Glossary of Insomnia

A book in the making... (It's gonna be published soon)

This glossary stands on its own. It does not ensure legibility and it does not visually nor discursively taxonomize knowledge.

Inspired by Eve Tuck and C. Ree and their Glossary of Haunting (2013) this glossary functions as signposting or a roadmap to wade through the world of insomnia. This is not a list of definitions. The glossary of insomnia is not about words explained. These are not even words. They are images. “Sometimes the images also point to the way the everyday is best communicated not through the piling up of examples, but through the condensation of experience in an image that cannot be approached as a fact to be tested.” (Stevenson, 2014) I have encountered the everyday of the insomniacs through snapshots, bursts of experience, coherent stories, pictures, sounds, laughter and anxieties, holding hands, sitting together in the wake and in silence, speedily moving, discombobulated virtual back and forth, ghosting, tension, understanding and ambiguity… Never in facts. Here I want to express without formulating, the way image does.

Among the wakeful in Belgrade I (re)met Aleksandar Kecman. Both of us entered shyly into what will become the collaboration for this book. I, the inexperienced ethnographer, and him an introverted person (I know you are an actor). I looked forward to every single one of our conversations and quickly forgot it was “my fieldwork” tying us together. I still go over our interviews finding comfort, or provocation. The only thing I knew for certain is that I didn’t want to contain that experience in a scholarly dissertation. My institution doesn’t allow for co-authorship. Academia doesn’t REALLY allow for co-authorship. Anthropology stops at acknowledging our “interlocutors”. I didn’t want Aleksandar to be boxed into an acknowledgment section. He has done so much.

And that is how it all started. We decided we will create a Glossary of insomnia. Aleksandar started writing, I started translating, and on and on it went…. This book is an object, but it is also a relationship to futurity. Because I don't want to ever stop writing it.

While it is organized in alphabetical order some terms are offered in their original meaning, some are translated into English and some are offered in both their Serbian and English form. There is no particular logic to our choice. Certain words just felt impossible to translate, and some felt too universal that the original was not needed.

This book is dedicated and aimed at all insomniacs, all the restless, wakeful and alert. In order for us (all of us) to sleep we are reliant on the vigilantly awake guarding our night. When we sleep we let go of ourselves and relinquish our reins to the wakefulness of others. Insomniacs, you are the guardians. You do so much, you are so much.

Almost like a dream

2

The next moment we are on a field, or a meadow, we are gathered around the table and a plate with thinly sliced spit-roasted pig in on top of it. Only the table now is very long, and mutant-humans, or mutant-bees or mutant-elephants are sat at it. The spirit is ceremonial, even though I know it is not a holiday. My father brings out a basket with Easter eggs, all of them are matte black. These matte black Easter eggs don’t seem to cause any confusion at the table, I am also not confused, we all proceed to egg-knock, in a true holiday spirit, and little chicks start falling out of the eggs, until a woman at the end of the table, that seems familiar, but I am not certain why says: I knew they were not barren.

About Aleksandar

My name is Aleksandar Kecman.

I am from Belgrade.

I do acting. Theatre when they call me. Movies when they call me. Series when they call me.

I love film. (watching, doing)

I love books. (reading, getting)

I love cycling. (riding, watching)

I love music. (listening, trying to play)