“Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil.” – Alfred Tennyson
Will the dream come back? Lexapro-fuelled nightmares consume all the terror from the day and leave it blank.
In January I wished for a landline across the world, I can’t get everything I want; only what I need. Drowsy summer. I get drowsy in the heat and the cold. I get drowsy in the mornings and the afternoons too. I get drowsy when I eat too much and when I haven’t eaten at all.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew have undergone a majority of their troubles on the sea by the time they reach the rich paradise of the lotus-eaters. Weary and devastated from war and loss, from endless wandering and suffering, they settle. The lotus they’re fed is “honey-sweet” and they soon forget all thoughts of return. They bask only in their pleasures, which they obtain fully, they rest and they eat well and indulge. They are never uncomfortable or want for anything.
One of the competing philosophical ideologies in the background of Cicero’s stoic work is Epicureanism (whether Cicero is a stoic is up to discussion – boss was a skeptic). Epicurus teaches his disciples to remove sources of fear, and the maintaining of constant happiness as the highest good. That all unpleasantness should be eradicated in one’s life, desire as precedent.
The myopia of peace is a response to grief, to suffering, to misery. One latches onto lasting peace and can’t physically see anything that may cause discomfort, instead guarding against its intrusion into the mind. It is an understandable blindness in a world of horror. Wouldn’t everyone like to eat the lotus? But is it true peace to be forgetful of our homeward way?
Peace and quiet is the aspiration of my life, I lose my peripheral vision which shows me the peace of every day and an idea of perfection begins to stew – which will never exist. I love every day of my life, time shines like gold, I can read and play games on my phone. My joie de vivre is so exuberant that it feels like I have died and asked a metaphysical entity to let me come back so I can learn a different discipline and kiss more people and care for more animals and have more fun drinks. And yet, I am unsatisfied with the idea of a reality that doesn’t completely encapsulate me in the cocoon of silence, void of anxiety. I am capable of recognising that this is a clear manifestation of GAD.
I tell Nykyta all the time, I just want to have morning tea in a peony garden I’ve planted, and zero pending matters. While he removes as many pending matters as possible, a life consists of next steps. What this clearly points to is a desire for absence of anxiety — is this what peace is? Epicureans believed that freeing oneself from ataraxia (mental disturbance) and physical pain was how true happiness could be achieved. Did Epicurus have videos of children being bombed on his pink Samsung Galaxy Flip?
All I’m saying is, what wellbeing looks like in a contemporary world cannot be the same as before in the trail of televised terror and widespread fascism. We often find peace and quiet to look like withdrawal, like shutting the world away. Yet, in a cosmopolitan world, everything affects us directly, and like phosphenes when you close your eyes, a lingering fingerprint of suffering stays with us even in the silence. There is no lotus to make us forget our own troubles and those we’ve witnessed, but always Odysseus dragging us back to the ship against our wills.
The nightmares persist, I awake in the night and reach for Nykyta, I roll over, and a kitten jumps on my head, scaring me further. I forget immediately what happened in the dream, but the fright stays. As I catch my breath, I try to think of things that scare me, trying to find what could’ve reached into the recesses of my consciousness, and come up empty. Another kitten is using methods of echolocation and military-grade sonars to find my ovary so she can put her entire weight on it. It’s time to go back to sleep.
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