"I lie down and sleep; I wake again..."
From the Old English noun slæp (slap), slép or verb slápan, slæpan, slépan. Originally Germanic, source language too of earth, fuck, shit and dead. Via OED: noun, 1.a.: “The unconscious state or condition regularly and naturally assumed by man and animals, during which the activity of the nervous system is almost or entirely suspended, and recuperation of its powers takes place; slumber, repose.” Verb, intransitive, 1.a.: “To take repose by the natural suspension of consciousness; to be in the state of sleep; to slumber. Also occasionally, to fall asleep.”
Earth, fuck, shit, dead, sleep. Bedrock languages, the Germanics, derived from Proto-Indo-European. Words spoken now nearly 7,000 years. Language of the animal newly brain-roused, chatty.
State of inactivity or sluggishness; to be dormant, inert, inactive, inoperative, quiescent; to act as a sleeping partner; of limbs: to be numb, devoid of sensation; to take rest in; continue in (sleep); the repose of death; to put to sleep, to kill, especially painlessly; to lie in death, to be at rest in the grave; as an indication or division of time, a period or occasion of slumber; to have to get one’s; to be careless, remiss or idle, to live thoughtlessly or carelessly; personified in sandman, dustman, sandboy; to sleep soundly; to sleep on; with away to lose, waste; dog’s sleep or dogsleep’s a wink, a nap, a snooze, a sloom…
Wake up is young! OED says from 1975. The year my sister is conceived, awakened to the long morning of her newness. “The act of waking a person from sleep, or of being woken from sleep.” The year my parents first wake my sister from sleep? Waking from 1377:
“Ac after my wakyng it was wonder longe Ar I couth kyndely knowe what was dowel.”
Come again? That’s William Langland in Piers Plowman. And after waking it took me long to make out what Do-well was.1
Me too, Piers! On the daily!
What is it that happens in the darkness of our shuttered eyelids? It is some time last year or the year before, the author at 42, 43, ballpark same age as Langland alliteratively versifying his Plowman’s tale six centuries earlier and one ocean over, that for the first time he finds himself wondering: Odd how we wake up with our eyes closed; that though arresting and comprehensive of our bodies generally the operative thing, the agent, is the brain only. Just wtf is going on with sleep?
Step back from research a mo. We know it is required. Sleep seizes the sleepy. You could be driving. That happens. You could be in the middle of Navy SEAL hell week. (A. and I watched G.I. Jane [1997] last night, the final piece of the weekend before the yawning bed: P.M. ablutions and mouth guards and lights off, thermostat down, books and the cat and rain sounds on the Bose.) Living must, living insists on.
Back to research.
The sentence is “ic hneappade & slepan ongon & ic eftaras for ðon dryhten onfeng mec,” which is Middle English for “Ego dormiui et somnum coepi, et resurrexi quoniam dominus suscepit me,” which is Latin for “I fell asleep and began to sleep, and I arose because the Lord received me.” A man from so long ago he is known today merely as “Jerome” made the sentence into Latin not from Middle English but from Greek, from the so-called Septuagint version of the bible, still the ur-text of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. “Septuagint” for the group of elders who, in Egypt in the 100-somethings and 200-somethings, by legend 72 of them to be precise and each independently inspired, translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek for Greek-speaking Jews; this rhyming in history with the seventy even elder elders who, according to Exodus (thus we think Moses), accompanied Moses to Mount Sinai oh say 3,200 years ago, whereupon Old Testament God struck with him a bargain and rendered unto him commandments et cetera. So that is where “Septuagint” comes from. The sentence itself is from one of the Psalms (third) ascribed to King David in the 11th century Before Common Era. Jerome, like me, like David, like most of you, arrived in one century (in his case the 4th CE) and died in another (5th). He translated the Psalms from Greek into Latin. Several centuries later copied pages of his work formed the core of an illuminated manuscript retroactively dubbed the Vespasian Psalter2, which went on to have inserted between lines of text Middle English “glosses” by monks in 800s Canterbury. The ic hneappade sentence is one such, and it includes the earliest existing use in, uh, “English”, of the word “sleep.” According to a googling that has spanned much of this a.m., the Psalter itself was on display at the British Library in London through February of 2019 as part of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms Exhibition. Thus this paragraph’s lineage: King David three thousand years ago: Egyptian translators roughly a thousand years later: Jerome a couple hundred years after that: some monks in Canterbury around five-hundred years on: the British Library in London twelve-hundred years on through February of 2019: this paragraph November 2024: your brain now.
It’s one of David’s braggy fight anthems. Today you’d overlay it karaoke-style on Eminem’s “Lose Yourself”. My enemies are legion, they think my Lord won’t deliver me, but he shields me. I hope he smacks their jaws and breaks their teeth! Actually the most peculiar line, the one that doesn’t seem to fit—at least to this reader’s vastly futuristic sensibility (a sensibility that in David’s day lay as far in the future as those reading this text in 5025 lie from me)—is the one in question, about sleeping and waking up. It’s a shorty of a psalm; let’s go ahead and take a look.
O Lord, how many are my foes! How many rise up against me! Many are saying of me, “God will not deliver him.” But you are a shield around me, O Lord; you bestow glory on me and lift up my head. To the Lord I cry aloud, and he answers me from his holy hill. I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the Lord sustains me. I will not fear the tens of thousands drawn up against me on every side. Arise, O Lord! Deliver me, O my God! Strike all my enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked. From the Lord comes deliverance. May your blessing be on your people.
My NIV Bible, which has exactly one name recorded on the page named “Deaths” and which was most recently used as a comedic prop in a necessarily impromptu scene shot for a friend’s 48-hour film festival entry, explains the sleep bit like this:
Sleep does not come easily during a crisis. David could have had sleepless nights when his son Absalom rebelled and gathered an army to kill him. But he slept peacefully, even during the rebellion. What made the difference? David cried out to the Lord, and the Lord heard him. The assurance of answered prayer brings peace. It is easier to sleep well when we have full assurance that God is in control of circumstances. If you are lying awake at night worrying about circumstances you can’t change, pour out your heart to God and thank him that he is in control. Then sleep will come.
We’ll get back to that, but first there’s something you need to know about that line. Almost every single interpretation employs the word, or some variation of the word, sustains (“sustaineth”, “sustained” also pop up) in explaining the how and why of the break from sleep, the morning part, that great gettin’ up mornin’ as it has been described elsewhere by other oppressed peoples harried on all sides by philistines. But a few other words or terms also show, including upholds, keeps, and protects. The initial English translation above was in fact provided by the Google translate bot, which suggested “received me”. That’s my kneejerk favorite because it sews sleep and waking together in this interesting going-out, coming-in fashion. Asleep, I retreat from that which sustains/upholds/keeps/protects me, recalled by it I rise. As if there is no daylight between “the Lord” and waking life: To be received into one is to live, and vice versa.
A less fanciful interpretation of “…I awoke, for the Lord sustains me…” is simply that David didn’t croak in his sleep. But the more fanciful interpretations are funner. If being awake is synonymous with being upheld, protected, sustained, kept by the power or agent or organizer of life, being asleep it would seem would constitute a necessary trip to the uncreation store, a drooling hiatus, a slumbrous noshing on the harvest of some essential deathlike season.
David was a busy and energetic bloke. Here he’s being hunted by his son Absalom’s army. He’s worked up about it. He’s incredibly loud about his religious humility. Then in the third stanza, smack in the middle of the song, he falls asleep.
A. and I fell in love with each other in part thanks to Absalom, Absalom, William Faulkner’s nearly unreadable masterpiece about I can’t today truthfully say what, now 18-years after trying to unpick its page-long sentences in the bathroom of her itsy apartment while she wound down from a panic attack in the tub and I used the toilet like a chair and quietly now and again cast the beam of my eyes over her body, a man glimpsing a radiance he didn’t dare imagine belonging to his world, the soundtrack to this scene my college-boy’s voice unfurling ponderous Faulknerian clauses like the endless handkerchief of magic acts and the odd water plats and swashes of herself in the bath and with some regularity the two of us breaking into mid-sentence laughter at the fucker’s sheer ongoingness. Afterwards we’d practice sleeping together.
I’ve never been a good sleeper, but it would be years before I’d pursue the remedy the NIV suggested. I went from Nothing to Probable Unreflectively Christian (I can’t really remember what I thought about between the ages of 0 and 11, but my folks were believers and we went to church) to Skeptic to Deist-Agnostic to Atheist and have now reverted back to Deist-Agnostic again. At some point, into married life, I started praying to myself: Dear Devin, go the eff to sleep, have cool dreams you remember, wake up on time, etc. Neurological legerdemain, I figured, encoding behaviors into the pinkgray loaf in the basket of my skull. I kept my requests to things within my control: less a Christmas list than a memo fired off to the Girl Friday keeping everyone on schedule in the Home Office. I kept doing it, and the practice evolved, because it worked. But on first reading “The assurance of answered prayer brings peace. It is easier to sleep well when we have full assurance that God is in control of circumstances. If you are lying awake at night worrying about circumstances you can’t change, pour out your heart to God and thank him that he is in control. Then sleep will come,” I got itchy in the way I used to get when captive in a religious classroom packed with kids who believed what the book told them because the book also told them it was true. Those protective layers are the hardest ones to shuck. “Assurance of answered prayers” is nuts unless you’re exclusively praying for the inevitable: Dear God, let me continue to take up space and have mass for as long as I’m alive and please let the sun keep going for another few billion years at least thanks so much. Whoever has “full assurance that God is in control of circumstances” is almost certainly not someone I could have bonded with tubside over Faulknerian clausiness unless by “God” they literally meant “no one.” And “thank him that he is in control” has me practically breaking out into hives. John Milton wrote that the reigns of Kings James and Charles had castrated English politics, making 17th century Britain into a choreography of the “perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people.” I’m too petty for traditional worship—petty enough to construe the pettiness as a form of perverse strength. Or at least an admirable quality, even if pretty dumb. I can think all those things at the same time and smile into the glow of my monitor because the studio is being received into a cloudy November morning by a sky that’s softened from onyx night along a gradient into a throbbing somehow nutty tangerine and you start to hear traffic and industry coming to life at various distances and I’ve been on this two hours now with A. asleep in the bedroom and her alarm just sounded.
Interpretation by N. Trübner & Co., Early English text society
It is presumably the oldest of four manuscripts discovered in a trove in southern England and subsequently named after four different Roman emperors. Vespasian was a cavalry officer who came to power shortly following the death of crazy Nero back on this side of Jesus but when years only had two digits. I don’t know why this book, which in its earliest known incarnation was Italian-made in the 9th century, almost a full millennium after Vespasian, came to take on his name. I’ll get on that.
Oh, I do love this intricate look. I will have to revisit and read more closely.