jetlag and the astronaut

 

D.H. Lawrence, drawing on Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, pins the ur-American hero as, famously,  isolate, cold, a killer. In fact it is easy to think that the American Adam, the first man in our cosmology, was clothed in a hazmat suit -  perfect for existing on this planet as a being entirely of the planet, from the rhythms of his blood to the Circadian cycles of his sleep. An astronaut in the anthropocene, a intruder from the beyond, perpetually alien, perpetually exploiter. Bless the alienation and count the money, we all say here.

A brilliant essay by Henry Sussman, The Phenomenology of Jetlag, Kafka is presented as the prophet of our time warped era, the era of insomnia and time zone smuggling – that is, smuggling time zones into other time zones. For instance, my cell phone doesn’t just tell me the time, now, in Paris, where I live, but also the time in the Eastern Time zone of the U.S., where I was visiting. And since I also visited Iowa, which is on Central Time, both of my numbers were off. Kafka, who worked with worker’s insurance and made it to many meetings in Central Europe to talk to factory officials and the like, was well aware of the hazards of sleep deprivation. Its effects could be tabulated in so many injuries, so many fingers cut off, legs wounded, muscles torn, etc. The effects of tearing away the natural attachment of our circadian rhythm from the light and night to which they are primordially coordinate makes for the heavy presence of sleep in his novels and stories. Sleep as something put off, sleep as something that occurs in highly inappropriate settings, such as in the Land Surveyor K.’s meeting with Buergel in The Castle.

Sussman writes: “… the recovering victim of a significant act of spatio-temporal dislocation and abuse, otherwise known as jetlag, is, unwittingly, subject to two sets of spatio-temporal parameters. There is the explicit one, clearly prevalent at the point of disembarkation in the form of a very loose etiquette defining the business day, customary periods for dining and rest and other conventional interactions: and then there is the holdover protocol of what Proust would call habit still operative in the zone of embarkation. It is surely in the most “jarring” and subliminal manner, Fraud would call it “unconscious” and Proust “involuntary,” that the recalcitrant regime operative a the journey-origins asserts itself in such forms oas sudden involuntary waking in a hyper-attentive state or equally abrupt onsets of fatigue at the least felicitous moments of the active day. We associate the sudden-onset phenomena of depth or unforeseen complexity that definitely establish the activity and output of  the parallel and embedded universe of aesthetic sensibility. Via this particular circuit of modernist invention we come to learn that K.’s pronounced episodes of jetlag toward the end of Das Schloss, of a jetlag before the fact, belong to his own heavily disguised apprenticeship as a performance artist.”

I’m unsure about that anachronism of “performance artist” in that last sentence – a phrase from a different embarkation zone than that of K, even if Kafka, as the author of the Hunger Artist, does come close to embodying, with dream-like precision,  the conceptual art theory of the seventies. Sussman’s larger point, though, is something I can affirm in my own disembarked experience now: the grogginess that succeeds a night of highly interruptible sleep on a transatlantic plane flight, and the ordinary surrealism of all the subsequent manoeuvres in the airport, the seemingly endless corridors and stairs and escalators, the passage through security, the waiting for your luggage at the carousel, the barking of the airport security, the awareness of one’s haggard appearance as one waits for the cab, and the sense that one is not in a good state, that one has been pickpocketed of something one didn’t even know one had, i.e. placement in a certain timezone.

Jonathan Crary begins his book, 24/7, with a story about the white crowned sparrow. The Pentagon is very interested in the white crowned sparrow. Why? Because this sparrow can stay awake for up to seven days during the migratory season. The Pentagon wants to unlock the sparrow and apply its lesson to the human astronaut – the astronaut human – in order to correct that flaw, our ability and need to sleep.  For Crary, “The injuring of sleep is inseparable from the ongoing dismantling of social protections in other spheres.”

I’m awake now in the old world, contemplating the injury – and how much coffee it takes to bandage it – and wondering if I really was, yesterday morning, in the New World. What day was that the morning of?  And thinking of the magnificent ending of Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus:

“Night which Pagan Theology could make the daughter of Chaos,⁷¹ affords no advantage to the description of order: Although no lower then that Masse can we derive its Genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven.

Though Somnus in Homer be sent to rowse up Agamemnon,⁷² I finde no such effects in these drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes.⁷³ The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.⁷⁴ But who can be drowsie at that howr which freed us from everlasting sleep? or have slumbring thoughts at that time, when sleep it self must end, and as some conjecture all shall awake again?”