Sleep is Now a Foreign Country: Encounters with the Uncanny

Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country

Encounters with the Uncanny

Mike Barnes

biblioasis

Windsor, Ontario

Contents

Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country

Acknowledgements and Dedication

Author Bio

Copyright

Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country

Food in dreams appears to be the same as food when awake,

but the sleepers are asleep, and receive no nourishment.

— Augustine, Confessions

On a spring afternoon in 2007, I was lying on the couch in my living room reading Simon Schama’s Power of Art. This chapter was an essay on Picasso’s Guernica. As I read Schama’s account of the German planes appearing in the sky over the Spanish town on April 26, 1937, something caused me to look up from the book. The objects in the room, clearly outlined in the spring light, seemed altered somehow, stark yet dubious along their edges. Not quite familiar, either as themselves or as an arrangement of objects. I had a sense of items poised in a museum, absorbing my attention while contriving to escape it utterly. Clear and hunkered as they were, I couldn’t quite see them. I realized then the date was April 26. The same day as the Guernica attack, exactly seventy years later.

The bombers had appeared in the sky at 4 p.m. I looked at the homemade wooden clock on the end table. Hand-sawed and painted yellow-green, it has the shape of a tall, slim house with no window and, at its base, a little red door askew on its hinges. The hour hand had dropped below the eave on the right, two-thirds of its way toward the crooked little door. The big hand pointed straight up into the peak of the tall roof. It was 4 p.m.

For a long instant, like the sustained vibrations of a musical chord, past and present collapsed together like the two ends of an accordioned paper figure. Or more than two: the moment thronged with splintery harmonics. Stretched out, the two sequences — the destruction of a town, which became the subject of a famous painting, which became the subject of an essay; and (reversing things) my reading of the essay about the painting about the destroyed town — were separated by the innumerable twists and folds of seven decades. Then somehow, with a speed that gave me vertigo, they shut up tight together, without a wafer of space between them.

They overlaid each other like clear transparencies. That was part of the vertigo. As if the intervening seventy years had suddenly gone sheer and negligible. Like wandering (I was looking at the house-clock again) in a building made of glass. A glass construction polished to such speckless transparency that things which ordinary walls and floors and ceilings would keep apart could suddenly loom, merge and blend.

But there was movement in that image. There had to be. In part to account for the lurching, jittery sense I felt lying there. A sense of caged turbulence — wild whirling bounded by absolute stillness — like the frenzy of snowflakes inside a glass-globed paperweight.

A dance, I thought. In a dance you whirl through space without ever leaving the dance. At a given moment some­one may be across the ballroom, or right next to you, or in your arms — these positions and others can repeat and alternate. All of these thoughts and comparisons, none of them quite right, none of them exactly wrong, could go on without any disruption to the dance itself. Perhaps they were even part of it. A step, a style of stepping, how­ever ungainly, that I could claim and recognize as my own.

For if the pure exhilaration of this kind of dancing has always come with close echoes of apprehensiveness, it is not just because of its weightlessness and the transparency of its figures, those unmoored, glassy possibilities that bring havoc just as easily as redemption to the world of solid sense and obscurity. It is because, once finding myself aswirl again, I have never had the slightest clue when or where or how the dance will end.

. . .

After that, there was nothing for a few days. Then the first transmissions, widely spaced. The number 70. Lines and circles scratched in dirt. My grandfather’s face. These could be core signals, or peripheral or preliminary, perhaps to test or clear the line. There was no way to tell at this point. I knew by now to do nothing but wait.

. . .

In July 1963, John Jack Green, my grandfather on my mom’s side, died suddenly of a heart attack, aged seventy. I was seven, almost eight, at the time. Ever since then, his death, as Mom described it to me, has been the model in my mind of a good death. The sort of swift and summing exit not granted to many. He was a gentle, churchgoing man, worn but not broken by working a Saskatchewan wheat farm for fifty years, including the worst years of the Depression. His father had been one of the first eastern settlers to build on the land outside Boharm. On the last day of his life, my grandfather came in from the field to have lunch with his wife. He was still vigorous, still active in the pattern of his days. I feel tired, Maudie, he said as he settled into his chair. I’m just going to close my eyes for a bit. When my grandmother came back from the kitchen, he was gone. Sitting with his eyes still closed, his hands still folded; no signs of pain or panic. As if, having reached his Biblical allotment of threescore and ten, he was permitted to depart peacefully, like a ploughman who has faithfully cut the long furrows back and forth in a vast field and can now, having reached the far corner, leave the implement and slip into some nearby shade for his rest.¹

But similes, like everything else, depend for their meanings on the frame that bounds them, on how far they’re allowed to go. Meaning is a bonsai operation. If the ploughman image is permitted to extend even slightly, there is, for the one back in the farmhouse, the matter of the abandoned plough, which must be dealt with, and the mystery of the vanished labourer. My grandmother, Maude, whose maiden name of Bastedo reveals her Spanish ancestry, had to wait eighteen years to follow Jack. Sighing, more frequently as the years passed, she would say, I’m tired. I want to see Jack again. Or, I’m ready to see Jack. Her hint of exasperation at the length of the vigil she was