Philosophies of Insomnia 2: Eli Siegel

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Love and Jobs

At rest  On her breast,  He lay.  And he thought  Of his job  Next day. From Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems (Definition Press) © 1957 by Eli Siegel

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Letter From William Carlos Williams to Martha Baird - November 3rd, 1951

My dear Martha Baird: 

     

I cannot adequately thank you for first writing me and then sending me the copies of Eli Siegel's poems. I am thrilled: your communications could not have come at a better time. I can't tell you how important Siegel's work is in the light of my present understanding of the modern poem. He belongs in the very first rank of our living artists. That he has not been placed there by our critics (what good are they?) is the inevitable result of their colonialism, their failure to understand the significance, the compulsions, broadened base upon which prosody rests in the modern world and our opportunity and obligations when we concern ourselves with it...

...You say Siegel is alive and working. Greet him for me and tell him of this letter. I congratulate you on the intelligent direction of your work and the heart behind it.  


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4)

The Philosophy of Insomnia 

By Eli Siegel 
(Extract)   

There was a person who told me he was troubled by insomnia, among other things. Sometimes he got angry with people. Sometimes he felt he was the most persecuted and most intelligent person in the world. Insomnia was one manifestation of the dislocation he had made between what Aesthetic Realism calls Self and World. He'd been having insomnia for a long time. His family doctor told him it came from a recondite kidney ailment. A neurologist of the advanced Freudian school told him he couldn't sleep because he had the death instinct. A psychoanalyst, somewhat less advanced, said he wanted to kill his mother.

In my work, one way of looking at the self has been through sentences. A person has been given two words, standing for matters crucial in his mind, and been asked to write a sentence with them. I gave this man the words magnificent and bed. The sentence he wrote was: “I am magnificent in bed.”

He unconsciously saw himself as most important in bed. He had trouble with his brothers, his father, his mother, the foreman where he worked. In bed, he said to hell with all of them. The tendency to be a king or queen or emperor or (more conservatively) a lonely duchess in bed, is tremendous. The loneliness of bed is used against the things seen and endured in the street. When you're in bed, the world is yours. This person had seen bed as a place where he could get back at everyone who had ever annoyed him.