1.
When the meeting was cancelled, I took a nap to celebrate the new excess of time. The hours swallowed or were swallowed. The nap grew larger than the meeting ever could. I was sleeping to dream up my assignment. I was sleeping to postpone work.1
This is a shadow version of my academic writing. It dreams of all the same sources. The links it draws between them are much less clear. It wanders from room to room and sometimes it doesn’t know how it got there.
Holes make space for a writer, as for a reader (these are nap thoughts). I have been thinking for a long time about ways to carve out space.
I started writing in the notes app because it felt easier to fit that into little caves of time. To carve out space. To make the caves bigger but from a position of smallness. I was going to write at night, a time when my mind is more open, and I did write a bit at night, but I rarely stick to my plans. It became imperative to sleep through schedules.
Fanny Howe, in the essay ‘Bewilderment’, refers to a figure that I can’t stop thinking about, ‘the sleeping witness’. The sleeper witnesses what is inside their head, in various states of dream, but the connotations of legality and proof enshrouding the word witness seem to contradict the natural opacity of sleep. To bear witness to something nobody else can see; the sleeper becomes a kind of mystic. Howe paints a ‘dream world’ of ‘weakness, fluidity, concealment, and solitude’ which is ‘safe enough’ for the sleeper to ‘lie down in mystery’.2 Sleep and mystery are aligned (both require safety), partially for what they do to ideas of proof. When proof becomes incommunicable and unrepeatable, we are on different ground (or maybe immersed in water).
I like nothing more than being immersed in a project (I have also been reading about Ocean) and yet I always find time to fill in forms. Where do these forms keep coming from? I write about forms: forms of sleep. Is this a joke? Howe says the joke is like a dream. I dreamed my way into a research fellowship and what I found there were more forms. And occasionally some space.
Virginia Woolf says writing is making caves.3 So is dreaming and thinking. Franz Kafka’s creature goes to the burrow for safety, in a story I first read about in Marie Darrieussecq’s book Sleepless, where she refers to insomnia as a ravine. We carve out time to protect thought. The sleeping witness needs safety, a protective space for lying down and closing off to the world. Wanda Coleman writes stories about not being able to sleep for lack of financial security: ‘Beastly, it rips at my sleep’.4 She writes dream poems.
I have thought about what precarity does to time, to continuity. ‘Sleep is a perceptual hole in time’ as the scientist William Dement says,5 but it is periodic. Precarity is a caving in, a collapse—movement which paradoxically feels like the opposite of movement.
Jacqueline Risset via philosopher Emil Cioran tells us that sleep in fact grants us ‘discontinuity’, ‘mak[ing] life tolerable’, in a way that is cruelly impossible to experience for the insomniac.6
2.
I never compartmentalise my thinking. Everything I’m working on caves into one. Each thing slides into the next and so I never actually leave a project behind. What will come of this grand accretion of projects?
Thinking about caves came from Kafka and my academic work, which is still ongoing—it may never end. Without repeating too much of that here I want to raise the obsession with thresholds, with inside and outside, found in Kafka’s last story and also everywhere else: sometimes there is anxiety about crossing (recently I have witnessed multiple babies screaming against the threshold into sleep, or that is how I interpreted it). And sometimes the realisation that thresholds can be ambiguous and lovely, like being at the edge of sleep, like sliding back in. How witness is paired with interpretation in that sentence above.
Anne Carson via John Keats writes too about burrowing: ‘like a mole in different ways of reading sleep’.7 Burrows are passages rather than roads (although cf Freud, who comes up below, on royal roads): tunnels, hand-carved, usually nonlinear unless nothing impedes their course, and what kind of ground would we be in then? One cannot burrow into water. This makes sleep a solid material, or at least it makes writing on sleep this kind of (earthly) material—something to be dug into.
Before I started writing this, I went to bed trying to think about how to make it cave shaped. I didn’t fall asleep for hours. I cancelled my morning tasks. The obsessive labouring that comes with making burrows. An obsessive labouring inwards (or building outwards into the dark, which is Freud again, in The Interpretation of Dreams). Outside the cave nothing can be seen. You wouldn’t even know it was there. I realised I had been writing about burrowing long before reading Kafka’s story, as Carson writes about another’s reference to burrowing—how burrowing might be the way to think about sleep (the movement of earth to make space). How all these caves link up and the paths are not always linear.
Dreaming of the living room, Carson talks about ‘enter[ing] it from the sleep side’.8 Caves I suppose are also rooms, all with many entrances. Enter the cave from the sleep side.
Writing on the nights when sleep doesn’t come early and the thoughts flood my brain, language becomes accessible in a way it is not during the day. That is, as a flood. Daytime language is like blood from a stone, where night language is deep, immersive. The lyric subject of the night—night is always in first person because who else is there. This is the experience of someone who is often awake while others sleep (and asleep while others wake).
The burrow, like the essay, is an assay—it sets out without knowing its exact course. Carson knows this when she writes about burrowing into sleep-reading, and Kafka knows this when he makes the burrows experimental: attempts on the part of the creature-narrator to re-enter the primary hole. Carson, elsewhere (in Float), orchestrates a number of falls and compares this to the essay form—multiple threads fall simultaneously and hopefully land at the same time.
3.
If the cave is protective, the movement which makes caves is not. Is precarity ruining (trying to ruin) thinking? At the end of the caving there is not necessarily a home, which is why the burrow often presents as fantastical. Though there is something different about the movement of digging and the movement of caving (caving in)—the difference is agency. Digging is work, claw by claw through material. When the material takes over, a caving in occurs.
‘The Burrow’ never ends. Kafka died before he could finish it. Any finality read into it is a misconception—the hole in this case is ideational. Like Sniff in Tove Jansson’s Comet in Moominland who fantasises about a comfortable sleeping-hole, Kafka’s creature fantasises about deep, uninterrupted sleep. The perfect hole in which to lay his head.
Wanda Coleman has a dream poem in which the speaker cannot exit, is stuck in the dream, at least for the duration of the poem, which ends without a full stop, without finality: ‘i did not wake up today’.9 We knew we were in a dream but that line changes everything. She is speaking to us from the sleep side, as Carson might say.
A point of immersion, or submersion. Coleman’s poem ‘African Sleeping Sickness’ bears the pre-title epigraph ‘even my dreams have dreams’ (regress of dreams inside dreams, even more submerged than one conscious not waking).10 The ambiguity resides in whether the dreaming is generative or the submersion repressive. Suppose it can be both. Like a phase space: freedom within constraint. This is not (necessarily) a good thing. This is not a resilience lecture.
As I write this a high number of people around me are losing their jobs or not making ends meet, seeking new employment.
I didn’t know the cave essay was about precarity until I started burrowing.
4.
What is called sleep hygiene typically advises modern sleepers to make their bedrooms cave-like, that is, to cool and darken, eliminating harsh light and other technologies. The cave in this thinking is natural and assumes our sleep can revert to an ancient form—another fantasy, this time of return to form. This idea has been wielded both ways. Thomas Edison apparently said ‘sleep is a criminal waste of time and a heritage from our cave days’.11 As if sleep itself can be eliminated (as if we would want that). Steven Lockley and Russell Foster refer to the ‘machismo’ surrounding short sleeping that still goes on today,12 as if time could be spent doing something more important, as if sleeping is an unnecessary indulgence. Those who claim to sleep little each night usually take long, long naps.
Recently I spoke to a friend about stress sleeps (the practice of going to sleep when overwhelmed). A short sleep, shorter than the average night’s sleep in any case, which is not luxurious. It is a going in, a shutting out. Perhaps it can be a retreat into comfort.
The cave can be both a point of expansion, of exploration—as for those who are interested in ‘discovering’ the unseen world underground—or of closure, of finitude—as when one wants to be protected from the outside world, where things are happening.
I have been trying to record my dreams, as someone who doesn’t usually remember their dreams. Mostly I have failed, although sometimes a portal opens, and I remember an instant of dream. As just now, I remembered being unable to get off a train, having too much stuff to gather and being too slow. The train rolled on to its next stop. Nobody would tell me where it was going.
If someone familiar with a bedroom tried to sleep in a cave now, I think they would have difficulty (which is to refute ideas of the natural sleep cave). Depending on the cave, and especially those that are not ideational, the environment can be inhospitably cold, dark and humid. Watching Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I learned that the Chauvet caves on camera were not even sleeping places, but sites of artwork and ritual 32,000 years ago. This film states its limitations as a cave film: it will not be possible to hide the crew; the material itself presents inevitable spatial and temporal distances which cannot be bridged.
Yoko Ono’s instruction for painting ‘Clock Piece’ says to ‘Steal all the clocks and watches in the world. Destroy them.’ (1963 Summer). I wrote before about wanting to visit Sommarøy in Northern Norway, where inhabitants proposed the abolition of time. To abolish time would be to live in continuous day or continuous night, without a threshold to cross—the threshold makes time. This is of course speaking in terms of cues. The threshold is a signal that time is passing. And Howe says that a signal might ‘mean that you want to be known as Unlocatable’.13 Limits, too, might want to be unknowable.
The desire to kill time is the desire to have endless time. Who doesn’t want time to kill?
5.
Referring to Woolf and musing on caves, Harlan writes: ‘The author carves out caves as water does, generating voids that she can manipulate, shape, and fill’.14 The idea that making a cave takes material away, generates a void (creates nothing, or an empty space), and that writing is also this process of carving. That writing makes space, into which you can wander.
I took a nap at six p.m. and didn’t come up with anything. The next day, compelled to do the same thing, I made the journey home at rush hour, after much fretting about the idea of making the journey home at rush hour. I wanted a quicker threshold, to not have to spend so much time crossing—even if that would in theory generate time to kill. Kill the clocks that generate rush hour.
While already writing this, I found Lavinia Greenlaw’s essay on caves and sleep, which is what led me to Herzog (burrows already traversed). When writing about burrowing, I think it relevant to note the trajectory of sources. Greenlaw’s essay is pleasing for naming sleep in its title, but leaving it in the dark: she discusses mainly the types of imagining which take place in dark spaces, including the night and caves. Darkness is ‘freedom from visual laws’.15 The desire to make caves hospitable.
Listening to a podcast on caving, I was trying to gain another perspective. The host discussed how caving had shrunk his fear in the outside world, how many things there paled in comparison to the sportive cave. Fears confined to an interior space, battled with and overcome, to make one more outwardly resilient? I wasn’t sure the podcast was for me. He signed off the episode by saying ‘kill nothing but time’.
Kafka’s story is endless, in that it doesn’t strictly have an end, or not an intentional one anyway. It is also endless in that the creature’s movements in theory go on forever, without resolution or finality. With no end to the digging, and the traversing of tunnels dug. The resting place continually in process, never finalised.
Trying to go to sleep to find a resolution is like trying to burrow through water. There is, for one, the inability to slide into nap and the alternate move towards endless writing (writing without end). There is, for another, the carved space of sleep and the world caving in behind it.
- Title is a quote from Franz Kafka’s 1924 story, ‘The Burrow’ in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. by Willa and Edwin Muir (London: Penguin Books, 1971), p 336
- Fanny Howe, Night Philosophy (Brussels: Divided Publishing, 2020), p 98
- ‘Virginia Woolf saw the writer as a maker of caves’, writes Susan Harlan in ‘How to Read Caves’. Harlan quotes from Woolf’s diaries: ‘I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters […]. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment.’ (August 30, 1923). Susan Harlan, ‘How to Read Caves’, Lithub, January 19, 2018 <https://lithub.com/how-to-read-caves/>
- Wanda Coleman, ‘CLOCKING DOLLARS’ in African Sleeping Sickness: Stories & Poems (Boston: Black Sparrow Press, 1990), pp 218–221 (p 221)
- William C. Dement, The Promise of Sleep (London: Macmillan, 1999), p 13
- Jacqueline Risset, Sleep’s Powers (Brooklyn, New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008), p 21
- Anne Carson, ‘Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)’ in Decreation (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p 19
- Ibid., p 20
- Coleman, ‘DREAM 924’ in African Sleeping Sickness: Stories & Poems, p 276
- Ibid., p 214
- Quoted in Russell Foster, Life Time (London: Penguin Life, 2022), p 32
- Steven W. Lockley & Russell G. Foster, Sleep: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), p 103
- Howe, Night Philosophy, p 98
- Harlan, ‘How to Read Caves’
- Lavinia Greenlaw, The Vast Extent (London: Faber, 2024), p 10