Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
Insomnia is never far from my thoughts, especially when I am writing. A poor sleeper even as a girl, I spent many nights scribbling diary entries in a notebook on the bathroom floor after our crowded household had gone to bed. As an adult, with three spirited children and a full-time job, I often sought the desk in the wee hours by necessity. Those liminal hours between dark and dawn continue to haunt my praxis even now that my nest is empty. At night the smallest noises, including the surprising veracity of my own breathing, are more apparent and seem to command an acute attention. For me, there is nothing as inimitably private and attuned as nocturnal writing. As I type away at this piece, for example, I find myself grateful that a lifelong habit of insomnia churned me awake at 5 a.m. from my usual choppy spell of semiconsciousness, affording at least a couple of deliciously quiet hours to think and work before even the dog will rouse and the winter windows lighten.
People swap insomnia stories with the same competitive pride as mothers proffer accounts of births and deliveries. We who suffer from sleeplessness also have an arsenal of advice to offer one another. After I once confessed in an article to being a "mouth-breather and ferocious snorer," concerned readers urged me to seek medical attention, certain that some sort of breathing issue was complicating if not causing my inability to get a good night's rest.
According to a small study, recently published in the journal Sleep, they may be right: Many people who believe that their insomnia is caused by "hyper-arousal" anxiety or racing thoughts are likely to be suffering from breathing problems.
Could it be that simple? More important, even if I could, would I want to cure my insomnia? Isn't my sleeplessness closely tied in with my sense of myself as a poet: of wanting to see, to be always awake and aware of the ultimate Big Sleep of which each night's little sleep is trope and harbinger?
Poets may not suffer from insomnia more than other people, but they seem more likely to write about it. For centuries, long before Thomas Edison (himself a famous insomniac who called his scientific team the "insomnia squad") facilitated the insomnia of so many of us by helping to invent the electric light bulb, poets from a wide range of cultures have written about their wakeful, nocturnal anguish and ecstatic vision. In the eighth century, the Chinese poet Tu Fu, in a translation by Sam Hamill, pined, "Sleepless, memories of war betray me: / I am powerless against the world." Patumanar, a poet of the Tamil period of Indian literature, writes (in a translation by A.K. Ramunujan), that "Even the far-flung world / has put aside its rages / for sleep. / Only I / am awake."
Does the study linking insomnia to troubled breathing, which, as one article stated, challenges "the predominant theory of insomnia as a problem of 'hyper-arousal,' in which the body idles on high psychologically and physiologically," change the way we think about and "read" insomniacal art? A dark night of the soul, heartache, remorse, guilt, desire, God-hunger — surely this, and not obstructed airways or a drop in oxygen levels, is the stuff of poetry. Would it alter how we experience Gerard Manley Hopkins's dark sonnets ("I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. / What hours, O what black hours we have spent / This night!"), if we knew he may have sawed Zzzzs? Or that Emily Dickinson ("Good Morning — Midnight / I'm coming Home —") might have awakened before dawn not to seek some alone time before the household stirred but rather because of abnormal nocturnal breath processes?
I think not. True, it's harder to romanticize insomnia if we know it might be a matter of aberrant breathing treatable by nose strips, ungainly headgear or a trip to the sleep clinic. But poetry has always been about breathing. The word "inspire," in fact, derives from the Latin in ("in") + spirare ("to breathe"), and it is possible to think about poems themselves as acts of disordered breathing, in which what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called "the best words in the best order" stir, disturb, move and perhaps even change us as we make and read them. As Robert Frost wrote, "Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat."
How separate are our artistic productions from any condition of our bodies? As one professor of sleep medicine said of the insomnia/breathing study, "we know arousal can in and of itself promote instability of the upper airway."
It is not new to speculate about the ways in which physical and psychological ailments of all sorts may have affected and contributed to works of art. It is now believed, for example, that the frisson of haloed light in the embroideries of Hildegard of Bingen might have been inspired by migraine aura. Could Dickinson's mysterious eye ailment (or, as Lyndall Gordon speculates in a recent biography, epilepsy) have contributed to her prevalent ocular imagery and the relentless "funeral" treading in her brain? How would William Blake's taking prescription drugs have affected his visionary prints and poems? How much did John Berryman's alcoholism or Wallace Stevens's own martini logic contribute to the "cadmium shine" and the "lunar paraphrase" of their compositions?
None of this musing, however, diminishes the crucial work of medicine to help all of us to live healthier, happier lives. Whether caused by poetic hyper-arousal or disordered breathing, there is nothing, finally, inspiring about a grueling, protracted and debilitating spell of sleeplessness. Although I'm not yet ready to call a specialist, I am as grateful for the ameliorating advances of sleep scientists as I am for the revelations of a host of poets who manage to make art, if not meaning, out of sleeplessness.
Lisa Russ Spaar, a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Virginia, is the editor of the anthology "Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems" and the author, most recently, of the poetry collection "Vanitas, Rough."
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