beyond sleep

it's almost 4 in the morning here.

again, I can't sleep. Or sometimes I am sleeping too much. the grey days make you want to curl up under your knitted blanket and close your eyes until the rain stops.

i want to wake up earlier and earlier and keep up with the sunlight when it is here, but instead I am just staying up later and later, completely throwing off my internal clock.

i was listening to a radiolab show about sleep. many animals sleep with only one hemisphere (one half) of their brain at a time. dolphins do it because they are conscious sleepers and need to be partially awake so they will not drown. ducks do it so that they can watch out for enemies. apparently humans used to do it too. that is only a theory of course, but it is kind of cool. when some humans can't sleep, maybe it is because that part of their brain that used to be wired to stay awake and watch out for danger is still partly functioning. that is why it is hard to sleep in new houses for the first time, new hotel rooms, with new people.

but, you know when you can't sleep because you are thinking, thinking, thinking....what is happening then? what is the danger, the fear, the discomfort?

this week i showed a boy from madrid around the city. i was a pretty pathetic tour guide since i know nothing about this city. instead we went to the library, got lost among houseboats trying to find an island, drank beer, and listened to jazz music.

i miss everyone so much and no one that i have met so far comes even close to any of you. it is making me mopey. can everyone just move to amsterdam? it's a lovely city....i promise.

xoxo,

m

milieux de mémoire

this evening we had a party in the backyard of my building to celebrate the installation of new bike racks.

suffice it to say, there was free wine and I couldn't resist....so three glasses later I am mildly incapable of completing my readings for tomorrow but fairly capable of writing things on the internet.

we're going to get a little academic here...but you will love it...I promise.

For class yesterday we had to read a text by Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History. It was really beautifully written and traced the shift from the milieux de mémoire, the settings or circles of memory as a real part of everyday experience, to the lieux demémoire, the place of history. Nora is focused on the enormous distance, spurred by the acceleration of history, that separates real memory “the inviolate social memory that primitive and archaic societies embodied” and “history, which is how modern societies organize a past they are condemned to forget because they are driven by change”. For Nora, the point when the state was divorced from the nation is also the moment when history was transformed into social self-understanding. He is interested in these divides, in the estrangement of history from memory, in the distancing we have created between ourselves and our pasts: “we feel a visceral attachment to that which made us what we are, yet at the same time we feel historically estranged from this legacy, which we must now coolly assess”.

Nora has a brilliant quote about the obsession with archiving and preservation:

"The less memory is experienced from within, the greater its need for external props and tangible reminders of that which no longer exists except qua memory--hence the obsession with the archive that marks an age and in which we attempt to preserve not only all of the past but all of the present as well. The fear that everything is on the verge of dissappearing, coupled with anxiety about the precise significance of the present and uncertainty about the future, invests even the humblest testimony, the most modest vestige, with the dignity of being potentially memorable."

Another topic surfaces is the construction of the human through memory, that memories are what makes human beings human. What are we, then, without our memories? The neurologist Oliver Sacks has case studies that explore a deeper redefinition of ‘memory’ for those people who have become unhinged from their pasts, cut off from their present, floating untethered in the world. It would be valuable, I think, to look at the ‘humanizing’ qualities that we have attributed to memory in light of the compulsive externalization, archiving, and documentation of the self.

(dream sweet my little pack rats, photographers, and collectors of beautiful things)

xoxo,

m

love.

after I posted the last (first!) post, my dear friend jana wrote to me about how she works on not becoming apathetic about daily experiences and constantly being surprised and excited....about things and also about people

this reminded me of a really lovely quote by Sam Levenson:

" People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed. Never throw out anybody"

For friends and for lovers there is always time lurking in the background, the possibility of getting bored, of leaving one another behind, and perhaps instead of falling into this we need to work extra hard to keep renewing the love we have for one another. Sometimes I am very weary of long term monogamous relationships, but then I meet a couple who have been together for years and years and their joy and excitement for eachother just surrounds them and I get all romantic again.

About Amsterdam....I think that the reason I have to become a little less excited about everything around me is because I would be unable to function or get anything done if I allowed my true joy for being in this city to be exhibited all the time. I would get lost staring for hours at the house boats floating on the canals, at the beautiful people on their bikes, at the tall colourful houses squished together.

Here are the things I love about Amsterdam (in case I forget sometimes)

1. People cycle their dogs instead of walking them...the doggies either run alongside the bikes or sit in the basket with their long doggie hair blowing in the wind.

2. Everyone rides a bike! From the poorest people to the businessmen in their fancy suits to the mayor of the city.

3. There are flowers everywhere, in peoples arms on the way to meet their loves, in their baskets, sold along the streets (especially sunflowers, which are my favourite).

4. Dutch people sing songs and whistle while cycling, and they are also quite sweet.

5. Best public library ever!

6. The canals are really beautiful, are overflowing with boats, and reflect the sunlight in indescribable ways

7. There are lots of crooked houses!

xoxo,

m