Page 70 - November 2020

November 2020 70
Litterateur

Strategies of Sleeping

The sky was a clear blue, the grass was bright green, and the fence was yellow, so
he could better see the animals. None of the sheep had horns, rings on their

noses, or bits of grass stuck to their pristine coats. The point was to count
quickly. Imperfections would only slow him down.

The first few sheep that leapt over the fence went over smoothly and he counted
them. However, Jim eventually found it difficult to separate one sheep from
another. They seemed to blur together into a stream of tufts that looked like
clouds rolling over the fence. The grass and fence were hand to tell apart by the
point as well. The overall effect reminded Jim of one of the paintings he had seen
in the gallery, where it was difficult to separate the edge of some water lilies from
the pond they sat on. Jim tried to remedy the dream by imagining crisp lines
around every object so that every color was contained as if part of a stained-glass
window. He liked to look at them, and wished that the museum he went to earlier
had a better collection. That would be getting them somehow from churches, and
he knew that was a complicated process.

As Jim continued to count the sheep, they began to transform again. The barriers
he had pictured around each sheep in order to preserve their color and shape

changed. They became angular and geometric. The animals turned into
collections of cubes ascending and descending over a fence. Trying to count
them was difficult. Jim looked for the eyes and mouth on each one, in hopes of
finding a way to distinguish one from the other. These features were not in the
right places and it was hard to tell in fact which direction they were even going.
Jim looked at the set up and expected them to start wearing harlequin costumes
while playing around fragmented bowls of oblong fruit.

He tried to picture the sheep in their previous blurry state. It was difficult to deal
with the stream of fur, but easier than completely losing perspective. The closest
he could get to that state resulted in sheep that were blurry and grass that was
now bright red. The fence remained yellow. Jim thought about counting
something else to fall asleep but nothing else seemed as easy as conjuring up the
sheep. At least as a subject. Other difficulties now presented themselves in his

imagination. The fence, the grass, the sheep, and the sky started to become a
confused array. There was no sense of perspective and all he could make out
were white splotches, disembodied black flecks of legs and heads, greed blades
of grass tossed everywhere, and pieces of yellow fence broken up as if in
splinters. The bodies were elongated in different directions too. Head and tail
were less important than the bump and the hollow.