Sur réalisme
Katerina Poupounaki
Bernard Hall, Sleep, 1906, National Gallery of Victoria. Oil on canvas.
Bag lady, you gone hurt your back
Draggin' all them bags like that
A MONTH AGO / later
I dreamt a dream of loss. Another one. I dreamt that I had lost my bag. I was beside myself, hurt by my reckless performance. A familiar fury inflamed my cheeks as I vehemently questioned those unfortunate enough to cross me in the realm of the unconscious. No clue. No sympathy. No bag. I was hysterical, in the most anti-feminist sense of the word. It was that bad.
I woke up clenching my heart. Still freaking out despite jumping portals.
Anxiety, like God, is transcendent; it has no limitations, only hurdles, or diversions.
—Leave me alone, I groaned.
I couldn’t get up. Needing another minute, I closed my eyes, then opened them, looking up at the ceiling.
—A bag?
The ceiling, my blank canvas. My eyes, my pen. There was a point where my bag and I met in the Real World. I could only make out hyperbolic curves and outliers. I’ve never been good at stargazing, or math, for that matter. I always get lost. I erased my canvas, irritated by my oneiric impasse. It was time to get out of bed.
I reached out to Lexi for guidance. She’s one of my dearest friends and is well-versed in the world of the spiritual. The thinnest thread ties us together, the thread is invisible, but I can feel its fibers as intimately as the hairs on my head.
She said that losing something of importance in a dream is allegorical for a loss of faith in someone.
—Are you beefing with anyone?
—Hard to say, I replied.
My cheeks reddened and my heart seared. These things are always hard to say.
✦✦✦
THURSDAY JULY 18 / 01:something
I can’t sleep.
I throw my face into my pillow and growl like a child. What a waste of time. It isn’t too late at night; I could be doing something useful, but I’m too tired to do anything. My heart won’t stop. I’m in limbo. Counting sheep feels pointless. I always thought that was bullocks anyway. In M Train, Patti Smith wrote about this game of letters she would play to help her fall asleep. Select a letter from the alphabet and list every word you know that begins with the selected letter until you can’t.
I’ll give it a go.
L
Labyrinth
Ladybug
Longing
Luggage
Languid
Languorous – indeed.
Lounge
Laughter
Ladybird — you already said that (not quite)
Lethargic
Little wing — does that count?
This is kind of fun. Different letter now.
M
Mother
Martyr
Myriad
Moon
Mantle
Morocco
Mumbai
Montana
✦✦✦
A WEEK AGO / ABOUT 07:37
I’m walking down my street when, suddenly, an elfin elderly woman appears in front of me. Horror invades my heart. She begins to charge towards me. I know what she’s about to do, but how? She gets closer and I grow petrified. I’m paralysed. WHY CAN’T I MOVE MY LEGS? She’s in front of me now and she’s beating me with her bag.
I wake up before the bag touches my cheek.
It’s always the same. I’m always the same. Still incomprehensible.
I seldom dream, and when I do, this is what I get. An abusive grandmother who visits sporadically.
Alright, I get it. I’m ‘stressed.’
At least I dreamt.
✦✦✦
Freud believed that we are the most liberated when we are sleeping. When we sleep, our overstrung superego settles, arousing the instinctive id, which imbues our mind with subconscious impulses. Pleasure denied in the light of day. By this logic, the function of dreams is essentially preservative; dreams are “guardians of sleep,” shielding us from the threat of disturbance, guiding us toward a kind of bliss only privileged to the most primitive part of ourselves.
These days I barely dream. It has been weeks since I was last visited by my elusive bag. According to Freudian theory, it is likely that I have a sleep disorder.
Sleep is my rival;
I refuse it,
I tease it,
I ache for it.
I can’t stand not being able to dream; I miss the intensity. I miss the pools of sweat, the racing heart, the clouds of confusion, the terror tears.
Dali had a one-second rule: he would fall asleep with an object in his hand and wake to the sound of it hitting the ground or a plate that he prepared earlier. Dali harnessed his sleep to induce creativity. Exploiting the hallucinatory nature of the hypnagogic stage to enter his subconscious from inside, returning pieces of it to the outside world.
The surrealists believed that dreams are central to human thought and existence. Through one second of sleep, Dali understood this reality, he faced it. And through the second, or the moment of waking, Dali caught the wings of ephemera between his thumb and forefinger and smeared them for paint.
Sleep has given me back issues, leaden eye bags, anxiety, memory problems and trouble focusing. Or are they from my lack of sleep?
✦✦✦
Melbourne
Mystical
Mysterious
Mermaid
Membrane
Member
Matter
✦✦✦
MONDAY AUGUST 12 / 06:20
I woke up to the sweet lament of my 5:30 alarm. Unable to recall the motivation behind my early arousal, I decided to flirt with my fatigue and closed my eyes.
I swept myself off my own feet.
I woke abruptly at 6:15, to my work alarm.
An image hung suspended in my mind. It was–
I was sweaty, anxious, confused, frightened.
I think I just woke from a dream.
A dream
I feel fantastic. I feel rejuvenated. This morning, I am protected.
I recite the dream to myself like lyrics. Reaching immediately for my notebook out of fear it might disappear. I write this down. While writing I suddenly remembered the rationale behind the 5:30 wake-up. I was testing the theory of arousal as a trigger for dreams. Today, it worked. I must have caught myself doing the REM rounds.
I hate that I’ve written this chronologically as I’ve now forgotten the contents of my dream. Linear is never linear.
✦✦✦
THURSDAY AUGUST 01 / 21:46
I met Amelia for dinner tonight. Lam Lam’s, 7 pm. I checked the time as I sat down. 7 pm exactly. I was impressed with myself. And how mature I was; waiting for her inside.
I scanned the room: one family, two couples, one group of millennials. Three horse paintings, one forest. Two elderly women sat at our table, already deep in conversation. I hid my smile.
—Amelia will find this amusing, I thought to myself. She probably won’t.
The restaurant seemed quiet for a Thursday night. Should Thursday nights be busy? I despise when people use lines like “It doesn’t feel like a Monday” or “It feels like a Tuesday.” Like days are a miscellany of emotions. I’m getting worked up about this because I wish I didn’t say these things myself.
Ultimately, I was too confident, my horse too high. It was 7:20 pm and she still hadn’t arrived. I knew I should’ve just texted her, letting her know I was inside. We had lost time. I texted her a minute later. She called me instantly after I’d sent the message. She’d been waiting outside the restaurant for 20 minutes. My apology was resentful, mostly because I was vexed with myself.
I think my superego has eaten my id.
Last week Lexi had us over for drinks; her family was out, and she was bored. I was feeling particularly vulnerable that day. Pregnable, as I just had my moustache waxed and was
convinced that my face was crimson. I was wildly paranoid, in one of my can’t-look-you-in-the-eye spells. I didn’t want to eat, and I certainly didn’t feel like drinking.
One hour in, half a bottle of gin.
This can’t be good.
TWO HOURS more, HEAD to the FLOOR!
It certainly wasn’t.
Riddles and rhymes, tears and tears.
I fought my id and my id won.
—OH, THAT’S RIGHT! You kept asking me about your bag, she said emphatically.
—What do you mean?
—Every five seconds you would ask me if I had your bag. You were so worried that you’d lost it. You were obsessed.
I immediately became bashful and looked down at my soup.
That would be right.
✦✦✦
Bag lady, you gon' miss your bus
You can't hurry up 'cause you got too much stuff
✦✦✦
“… a meditation on the experience of death.”
Sleep by English painter Bernard Hall. Oil on canvas, 64.0 × 141.1 cm. Made in Melbourne in 1906. Located in 19th Century European Paintings Gallery on Level 2 of NGV International.
I don’t think that there is anything inherently special about this painting. Its Dionysian symbolism is enchanting, but my attachment to this piece hinges on emotion and temporality, not aesthetics.
My affection for Sleep is comparable to the irrepressible movie cry, an excuse for indulgence. I don’t know why, and perhaps it's only because of its title. Sleep struck me from the inside out, lacerating the steadfast stitches I had sewn together so thoughtfully. The first time I saw it, I laughed and I cried, I came undone. We come undone when we’re asleep.
Sleep is beauty is eternal is divine is death.
“Death’s drapery (representations) nudes (representations) reclining repose (activity) seated figures women (female humans).”
✦✦✦
Minister
Mingle
Metallic
✦✦✦
I must admit that I was engulfed by a strange sense of elation when I spotted the figs in the right corner of Sleep. I immediately thought of Sylvia Plath and her alter ego, Esther Greenwood, sitting by a rotting fig tree.
The notion or fear of “starving to death” began to plague my mind. I’ve never thought of it that way. Doubt. Denial. Time. Maybe I always have.
is escaping me. Excavate. I feel like I’m losing
“I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
Sleep is supposed to be
By souls of sanity
The shutting of the eye.
Time
The presence of the figs in Sleep is a little too convenient for me.
Historically, figs symbolise abundance or temptation. In The Bell Jar, Plath employs the fig, a canonical symbol, to convey ambivalence and anxiety surrounding these themes.
Sleep and figs.
Sleep and figs!
Don’t you see?
Sometimes, I feel so–
Nope, too hard
✦✦✦
Meter
Mold
Money
Mol…
✦✦✦
Feeling anxious, I drew a card from my tarot deck before heading out for the day.
La Maison Diev; The tower. “Represents the spirit facing destruction.”
“Termination, adversity, downfall, disruption, loss of stability, loss of money, loss of love and affection, terrible change, annoyance.”
My mistake, it's in the reversed position.
“Continued oppression, living in a rut, entrapped in an unhappy situation.”
I smiled flatly.
Well.
✦✦✦
“It occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.”
✦✦✦
One day, all them bags gon' get in your way