One of the most profound aesthetic experiences of my life involved falling asleep in an armchair in the middle of the afternoon while reading The Fairie Queene. I did not dream of Britomart and Sir Artegall, or of the evil wizard Archimago. In fact, I did not dream at all. I was simply wrapped in a delicious, all-consuming darkness. When I awoke with the open volume in my lap, redolent of the magic dust of libraries, the limpid vernal daylight filling the room, I left off reading entirely and, with a powerful and serene sense of clarity, went in search of a cup of coffee.
While attending a production of classical music, opera, or theater, napping is not only inevitable, it is the entire point of attendance. Even the most austere wooden seats, constructed with the moral aim of keeping audience members painfully awake for every minute of the performance, are transformed into sublime luxury by the hypnotic majesty of high art. I pity the poor sods (and I admit, I used to be one of them) who struggle against the tide of sleep, jolting themselves awake every three minutes. This kind of sleep deprivation, in which one is violently yanked back from the precipice again and again, is a noted technique of “enhanced interrogation,” and it’s not hard to see why. It’s torture, and for what?
We’re all terrified of “missing” something important, which is why for most of our waking hours we’re transfixed by social media feeds, group chats, livestreams, and podcasts, constantly feeling like we have to “keep up” with whatever is “happening.” Hardly anyone falls asleep while scrolling through social media, no matter how inane and mind-numbing the “content” in our “feed” may be, and this is the key to its profound difference from Emily Brontë or Shakespeare. It goes without saying that our unbalanced addiction to the stimulant of social media has wrecked havoc on our inner lives (not to mention our sleeping habits), but too often we entirely misunderstand what the cure to this malaise ought to be. We imagine we are supposed to discover in the works of Ingmar Bergman or Chantal Akerman the same kind of stimulation that we find on Instagram, and when we fail, when our eyelids grow heavy and we begin to drift off, we blame ourselves, convincing ourselves that we aren’t cut out for high art, when in reality we’ve grasped the point of it all too well.
No one would deny that napping beneath the shade of an umbrella on the beach, in the forest by a murmuring stream, on a granite slab at the summit of a hill, or on the lawn of a public park, is the most perfect way of making peace with nature, of receiving the divine gifts of the sky and the earth. In much the same way, to sleep in the arms of our beloved is a sacred communion, almost equal to that of the orgasm, which itself is a momentary lapse into unconsciousness. All that I propose is to extend this obvious insight to the realm of culture, where for too long the echo of the schoolmaster’s disciplinary injunction to stay awake and pay attention, and the bourgeois impulse to suck all the moral value that we can from the aesthetic commodity, have deformed our whole experience of art.
As a child I often saw my father put on a rented DVD, make himself comfortable in an armchair, start the film, and then immediately lose consciousness, his mouth and eyes hanging half-open like a corpse, a bowl of uneaten popcorn in his lap. My brothers and I were bitterly annoyed by this behavior, which our inexperienced minds could not understand, and sometimes we even went so far as to wake him up in the middle of his nap. He would wake up, apologize, then go instantly back to sleep. In those days, it was not unusual for me to stay up until dawn drinking Coca-Cola, playing video games, and watching films with my gang of screen-addicted friends. I try not to think about all the nights I wasted this way when I could have been sleeping—it’s best not to live in regret. But as I grew older I learned to appreciate my father’s wise and judicious approach to cinema.
It was as a result of my exposure as a teenager to drone music (Dylan Carlson, Stephen O’Malley, Keiji Haino) that I first began to appreciate the mystery of sleep. I will never forget the first time I saw the back cover of Carlson’s 1993 album Earth 2, which was filled with anonymous blurbs praising the music’s sedative and healing properties as if it were a pharmaceutical drug or New Age talisman, inducing me to approach, and experience it, in precisely this fashion. Music, and art more generally, would never be the same. (I later had the privilege of falling asleep during a live concert of Carlson’s band. Deep slumber, of the kind one might enjoy during a play or a film, was not possible in the crowded concert hall, but with a seat on a narrow bench along the wall I did manage to steal a brief but exquisite dip into the black pool of sleep.)
We should sleep through concerts, books, plays, and films, but why stop there? It is a crime that we are not allowed to nap in galleries and museums. Perhaps in the future, when society has been reorganized on the scientific basis of universal justice and mercy, we will be allowed to pack a pillow and blanket into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, set up on the floor amid the European sculpture, and catch some shut-eye.
We must avoid the fate of Don Quixote, whose “brain dried up,” Cervantes tells us, as a result of “so little sleeping and so much reading.” (Ingeniously, Cervantes composed his rambling masterpiece as an ideal literary sedative.) To conclude I will say that there is more to be gained from sleeping through Don Quixote, or the films of Tarkovsky, or the compositions of La Monte Young, than staying up all night for the latest Netflix series.
Let there be no more shame in sleeping. We are all very tired, and anyway, someone else can always tell us what we missed.
