Much sleep the past week, hard to wake for more than a few hours at a time.
I have spoken before about the memoir of Lady Sarashina – one of those ninth-century Japanese Heian women writers, but very unlike Murasaki or Shonagon, all we have of her is a late, not long attempt to put her life to paper. It has no actual title, and the name 'Sarashina' is simply the way Japanese historians chose to identify someone whose name is unknown, from her memoir's quotation of another work I think. The truth is, this sheaf of papers with her dreams, with memories of her family and travel, and of her hesitant and rather unfocused life, is really a faint trace, no more.
I know, of course, that there are many, many people in the world, and that there have been many, many people in the world in its history: some of them active, some quiet, some silent, some productive. Most, the greatest most, vanish without a trace of course (it has been slightly eerie to read Peter Levi's history of Greek literature, and realize that what we call the 'great Greek poets and dramatists' – not to mention the philosophers – cover a remarkably small geographical area of Greece, and a very brief time span out of the local activity, with enormous gaps between the few figures we can name; the fact is, much of the Greek culture that we claim to remember is the faintest trace of a vast stretch of time and space and people that are all almost incredibly, totally, forgotten).
And I know that, in our very loud and very present world especially, most voices vanish or are lost in a cross-fire of bandwidths of noise. Notwithstanding our rather unfortunate training and values that aim towards promoting ourselves.
So it becomes a bit strange, a bit pointless I think, to take one's dreams and bring them to consciousness – or to write words that probably won't be remembered, to speak out when only the vaguest fragments are remembered even the next day.
On the other hand, I'm not all that enamored of silence either... ah well.
Keeping life systems going just enough – the apartment coherent, food ordered – to have the illusion of continuity. Though I suppose I would matter just as much, to myself as to anyone else, if I were not pretending to act, or even to Do or Make Things – but if I just slept, coasted... like a coma; like a dream.