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.

In that Sleep of Death What Treats May Come

Alas, poor Yorrick. I ate him, Horatio.

We’ve already discussed the desire for sleep in a blog previously posted titled “The Sleep-Lust Parabasis.” If anyone needs a refresher I suggest you go ahead and click on that in order that you may marvel at the proscribed role sleep-lust plays in our society. Furthermore, if you think I made up the word “Parabasis” just because your Mozilla browser doesn’t recognize it, I suggest you go find a copy of the fucking OED and educate yourself as to the viability of that particular word. As for you, Mozilla spell-check dictionary: You’re on my list.

The original plan was that I would post a “Food-Lust Denouement” in order that the two could be inexorably linked and their oblique concurrences illuminated for all to see. Unfortunately, I found the subject far too embarrassing and personal. Food-lust is not just a phenomenon; it is the defining phenomenon of my American generation. As much as we like to believe we relate to one another through our ridiculously arbitrary musical tastes and director preferences, it’s all so disgustingly similar it gets to the point it makes me want to throw up in your face. I get it, you really like Wilco but you didn’t like the latest Wes Anderson film. GET THE FUCK OVER YOURSELF.

Memo to everyone: Go fuck yourselves.

The truth is it is through our relation to food that we learn and discriminate the most. Those with a hatred for a specific race are antiquated mummies when compared to the growing fascination with body size and food intake. As fast as people are growing to despise the hefties among us these selfsame hefties are circumscribing their food-lust in the language of disease (!!!). Food-lust is not looked upon with the inauspicious gaze of those who glance on sleep-lust so inertly. The hateful gaze directed towards food-lust is as active and baleful as punching a hefty right in his/her jiggling fat-pouch.

It is interesting, then, that in the case of a clinical diagnosis of sleep-eating a doctor would so openly accept that food- and sleep-lust are intimately connected, claiming, “I think two instinctual behaviors become intertwined.”

But my case for the separation between the two lusts (and the holy post our relation to food maintains) is in the fact that those afflicted with Ambien-caused sleep-eating “realize they have an eating problem but do not associate it with…sleeping.” The lust for food is a “problem,” yet the lust for sleep is so benign they march their swollen ankles dutifully to the pharmacy to refill their tranquilizers in order that they may further clog their gullets with the silky-smooth embrace of JIF and Skippy as their horrified teenage sons look on. In horror.

This leads us to perhaps the most telling revelation of the article, that “abnormal behaviors [read: sleep-eating] like those could be unmasked in a small minority of patients taking any [sleep] medications.” In other words, perhaps those who are insomniacs are by nature the most likely to sleep eat.

When I began my foray into the realm of sleepy-time munching, I was in fact suffering from insomnia. I spent (spend) the nights consumed in worry until my lower-right eyelid twitched (twitches) uncontrollably. Then I would count the twitches until I fell (fall) asleep. Then I would wander about my childhood house and snack in complete ignorance of my own actions.

The point is, perhaps the same worries that keep us up at night are the transubstantiated forms of our repressed and hated sleep- and food-lust. Maybe the muted muffled voice of our animal past manifests itself in our concerns over our jobs, schooling, and haircuts. Maybe our whole societal structure is intended to limit how our true instincts are expressed. Yes, Derrida, I am plagiarizing your corpse. But in a context you may not have dreamed of and certainly would not approve.

This is why all old men should smoke pipes.

More to come next week, including a discussion of the following:

The first night her son was there, he found her standing in the kitchen, body cast and all, frying bacon and eggs. The next night he found her eating a sandwich, Ms. Evans said, and sent her back to bed. Later that same night, her son arose to find her standing in the kitchen again. "I had turned the oven on," she recalled. "I store pots and pans in the oven and I had turned it to 500 degrees."

Ah, the recognition of my youth…

Naked [Sleeping] Lunch

Just got a hankerin' for a few dozen popsicles and candy bars

The thing about drug-induced sleep eating is that it presents what could be considered a “golden ticket” of the Willy Wonka ilk that promises a lifetime supply of chocolate and definitive contact with a distant animal past. The article makes sure to mention that the drug’s side effect does not cause the usual psychological over-eating that Americans are all too familiar with, but a “primal” need for food that our culture is so foreign to it's ridiculous. This is part of what I identified earlier as the true attraction and joy of sleep-eating; that it in essence connects the advanced desire of symbolism and repetition of our current culture with an indistinguishable animal past.

Admittedly, my time with sleep-eating is most likely over. It was a constant and sticky companion throughout the years of my adolescence. When I found out Death Mask was afflicted with it to this day my initial and continuing reaction was bald envy. Therefore, the prospect of Ambien handing me a potential route by which I could relive the thrill of my somnambulant snacking gave me hope.

There is a problem, though, and that is the way that the “side-effect” of this drug is causing unbelievable weight gain. As the article claims, some woman in SoCal gained one hundred motherfucking pounds by sleep-eating candy bars and popsicles. Furthermore there were concerns that those who were sleep-eating would “choke” themselves in the process. This is not the re-enactment of awake eating that I remember so fondly, this is the action of a dog who destroys a rat trap and eats over three pounds of poisonous fucking rat bait because she is too stupid to know the shit will kill her. As Joseph K. exclaims at the end of Kafka’s The Trial, “Like a dog!”

This dog is so fucking stupid

The point is, perhaps the balance of modern to primal eating instincts when spurred by the drug tips heavily towards “primal,” making those foraging forays into the pantry a tipsy trip up the trunk of a prehistoric family tree. While this phenomenon may be just as interesting as the variation of sleep-eating we’ve been discussing up to this point, it is trivialized by the fact that it lacks a context in our society. I think the sleeping consumption of meticulously breaded shrimp preserved specifically for lunch in a Ziploc bag, or the unconscious preparation and consumption of a toasted PB&J resonate more clearly in the 21st century than the blind desperation involved in eating an entire bag of flour at 3 a.m. while your horrified teenage son looks on. In horror.

Coming Friday: Part 2, including interpretation of the following:

No cause has been found for sleep-related eating disorder, but Dr. Schenck says he believed that it happened when the brain confuses two basic instincts: sleeping and eating. "Those two become linked," he said. "In the sleep stage you eat. I think two instinctual behaviors become intertwined."

It's almost like there's an echo in here.