Sleep and Wakefulness

Hello, while you are reading this text today, you will be taking part in a funeral process I have arranged; I will be on both sides of that process, and once the procedures are over, we will have a small celebration as well. Do not ask how, it can happen. We are learning together, or perhaps I am learning while writing these lines. While I, and the world that is with me, bid farewell to me on one side, I also find myself among the crowd, helping that farewell along. In other words, I am still active within the process, placing what ought to be passive upon the stone. The one lying there is me, the one carrying him on the shoulders is also me, and of course you too, through this text, are witnessing this process. How? We might think of it like the letter H, or perhaps you can look at it slightly tilted. Each time, a small piece of me remains outside the process, because perhaps learning can only continue in this way.

Yes, with every breath we move a little closer to bodily death. Our lives are measured by pulse counts, and in an average lifetime a person reaches two billion heartbeats. Although animals live for different lengths of time, both the elephant and the mouse, in the end, complete their time here with roughly the same total number of pulses. In Nick Lane’s Transformer: Life and Death in Deep Chemistry, he writes that we remain alive through reaction processes taking place in less than a second. When our cells, which appear so still, are observed through a microscope, each one enters into a billion metabolic reactions every second, and thirty trillion cells together sustain one hundred billion trillion reactions per second. 10^23

In truth, with every breath a new world is being established around us, and as long as we remain connected, we experience this common field and try to understand it. Once again, what the ancients said proves true: according to the four and the seven, we are living inside a world that is rebuilt and destroyed every day.

Today I began my text with the word funeral, a word that in one sense recalls death, the end, and in another sense separation. Yet funeral was simply the first word that came to mind for the subject I wanted to express. Sometimes, when we cannot fully say what we mean, we choose long texts. Some prefer to continue by multiplying meanings; I, on the other hand, search for ways to express the whole through less. That is why, as in my earlier writings, I have to descend into the roots of words and draw meanings from there. Since I began with the word funeral, I want to focus on it and see what I can find. My field of inquiry contains the words funeral, grave, and tomb. The carrying process continues, and together we begin to learn. The Turkish word cenaze comes from the Arabic janāzah. At first glance, nothing seems to change. When I look into the Arabic meaning, I do not find much that immediately catches my attention. Following this path, I turn to the words grave and tomb through Mehmet Zeki Pakalın’s Dictionary of Ottoman History and Expressions. I learn that the Arabic word kabir also means grave. I also learn that makbere, another Arabic word, is used in the sense of cemetery. Then I turn to Semin El Halebi’s Illustrated Encyclopedic Qur’an Dictionary. I search under the letters q b r ق ب ر These letters tell me of meanings such as placing a person into the grave and giving someone a grave. As roots, the word appears before me as a place, but at the same time it speaks of an action. As I continue on the page, I come across the verse in Versus Fatir 22: You cannot make those in the graves hear. The explanation suggests that what is being pointed to here is that people are in fact asleep, and that when they die they will come to themselves. Yes, I sense that I am getting closer to what I was searching for. We have come quite close together. This time, through the English word cemetery, I move a little eastward, reaching its Latin form coemeterium. Then I move a little further east again, wishing to descend into the roots and ask what the ancient Ionians of Anatolia said. I learn that coemeterium is connected to κοιμάω koimao, to put to sleep, and κεiμαι keimai, to lie down, to be laid out, while the suffix terion creates the sense of a place. As I continue following these connections, I come across ἐγκοίμησις enkoimesis, that is, sleeping inward, almost a verb expressing the wish of those who wanted to sleep in order to seek healing and rest. Here, it seems that as one enters the process of sleep, a state of consciousness still continues; after all, we understand that we move toward the act of sleeping through a deliberate choice. And enkoimesis leads exactly to the destination I wanted. With an active aspect, the doer also accepts being passive: keeping a small part of the self outside, while laying the body down and becoming a noun. One lies down in order to accept. One part remains outside to guide the process, still helping with the carrying among the crowd. I continue searching for more meaning, and I find the saying: If you sleep from your thoughts, if you let go of them, you become one of the Companions of the Cave.

Now we return once again to the visible side, to the space between numbers. Because the funeral process seems to be over, and we move into the phase of congratulating one another. We live in a world capable of producing as much perception as the multiplication of the number of people by the act of daily thinking. Among these perceptions opening out toward infinity, we draw close to one another within an average that feels near and safe to us, and then we move apart again. Every day, every second. Perhaps we are afraid, or perhaps memorizing is simply easier. And so we are able to meet in a common field, a common idea, a common time. If we accept that a person thinks on average six thousand times a day, then together with the world’s population this would mean fifty trillion thoughts emerging in a single day. In such a place, where mental images scatter in every direction, I imagine that millions of different contents can be born every second. But the three dimensional cube, that is, the box, keeps repeating the same thing; it wants to draw people into a single box and swallow them. The children of those who were once trained in front of the television to laugh and grieve at the same things at the same moment are now, through the device they carry in their pockets, being made to believe in the same fears and the same realities in much shorter spans of time. Human beings now carry in their pockets what they want to hear.

Yes, I am entering a deep sleep. When the part of me that remained outside becomes ready to be carried and arrives here, I believe I will see that some among the crowd will already have risen above the surface of the water.