Circling: Late-night Thoughts on Body and Mind

1

I can’t sleep. My mind is spinning. But is that the right word for what is going on? For the associative jumping from one part of my life to another with no apparent reason or order, for those hundred things that flash across the screen—is it a screen?—of my mind at the speed of thought? I said “no apparent reason or order,” but as William James pointed out, you can always, if you take care and time, map how one association, however seemingly unconnected, sparks the next. What you can never do, he added, is predict how those associations will move forward.

There is something inherently manic about this state, a state that I already know, at two o’clock in the morning, will still be going at four. I could stop the spinning (or jumping or cutting or darting or whatever it is) easily enough. There is a little white pill in the cabinet under the sink, and if I break a quarter of it off—such a tiny thing!—and gulp it down, the circling will slow like the last swirls down a drain and under I’ll go. This would be a smart strategy if my only goal was to get to the more focused circling I need to do tomorrow, but for tonight I decide to let it play itself out, to let the circles keep spinning, the thoughts keep jumping. Something could be gained from it—new ideas? (an essay even?)—but this is too pedestrian and utilitarian a goal. Even when I consciously slow my breathing, inhaling and exhaling with exaggerated deepness, I assure myself that the goal is not sleep. Maybe this is a trick, a way to drop down into those thick groggy layers: where the associations slow and grow strange, and things connect more surrealistically and less consciously— and it usually would be just that, a trick, but not tonight. Tonight there will be no goals, not even the goal of peace. Tonight I would rather be awake than drugged.

Soon, instead of focusing on my breath, I am thinking about breath, which, you will admit, is a very different thing. I think about my father’s breath during the last minutes he was alive, how strange and wheezy and animal-like it was, and how much hearing it affected me as I held his hand. Lately breathing has become an important ritual in my life, though I will not call it religion or meditation. I will not even call it self-hypnosis, which is what the psychiatrist called it when he taught me how to do it back when I was twelve or thirteen. He taught me to breathe and count backwards as a way to slow the circling of my own mind—though back then it felt less like circling than a climbing upward toward this central fact: We all, including my mother, my dog, and my self, die. Everything is nothing. I thought this trick of his would never work—just stupid breathing and stupid numbers—and that there was no way I could slow down when I was spinning so fast. In some ways I was right. But in some ways he was.

2

I keep a pad by my bed and scribble down notes in the dark so as not to wake my wife. I’ve gotten good at this, writing in the dark, though of course sometimes I can’t make out the words in the morning. But tonight, suddenly, it is pictures, not words, that are dancing in my brain, and so I quietly get out of bed and go to the kitchen and turn on the light. I draw the image below.

The next day I show this drawing to a couple of friends (which is a quaint, old-fashioned way of saying “post it on Facebook”), and one points out that it is the outer rim of a circle that actually spins faster. I grant that this may be the scientific truth, but I’ll stick to my own subjective one. I like the slower...