bats in my attic
I sit at my desk after one Xanax, three cups of karak, two cups of green tea, and three cigarettes, but my head still continues to hurt. All the substances at my disposal fail when confronted by this dull pain that rests like a thin film over my skull, and tugs inwards at my eye balls. Still, I sit adamant at my desk, for I have this compulsion to write something, and I know I have something to write about because I sense the heaviness in my head, and I can tell it apart from the heaviness of my headache. This heaviness comes from the mess of congealed thoughts and emotions somewhere in there, and they bounce around my mind with heavy thumps so that I can tell that they are present, but to tell them apart is an exercise in cognition of its own. Their ecstatic motion in my head resemble stray bats in an abandoned attic: I can still cook and clean in my house, entertain guests and myself, but the relentless thumping from the ceiling nevertheless makes me look up and grunt from time to time. The only thing left for me to do then is to brave the attic at a convenient time, and catch a bat, one after another, and set each of them free.
“Setting them free” is an expression that I just made up, and on second thought it doesn’t hold, since I am looking to translate the commotion in my head into writing, so as to affix a stable meaning (or meanings) to it. In a less digressive manner of speaking, I write my thoughts so that I can capture them, and in turn make them weigh less. “To say a feeling, an impression is to diminish it — expel it,”1 as Susan Sontag writes. One might object to the part about “diminishing” it, because it is so often that the translation of our thought into language mutates the thought, and in doing so, undermines it (picture the scene of a confession — how often does the other person wholly understand the one confiding?). But such is the premise of human language, that it exists in relation to three dimensional things, as opposed to human thoughts and emotions that occupy a different, metaphysical space. Thus, I sit at my desk with the somber understanding that my thoughts and my words are not mirror images of each other, but are rather like siblings. One sibling, the written word, exists in the same world that I myself occupy physically, and as such, I find easier to work with.
This presupposition of the ‘loss in translation’ is more widely and more easily accepted in other areas, such as art. An abstract painting poses less of a threat when the painter’s motives and intentions are set aside, given that I can never ask the painter what they intended to communicate with their work, and even if I could, I would never be sure whether they are being truthful. In this case, I take the painting as an object separate from the painter, and allow for exclusive dialectic engagement between the brushstrokes and myself, “experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.”2 Or think of a really sad song: rarely do you have to learn about the artist’s lived experiences before you let the song do it’s thing to you. In this sense, the painting, the song, or the words in my journal, may be separated from their source to be considered as being their own things in the world, not mere diluted images of something else. If my journal entry says, “I am upset, because of this,” I can go ahead from there and deal with this. On the other hand, to take on the metaphysical feeling in my head directly, while it remains nebulous and fidgety and ever-changing, would be an enterprise in vain.
Take, for example, how I used to think I had a problem with being alone. In reality, that is not the case at all, from what I understand after translating and re-translating this feeling. In my mind, it was just a desperation to always be in someone else’s company. But after several iterations of translation, my problem seems to be with solitude in freeform. I can do whatever I want when I am by myself, and this freedom is overwhelming. Being with someone else, I restrict myself to their conditions — they are here to study, so I study; they are here to sleep, so I sleep; so on and so forth. In hindsight, I can see how it was easy to let myself think I cannot be by myself because of some deep rooted emotional condition.
This fear of confronting a deep rooted emotional condition explains why it took me so long to dissect my solitude problem, and hints that my issue quite often originates earlier in the process, in that I shy away from according a shape to my thoughts. Either I am too scared, or embarrassed, or owing to whatever nefarious reason. I remain averse to going in the attic at all, let alone the catch one of the bats with my bare hands. I still allow the loud thumping from upstairs to get in my way — I am startled when I hear one of the animals crash against a wall, and I let a cup slip from my hands. I sweep up the shattered ceramic and go on with my day, and then another bat drops head first onto the attic floor, and I am taken aback once again. The havoc in my mind’s attic continues unabated while I let it get in my way. This can only go on for so long before my idling begins to annoy me, so recently I devised a clever plan: to go and check every time a bat crashes. Otherwise, I see no plausible explanation for lying awake at night listening to the loud thumping, and doing nothing about it. The courage to go in the attic must inductively follow from the nuisance that I am suffering, and I am old enough to hold myself accountable for my emotional dilly dallying. This is not to say the attic will one day be empty, and I am at peace knowing that I might never catch enough bats. But I can still keep them at bay, or under a certain population density, which, in any case, is the best I can do.
Then again, it is not uncommon for dead bats to resurrect. Say, when I feel like I am longing for something, then in attempting to give shape to this feeling on paper once again, I suffer from the risk of reusing the same words that I used before. But I have dealt with this one particular bat long enough, and I think we see eye to eye now. This longing, that sometimes creeps up on me in certain moments of weakness, I realize, could be outlined with some new words. Now, instead of plain old longing, I look at it more like when someone says they miss their bed: they don’t really miss their bed; rather, they miss being asleep, they long to be at rest. The bed, in their case, is merely the signifier of that which once brought contentment. It would be a mistake, then, to try to rebuild a bed, and tire myself out in that process, when instead I could lie down anywhere else, and get just what I want: rest. My bed was made of pinewood. I could spend weeks sourcing pinewood and building myself another bed from scratch. But this whole ordeal would have been in vain, for what I needed was not the bed at all. Maybe beds made of mahogany are more comfortable, but if I am in search of my old pinewood bed, I will never sleep, and I will never know.
At the same time, there are probably some caveats to this bats in my attic analogy, since no one is actually giving me a list of bats that I have to go suffocate — I made it all up. So even if there aren’t any bats, I have to believe that there are. Humans made up ghosts because we wanted to fear the night. Sometimes the problem is that we want to have a problem. In proposing I go and solve each of my problems, I assume a right and wrong way of being, and in doing so establish myself as the judge of a great deal of things. The truth is that I know very little, and instead of striving to make my existence comfortable, I have been enforcing some abstract moral code on myself. This moral code, which I try to look for in the works of everyone that I look up to probably does not exist in the shape or form that I had hoped for. I keep looking for the recipe for bat poison in The Myth of Sisyphus3, but all it talks about is Camus’s jolly walk around the attic. That’s probably the most I can learn from these people, and I’ll have to cook the bat poison myself, when I need to.
I sit at my desk before this big, bright, yellow IKEA lamp4. I turn it off, and my head stops hurting.
Sontag, Susan. As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980. United States, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation: And Other Essays. United States, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. United Kingdom, Penguin Books Limited, 2013.
https://www.ikea.com/ae/en/p/blasverk-table-lamp-yellow-50547979/