Insomnia by Marina Benjamin review - sleeplessness as resistance

Ranging from Penelope to Virginia Woolf, this study makes a case for restlessness and insomnia as acts of female rebellion

If you think you sleep badly it will soon become clear, on witnessing Marina Benjamin wrestle with the problem, her mind “on fire … messages flying, dendrites flowering, synapses whipping snaps of electricity across my brain”, that you really don’t. Never again will I refer to the kind of sleeplessness that can be tamed with Ovaltine and a few pages of Knausgaard as “insomnia”. Benjamin’s impassioned and elegant memoir is not just an intimate account of a disorder for which there is still no straightforward cure, but a defiant celebration of its paradoxical potential. For, as she suggests, insomnia is more than “just a state of sleeplessness, a matter of negatives. It involves the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing.” In fact she pursues sleep so hard that an entire book is the result.

Fittingly for a meditation on a disrupted process, her method is fragmentary, hurtling from thought to thought. Its starting point is Lacan’s observation that desire is born out of lack. “On certain turbulent nights this longing is so great and deep and bald it swallows up the world,” she admits – and after that, anything goes. All literature is raw material for the pursuit, because if the “enervating mania” of insomnia involves “an excess of longing”, it also involves “an excess of thinking”. Benjamin never offers a medical explanation for her insomnia. Is it a side-effect of the menopause, she wonders? The result of chronic hip pain? Fallout from a melatonin deficiency? These questions are all red herrings. Her key idea, approached via detours into history, philosophy and art, is that the inability to sleep is not just a symptom of an underlying pathology, but an existential experience that can give us fresh insights into the nature of creativity and love. If there is an answer to why she can’t drift off we have to find it, as she does, in the stories of others.

Continue reading...

from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2QSWk6s

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mine management and predictive maintenance are top priorities for miners

Image
While miners are starting to trial and make small investments in technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and cloud computing, the traditionally conservative mining sector remains focused on improving efficiency and productivity by continuing to invest in mine management software and predictive maintenance. GlobalData’s latest report, Global Mine-Site Technology Adoption Survey 2018 , reveals that while investment by the majors is currently well ahead of mid-tier miners and producing juniors, higher shares of the latter two groups are planning investments in mine management software and predictive maintenance given their immediate impact on improving productivity. Source: GlobalData Mining Intelligence Center The report includes data and analysis from the company’s survey of over 200 worldwide mine sites which investigated the extent to which mines had invested in 13 different technologies ranging from communication systems to drones, predictive maintenance
Read more

Down with the kids: can mining ever be cool?

“Do you want to win a bucket load of cash? Of course you do!” is the eye-catching strapline of the Mining Association of Nova Scotia’s (MANS) annual Mining ROCKS! contest. It offers cash prizes totalling C$8,000 for junior high and high school students who produce the most interesting and engaging videos about mining across five categories. Held between October 2018 and 22 February 2019, the contest hopes to inspire young people to teach themselves about the mining industry in Canada and beyond. Sean Kirby, executive director of MANS, says the association launched the competition because the industry needs to do better at explaining itself to the public and, in particular, reaching out to young people to educate them about mining, minerals and geoscience. “We started the Mining ROCKS! video contest as a way to appeal to young people, to give them a reason to want to learn about what we do by doing their own research,” he says. Attracting the next generation of miners Ingratiating
Read more

GR Engineering wins OZ Minerals Northern Wellfield project contract

OZ Minerals has awarded a contract to GR Engineering Services for the design and construction of the Northern Wellfield for the Carrapateena project located approximately 160km north of Port Augusta in South Australia. The engineering, procurement and construction contract is valued at A$16.3m ($11.77m). For the Northern Wellfield project, GR Engineering will provide the detailed design, survey, supply, transportation, construction, testing and commissioning services for the development of the trunkline and transfer pumping stations associated with four wells. The Carrapateena mineral processing plant, which is currently under construction, will obtain water through the wellfield project. The Northern Wellfield project will include access roads, pipeline corridors, staging tanks, wellheads and pumps to source groundwater from deep underground aquifers for providing raw saline water to the mining operations. “This work demonstrates GR Engineering’s credentials in the supply of proc
Read more