Heartbreaks, Insomnias, and Clouds
Substack
Author: Merve Unsal, 15.06.2025
I am at an artist residency on the Aegean coast, and the drive back home to the studio involves a lot of scenic and swerving roads. As I made a left turn today, I saw two people who were standing by the road, a few meters apart. They were clearly having an argument, and the distance between them felt heavy. I wanted to get out of the car and cut through the miscommunication between them, like the ribbon at an opening ceremony. I imagined driving through the gap between them to disrupt the moment and scare them out of unhappiness, which was, admittedly, a misguided response. The sunset behind them felt out of place, as did the splashing of the waves right next to their feet. Around heartbreak, everything else is out of focus.
Maybe it is the physical remove of the residency or the long summer sunsets that pull at my heartstrings. I have come to realize that heartbreak plays an essential role in making artworks. I am not talking about work on the subject of heartbreak, which I have seen and heard and appreciate on occasion. I am rather thinking about the sensations, affects, and motivations of heartbreak as an actual material in practice that is worked, reworked, kneaded, pulled, stretched, slapped, crashed, squeezed until it becomes something else. Sometimes the country breaks your heart, sometimes an institution, sometimes a person, and most often, it is a combination of entities, persons, and situations.
I had a series of misaligned communications in the last few weeks. I spent sleepless nights going over words exchanged, sentiments expressed and unexpressed, articulations that were stuck at my throat, and the ghosts of past encounters. I felt like while the messages were between two humans, others were Typing... between the lines, catapulting me back and forth across times, places, and selves past and present.
And I am mostly haunted by the self that I crave to be. This gives me chronic insomnia, which I have learned to live with over time. Recently, a wise witch told me that I can’t sleep deeply because I enjoy the world of dreams too much. It’s not that I enjoy dreams inasmuch as I like the confused and ambiguous timelines of nighttime. At night, when I’m flipping through images and soundbites, real, imagined, and dreamed, I co-exist with all the selves that I have been and all the selves I can be, and to me, this is a vital process. The insomniac state of the night is an inhabited space of not-time, flickering with possibilities, connections, connotations, and realignments.
I had picked up Etel Adnan’s In/Somnia (2002) when I was still trying to understand and resolve what was happening to me at night, trying to access the slumber that eluded me. Adnan breaks up words, sentences, spaces, and explodes punctuation to collapse space. Most of the time, that boundary between the inside and the outside and the contours of our corporeal entity feels like it’s oozing. The poem “XXII” is, “No clouds in this room / but... (?) mountain— / blanket... blank . / vibrations underneath / neathhhhhhhhhhhhhh”. I know that this book, as are many of Adnan’s works, describes war and its affects on peoples and histories, but these four lines also articulate that act of tuning into and out of times and landscapes that fold in on each other, one cloud, one vibration at a time.