Turning Away Shall Be My Only Negation
“Turning away shall be my only negation,” declared the old psychonaut, and whom Freud had read (in secret) so that we might speculate that this same “turning away” becomes the basic action of his model of the psyche, the principle means of warding off what we find unpleasurable, or unbearable, or just plain excessive—like the election cycle—or as when at end of day, it is the too-muchness of reality that exhausts us and we finally turn-in from turning away and retreat under the duvet to the twilit world of dreams.
Falling asleep is one of those strange acts by which the only way to do it is to not do anything—like the Daoist’s action by non-action: (“wei wu wei”). Or, rather, to not do anything except to have lived for a day on planet earth.
Then again, having regular sleep (for me) is a result of doing a lot of things, an elaborate spell of equal parts practical and ritual magic, including lion’s mane mushroom pills (for the dreams), no caffeine after one pm, no screens or bright lights after nine, no drinking, no thinking about current events, a ten pm bedtime, twenty minutes of reading to zero the mind, blowing out the candles, darkness and running a fan to drown out the traffic.
Of course the other main component of the magic spell for sleep is, as Freud reminds us, the “deliberate rejection of reality.”
We just can’t bear too-much reality; that’s what insomnia is.
In the morning one wakes up into a dream that resolves itself into what seems like a continuity but that is more probably a discontinuity; the previous day’s residues have been rinsed by dream, the furniture of your mind have been jostled in the night by the currents of dream—without you being aware. The routine of the new day is pieced together from memory that is itself subject to revision, uncanny replication, wishful fantasy; how much of the previous day’s reverie and stray feelings had been lost in the night?
Imagine that your psychical life were a giant spiral and that each night you are rotated upon the spiral so that in the morning the entire world has subtly shifted without your having noticed…
A question to occupy the philosopher: if our mental life is a spiral, around what, precisely, does it revolve? Also, dear philosopher, to where is the spiral going?
For a long time I thought that Kierkegaard said that “the point of philosophy was to learn how to sleep” but now I can’t find if he did say that or not… In any case, it would be better if he had said: “we go to sleep to escape philosophy.”
Every night we can feel perception tearing away from consciousness as we drift to sleep; the “continuity” of self is nothing more than the discontinuous and fragmented marks perception leaves upon a memory wax that yields in the morning to the demands of self-satisfaction.
Or perhaps memory is more unyielding? Like graffiti carved upon the stones of Pompeii?
Anyways, Freud claims at the end of A Note Upon the “Mystic Writing Pad’ (1924), in his occasional shoot-for-the-moon mic-drop style, that this discontinuous turning away from reality of our perceptual apparatus “lies at the bottom of the origin of our concept of time.”
I myself will occasionally have the strange feeling, as I did this last Monday (the day that François Laruelle died), of having passed through a circuit, or gate, on the other side of which is a world that has radically shifted on its axis from the world of the previous day. The recent events of life are suddenly regarded as if from a great distance, like they happened six months ago and to a different person…
