Angeleno Femme

‘Mysteries Of The Brain’

The lonely pace, sleep, dream. I recall a friend telling me that what made him the saddest was to think of his father in solitary confinement at some penitentiary in the empty, frost-bitten lands of upstate New York. He was locked up for life for crimes bred from seventies idealism. I’d watched his father’s kind on television before, a cameraman the closest connection to humanity as the prisoner exercises in a blank room, and then stares out his small, barred window for the rest of the day. Years pass. His mind unravels, and I, many states and mistakes away, watch while eating a bowl of grapes.

In fact, his father sits in a nondescript cell right now. Staring, thinking. I lie in bed touching the gauze of my canopy, thinking about my characters, wondering about a local happy hour and if I should clean my bathroom or not. I should. I probably should.

I could never claim to understand it. None of us could, unless there, alone.

Recently, the writer’s life (or whatever it’ll be called) swallowed me up. To set my own schedule: stay up late typing, sleep in as sunlight stains my eggshell walls. Pace in my kitchen. Let stories blossom in my head as I find patterns on the ceiling. Hit a coffee shop to purge it out with my keyboard, and as I drive home, listen to the wind hit my car, the gears shift, the engine hum. I track the days in a diary but even that is smearing the calendar lines together into something of a “it’s all feeling the same.” I progress in pages, but regress elsewhere. Suddenly sleep is too easy. My dream world begins to substitute the reality of my Hollywood apartment.

I’d forgotten how much the office life stabilizes the mind, and how writing — to truly write, to let it overtake you — consumes you at times to the point of insanity. I’d always teetered on the edge. As a young girl, I’d spend hours quietly alone after sleepovers with screaming pre-teens and NSYNC blasting from boomboxes. No one would assume I was a loner in high school or college, either; I hid it well with high heels and a propensity to party. As I began to lean towards my own solitary confinement, the drag of work would pull me back on a Monday and I’d find myself in a cubicle, connected with the world yet again by means of deadlines, work lunches and ubiquitous, polite smiles in the elevator lobby. I’d go home, spend quality time by myself, a daily balance stricken not by some knowledge that I’d be healthier that way, but by a need to pay bills and stick to the post-grad cues.

But now, without an office to incubate my social life, I’m found in daily free fall, a blessing and curse all at once. I set my own schedule. I wake up when I want, and can sleep when I want. Perhaps it is the ultimate freedom, and it was certainly something I longed for during the days of pre-dawn wakeups and paperwork stacked so high I couldn’t see past the copy machine. I’ve wanted this for so long, yet now that it is here, I question my ability to handle the freedom, a freedom that at times feels suffocating.

Like most writers, there comes a point of regression into a mild form of solitary confinement. Many find themselves in rural cabins, or holed up in studio apartments, scribbling away about a world that does not exist. Some find themselves awake specifically during the hours of the day (or night, rather) when they will be least disturbed by other people. But the momentum of their alone time builds and, like some mental snowball, it takes on a life of its own. The solitary confinement, at first purposeful, is suddenly unintended, like the mind’s unstoppable inertia guiding you through exhausting sleep patterns and dishes stacked up in the sink. You feel like an unwilling participant in your own descent, even though the descent is based almost purely in unbridled mental freedom.

This, as it turns out, is like a weakened homophone to what is considered to be one of the most taxing forms of punishment. For those who act out while locked away with other “dangers to society,” it’s a year…or two…or maybe seven of being alone. Of your sleep patterns making vague sense only because of a small window. Of the mind trying to make use of the vast space now dug up thanks to a completely blank, untouched schedule that is peppered occasionally with meals and an hour of exercise. One man’s freedom can begin to, if misused properly, resemble another man’s complete lack thereof. In the end, the challenge is how to make use of our mental space. To create outwards, or to self-implode. We could never claim to understand, but we could see glimpses — just momentary glimpses — into the downward corkscrew and nod in humble recognition.

The difference that separates understanding and not understanding is a simple matter of choice. For the prisoner, their world is wiped away by the hand of another, and the mind festers in its place. To see the artist’s mind dip into bouts of shallow madness after being alone with itself reminds me of the depth of madness that must be experienced by those who wake up and fall asleep each day alone in a small cell. Charles Dickens wrote of solitary confinement, “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” As it is, it isn’t the specific act of being alone that can be so troubling; rather, it is the mind’s reaction to the loneliness that begins to spiral it into madness. It is the “mysteries of the brain” that close the walls in, not the architecture, not the room.

My friend told me he does so much, achieves so much, because he knows his father — holed away in a cell — cannot do anything. He lives for two, now. Though I only live for one, I keep in perspective my own “mysterious mind” by reminding myself of those who lack choice in their loneliness. Yes, the inertial mental tendencies of a writer (or any artist) can be a slippery slope, leading you into the pits of a narcolepsy fueled by your mindspace widening and closing in all at once. But there is a choice. There is a phone, a laptop, a car. There is a friend, a family member, a stranger’s smile. There is a ladder to climb out with.

I climb out with blisters. It happens. To lack daily structure is to, at times, lack mental structure. But with the free space, I skip around and create. It is a blessing, truly. But a blessing swathed in a challenge. And it is amazing how a blessing can almost degenerate to a shade of punishment, the brain walking a fine line between sanity and madness. Some are shoved over into a barred cell. Others trip over in the pursuit of something else. Me, I wobble across like a young gymnast on a balance beam. My toes grip the edges with each night of sleep.

To pace, to sleep, to dream. Hugging the wall, hugging the edges, thankful for the movement of my feet to keep in stride with the movement of the mind. Thankful for the ability to say yes, to say no, to turn a door knob, and walk out.