Insomnia Chronicles II

The night is full of insomniacs Googling insomnia. Babies and puppies sleep better with a ticking clock that mirrors the mother’s heartbeat. In the song “9 to 5,” Dolly Parton recorded the sound of the typewriter with her sculpted fingernails, the very things that would have prevented her from typing. When my daughter learned the word Bluestocking—an intellectual woman—she asked what an intellectual man was called, then answered her own question: Oh, I know: an intellectual. I was today years old when I first heard of the beat poet Elise Nada Cowen. I search for her work and find only fragments: The body hungers before the soul and I am trying to choke you/ Delicate thought. I don’t remember learning about Jeanne Villepreux-Power who studied the argonaut octopus in the 1830s. Aka the paper nautilus. Isn’t there a glass octopus, too? In college when I hurt my back, a doctor asked What does it mean that people in glass houses should not throw stones? I’d never been to an orthopod. I assumed this was a question they always asked, the way dementia patients draw pictures of clocks. The glass octopus is Vitreledonella richardi. You can see through its body to what lies—or floats—beyond. A kind of camouflage, protection from predators. Sometimes we exist by pretending we don’t exist.