"what can be explained is not poetry" — yeats

I have been having trouble falling asleep lately, and I haven’t slept very well in a while. I wish I could dim my thoughts like I dim the room — at the flick of a switch. Tossing and turning, I stand as a bored spectator of the clamor of my mind, becoming even more pronounced as the night matures. The nightmares are probably what my body is trying to protect me from, and as much as I think I want to fall asleep, deep down I’m also scared, and hoping that when my body eventually relents tonight I won’t be playing cat and mouse in my sleep with the same repulsive imagery from all the previous nights. By now I have already accepted that these dreams are a byproduct of something I’m trying to evade in my waking hours, but either I’m so repulsed by the people and things that I’m just scared to reach down there and twiddle with the circuitry, or I have simply given up without even knowing it. Regardless, if I were to entertain the idea of “reaching down” just for a second, I start to wonder, how deep can I actually go myself, when I don’t have any instructions whatsoever? When I look all I see are shapes, some good but otherwise almost always bad. What I should do with the landscape of my subconscious is certainly far from clear.

“I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.”
Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Last night, before I fell asleep, I was thinking about the cheddar I was putting on my crackers at the beach earlier in the day. I was wondering, if you’re cutting up a block of cheese, how fine can you make the slices? On the picnic mat, I was using a butter knife. The slices were rough and meaty. I’m sure someone else with a better knife could do better and give you a paper thin slice of cheese. But say you go further, and bring along a biologist who can separate the protein and bacterial cultures in the thin slice of cheese. Then a physicist shows up who separates the atoms and its constituents. Then, perhaps a Nobel Prize winning physicist joins in and separates the protons and neutrons into elementary particles, quarks, leptons, and bosons. At this point I intervene and tell all three of them about string theory and how the elementary particles are resonances of vibrations in vacuum. At this point we all would agree that we’ve reached the bottom — it would be oxymoronic to contend that someone else will come and break the vacuum into something more. Now, this takes us back to my initial problem of sleeplessness. When I’m lying awake at night with a block of subconscious, nebulous thoughts in my hands, who am I, the person with the best knife, the biologist, the physicist, the Nobel Prize winner, or myself?

It’s most likely that I’m either the biologist or I have really mastered the art of sharpening knives. To expect more from me would flatter me certainly, but the reality is that I’m only equipped with mental health TikToks and infographics, not the DSM-5. For now, I remain standing uncomfortable in the face of my own opacity. “If we become conscious of this and give up trying to reduce such behaviors to the obviousness of a transparency, this will, perhaps, contribute to lightening [our] load, as every individual begins not grasping his own motivations, taking himself apart in this manner,” Glissant wrote in Poetics of Relation, trying to argue that any attempts to reduce the human element is futile and reductive. What remains for me now, is not to hammer at it, but perhaps to make peace with whatever it is that lies down there.