The Sleepers
Sleep-deprivation, Walt Whitman, and ICE.
Walt Whitman wrote a poem called, “The Sleepers.” It’s basically a long list of every kind of person you can think of, sleeping. The murderer that is to be hung the next day. The moneymaker that plotted all day. The idiot. He that is wrong’d. Even the onanist makes it in. All are included here. Sleep, we are to understand, is a unifying force connecting us all. It’s the revelation of our essential innocence. A portal to the peace that is our nature.
Buncha bullshit. See, Walt Whitman never had a baby.
“How quiet they breathe, the little children in their cradles.”
They do not breathe quiet, Mr. Whitman. They do not breathe quiet at all. And do you know what that means for mommy and daddy re: sleep, good sir? I don’t think you do. If you did, you’d realize your thesis is bunk because there are some of us—red-eyed, wide-eyed, twitching—who were not invited to your little slumber party.
“The married couple sleep calmly in their bed, he with his palm on the hip of the wife, and she with her palm on the hip of her husband.”
Oh, Walt. I used to trust you. I thought you had a direct line to the truth, the deep truth. But calmly, he says. The married couple sleep calmly. Yeah, no. Fitfully, maybe, if it’s a good night. Interruptedly, certainly. Hardly at all, yes, absolutely yes. But calmly, he says. Calmly.
“The mother sleeps with her little child carefully wrapt.”
See no she doesn’t, Walt. Stop gaslighting us.
It was a great idea, I’ll give you that, the whole sleep-as-peek-behind-the-veil-of-delusion shtick. If only we could all see each other in sleep, imagine each other sleeping, undefended, then we might perceive the vulnerable truth of any one of us, of all of us, and thus we might not be so afraid of each other, and might not need to hate each other and do the terrible things we do to each other in this nightmare we’ve come to mistake for being awake.
But…nah.
It was almost one of the great poems of American literature. You had them all fooled, but not me, Walt, not today, the day of your undoing, because what you don’t understand is that the little child is not “carefully wrapt,” no, he thrashes like a little zombie all night long and so therefore the mother does not “sleep” and hasn’t slept for over a year now.
And you know what, Walter? Neither has the father. Neither has the father.
Christ there he goes again, my zombie baby. He’s supposed to be napping right now after another rager last night, I mean, how is this even possible, how can he possibly be waking up, and why, sweet Jesus, why? You seeing this, Walt? We’re not finished here but Ima have to put you on hold for a sec and go be the unconditionally loving safe patient expansive generous and attuned presence who is definitely not pissed at all not starting to lose it no certainly not.
So it turns out sleep is kind of important. Who knew things start to get wacky if you’re only clocking 3, 4 hours a night, maybe 5 on a glorious blue moon, and none of the heady dank REM bud. You’re smoking that weak stuff on the sly. Seeds and stems. You got scammed and it’s oregano. But it’s the kind of oregano that will F you up. Sleep deprivation is one hell of a drug, kids. Your brain is the egg on the frying pan you forgot about. Why is the smoke alarm going off?
And the ironic thing is that even though you’re not sleeping it does feel like you’re dreaming, at the office, in your schools, in the circles you’re supposed to be facilitating (who even is running this thing right now, who is that talking, is that me?), and it’s kind of a nice dream at first, all fuzzed out and sorta slaphappy until things turn a shade of dark you don’t quite notice at first, like the days getting shorter in autumn, but then you start to catch on when you realize you’ve been sick five times in the last four months and regressed into hating your job and the commute feels like you’re swimming up the stream of your soul and you’re daydreaming or is it actual dreaming on Route 1 about ways to get rich quick so you can just stay home and do the dad thing and be a writer and run circles on your own damn time maybe you can I don’t know start a 501(c)(3) or some shit not that a non-profit is a way to become independently wealthy it’s a not-for-profit after all and daddy’s tryna profit tryna make that biiiig bag when suddenly you see the red lights in front of you through the night rain and you’re slamming on the brakes and shouting out NO involuntarily as your car doesn’t exactly smash but it’s definitely more than a bump more than a dings right into the back of the Rav-4 in front of you and you understand like for real that you need to get some fucking sleep.
ICE has come to town. I wonder how those guys are sleeping these days. I wonder what it would be like to watch them sleep, Walt Whitman-style. I guess they refer to their campaign here as “Operation Catch of the Day,” like it’s some kind of big bass fishing tournament. 206 people arrested in the first week of the surge. Does it affect your sleep, to apprehend someone? The adrenaline hit of pulling a guy over, and when he doesn’t get out of his car, forcibly extracting him with your colleagues, and the guy is shouting all along that he’s a corrections officer, that he works for the county, and to then manhandle him into your SUV. Do you need a Nyquil to go down after that? Something stronger?
And before you slip back into the sleepstream that apparently unites us all, when you’re brushing your teeth and you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, do you think of him? Your catch of the day? As you slip on your PJs—the threadbare Pats T-shirt your wife gave you for your birthday back when Tom Brady was king, your new long-johns from this Christmas—do you wonder who might be missing him tonight? A baby, maybe. A sleepless wife, mother of the child, maybe their first. What will she do now?
And when sleep does come, however it comes for you, do you dream of them?
“I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers,” Walt says at one point, “and I become the other dreamers.”
He redeems himself over the course of the poem. Sure, he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know vis-à-vis babies, but the guy was, as my wife would say, “on some other shit.”
Like this line, for instance. In 18 neat little words, he unravels the empire. The myth of “me.” The “me” that thinks it is absolutely and fundamentally separate from the other “me’s” out there, those “you’s,” some of them good, some of them bad, all of them “not-me.” Your dreams? Not my dreams. My dreams? Mine, not yours. I am me and you are you and if there’s an “us” then there’s a “them” and we are certainly not them, whoever they are, those…other dreamers.
This is our drug of choice in western civilization. If sleep-deprivation is some schwag that might get you into a little fender-bender, the story of the separate self is the Fentanyl that’s been ravaging us all for generations. It makes ICE possible. And it makes hating the ICE people inevitable.
Walt Whitman’s poetry is Narcan.
“I swear they are averaged now,” he says, of all the sleepers, “one is no better than the other, the night and sleep have liken’d them and restored them.”
Getting Narcan-ed sucks, apparently. It might save your life but it’s gonna hurt. You’re high and then suddenly you’re not. You’re back…here. You’re feeling all the stuff you don’t want to feel. Which is to say, reality.
The reality is, we all belong. That’s why it hurts so much to see these detainments and deportations. It goes against reality, the deep reality, the one that laughs at all our imaginary borders, like the sun laughs, shining on all the land, and the rain laughs, and the wind, any of the great gods who pay no mind to the rules we’ve made up here in our sandbox games.
You’d think we all belong would be a feel-good thing, a happy truth. But so long as there’s someone you don’t want to include, that truth is going to hurt.
“The criminal that stood in the box, the judge that sat and sentenced him, the fluent lawyers, the jury, the audience.”
Can you open your heart to the reality that each and every one of us belongs simply by virtue of our existence here, no matter what we’ve done or haven’t done, no matter who we are?
This is what he’s asking us.
“The call of the slave is one with the masters call, and the master salutes the slave.”
It’s triggering stuff. It bothers our sleep, the sleep we don’t realize we’re sleeping, the nightmare of separation that isn’t our problem, no, they’re the ones who are dreaming, surely we’re awake, right?
The first step to lucid dreaming, they say, is to realize you’re dreaming. That’s how you awaken in the dream. I guess there are tricks to it, like opening a book in a dream, you can’t actually see the words, or you can’t properly make out the time on a clock, stuff like that. And then you realize, oh wow, I’m dreaming, and from there you’re awake within the dream. You’re lucid. I don’t know, I’ve never done it. And these days I’m not dreaming much at all, any sleep I do get is a dead man’s sleep, so I’ve given up on lucidity.
One trick to realize you’re asleep and inside the nightmare of separation: the “us” you keep talking about implies a “them.” Bingo. Now get lucid.
It’s agonizing stuff, because who wants to include “them,” whoever our particular “them” might be?
You’re sleeping, Walt whispers. Wake up.
Actually if you read the poem it’s clear he doesn’t need us to wake up. He loves us as we are, loves watching us dream our beautiful and terrifying dreams. ’Cause he’s a boss like that. He’s out there with Rumi in the field beyond right and wrong.
We’ll get there someday. Or realize that’s where we are and have always been, could never not be.
Something had to give. Two weeks ago, in the darkest depths of winter, it finally happened. As the sun was setting, my wife trudged through the snow to the old trailer our landlady keeps out back, turned on the space heater, and when the moon was out she bid us both farewell, godspeed for the night. Just me and the boy. It felt like some kind of initiation.
Welcome to the world of men, son. It’s hard out here, but we make do. Kind of.
It went exactly as I feared it would. I mean, when you know what Mother is, why would you settle for this guy? What the hell does he have going for him? Oh you mean this is it, this is what you’re bringing to the table of my despair, a little song, a little chest-rubbing? Where’s the breast you son of a bitch? Where’s the milk? Give me the milk. None of that bottle bullshit, I’m talking straight from the source. Where is she? Where is she? You want me to go to sleep in your arms? This is some barren desert outpost shit. I’d rather just keep walking and hope for the best than settle into your post-apocalyptic wasteland of an embrace. Yeah, we’ll just go ahead and keep walking. And by walking I mean screaming.
He’ll get it eventually, I tell myself. Or I’ll get it, grow into it, my fatherlove, what it is to be Dad, the guy who stays up all night with you even as you rage against his inadequacies, the dude who keeps giving you the best he’s got even when it comes flying back into his face, but hey this guy keeps singing, and wow he’s singing to me, keeps rubbing my chest, and you know what I think he actually means it, like he’s really actually trying, which is kind of sweet, not breastmilk sweet, never breastmilk sweet, but he’s here, with me, and we’re in this thing together aren’t we, and sure, I’ll give him the old college try and cuddle into his arms and yes I guess I’m safe enough and loved enough to go ahead and pass the fuck out.
That’s what I hope he’ll feel. And soon. Please let it be soon, son.
They took the dad as he was dropping off his child at school, one of my elementary schools. That was the first abduction I heard about, back in the fall. Then the surge came, the nightmares.
A mother was taken on her walk back home after escorting her child safely to one of my high schools. She worked at one of my middle schools, someone told me, in the cafeteria I think they said. Just, gone.
A brother and a sister were taken from two of my other high schools. Then their mother. Their other sister. Asylum seekers all. They’re in Texas now, I guess.
Families are sheltering in place like it’s a pandemic. 90 children didn’t show up to one of my elementary schools a few weeks ago when word got out that this was an organized, state-sanctioned campaign of terror. 90. At one of my high schools just last week, half the student population stayed home. That’s over 200 kids.
At another high school, no one came to our weekly community-building circle. That’s never happened before. One of our regulars popped in briefly to get a snack. “They’re all at home,” he told me, “everyone who normally comes to the circle.” Just the other day, he said, he had to stay home himself because ICE was right outside his house, coming for one of his neighbors.
“How are you doing with all this?” I asked him.
“All right,” he said, on his way out the door.
“Stay safe,” I said.
“You, too.”
“I swear they are all beautiful,” the poet insists, “every one that sleeps is beautiful.”
It’s hard to hear that at a time like this, when we get so ugly awake.
“Peace is always beautiful.”
What about when there is no peace, Walt?
“The soul is always beautiful.”
What about the soullessness of it all?
It’s helpful to remember that Whitman was a nurse in wartime. It’s not like this guy was naive. He looked the nightmare dead in the eye, saw the way it tears off limbs and gouges out eyes and breaks spinal cords. By his own estimate he visited around 80,000 wounded humans over the course of more than 600 hospital visits during the Civil War. Soldiers from both armies. He wrote letters home for them. Gave them candy, tobacco. Played 20 Questions with them.
“Lots of them have grown to expect as I leave at night that we should kiss each other,” he wrote to a family friend, “sometimes quite a number, I have to go round—poor boys, there is little petting in a soldier’s life in the field, but I know what is in their hearts, always waiting, though they may be unconscious of it themselves.”
Guy actually does sound like a dad.
About a week in, we had a breakthrough. And by “we” I mean “me” because of course he’s been doing his job perfectly this whole time. Being a baby. Being himself, exactly as he is. The baby isn’t wrong. The baby is never wrong.
The revelation came around 2 or 3 in the morning. He was up again, sitting up, wailing, eyes open but not quite awake, little tears running down his cheeks, and instead of trying to get him back down—grabbing him, pulling him into me, rubbing his chest, singing a song, strategic tactics in this ongoing battle to get him to shut the F up and go back to sleep—this time, I sat up with him, facing him. Mumbled something like, “I’m here, bud, I’m here,” and we just sat there, in hell, together. He paused. Sighed. Lurched toward me and fell into my lap, asleep.
We are not in conflict. There are no sides to this thing. This isn’t a fight. That was the revelation. Sounds obvious, I guess (because how could you possibly be in conflict with a baby, who isn’t on a side, who just is, perfectly), but things get murky at midnight when the kid is screaming again and shredding your nerves like Jimi Hendrix on the guitar. It can feel like a power struggle, me versus him. But the truth is, my man is hurting. That’s what’s happening. He’s scared. He’s disoriented. He’s still landing here on Earth and it’s intense and trippy and what is sleep and what isn’t sleep and where do I go when I start to dream and who even am I and am I safe and am I loved and am I loveable and am I alone and can’t I just get a little comfort please?
I just have to remember what’s actually happening. When I can see what’s actually happening, there’s only love. Otherwise, it goes a different kind of red. I never thought a baby could make me rage, but the lizard brain is wild and not getting enough sleep can start to feel like a survival situation and if the lizard thinks you are under attack it will turn anything into an enemy.
And so you see where I’m going with this. There are no sides to this thing we call humanity. There is no conflict here, in truth, underneath and within it all. We just don’t see that, haven’t seen it for thousands of years. Maybe we’ve never seen it. The human species gets an occasional Walt Whitman, a jackpot Rumi, but by and large we are convinced the enemy is real, is out there somewhere. We behave accordingly, an enemy is thus made, and then we have to deal with that very real unreality.
But we can’t escape our nature. We can pretend to be something we’re not, but we can never change who we are. Like a lion pretending to be an elephant, or a mouse, or a vacuum cleaner. The lion can get all weird like that, might even believe his own act, but he never stops being a lion.
Who we are is: beautiful.
Who we are is: peace.
Who we are is: unite.
Walt Whitman tells us so. But we shouldn’t believe him. We each need to see it for ourselves. This is the terrible task of love.
It might be the hardest thing, to see through someone’s confusion to the truth of who they really are, especially when their confusion is harming others, harming you. It’s the impossible hand we are dealt every day, every waking moment. It’s Hercules mucking out the the stables that haven’t been cleaned in 30 years, except these stables haven’t been mucked maybe ever and it’s been generation after generation of not horseshit, not even bullshit, but the nastiest feces of them all: human shit. We need to go Hercules on this thing and divert a river to do the job for us.
That river is love. “The work for which all other work is merely preparation,” Rilke called it, out there with Rumi and Whitman. “The most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof.”
What does love do, see, say when the baby is up yet again?
What about when that baby has become a man and he’s still asleep but doesn’t realize it and he’s having a wicked nightmare and thrashing around in this California king we’re all stuck on together called life but now he’s got a gun and the power of the state and he’s taking away someone’s dad, or mom, or baby, or he’s firing into the face of one of us?
What does love do, see, say?
There are, first and foremost, questions about what the targeted families need right now to stay safe, stay alive and free and together. But there is also a question concerning the people whose nightmare is spilling out into the lives of others. How do we wake them up? It’s the question we’ll be living forever, or till we’re all awake. Hercules did it in a day. Might take us a bit longer.
Then again, love doesn’t even need a day. All love needs is now.
The day of my fender-bender I was co-facilitating a circle for teachers at one of my high schools and my colleague asked us the question, “What are you doing to take care of yourself in these challenging times?”
I talked about being up all night with Valor, and how weary I was, struggling to bring my whole self to work, starting to feel little whispers of not quite despair but almost and the teachers listened and one or two of them shared some words of encouragement when I was finished, which felt nice but didn’t really change anything for me.
We went around the circle, each of us sharing, and I somehow stayed awake, listening, mostly, and caring, kind of, until we got to one of the teachers, an older man.
“I don’t really know what to do now,” he said, and then he looked at me. “You’re lucky. Back when my kids were little, they were my therapy. That was my self-care. Carrying them around, or putting them to sleep, or holding their hand on a walk. Now I don’t really know what to do for self-care. Go outside, I guess.”
My son, I realized, has been holding me all along. I’m not just soothing him, I’m being soothed, too, every time I meet him with love, and so in a way it’s he who’s soothing me, singing to me through me, breathing me back here, back home to this embrace of who-is-holding-who-again? and my God what a gift, what a grace, my son, to get to be up with him, to get to be the guy he’s starting to settle for, settle into, the one whose body he’ll heave himself up onto in sleep and drape across my chest or nuzzle into my neck and whatever I’ll sleep when I’m dead because there’s gonna be a day when I don’t get to hold him like this and then a day when I’m dead-dead, like actually dead, so lizard brain thank you for your service but you can relax we’ll deal with a little sleep deprivation it’s a small price to pay for this priceless joy of sleeping not sleeping with my son and anyways it’s just oregano not gonna kill you but you should still keep your eyes on the road and both hands on the wheel.
“The father holds his grown or ungrown son in his arms with measureless love, and the son holds the father with measureless love.”
Damn it, Walt, you had it all along. Of course you did.
Moving. Gorgeous. Inspiring. Terrifying. Sobering. Hilarious. How do you do it? Bring all those elements of our mad human condition into one essay - and make it WORK!!
What a thing to have this sleepless odyssey juxtaposed with the waking nightmare of ICE. How both are directly affecting you. Marking this time as extraordinary - and something you wish - we all wish-would end.
I felt a little bad breaking in laughter as you describe the hell of sleeplessness with V. Knowing that it is a temporary hell and having infinite faith in your capacity to meet the beast, made those parts so so funny.
Your writing is wonderful. Mostly you are wonderful.
Brilliant, again, Andrew. Keep going.