On the Notes App
Chantal Wnuk, Posture of Being Tired - Planner, 2021, oil on panel, 18 x 24 in.
[Image description: A person with greenish-orange skin lays their head on a desk and looks at their phone. Behind them, the sun peeks into the room through the shaded window.]
by Elizabeth Rooklidge
I have trouble sleeping. Well, that’s an understatement. The insomnia started five years ago, and while it has waxed and waned, it has become an ever-present specter, looming each time I peel back the covers on my bed. You might be tempted to ask me, Have you tried meditation? They have apps for that now. Have you tried melatonin? Have you tried relaxing all your muscles, one by one, until you fall into a blissful rest? Have you tried playing white noise? They have apps for that, too. And most importantly, have you tried yoga?
I am a person with an internet connection in 2022— of course I’ve tried. I’ve tried all of it. Because when I don’t get enough sleep, I’m not just tired the next day; it does something terrifying to my mind. It feels like the apocalypse is happening inside of me, a faster, more bombastic apocalyptic downfall than the one actually happening in the world around me. I miss one night’s sleep and my eyes burn fiercely for days while a smoldering sense of doom creeps around the interior of my body. Everything feels fundamentally hopeless.
The one thing that sometimes helps is Ambien, the prescription sleeping pill known to make people act wildly in their slumber. They sleep-drive, sleep-eat, even have sleep-sex. All unwittingly. I feel fortunate that none of these things have happened to me. What does happen to me is a kind of fever dream between the time the Ambien starts kicking in and I actually fall asleep.
During those quasi-dreams, I find myself thinking about art, thinking about it from a different angle than when I’m awake and writing. It’s as if the strictures of art history and theoretical rigor— the ones imposed and upheld by my academic training— disintegrate, leading me to the most intimate kind of encounter with a work I hold in my mind. [1] Maybe I saw it in a gallery, an artist’s studio, in a book, on the internet, but it’s there— bundled up in my bed— that I am able to most fully encounter a work of art.
So when I have these moments, I reach for my phone and open the Notes app. I pour what I’m thinking and feeling onto the small white screen. I wake up in the morning and look at what I’d written the night before; it’s always better, more precise, more emotive, than what I write during the day. Almost everything I’ve written that I really love started out on that rectangle glowing in the dark. The phone: that thing we blame for ruining our sleep, for rotting our brains, is my most precious tool for reaching toward, eventually touching art.
Note:
Some theorists I’m abandoning: most of the old white guys. Definitely Sigmund Freud. The theorists I might be willing to keep: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sara Ahmed, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, because I imagine them as kindred spirits to my sleepy, uninhibited self.