Try harder!, my dad used to say to my sister when she complained she couldn’t sleep. As if you had to strain yourself and push in order to find sleep, when it is by surprise that you must come to it, or by surprise that it finds you, as when, walking through a wood, a clearing opens up, a secret vista – and I remember, now, a garden opened to our schoolbus that I would see again, years later, in Chagall’s The Poet Dreams.
Every time, it opened unexpectedly, and that is like sleep, which unexpectedly finds you, there around the corner you couldn’t turn by yourself. And then you understand that sleep was steering you to come to itself, that it was backed up behind you, and exerting a gentle pressure. Sleep calls you to itself, and what you want is only its wanting inside you. Sleep would like to join itself; sleep would like to lie down, turning inside you like a cat trying to find its spot.
That you wake up, like a diver surfacing – that awakening wants to waken in you, lightens you, and presses you upward to where the water’s bright – is the analogue of another kind of awakening. There is a state, says ancient Indian thought, of a deep sleep beyond sleep – and isn’t there an awakening beyond being awake? perhaps the two states are the same.
I can’t remember the Sanskrit term, but it is what is translated as the witness that is called from waking (or sleep): wake in awakening, sleep deeper: but it is the witness that seeks to find itself in you. To find itself, and to find you – for isn’t this, of the ancient Hindus, the truest self of all? Or perhaps it is only that it is joined to the self that sleeps or wakes that brings you to the edge of truth.
Joined – but as you fall deeper in sleep than sleep, or awake from your awakening, it also unjoins you from the normal course of your life. A relation in lieu of itself; a joining that is an unjoining: it is the witness that is the measure of you, looking for itself, seeking through your life and your dreams.
Borges has a story of the mirror people trapped by an emporer on the other side of the glass. But he says they are coming again, that the magical trap will lose its force. In the deepest mirrors of a certain province, says Borges, a fish can be seen. The same fish, I think, that Wolfe’s Severian sees in the mirroring pages in the House Absolute, gathering itself, obscure threat, to break the charm.
How can you reach the image in the deepest mirror? But it is coming to reach you, the witness, the one who would see with your eyes and dream with your dreams. Or it already roils in your dreams, turning there, hinting at itself, strange leviathan that withdraws as it comes forward, and whose scales are each larger than the whole world. And aren’t those scales what you see behind the sky, silvery blue within blue?
But it also turns in your own heart, and its turning is what allows you to find it everywhere, on the edge of your sight and the corners of your hearing. Isn’t it a version of the avatar of Vishnu that let itself be caught as a tiny fish, but then grew into its true, massive size – a fish as large as the universe – and announced itself the principle of all? Only this principle is not such, but is that withdrawal that undoes the structure by which knowledge might come to itself. Or is only undoing unleashed in that system, a fire in the forest?
The poet dreams: I remember that vista, and coming across it, always unexpectedly. A garden, and a wooden house, framed by pine trees, as though on the edge of a greater forest, a sample of immensity in our dull suburbs.
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