This is another chapter-in-progress from my current project, tentatively titled In the Black Liquor Garden, a work of creative nonfiction on the subject of sleep.
A bang from the utility room. At least I think the utility room—right across the hall from our bedroom. A loud and sudden but already completely extinguished crash. The bed is calm. The kittens are here, A. asleep. I’m the only alerted thing. My heart beats double time. It had to have been Li'l’ Pal Rudy, but what did he do?
In the morning I investigate and nothing is amiss. And no she didn’t hear a noise. I must have dreamt it.
Last night a dream of walking on a floor with bugs. Stepping carefully to avoid them. Then the soft lumpen grope of a large one, a tarantula maybe, furry and warm, leaping onto my calf and attaching itself. I freeze. Realize I’m dreaming. One of the kittens has clumped onto my leg, on the bedspread. The impossible sequencing of dream logic. The kitten happened first and caused the dream that explained it. In my mind it played out in reverse. We see what, when and how our minds instruct. Then we see through them.
The mind capable of tying itself into a knot is a mind no longer capable of completely trusting itself.
I’m about halfway through Utopia Avenue, at present the latest in English author David Mitchell’s extended fictional universe first glimpsed in his 1999 debut, Ghostwritten. Mitchell’s kind of a nerd rock star. The Wachowskis turned his 2004 opus Cloud Atlas into a huge, wonderful mess starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and Hugh Grant. He presented a haunted house novelette via Twitter, when that was a thing. He’s one of the contributors to the Future Library Project, an annoying and awesome hipster venture that will publish books from famous authors a century after their writing.
It wasn’t clear at first that he was up to something. The initial four titles were plausibly discrete entries, albeit with a certain tangling of themes (heroic dialectics, reincarnation, cynics feasting on the naïve). Following the maximalist extravaganza of Cloud Atlas he downshifted with a short bildungsroman about a middle-class lad with a stammer. Black Swan Green (2006). I loved it right off and have come with time to appreciate it only more. It’s about bullies and disintegrating families and turning pain into experience. Always formally inventive (like Christopher Nolan, Mitchell never encountered a narrative form he didn’t seek to invert), the innovation in BSG takes the form of chapters that float up and dissipate with the precarity of dreams. Crises flare and are left unresolved, sometimes seemingly totally forgotten, subsumed by a half page of white space, a new chapter, the assumption of another story.
It’s years since I visited Jason Taylor and the speech impediment he anthropomorphized into a sinister character called “Hangman,” but that tendency of its structure, to tease and then resist conclusion, just improves in my memory with time. When you think of your childhood, do you see a through-line, a neat a to b to c stitching an arrow through your past, aimed at this afternoon? I see a dog’s breakfast of mostly unconnected episodes lacking in definition. It’s a continuum problem. Scoop a handful out of the Mississippi and you’ve got yourself a puddle of water. I remember towering surges of feeling, irresponsible geysers of rage and joy that, in their mountainousness, seemed undiminishable, permanent. But we reset, thank god, manhandled by forces into homeostasis. Jason Taylor’s story feels more truly recalled for manifesting on the page less like a discursive diary entry than a wandering trail of cairns left on an overgrown path.
His fifth book, a compulsively readable gothic samurai mercantile thriller called The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (a surname he takes care to explain in Utopia Avenue “rhymes with loot, not poet”1), revealed for the first time what Mitchell’d been playing at. A powerful Japanese villain has discovered a recipe for eternal life. It is called oil of soul. It is decanted from the bodies of sacrificed infants. There are lots of rules, and oil of soul isn’t the exclusive intellectual property of remote evildoers in Japan. Over the centuries secret factions of more or less immortal white- and black-hats (Horologists, Anchorites) have formed. With his first four books, Mitchell hinted and feinted at this plot. With his last four he broached the black hole’s event horizon and surrendered fully to its inexorable tug. To the best of my memory, Black Swan Green’s loan tie-in to what Mitchell refers to as his macronovel is a side character named Hugo who goes on to play a starring role in 2014’s The Bone Clocks, the apotheosis of his fantasy, and a book Stephen King (Lord Castlerock) liked very much. Which is the last instance of Mitchell receiving an undilutedly positive review I can recall. These days the critics bring sharpened knives. Dwight Garner’s review of Slade House employed the words second-rate, fripperies, Hardy Boys, obstructed view and isn’t scary. Concluding his comprehensive smackdown of Mitchell’s 1960s rock opera Utopia Avenue (2020), Daniel Mendelsohn went in for the kill:
…the issue isn’t that “Utopia Avenue” and some of the other novels fail some superficial critical litmus test — some arbitrary insistence on tonal consistency or unity of genre. The problem is that they fail to meet the high standard Mitchell himself established early on: a standard that insists that a work’s stylistic eclecticism harmonize with, and serve, large and significant themes. No doubt the appearance in “Utopia Avenue” of vengeful transubstantiating Japanese demons and some conveniently timed Horologist psychosedation will excite some of his fans. Others, who have admired his work in the past but are finding it increasingly unpersuasive, can recognize the sound of a broken record when they hear it.
Count me among the latter camp, though I’m enjoying my stroll on the avenue. Mitchell is a stylist, and in this anodyne, Goodreads-approved age, I will forgive a stylist lots. I’m five years late to the party because Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood just reminded me how much fun reading a novel can be. You always have fun reading a Mitchell book, even if he’s no longer breaking your world open and rejiggering all your wires.
There’s a certain class of rookie who comes up in sports now and then who people suppose will lay waste to all the records, and who indeed gets off to a hot start and does quite well for a while before the league adjusts and he becomes, right there in front of God and everyone, exactly who he was always fated to be. We all must then come to terms with the fact that he isn’t a world-beater or a surefire Hall of Famer, he isn’t legendary, he’s just a good or very good or even decent player, and his career is going to be up and down with probably whole seasons lost to injuries as well as occasional public ignominies. It’s with the sobered-up eyes of a longtime watcher that I’m reading Mitchell’s latest.
And this longtime watcher can’t duck the feeling that his plot haunts him. He may have set out to write a book purely about a fictional London-based psychedelic band in the 60s only to get ambushed by an incorporeal spirit squatting in the lead guitarist’s neural recesses. In Jasper de Zoet’s case, the spirit presents as a knocking on an interior door only he can hear. Knock Knock, he calls it. The phantom first approaches in his teens, in the outfield on a cricket pitch at a school for toffs. He confesses to his best mate, who initiates a contact of sorts with the spirit by looking deep into de Zoet’s eyes and asking yes or no questions Knock Knock can respond to in the binary. They learn that the spirit is nearly 900 years old and will only be freed by the death of its host. This scene is the culmination of a section that patiently walks us into the madhouse of de Zoet’s condition. By the time we tap into the voice, we’ve been treated to scads of knockings.
It was the weekend I’d turned 45, and I was feeling the effects of having helped myself to a few drinks several nights in a row. Lying on the front porch on a Sunday without a dot of temperature or humidity, a windchime-chiming, leaf-perusing breeze paying the odd visit, letting the book fall over my chest and my eyes close, I heard it. Three of them in a tight formation. In my right ear. Somewhere between clear as day and unmistakable. Knockknockknock.
Just as exterior stimuli can become incorporated into our dreams, interior stimuli can manifest in our brains. A brain is a most peculiar interchange, both receiving and producing the world. The mind is simultaneously the seat of interiority and the projector of externality, a self-dealing croupier unconsciously counting cards.
Reading is weird. I had in a dream the other night a funny idea—or, it seemed funny at the time—that blended reading with watching. It stemmed from a trope I often find engineered in my dreams, which is that “I” am alternately spectator and participant. (I suppose that is a distinction without a difference from waking life, in which one is permanently both. So let me try and think of a better way to say it…) I often wake up from a dream that I have been watching myself act in. I’ve little doubt this is a consequence of the ubiquity of the televised narrative form. It’s also true that for many years now I have suffered from hyper-self-consciousness, a sort of internal distancing mode that causes me to feel remote from whatever situation or society I’m in—as though I am watching myself interact, an unnatural being among natural. Since we are each entrained hermetically within ourselves, it’s impossible for me to know whether this condition is solitary or widely shared—though the former notion smacks of outrageous solipsism, and I’ve read descriptions—primarily if not exclusively in fiction—of characters whose experience jibes with my own. The condition is sad, alienating, difficult to describe, embarrassing, and frightening—all factors that militate against sharing. Anyhow, this is all to say, my dream included the funny notion (at least I thought it was funny) that whenever I opened my book in bed I would “see” a promo going: Previously, on “Reading”…whereupon I would watch myself, in flashback, opening my book, reading quietly, turning a page…
Reading quietly, except when used to draw a distinction from reading aloud, is an unnecessary cliché: there is no other way to read. You can’t read and hum at the same time. You can read and walk, but not really. Not well. You can read and think about something else, but you weren’t reading. And reading aloud, like reading, is an acquired talent. It takes concerted effort for me to read aloud and listen to myself. I can pronounce whole pages worth of words without hearing a one.
Most things we get up to in life are various. The waking day is divided into tasks, the tasks divided into elements. Work is multiple, entertainment and education multifarious, they require coordination from us. Conversation, art, cooking, work…all require multiplicity, the orchestration of physicality and mentation, the discerning mulch of input and output. Like sleeping, reading is an all-consuming activity, arresting of the totality of a person’s consciousness. In terms of singleness, next to sleep is probably driving—or, more generally, going somewhere—which, it is not surprising, invites into the mind a parallel state of depth, of automation, as it were: we arrive at a point not remembering how we got there. (Studies have shown that, in certain conditions, driving is so akin to sleep as to provide the same neural nourishment as deep stage non-REM sleep.) But reading done right is holistic, monopolizing, absorptive. We crack open a window a few inches from our face and gaze into it, oftentimes looking for mirrors, frequently finding them.
One can adopt an outlook to assuage the pain caused by loss of retention. I have latched on to the argument that remembering a book isn’t as important as enjoying it in the moment: it’s about immediacy, what happens to you and your day while reading. If you don’t remember it tomorrow, big deal. Read some more.
Obviously, this can’t always be the case. Students have different motives. But I fancy the idea that my brain and the world funneling through it make for a kind of babbling brook wandering in its courses, hurrying and flagging according to prevailing weather, playing host to unseen schools of inconsequentia. Reading changes us whether we remember it or not.2 It’s like everything else, in this regard. You are what you consume. Except that, when it comes to books, we have unabridged freedom to curate the menu.
Regardless of what storytellers like to pretend, a person of sound mind can always tell when she is awake. She can be deceived by sleep, but waking doesn’t lie. Similarly, when thick with dream, she may be convinced she heard something that wasn’t there, a signal fabricated from whole cloth by the loom of her brain. But when she’s awake, she won’t mistake a false note for a real one.
I knew that the bundle of knocks had been generated in me, for me alone, that it was the product of an active collaboration between my mind and that of an Englishman I will likely never meet. He does those soft rs reminiscent of the old upper classes. I suspect, from context clues, that he’s a good man in a kitchen and that he knows London streets like the back of his hand. I think Jason Taylor’s Hangman was modeled on a personal ailment and, though a stranger to him not otherwise trained in stammers wouldn’t guess it, I believe he still regularly negotiates a potted path of speech. I saw him deal with a treacherous word in an interview with Leonard Lopate on YouTube and registered a Tolstoyan novel of difficult and intimate history in a subtle, two-second storm across his Etonian good looks.
Then I lifted his mind up to mine and heard a knock.
Though he leaves mute the question of the first name, which I insist on pronouncing—in what I take to be the appropriate 19th century Dutch manner—Yah-cob, even though, and it pains me to say this, I’ve heard Mitchell read from de Zoet and he did the j with a full, lusty, English ripeness.
Science fiction writer Ted Chiang hypothesized in his short story The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling that human beings became cyborgs with the advent of literacy—a tool that changed our brains.