In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish

Author:Mahmoud Darwish
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781935744658
Publisher: Steerforth Press

XII

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You love sleep, a swooning wakefulness, like your own situation. Sleep is an overlord and sovereign. When asleep, you are your own overlord and sovereign. Alive, but without life’s burdens. Alive in a metaphorical death chosen with the care of an angel to train the body for the visit of the invisible in a mutually befitting form. A sleeper does not age while asleep, nor does he fear or hear news that squeezes colocynth into the heart. But you ask yourself before going to sleep: What did I do today? You swing back and forth between the pain of criticism and the criticism of pain, and you gradually soothe yourself and fall asleep in your own lap, which gathers you from the ends of the earth and holds you tight as if you were your own mother. Sleep is the sheer delight of forgetfulness. If you dream, it’s because memory remembers what you have forgotten of the obscure. You sleep and know that you are sleeping so it gladdens you and you sing the praises of laziness, the friend of sleep and of talent. You do not care if sleep prolongs your life, but you do care that life prolongs your sleep. Sleep is the senses hosting whiteness and blueness roaming the land of infinity without guides, priests, or mystics. Sleepers are equal, despite the differences in their hearts, or the lines on their hands. But wakefulness discriminates between sleepers, and drags them into wars before and after sleep. If only the world slept more, differences would diminish.

As you sleep you know that you are sleeping, and you delve deeper and become intoxicated by a warm cloud that embraces you as you embrace it. Two birds with no rendezvous or destination except this spontaneous embrace. Your left wing is yours alone and your right one too. Your snoring rouses you to remind you of your longing for more lightness: you are asleep. You might forget where you are, where you came from, and when you arrived. So you turn on the light and realize you are in the land of sleep. You thank the blessed lightness of feathers. You doze off unaware of a ray of light spying on you, or of the noise from the street. Because when sleep is sound, it neither listens nor sees.

But you see sleep, smell it, taste its happiness and touch it, bit by bit. You sleep and know that you are asleep and that you are on a deep journey without roads, maps, or addresses. On a picnic beyond any destination. You depart the world, the world of objects and words, and what separates them during the day brings them together at night, as if night were a bed. You are amazed by those who turn day into night and night into day. Sleep is the body being filled with stillness and serenity and the mind freed from fear and boredom. There is no boredom or danger in sleep. It is the need for a stupor in which things resemble their absent selves.

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