Taste the Night #3 Print

Written in 2019: Sleep is a variable thing for me. I’ve nearly always woken in the middle of the night. It doesn’t matter what time I go to bed I know I will wake before morning arrives. I’ve come to realise that if I didn’t wake, I’d feel deprived of the night time. This is a revelation for someone who has tried so many methods to get back to sleep. The main reason I usually want to go back to sleep is because fears love to insert themselves into the swirling cells of my consciousness. I think I recall a time when I felt really safe and fearless, but I’m not sure. Time at night is of a different order to time in the day. It feels very different, in many ways I prefer the night. However it is the time when mind demons like to test the waters, to see just how many worries, how much stress they can prod and poke loose. It’s like each demon has its pick out of a hat. A hat that includes, strain, pressure, tension, worry, fear, anxiety, trouble, difficulty, distress, trauma, suffering, pain or grief, then vies for the chance to be the top dog, or Demon, for that night. I’ve learnt many techniques for shutting my mind, just as I’ve learned others to open it. I’m still not sure which one is the most difficult, or indeed the simplest. I cannot be bothered to list what those methods are, mainly because I now prefer to split my night into two sections, the section before my first sleep then the second. It is night-time awakeness that becomes an addition to my being. Sometimes I step outside to taste the feel of the night. I do that at home as well as when I’m away, I especially love the taste of night when I am in one of my favourite places. In Snowdonia near the sea the night has a truly wonderful taste. It has been just over a year since my husband died. During his illness my sleep was altogether a rare thing therefore I adjusted my times to his as far as possible. I would go to bed very early. Now my personal sleep pattern is re-establishing itself, but I have continued to go to bed early. I’ve written about sleep before, see: Not the Insomnia Drawings. Now I am writing about it again, it is about drawing in the night. I draw in the dark, I draw with the lamp on, I draw not caring if the drawings are seen or not. It’s only relatively recently that I’ve started night drawing again so perhaps some of the exhaustion of the last few years is easing, we’ll see. I don’t think the night demons like drawings, they know that the activity of drawing loosens their tentacles. What is drawn does not matter and often has no apparent connection to any obvious studio work. Night drawing does not demand any particular image, any particular subject, it is merely a movement of the pen-holding hand on paper. Sometimes what comes out in a night drawing begins to be some image that the mind can’t resist making into something else. Interesting, boring, pretty, ugly, good, bad, It does not matter what the drawings are like, what matters is the activity, the directness. It is what it is.