imprecise sensation of yawning before descending once more into dream.

I often think back to a holiday my family and I had when I was 11. We spent a few weeks in the Pyrenees - I think we were on the French side - and being in a high and remote hamlet, there was no running water and a very limited electricity supply to the house. The nights were so dark it was impossible to see anything but matt blackness - your eyes never adjusted to the absence of light, never saw outlines, never saw depth, only the black. Waking in the night to find the toilet was an impossibility. With this darkness came three or four weeks of the deepest sleep I have ever experienced - dreams so vivid I can still recall some of them, and a sleep pattern so stable and predictable I remember that holiday not for the experiences of the day, but the otherworldly ferocity of the sleep. It is a state I would like to feel again - inert, powerless to the darkness, utterly without motion. If that sleep was treacle, then the vague and wobbly sleep I have come to expect is more like gravy - thin, vapid, and lacking in an appropriately reassuring level of density.

The Thought Fox, Ted Hughes

The Thought Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest: 

Something else is alive 

Beside the clock's loneliness 

And this blank page where my fingers move. 


Through the window I see no star: 

Something more near 

Though deeper within darkness 

Is entering the loneliness: 


Cold, delicately as the dark snow 

A fox's nose touches twig, leaf; 

Two eyes serve a movement, that now 

And again now, and now, and now 


Sets neat prints into the snow 

Between trees, and warily a lame 

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow 

Of a body that is bold to come 


Across clearings, an eye, 

A widening deepening greenness, 

Brilliantly, concentratedly, 

Coming about its own business 


Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox 

It enters the dark hole of the head. 

The window is starless still; the clock ticks, 

The page is printed.

In this poem, written in 1957, Ted Hughes writes self-reflexively about the process that occurs during both poetry making and poetry reading. He displays a self-consciousness that refers to the role of imagination in the creating and reading of his poem – where he seeks to break down our perception of what is ‘real’, and what is imagined within written text. Throughout the poem, Hughes alludes to a sense of reality. This is an attempt to make his own poetic persona seem tangible, and he repeatedly references naturalistic and specific detail such as ‘the clock’ and ‘this blank page where my fingers move’. This verifies a present tense, and locates Hughes as a vital, physical presence within the text, whilst crucially acknowledging his own existence. This is juxtaposed by the following lines which seek to declare the essential power of imagination. He slowly turns the shadowy other presence – the ‘something more near’, the ‘something else alive’ - into a fully formed, fully articulated signifier of a fox. We can pinpoint the moment at which the fox appears in Hughes’ imagination – ‘A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf/ Two eyes serve a moment, that now/ And now again, and now, and now/ Sets neat prints into the snow’. It is the repetition of ‘now’ that is key to this stanza, an adverb which reveals Hughes’ attempt to trap the moment of the fox’s mental conception into the physical lines of the text. The subsequent sensory description of the animal – ‘a lame/ Shadow lags by stump and in hollow’, ‘an eye/ A widening deepening greenness’, ‘a sudden sharp hot stink’ works to break down the established boundary between imaginary and physical existence. Hughes is asking us to imagine, really imagine a fox, but goes beyond the mere testing of our mental faculties by also inburing his 2-dimensional signifier with sensory desciptors. By doing so, he draws attention to the process that occurs between poet, poem, and reader and the fact that written symbols can only do so much to describe before reader must meet the text and take over the cultivation of meaning. The poem is a paradox; where Hughes is and isn’t the all-powerful creator of textual content. He hands responsibility over to his reader to participate in the making of the poem, and he acknowledges that the act of reading is not a straightforward negotiation between sender and receiver. Instead, suggests Hughes, the reader anticipates and creates his own interactions – we are guided by Hughes into imagining a fox, but ultimately we must create it, modify it, complete it, for ourselves.

This idea is critical to one element of my doctoral thesis since it articulates the complex gap between physical marks on the page and the process of imagination that occurs in the reader’s mind. The Thought Fox is a poem which attempts to pinpoint the moment at which the recognised shape of letters becomes transformed into a fully functioning mental picture. My thesis, in part seeks to analyse this moment in more detail, by investigating the various ways in which artists, writers, poets and illustrators have used this interplay between text and image to achieve a wide variety of artistic and intellectural results.

What I find so remarkable about Hughes’ poem is his insight that nothing that we perceive as ‘natural’ is free from semiotic baggage. A traditional reading of his poem might surmise that he is a naturalist/existentialist writing metaphorically about an fox, but I argue his wry analysis of the way that his own text is operating bears a close resemblance to semiotic criticism. Hughes seems to suggest that reality is dependent upon a system of signs; that nothing can exist outside of such cultural constructions. We ‘see’ the fox because a system allows us to read and interpret the textual signs (the letters, punctuation and spaces) that Hughes lays out. The play in the poem arises from the tension that exists between spontaneity and forecast – as new readers we are led to feel as though the conjuring up of the fox is somehow unique and fleetingly precious, when in fact the fox is an inevitable by-product of the signs already organised by Hughes. This relationship between signifier and signified is often taken for granted as being natural, which makes Hughes’s attention to the gap between the two all the more extraordinary. This supposition of ‘naturalness’ is one of the most common ideologies that semioticians seek to expose and eradicate. Semiotic analysts such as Jonathan Culler argue that taking this exchange between signifier and signified as being unmediated is like perceiving photography as being ‘a window on the world’. – a claim made by Roland Barthes in 1977 which has been widely contested since. Hughes works in opposition to this notion of naturalness by calling noisy attention to the process of mediation, as if he is unpicking the so-called ‘invisible editing’ we have come to expect from most forms of mass popular culture.

To Walk On Hills/ The City as Landscape

To Walk on Hills

To walk on hills is to employ legs
As porters of the head and heart
Jointly adventuring towards
Perhaps true equanimity.

To walk on hills is to see sights
And hear sounds unfamiliar.
When in wind the pine-tree roars,
When crags with bleatings echo,
When water foams below the fall,
Heart records that journey as memorable indeed;
Head reserves opinion,
Confused by the wind.

A view of three shires and the sea!
Seldom so much at once appears
Of the coloured world, says heart.
Head is glum, says nothing.
Legs become weary, halting
To sprawl in a rock's shelter,
While the sun drowsily blinks
On head at last brought low -
This giddied passenger of legs
That has no word to utter.

Heart does double duty,
As heart, and as head,
With portentous trifling.

A castle on its crag perched
Across the miles between is viewed
With awe as across years.
Now a daisy pleases,
Pleases and astounds, even,
That on a garden lawn could blow
All summer long with no esteem.
And the buzzard's horrid poise,
And the plover's misery,
And the important beetle's
Blue-green-shiny back...

To walk on hills is to employ legs
To march away and lose the day.
Confess, have you known shepherds?
And are they not a witless race
Prone to quaint visions?
Not thus from solitude
(Solitude sobers only)
But from long hilltop striding.

Robert Graves




The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque'.

Susan Sontag, 'On Photography', 1977

Ingrid Pollard, 'Postcards Home'

Ingrid Pollard’s photographic work 'Postcards Home', calls attention to generalizations and assumptions made about race and colour within Lake District discourses. She inhabits the gaps and silences and inserts herself into the mis-en-scene of typified Lake District landscapes. By doing so, she substantiates an idea I share: that the Lakes are not a landscape that allows space for a dynamic variety of peoples and human experiences. Rather, she focuses upon the isolation and menace of being the ‘other’ in this culturally and visually constructed part of England. ‘It’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment. I thought I liked the Lake District where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white. A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease, of dread’. The text which accompanies Pollard’s ‘Postcards Home’ is interesting, as it asserts a radical and politically-charged – and yet poetic – vocabulary. Her linguistic deviation highlights the presence of a conventional language of the Lakes – a way of prizing and describing the landscape that is seen to be inclusive, and which orients that landscape as a site of wholesomeness, nurture and inspiration. Much has been made of the Lake District as ‘Real England’ and its capacity to restore health and peace of mind: a place to ‘get away from it all’ and ‘return to nature’. Pollard challenges such notions with a rhetorical style that is steeped in violence and objection – “Death is the bottom line. The owners of these fields, these trees and sheep, they want me off their green and pleasant land. NO TRESPASS, they want me dead. A slow death through eyes that slide away from me...” Pollard’s final sentence in this quotation is telling – she suggests that as a Guyanan immigrant, hers is a face not recognized and affirmed through others’ gaze. With ‘the eyes that slide away from me’ she is reduced and annihilated, not accepted as a legitimate symbol within the order of the ‘true’ Lake District semiotic code. This leads to a sensation of non-existence, affirmed in Pollard’s exploration of ‘feelings I don’t belong. Walks through leafy glades with a baseball bat by my side’. Pollard’s awareness of her own face and colour as a politicized aesthetic symbol means she is able to treat her personal experiences as a microcosm through which to explore much greater relations of power. “I heard black people talk about the [postcard] image. Heritage? Whose heritage?”


Pollard attempts to find answers to this question through the particularities of her chosen medium. She exploits the conventional aesthetic code of the holiday photograph as a stable norm from which to then deviate. By inserting her own black skin into the pastoral mis-en-scene of the Lake District she plays with the initial shock that comes from seeing a Black presence in a 'natural' setting to affirm the existence of conservative conventions and assumption of pastoral heritage. Pollard explores notions of her outsider-status in the photograph below – a piece which registers multiple levels of otherness and alienation. The barbed wire fence acts as a visual signifier of the barrier that exists between her and the landscape beyond – a physical articulation of the ideological gap between her and the ‘Real England’ of the Lake District. Pollard’s look settles out of frame exacerbating the photograph’s unsettled quality. The tone and colour of the project parodies 18th century painting, shown more clearly in the photograph below which gives a conventional ‘view’ or ‘vista’ - one then challenged by Pollard’s lack of belonging to the scene she is parodying. Her work 'Pastoral Interludes' drives at not some ‘essence’ of the Lake District – it does not attempt to argue that popular conceptions of the Lake District are right or wrong – more, Pollard recognizes that they are informed by our reading of and repeated encounters with public artifacts such as postcards, photographs, and advertising literature. Pollard quizzes the stability of these artifacts as bearers of certain ‘truths’.




Photography continues to carry assumptions of truth-making – as Jean Francis Lyotard in his ‘The Postmodern Condition’ observes, “photography retains its place in the hierarchy of devices of realistic representation”. Her photographs toe a fine line between parody and documentary - Pollard’s photographs defy the naturalness of nature and expose the cultural definition that lies behind so much of the purported photographic ‘truth’. Pollard represents the experience of the Lakes through codified objects – she rewrites culture with her subversive take on existing modes of cultural ephemera.

In her words: 'the leisure industry dominates the surface, but there’s all this other stuff underneath, hidden.'

Bricolage

An interesting quotation which helps to illuminate Walter Benjamin's much-lauded 'Arcades' project; itself never finished, but a text frequently used as a vibrant working model upon which to base bricolage-centred methodologies

Perfect Light

There you are, in all your innocence,
Sitting among your daffodils, as in a picture
Posed as for the title: 'Innocence'.
Perfect light in your face lights it up
Like a daffodil. Like any one of those daffodils
It was to be your only April on earth
Among your daffodils. In your arms,
Like a teddy bear, your new son,
Only a few weeks into his innocence.
Mother and infant, as in the Holy portrait.
And beside you, laughing up at you,
Your daughter, barely two. Like a daffodil
You turn your face down to her, saying something.
Your words were lost in the camera.
And the knowledge
Inside the hill on which you are sitting,
A moated fort hill, bigger than your house,
Failed to reach the picture. While your next moment,
Coming towards you like an infantryman
Returning slowly out of no-man's-land,
Bowed under something, never reached you -
Simply melted into the perfect light

Ted Hughes, 'Birthday Letters', p143