On not knowing how to sleep

I can’t fucking sleep.

I saw this at the dentist on Friday and I couldn’t resist it.

I’m not even going to get into the ludicrous copy right now.

I thought we could focus on the pictures instead.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Earlier I was lying in bed, wishing Mr. Pistol wasn’t such an enthusiastic sleep-breather, and pondering those teeth. They made me think of a book called The Way We Are, by the psychoanalyst and philosopher Allen Wheelis. He writes a lot about how we obscure our aggression from ourselves. And he mentions exactly this sort of fetishization of teeth:

Everyone eats but few kill. Technicians fell the lamb. Eating becomes a ceremony of innocence, tinkle of crystal, rustle of taffeta. Teeth are for beauty: straighten them, make them whiter, the smile more loving. Visit every restaurant in town, never pass the house of slaughter.

I am pretty sure that that brochure is not an effective advertisement. Because that Asian girl has some dangerous-looking choppers! And the thing she’s doing with her eyes in the first pic has psychotic episode written all over it. It does not make me want to whiten my teeth. It gives me the heebie-jeebies!

The Way We Are is a beautiful book. I read it this fall, and I had to go slowly so it wouldn’t give me an aneurysm. It’s like that: fucking devastating. You should read it.

Props to whoever decided to put that Magritte painting on the cover. Because that painting is exactly what the book is about.

She does not know me. I do not know her. Desire deceives. We never know the real other out there, know only that other as reshaped by our desire. We take our fantasy, go looking for a suitable place to lodge it, reshaping reality with longing, stumbling through our years, seeking out stand-ins with whom we can act out again the old script, hoping this time for a happy ending, believing all the while that we are into something new.

Maybe it’s Projection & Infatuation 101, but elegantly expressed, I think.

Lips and legs and lingerie, and laughter in the night, all swirling into the void. And temples, palaces, and pyramids, and stone heroes on stone horses. And continents that split apart and drift, and stars that collapse and implode, and we are a flicker of desire in a torrent of fire and ice, and she’s right, it doesn’t mean anything, it all fades away, going, going, going.

Sigh.

Desire is endless and unappeasable, is most intense where most forbidden, and is never far from despair.

La condition humaine! Knife in fucking heart! Five o’clock in the morning!

Wheelis also wrote a book called On Not Knowing How to Live. I’m awarding it a Pulitzer for Best Title Ever. Because, uh… do I even have to say it?

Sadly, it’s out of print. I think there’s probably a joke somewhere in there, but I can’t figure out which string to pull. [Computer, make joke!]

I am going to order it from Abe Books RIGHT THIS SECOND. That will be my last act before I lay my head down. Again.

by Pistol Whip | 19 March 2007 | insomnia, the mind boggles, reading | Comments