The Insomniacs Vigil
Insomniacs, in case you are one of those sweet souls who sleep with a clean conscience, inhabit an alternate universe. We don’t count sheep. We pirouette to the sky and plunge into terrifying subterranean depths.
On Christmas Eve, my mind flew over the sea. A blue so deep it was an olive ink. It landed to my dismay on an interview I once did with a deep-sea diver who described his dive around Point Lisas. He told me things about the fish I have never been able to forget. Amidst the oily effluence, where all corals were dead, he saw fish with three eyes, fish with two heads, three fins, or a single eye. Distorted by disease from oil blotted water.
So the mind floated from the diseased fish to humans. None of us can avoid the oily waters. Despite free will—and brains can create and discover immortal intricate work, (Shakespeare, Taj Mahal, Space)— we remain physical beings with a definite life span, not unlike the fish.
Some disease or the other will get most of us. We kill ourselves better than any other creatures. Mostly with fat, sugar, alcohol, drugs, sadness, sloth and tobacco. If not that our genetics do us in. No one said it was fair. We all do what we must do to get through the day. It’s hard being human.
The problem with us humans is that unlike fish or plants which live and die, our gift of the human brain is a double-edged sword. We have an idea of immortality, of unending time, knowing the Solar System was formed 4.6 billion years ago and takes about 230 million years to complete one orbit around the galactic centre.
So it seems to be horribly unfair that we won’t be around to experience much time. We all must pay for life by being aware of how little time we have on earth, and fright of not knowing exactly what death is despite the various stories we tell ourselves. Some say we will rise, others we will burn in hellfire or swim in honeyed rivers, and others that we will be reincarnated. This absolute faith in their chosen religion is possibly a massive consolation for those who have it.
Knowing I was less than an atom on earth yet feeling my blood pound in my ears like there was no one else on earth, I slept.
On Christmas night long after every drop of the day was wrung dry, I lay awake socially, emotionally, physically exhausted, with a slight hangover and much self-loathing at my gluttony. I thought, how we flap about-writhe like dying fish for much of our lives.
The rich are Machiavellian, dismissive of the poor, protective of their wealth at any cost. That why the imprisoned don’t believe they’ve done any wrong. They just think they got caught, unlike the big boys. The middle class is furious because they play by the rules, but its a treadmill to nowhere. The poor are angry because they feel locked out of their fair share and lie in wait with guns. I slept thinking of the aphorism that a fish rots from the head down.
On our family Boxing Day nature trek, we chose Caura Valley. The meandering river shaded under bowed bamboo was pierced by pools of sunlight. We walked beside it until we had to be in it, walking fully clothed to the sounds of cicadas and the breeze through the trees, until we were swimming under the waterfall. We dried off at the bank, watching the smoke from a nearly cooking pot rise into the trees.
Boxing night, wondering what it was all about, I thought of a nun who became a friend, sister Paul D’Ornellas. She taught me even on her death bed, that very human oily poisoned waters of grief, rage, loss, confusion fear and disease carry gifts. The main one being that of empathy for others who’ve experienced the same. This empathy leads to connection. We feel love when we give it. Loving people has a practical purpose. It protects us from terror. With that, I slept, grateful for our brief lives, for clear luminous days that separate us from the fish. Happy New Year.