Tiresome people are forever telling us to get out of bed. They scold us, they lecture us, they expound on the ills of our horizontal way of being, they call us lazy, they set our alarms, they poke us and prod us and pour cold water over our heads, all the while—I see the smug expressions on their faces now—thinking themselves morally justified. Behind them (think they) stands a vast legion of scientific research, armed to the teeth with facts and figures, anecdotes and experiments, ready to come to their aid at a moment’s notice. If that does not do the trick, there is a whole host of aphorisms of the carpe diem variety they can unleash upon you to shock you out of the comfort of your covers and into the cold air of industry. “Is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?” reproaches that Fifth Good Emperor, idol of those who like to peddle self-help in the form of Stoic philosophy, author of the Meditations Marcus Aurelius. I do not wish to refute such wisdom. It is doubtless salubrious to pay heed to it. Mens sana in corpore sano, as the saying goes, for how indeed can an inactive body support an active mind?
The recent phenomenon of “bed rotting” has emphasized this separation between bed and productivity—to “bed rot” is to bury oneself in a shroud of blankets, one’s eyes glued to the screen of one’s smartphone, usually, and ignore the demands of the world, the duties and obligations, the stressors and pressurizers, the ticking of the clock and the hours whiling by. The most extreme example of bed rotting can be found in Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998), a piece consisting of “box frame, mattress, linens, pillows and various objects”—that is to say, the artist’s actual bed, as it was when she emerged from four days of a post-break-up bender in which she consumed nothing but alcohol, cigarettes, and pills. “Various objects” include empty vodka bottles, cigarette packets, used condoms, period-stained underwear, a pregnancy test, dirty tissues, dirty clothes. The linens, as a byproduct of having become the artist’s most intimate canvases, are rumpled and stained with bodily fluids. This is what the wreckage would look like if a car crash were a person. It is the end stage of bed rotting. “Oh, my God. What if I’d died and they found me here?” thought Emin when she finally managed to crawl out of the scene of the crime for a drink of water.
And yet by plopping her bed wholesale into the Tate Gallery, she rewrote it as a site of creation, not destruction, a place where the self had license to draw its most inward contours, paint its most private hues and shades. One can curl into one’s snail-shell of self here, feel and be without having to do. The unmade bed, uncleared of its detritus, becomes the closest thing a human being might have to a nest. We curl our lip up at Emin, in revulsion or in contempt, but the truth is that all of our beds contain, visible or invisible, the wreckage of our most painful feelings, the refuse of our most wounding and incriminating thoughts, the scattered debris of who we used to be, which is also the raw material of who we are becoming. If our sheets are not stained with blood, our pillowcases at least may reveal upon close inspection the faintest traces of tears.
A few years later, Emin came back to bed with To Meet My Past (2002), this time a neat, orderly, four-postered affair, with chintzy bedding and curtains. Unlike My Bed, it is manifestly artificial, a created object, decorated with Emin’s own drawings, embroidery, and appliqué; the title of the piece is emblazoned in large block letters at the very foot of the bed. “I cry in a world of sleep,” reads one cushion. “Please, God, don’t do this to me,” reads the other. “I cannot believe I was afraid of ghosts,” reads a scrawl on the sheets. These give language to the sentiments of My Bed, making visible in a more formal way the private torments, the twistings and turnings of subjectivity a bed is often witness to.
Reader, scorn not this humble piece of furniture, for it just might be the most important. Indeed, aren’t the objects in our rooms our destinies? Don’t they witness our daily struggles, don’t they become the sepulchers of our dreams when we die? What secrets are being etched, second by second, onto their surfaces? What essence of us will cling to them perhaps forever? When I leave this room, what kind of existence will it take of its own initiative? What will that porcelain doll say to that chair over there shaped like a giraffe, what confessions will the pen make to the paper without my being there? But the deepest parts of our material and immaterial selves leave their vestiges most of all in bed.
Even the meanest abode contains a mattress, if nothing else. 200,000 years ago, we had, in a cave, a bed of grass mingled with ash; its “various objects” were “lithics, burned bone, and rounded ochre grains.”1 A bed molds to the form of its occupant’s body and very often remembers it. You can lie in a bed, sit on a bed, jump on a bed. People are conceived in bed; they used to be born, they used to die in bed—the warm, familiar bed of home, not the cold, clinical hospital bed—the bed that knew the daily dreams of its occupants, their fears and hopes and nighttime anxieties, their running thoughts, their half-formed aspirations, the secrets they could never disclose in public, the various metamorphoses and gradations of self.
Having returned to Ithaca after ten years of war and another ten of oceanic wandering, Odysseus finally comes face-to-face again with his wife Penelope. But, 20 years older, battered by combat, weathered by salt and sun, he must verify his identity to a wife plagued with suitors. Wily Penelope puts a test to her husband of many turns: she tells Eurycleia, their faithful servant, to move the couple’s bedstead out of their bridal chamber and “cast upon it bedding, fleeces and cloaks and bright coverlets.”2 Indignantly, Odysseus tells her that the bed is rooted to the ground and cannot be moved. He knows this because he built it himself, with his own two hands: “I myself, no other man, made it.” He himself found the “olive tree with long leaves growing strongly in the courtyard,” he himself built the chamber around it, he himself cut away the leaves and trimmed the trunk and made it into a bedpost and built the rest of the bed, lashing it with purple oxhide: “There is its character, as I tell you; but I do not know now / dear lady, whether my bed is still in place, or if some man / has cut underneath the stump of the olive, and moved it elsewhere.”3 This is the crafty man who thought up the Trojan horse; this is her husband; Penelope’s knees loosen and her heart melts and she flings her arms around him and kisses him, and husband and wife weep together.
A similar test of identity occurs in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea.” A prince goes the world over in search of a princess to marry, but he can never be sure whether or not they are real princesses. One stormy night, a girl claiming to be a princess comes to his castle seeking a night’s shelter. The queen plants an uncooked pea on the guest’s bedstead, then puts on top of it twenty mattresses and twenty eiderdown beds. The princess tosses the whole night through; in the morning she is black and blue. Nobody but a princess could be so sensitive, and the prince marries her.
We may not be characters out of Greek myth, we may not be fairy-tale princesses, but our beds, too, contain the signs and signals of our selves. They inhale one-third of our lives and exhale our mercurial residue. In 2014, Tracey Emin took My Bed out of storage in order to prepare it for auction. The duvet had gone flat, it didn’t look quite right. “So I actually made the bed and got in and pushed the cover back so it had that natural feeling that a body has been into it,” she said. “It is strange because it still has that same smell that it had sixteen years ago…. it’s like being touched by a ghost of yourself.” I think of Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series, ghostly outlines of the artist carved into beds of rock or sand or turf or cracked earth or fire. The world itself is her bed; it is the bed of us all, ferrying us away into that land of dreams and darkness from which we will never wake, except that our scattered atoms reawaken once more into the lives of trees and plants, that we sit up and rub our new eyes in what are aptly called flower beds.
But let us pass over that gloomy contemplation, for while there is yet life in me, bed is the most perfect place on Earth for my two favorite activities, reading and writing. How wonderful it is at the end of a long day to climb into bed with a good book, turn on the night lamp, and surrender oneself to a dreamland wrought by human craftsmanship; how wonderful it is in the morning, especially if one wakes early, to lie, still with the warm atmosphere of sleep around oneself, the perfume of half-remembered dreams, with the fleet phantoms and shimmering visions running about, and try to pen one’s own dreamlands. Indeed, no matter how many times I have tried to force myself to sit at my desk and write, no matter how many times I have scolded and cajoled myself, I always find myself and my computer drifting inevitably back towards bed, where the mind feels somehow freer, the flow of thoughts looser and more limber, the imagination more supple. As a very young child, by the workings of my rudimentary creative power, before bedtime I would always trick myself into thinking that, walking through the basement, I was actually wandering through a selva oscura, a witch’s wood full of gloomy shapes and tangled thickets, and that a warty, hook-nosed witch was actually out to get me. Then I would race up four flights of stairs and through the hallway, through my bedroom door, and leap into bed, where I was safe at last, as on an island of refuge inaccessible to none but myself. Sailing on the high seas of imagination, the bed was my faithful boat, steering through the shoals and currents of a world of my own making.
Colette, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, René Descartes, Heinrich Heine, and Alexander Pushkin all wrote in bed; sickly Marcel Proust withdrew to his “tidy mess” of a bed in a curtains-drawn, cork-lined Parisian room for the fourteen years in which he wrote the 1.2 million words that came to make up his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. When I visited The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in the Berkshires, I was surprised to learn, stepping into the calm of her blue-grey bedroom, that she wrote in bed, that every morning she would dash off page after page, propped up on her pillows, and fling them to the ground for a servant to collect. Checking into her room in the Hotel Esplanade in Berlin, she grew angry “because the bed in her hotel was not properly situated; not until it had been moved to face the window did she settle down….”4 The bed was a necessary and important instrument of her creative process. It supported her, it carried her through the labors of conceiving and delivering these carefully composed novels.
Against “bed rotting,” I would like to theorize the concept of “bed blossoming.” I have always loved a blooming tea, those bulbs that unfurl beautifully in hot water, releasing in thin transparent tendrils their essence, their flavor and aroma and their secret world of beauty. I think the mind does that in bed. I think it needs the warmth of dreaming, the watery unconsciousness of sleep, the supine position of rest and repose, the leisure to unfold all its involutions and sinuous turns.
In a couple of weeks it will be the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Will, in his will, bequeathed the majority of his estate to his eldest daughter Susanna; to his wife Anne, he infamously left his “second best bed.” Scholars have debated for four centuries whether this was intended as a slight. On the one hand, it would not take a poet to hear the pejorative undertones of the phrase “second best”; on the other, best beds of the time (some rationalize) were typically left for guests. But perhaps it was simply that the best bed was the one in which, as a young man, the great playwright had lain dreaming up his hour to strut and fret upon the stage, conjuring the dim outlines of Imogen and Iago, Puck and Falstaff and Cleopatra, cocooning himself in a silk gauze of poetry, in those lost years before he left the little village of Stratford for the great city of London in order to seek his destiny.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abc7239
Homer, Odyssey, Book 23, translated by Samuel Butler (1900) and revised by Timothy Power and Gregory Nagy. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0136%3Abook%3D23
Homer, Odyssey, Book 23, translated by Richmond Lattimore.
R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography.
As someone who prefers to do the majority of my work in bed (in fact, as I write this, I’m currently cocooned among a mountain of pillows, enjoying the spring breeze and sunlight streaming through the window beside me), I’ve always scoffed at the belief that repose is antithetical to productivity. We are not machines; compared to the universe, our lives are barely a blip in existence. Why should we deprive ourselves of the pleasure of being comfortable and relaxed in the little time we do have in this world - particularly if we are able to accomplish the same end products in bed or at a table?
On a different note, Ramya, you never cease to amaze me with the absolutely stunning eloquence and lyricism of your words. “The world itself is her bed; it is the bed of us all, ferrying us away into that land of dreams and darkness from which we will never wake, except that our scattered atoms reawaken once more into the lives of trees and plants, that we sit up and rub our new eyes in what are aptly called flower beds”. Wow. Reading your writing is like unwrapping a chocolate bar you’ve been saving for a special occasion and relishing in its sweetness and the satisfaction of a desire finally fulfilled. Or, perhaps, like the contentment of enveloping yourself in the softness of comforters, pillows (and cats!) after a long day of work….in bed.
*winks*
Hi Ramya, fantastic piece. Only you, with you cleaver imagination, references to history, writing and artful writing skills, could very nicely articulate traversing from “bed rotting,” to “bed blossoming".
I learnt something great today.
Thanks and keep on writing.
Best,
Boo