Where the Mountain Hare has Lain

My where has the time gone?

A simple question plagues me: how does one remember sleep eating?

The question persists in the field on account of the theoretical basis my partner and I have outlined. The basic premise has always been that there is an essential recapturing of a memory informed by the imaginary in the act of sleep eating. Evidence which can be gathered below, particularly in Death Mask’s fantastic bit on Freud and art ultimately predicting the sonambulent consumption of NutraGrain bars, as well as in my own serialized investigation of newspaper reports of Ambien side effects, points to the presence of a repressed spectral primitive past that surfaces in sleep in order to mandate the mass consumption of neophytic foodstuffs. If this is the case, what role can we ascribe to the way in which the sleep eating act is remembered, both by the participant and their helpless horrified teenage sons who look on in horror?

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest

Heidegger’s project in Being and Time is often described as a rumination on the potential contexts of universality. If there is a “being” at all with which we can connect all human consciousness, surely all ideas of fundamentality must spring from this very location in time. Of course, when put in these terms the project looks hopelessly Cartesian, a hopelessness I wish to maintain throughout while simultaneously offering an apologia to those Heidegger fanatics who find the Descartes comparison unbearable.

The man depicted is not Martin Heidegger, ergo, the man depicted is not a Nazi sympathizer

The potential uses of Dasein have been explored in more depth than I care to give them in relation to the discussion of eating and sleeping, but the most important use—outside several references in Encore that Lacan makes to it, usually punny—is Derrida’s concept of the trace; a temporal shift that allows memory to act on signifiers and establish relations of competing subjectivities. 

The internet says Lacan really drew this

The importance of this critque, as it were, is that it locates comprehension outside the realm of absolute presence, a myth Derrida cheekily ascribes to Saussure’s original notions of linguistic signification. As shaky as his blame game can get, Derrida is right in noting the supplement embodied in memory—namely, the supplement that makes the whole system of Dasein work.

Quickly becoming my favorite collection of pictures in any YHTALMM post

But if any ontological view of the present needs a supplement, what is the present anyway?

What if instead of present and past in dialectical processes, subjectivity were really a dialectic of past and ur-past, or time and Autre-temps? What if the duality of time and memory, described by Samuel Beckett as “that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation,” were itself only a mote in a larger system of dualities?

Officially my favorite group of pictures for any YHTALMM post

Every memory of the sleep-eating act is therefore a play between the two times in which one can remember. The Ego, then, is only the memory, only the auditor of a speech that has already come before its time. The Id becomes the locus of mythic time, a time of cannibalism and castration that only redeems itself in the unbounded potential for enjoyment. The question of how one remembers sleep-eating may not be the question at all; instead let us ask when.

Never to Leave that Valley his Fathers Called their Home.

This begins what will hopefully become a regular series of posts on art criticism focused around those pieces with specific applications to our ongoing investigation of sleep-eating. Today’s selection, Saturn Devouring His Son, was only the most obvious and disturbing of a large collection we plan on glossing.

Francisco Goya’s overeager biographers are quick to point out that the artist’s diminishing eyesight and growing isolation at the end of his life contributed to the gloomy oeuvre of his later work. I am quick to point out that the dude was painting depressing shit his whole life, and that if anything changed when he went blind it was only a matter of degree.

Oh, cheer up, Mr. Sappy-pants!

Another frequently held opinion about the work is that it somehow represents blindness and insanity; the madness that a rapidly encroaching death confers on the elderly. Erik Weems writes, “[Goya] renders [him] blatantly insane, Saturn shown without any recognizable expression of premeditation.” This line of interpretation belongs in O magazine, just above the picture of Oprah on a bicycle. I would first like to know what an “expression of premeditation” is. Perhaps when a cannibalistic act is premeditated the cannibal in question achieves an inner peace as he consumes his/her victims. Apparently Erik Weems knows about these things. I must admit I do not.

Erik Weems can tell this was not planned.

What I do know about is the painting itself, and although it is impossible to determine premeditation from it, Goya does leave us with substantial clues as to its interpretation. The original myth has Saturn assured of his children's eventual usurpation of his role. Thus motivated, he eats them in order to prevent his eventual downfall. Samuel Beckett seems to substantiate Saturn’s concerns when he says, “there is no hope, for everyone is a parent.” And, yes, that is a pun: Beckett was fond of them.

In defense of Erik Weems’ position, there is something jarring in Saturn’s expression; namely, he does not look on his victim (his son) but gazes past him and out at the audience. The resulting experience (for the viewer) is the impression that Saturn is more interested in us than in the son he is devouring.

The act of cannibalism is often referred to as “primal,” or, alternately, “savage.” These are both words, coincidentally, that were used in a recent Cosmopolitan article that heralded fucking against a wall as the greatest sexual position. On the one hand is the unthinkable crime: the familial betrayal of protective father against dependent son--like Abraham raising the axe above Isaac’s head; yet made even worse through the act of feeding. On the other hand is the thrilling sexual act, in which you are encouraged to claw at one another and scream in order to heighten the “primal” and “savage” enjoyment.

The question should be, How WILL you sleep when he's not there?

The disturbing point is that in the Cosmo-approved fucking there is a piece of Saturn Devouring His Children. The desires are crisscrossed: the perversion of food-lust has the meat of the ram transubstantiated into the helpless Isaac; the wall-fucking transforms procreation into mock-violence. Notice also how in the media food is frequently sexualized and vice-versa—not just in women’s magazines, but even things as (seemingly) harmless as advertisements for frozen pizza.

Death Mask and I have provided plenty of evidence already describing how sleep-eating connects with a distant past in which desires existed at their “primal” geneses. That is not to say that this “time” ever existed, but that it exists qua universal point of intersection of all human desire. This point of universal desire, of the excess of all possible satisfaction, exists dependent on the fact that it is impossible i.e. that it can never be symbolized or dominated by interpretation. Because it resists our efforts to subjugate it we strive towards it with stupid and blind stabs in the dark; we fuck against a wall or eat an entire frozen pizza while sleeping or watch Spielberg movies about the Holocaust. These efforts, however pleasurable in the short term, continue to deny us access to that point of original (terrible) joy. Instead we get only glimpses, only tiny crumbs off the enormous Whole.

Here, in Goya’s painting, rests the impossible Whole. It stares us in the face because it already knows us—knows us like it knows its own children.