Last night remained hot – not very hot, but hot enough to reproduce that feeling of endless night, of I'll-never-get-to-sleep, where faint noises (not traffic – something electrical? an air conditioner a block away?) and the pillow, which is only blessedly cool for a moment when you change to another part of it, create a space of awareness where time stops, and your whole life, mind, imagination are suddenly seen as contingent decisions, as things that actually didn't need to go the way that they did.
I've had many nights that are technically like that; many of them acutely uncomfortable (stomach problems, mostly), or some that were worried (I don't, fortunately, tend to be wakeful in anxious circumstances – good thing, I suppose; instead I stay asleep as long as I can, to avoid them). However, this one was somewhat different, and had instead a resonance with other kinds of nights that are rarer: where I really seem to see everything as an accident, and vaguely wonder how it could all be made different. Where my whole life seems to be a story – and therefore, of course, a story that could have been told differently.
The night that I was reminded of last night: at some point – when would it have been? – we were in New Hampshire for a cousin's wedding, and I was put upstairs in the front room of my grandmother's apartment, along with a handsome red-headed sailor. Impossible to sleep; and impossible to not be aware of this man (I was pretty young – late teens, early twenties? – and acutely disoriented by how close he was, and how attractive he was). A very long night, with I'm sure passionate dreams (now pretty faded or forgotten); but also with a broader awareness of myself in time (made more acute because of the relative narrowness of the house, of the time-scale, of the space-scale, of the area where the Greek side of the family lives – it was always so disturbing for me to imagine myself in a smaller town like this one).
I suppose the normal responses to such a thing are: well, one can't feel that way all the time, if one did one wouldn't get anything done at all. (Which might explain why I get so little done, at all.) Or: that's existential angst, and then you try to figure it out by reading and discussing. (Hmm. Feh.) But I suppose I want something that would touch on my long, close relationship with fantasy, with ideas of science fiction and magic and such – that somehow, if I really can see my life whole, that it could be changed, either retroactively or at least from this point forward.
Today, I was continuing to read Bender's Sandman Companion, where he runs through synopses and details of Gaiman's wonderful Sandman series. (I first read the Sandman books this winter, at Vanessa's instigation – and was surprised to realize that they are indeed extremely good, and very much to my taste.) When Bender launched into an explanation of The Kindly Ones, book 9 of the series, I abruptly became very, well, avoidant – in a way that has been very familiar over the past five years or so: when any novel, story, television drama, reaches the point where terrible things are happening and everyone has to cope with them, I shut down and become unwilling to read/see any more.
Wimpy, I know, but there you are. Although I've always been a bit like that, it was never as bad as it is now, since the Australian debacle. A weakness in the area of dealing with disaster – frankly, all of Aristotle's catharsis theories seem beside the point; or perhaps, more accurately, after one has been through several disasters, the 'created' disasters of fiction don't seem like any fun. At all. (Incidentally, this is probably why I like CSI and Law and Order so much these days – the really terrible stuff happens at the beginning, quickly, and then most of the show is taken up with calmly figuring out what happened, and of course with retribution.)
In The Kindly Ones, many terrible things happen; things that have been made inevitable by various decisions and mistakes strewn through the previous eight books. Change happens – big change, with finality – and a whole relative stasis, where big things return to normal after everything gets a bit messed about, vanishes. Brilliant, but difficult for me to stomach: perhaps the greatest mercy of this book is the speed with which everything happens – you can see it coming, and then it does, and then there's nothing to do but think about the aftermath.
Terrible things happening: yes, I know, These Things Happen To Teach Us, etc. So many people around me are going through difficult times, transitions, trials – C–, P–, V–, and others I'm sure. I know: I should be more willing to be the confidante, the helper, a supporting player in other people's dramas, but even that seems emotionally tiring. Maybe I'm just at a stage – or perhaps more accurately, at the end of a stage – where I'm tired of things happening, and can't deal with them or learn from them. Wanting stasis; wanting time to slow down; wanting a relatively simple, daily approach to life....