Project Somnolence Residency
May 21-25, 2024 | Perth & Kinross
Project Somnolence - Tour Blog
Scoping
Kevin disappeared and so did I. He was running and I was sleep-running, unable to know how much I needed it. Later he told me: ‘When I was running, I was scoping’. Scope is so close scoop. Scope comes from the Italian word for ‘aim’ and the Greek words for ‘target’ and ‘look out’. Scoop on the other hand concerns etymologies of drawing water. The multitasking of running and scoping was for Kevin I presume a mode of rhythmic listening. How does the world sound when you run? I imagine the pulse of a quickening heart, thud of footsteps; breath, breath, breath.
Where did I go? I was sleeping. I was sleeping eight hours back into the past, scraping my way through fractal dimensions. I was scooping the bits and pieces of me, here, from whatever the Atlantic Ocean did to my wee soul. I was drawing water from my dreams.
How to sleep when you feel a full moon in you?
Naval breathing: box breath.
Breathe in = four seconds
Hold = four seconds
Exhale = four seconds
Hold = four seconds
(repeat as necessary)
Develop a cellular sensorium to use as soap. I cleanse myself with errant particles.
Sco(o)ping late night snacks to fuel our jet lag and self-induced insomnia - ice cream, fresh strawberries, and reduced Bosh coffee cake.
Daemons
A background process in computation that handles service requests.
Print spool. File transfer. Dream spool.
A daemon is dormant when not required.
A daemon may be responsible for the undeliverables.
You wouldn’t download a dream.
You wouldn’t adopt a daemon.
Companion species
Dogs should be in the public domain, we say on the phone. It’s like 11pm and I’m painting, saying to myself that night painting is a way of being aware of darkness, smudge, not needing to paint by the natural light but calling the painting soft, smudge, the work cannot be cynical it’s a quality of being up late, I was painting myself up late wanting to lay chords down.
Slug [?]
Dream scoop
A deer leapt out nowhere, stared straight at my phone.
My diary was all like ‘I write this at 4:22am, mug of passionflower tea between my legs’. Dawn mingles birdsong with drone twangles of Kev’s speaker.
Resisting the urge to nap or call it quits for the evening, getting lost in another book, being drawn into Let’s Become Fungal!
House Share
Like wombed ones syncing periods, housemates may often sync their sleep. By day two, we were both working until five in the morning. I took a video call outside and paced the house, listening to an owl hoot, the data-compressed sound of my love, 5000 miles away.
We could have cat-napped under the sun but it rained all day. There was a switch to soft, organic time. Listening to midwestern emo to get into the teenage mood of intuitive eating, intuitive feeling.
We were greeted by several moths during our stay, no doubt attracted to the ever-present overhead projector. We invited them to perform with us, weaving in and out of sonic and visual scapes.
We gently fell into a daily rhythm, elongated by jet lag and the excitement of having carved out time to work on our practice in a largely uninterrupted way. Easing into mornings with freshly brewed coffee and resuming the previous night’s thinking and working, writing daily schedules on acetate - sometimes diverging from and sometimes largely following our well-laid plans. Synchronising our patterns, our growling stomachs as we worked our way through our Tesco haul of fresh vegetables and snacks. Definitely a different ambience from meetings caught between Zoom calls and the non-stop flow of academic seasons; a glimpse of liminal time and seasonality, caught between spring and summer, between wakefulness and somnolence.
Ambience
Morning soundscapes of gentle rain against the open velux morphed into nearby lawnmowing, with the scent of late spring petrichor and freshly-cut grass swerving into the house.
Mystery grass scent staining my shoes. A place of grass. Sound?
First the earthquake dreamed me awake. Whose?
I heard my phone chime in key lime
and I nipped up the stairs to your room.
‘Sound is only part of the mystery. But sounds are only the echoes of a place of first love’ (Howe 1989: 21).
So echoes Robert Duncan’s meadow and its ‘place of first permission’. Could there be a poem strong enough to hold the meadow here? We saw it each day unchanged except by the rain: wet long grass at calf-length; just before the aching arena of sheep, overlooking the loch.
I took pictures every day of texture. There were so many textures we happened upon during our daily walks, from metal album cover looking roots to many windswept foliage and waters of our surrounds, not to mention the sonic scapes and drawings etched upon the surfaces of the living room.
This meadow was the green tissue of originary love: say, here is my curiosity. What has been done here?
Roll me up in the rain-soaked meadow.
We set up camp on the plastic dock on the loch, deck chairs placed looking out across the water, as if some boating event was going to pass us by. The weather was calm and we set up to record, to listen to fauna both around and above us, as well as below the surface. I enlisted my hydrophone to spy on the fish, but we mostly just heard small bubbles and pops - what we loved was when the swans started to take flight from the surface of the water.
Amniotic
I never knew that prosecco could freeze ~ I thought I was doing us a favor by tossing a bottle in the mini-freezer. Unfortunately, prosecco does freeze, and after some difficulty with removing the frozen cork, we were met with a fountain of alcoholic slush. What do these unexpected and in-between states - from liquid to some-what solid - afford us in thinking about our waking (hypnagogic) and falling (hypnopompic) states?
Hot tob reading: fueled by several days of unperturbed research, practice, and play (as well as an appropriately-chilled bottle of prosecco), we immersed ourselves in a warm amniotic bath as the late May skies brushed against us and read from an array of somnolent poems, returning to some sort of primordial soup.
The hot tub has been christened, latterly, the think tank.
Kevin read Emily Rosselli’s Sleep poems aloud and we recorded the slosh and bubble of water.
Sustenance
Marmite-flavoured rice cakes dipped in luxurious hummus.
Fire
Cinders: the voice I can’t shake from my psyche.
Jet Lag
Easier to travel west than east. Not sure where it is we’re facing now. I feel displaced without view of the ocean.
The best remedy prescribed was light. So I set about exposing my skin to Scottish grey, wishing I had ease of access to melatonin — my own, or store-bought, as was possible in California.
Light
Whole again, Scottish air, revisit the morning. I began feeling like the open yawn of a chamomile flower.
Everything stayed just so until the sun went down, 10pm. it wasn’t yet midsummer. A moth flown into the emerald bowl.
We were blessed by an all too brief window of sunshine during a peaceful late afternoon spent on Loch Monzievaird. The sun reflected off of the slowly undulating patterns of the surface of the loch, as we read, listened, and relaxed.
Mcyelium
Scouting for mushrooms, finding loads of interesting species, but being too scared to harvest any following mushroom ghost-stories and tales of unfortunate deaths from mistaken identifications.
A mycelial model for collaboration weaves together different practices “from a whole host of sources making different components, or the nutrients of insights and ideas, available to each other in new ways”, offers Liza Lim (2013). Together, we intertwine sound, text, visuals, memories, and feelings in order to bring new light, and shade, to issues of sleep and dreaming.
Gloria said the mushrooms we found were called ‘chicken of the woods’. Often they grow on yew trees. Are they hungry for the dead? Mushrooms are our true friends, liminal loves of the underworld. Still, we can’t trust them.
How can we attune to a mushroom’s sense of time?
“It’s like the mushrooms are trying to escape extractive systems by moving between different speeds to fit – and not fit – our time frames. It’s hard to describe fungi’s different notions of time… we need to let go of our extractive mindset towards fungi. When we don’t try to control them, they happily pop into human time frames. The fact that they do like to be controlled makes the majority of mushrooms very hard to cultivate… When foraging for mushrooms in the wild, it’s helpful to tune in to that different sense of time since finding them requires a specific type of patience, attention, and openness.” (2023: 235).
Asynchronicity
It’s only me going temporally insane, talking at four in the morning. Henri Lefebvre says ‘[t]he rhythmed organisation of everyday time is in one sense what is most personal, most internal. And it is also what is most external [...]. Acquired rhythms are simultaneously internal and social’ (2023: 84). We talk about professions which require an asynchronous relationship with time, aka shift workers: nurses, workers on oil rigs, bar staff, musicians, cleaners, carers — to name but a few.
Just as there are a thousand reasons to not drink alcohol, there are a thousand reasons to sleep.
My sleep is in sync with some inexorable heart knot, what Joanne Kyger writes:
Knowledge comes from what purported strike? From that which cleanses,
and let us knot say “heart” but tissue.
The not/knot is the tree touching of knowledge that does not solidify into hierarchy. I can’t know its branches, only its heart. Who purports to strike or be stricken by knowledge? Not waiting for the apple to fall upon my head, I go to bed. The ‘knot’ then as a tying together at the same time as refusal. The heartwood. Stubborn, strong possibilities.
I was always picking up shifts in my dreams, forgetting the lay of the till, lulling myself into false consciousness that the rhythms of wage were the rest of my life.
Mercury Rev says of the music of Sparklehorse: ‘it’s caught between two worlds’ (Crowton and Dass 2024).
How can we think about chronodiversity and non-linear time, especially in relationship to sleep? Why are we so bound to the 9 to 5, the 24/7 of ‘working without pause, without limits’ (Crary). Can we extract ourselves from the extractivism of capitalism?
“In linear time frames we have accumulation as the main orientation of life. To realize that accumulation for everyone we would need at least nine planets.” (Almonacid). We don’t have nine planets, so how can we make do with what’s left?
Scotch mist
I think it rained every day of the residency. We were not to know that this would be the wettest summer in living memory. Glasgow in August doubling its usual rainfall.
The rain brought out the wet sweet scent of the hawthorn.
Not one applicable category of precipitation. I tend to go for random disintegrating moments of eros.
Spring
Enormous green bug on black lace, brushed.
Oops you caught me seedbombing!
Do you see this page as ocean or meadow?
Scent
The apple core started to oxidise smelling viciously of cider.
Lyn Hejinian writes that poetry ‘takes as its premise that language is a medium for experiencing experience’ (2000: 3). What of a blog? To what extent does reading this reproduce the somnolent feeling of five days in rural Fife, toe-soaked from boglandia, jet-lagged and sodden in 2000s nostalgia?
If poetry takes experience as its motional premise, might a somnolent poetry allow us to sleep without really sleeping?
For 18 months of my life, thanks to Covid-19, I couldn’t smell anything. It came back to me in barely believable drifts: hops from the Tennents factory, yeast from the Hovis factory, shit from the sidewalk, bleach. When I first smelled the wild lily again, I wept.
I still struggle to smell garlic. I love the smell of wild garlic which is so Glasgow.
If I think too much about the missingness of garlic, I start to panic.
Then I see garlic in prosodic relation to panic. A clove of panic garlic. Seasoning the years.
What about a smell diary? A life measured in olfactory sensory neurons. A few million, high inside you.
In the dreaming state of sleep, we don’t respond to odours. Does that include smoke, or gas?
Apparently, smells experienced in dreams are created in dreams. They don’t come from outside.
Hot Water
What do you sip before bed to sleep?
Smoky whisky, valerian tea, meditative thoughts boiled into a sort of creche.
Where you can go to shrink and play.
Sometimes I see sound — optic ripples, nervous geometries blooming in fractals — yellow, lime, celadon.
List of references
Crary, Jonathan, 2013. 24/7: late capitalism and the ends of sleep (London: Verso).
Crowton, Alex and Bobby Dass, 2024. This is Sparklehorse (Sad & Beautiful Films).
Howe, Susan, 1989. ‘“The Difficulties Interview”: Interview with Tom Beckett’, The Difficulties, Vol. 3, No. 2., pp. 17-27.
Hejinian, Lyn, 2000. The Language of Inquiry (Los Angeles: The University of California Press).
Lefebvre, Henri, 2023. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore, (London: Bloomsbury).
Lim, Liza (2013) A mycelial model for understanding distributed creativity: collaborative partnership in the making of ‘Axis Mundi’ (2013) for solo bassoon. In: Performance Studies Network Second International Conference 2013, 4th-7th April 2013, Cambridge, UK.