By Robert McCool
As you may know, I was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease recently. With the proper medications most of my symptoms have gone into remission, with a few exceptions. I still find it hard to swallow without choking, I sometimes have a tipsy way of walking that requires a cane, and my hands don't always do what I want them to, so I drop things.
But the worst symptom is the one which refuses to go away without some strong additional medication that I'd rather not use. That is my persistent insomnia.
Back in the misty, shrouded past of 1994 Stephen King published a weighty novel of 787 pages titled “Insomnia” (A Viking book published by the Penguin Group, ISBN 0-670-85503-0). That book means something to me and my condition that it didn't before.
Now, I know that Stephen King is not to everyone's taste because of his violent and sometimes unnecessarily bloody, scary plots. But this book is different. This book is a long, sometimes extremely slow character study of common people called by circumstance to rise above their everyday existence and recognize that something serious in their life is not right, and that some action must be taken to bring it back to something acceptable to a sense of justice and balance. Some call those people heroes. But some are simply protagonists in a story line that leads them into a peril most deadly, regardless of their fragile humanity. There is no written gore here to distract them along the way.
This is one such story.
Ralph Richards has developed insomnia after his wife dies. Every night he sleeps less and less, until he is awake almost all of the night. He can find no cure to his affliction, as it alters his sane existence and tired brain. And then he begins to see things that he believes to be hallucinations brought on by his sleeplessness.
Only they are not.
Ralph discovers that life is made up of layers of perception, and that he has been elevated to the next level above our commonly understood one due to his insomnia. Scientific literature is full of studies about how the brain ceases to function properly without sleep, and that will lead to extremely confusing, increasingly bizarre beliefs and actions. But that doesn't seem to be the case with Ralph.
Or me. How do I cope with this insomnia that's happening on a daily basis? What do I do during the long hours of the night that keeps me from being incapacitated during the day?
First, I may be able to sleep for one or two hours if I do fall asleep, which is good, with only a fully and completely awake night once every week or so. I take brief naps during the afternoon, but those are disappearing too now, so I get about fifteen minutes while I'm laying down on our supportive and comforting couch.
But in the wee hours I listen to music that I enjoy or haven't heard for a while. I've been through both Bob Dylan's and Van Morrison's poetic catalogs of forty albums each, as both artists became forceful expressions of Christianity in their richly productive later age. I let Leo Kottke's nimble fingers fill up the holes in my soul where sleep used to reside and wait for me to enter. I wade through Miles Davis' work like walking on a warm beach. John Coltrane is a sharp rocky coast, where I become the eternal spray eroding his rough edges. Those like his improvised blasts which would keep me awake and splashing against him. Also, I have found that Philip Glass and Brahms can be almost as numbing as the dreamlike unconscious fugue state of total darkness and silence. Or, they can even be like some possibly addictive sleeping potion. I also find that I can surf on the rhythmic waves of bodily pain that is the sadly sung blues while struggling through a bad spell or clumsy day.
But King’s Ralph is different; he takes action once he discovers the bizarre events are coming from a malicious danger to his mortal world. He then finds a stalwart companion in Lois, who suffers from insomnia too and sees the same visions as those Ralph suffers from. Together they set out to discover and battle the forces of evil like those that have taken over their neighbor Ed Deepneau. They hear about, and eventually fully perceive the malignant and scheming embodiment of evil called the “Kingfisher” or the “Crimson King.”
The novel centers the battle of good and evil around the abortion issue that was as hot a topic in 1994 as it is today. Without judging or taking sides in this ongoing and eternally unresolved debate, King lets his characters act around a rally of a pro-choice proponent woman, and the dangerous intentions of a madman intent on killing her.
It has been said that King could have done without the first 300 pages and had a more exciting book. It has also been said that if you make it past the first 100 pages you could then finish the novel and enjoy the characters in their deadly struggle to stop a slaughter from happening at the rally of women exercising their first amendment rights, be it right or wrong to the reader.
I picked this older book because I know of the altered state brought on by extreme insomnia, and because of my temporary difficulty in reading and remembering new books. I did read this novel when it came out in 1994, and remember it clearly as I look through it today. I liked it that much. And also I find myself now remembering just what's what and getting better at understanding fiction and how it operates, all because I had to start over learning to read and write critically.
I found this book to be fascinating with the struggle of simple good versus the all too common evil potential in we humans. I liked Ralph, tolerated Lois and her sometimes 1950s housekeeper-like thoughts and behaviors. She starts out too simple a person to be on their quest of righteousness, but eventually comes to provide Ralph as a foil and as a woman to care about.
I hope this novel will appeal to a new, younger audience who might find some satisfaction in the eternal battle of good intentions and actions versus apathy and ignoring the all too human truth about what we ourselves are capable of.
