Awakening to the Great Sleep War. Gert Jonke

welcome at his place, in future he hoped as many of them as possible would swing by, any time was fine, he would always welcome a visit from the telamones—which is what all of them together called themselves—at any moment, because their friendship would brighten the twilit loneliness of his quiet rooms!

      But unfortunately they didn’t give him a single opportunity to wine and dine them, if discreetly, with his meager hospitality, because of course they never went to his apartment; it would just have been too difficult, for a number of reasons, but above all it would have taken too long.

      Instead, he went to visit them regularly, questioned them about the composition of their world, their worldviews, their ideas about existence, and about the course of their walled-up everyday life.

      How did they manage to communicate?

      On the one hand Burgmüller spoke as slowly as possible, with pauses between each word, between each syllable, if possible intervals of several seconds, so that they were able to hear or understand everything he said or asked, even if he spoke quietly, barely audibly, or often just thought; while on the other hand, their utterances took the form of a not-really describable nor closely definable trembling of the light in the airspace immediately around their figures: Burgmüller thought he heard it very quietly, at least he thought he understood the meaning of it, because “hearing” probably wasn’t the right word for it, although each of their sentences did seem to be infinitely slowly and carefully spelled and then spoken, if it could even be called “speaking,” no, “speaking” wasn’t a suitable word either, not for this type of communication—those veins of light that flashed through the thin, perhaps whispering, nearly invisible blurring of the air that very quietly surrounded their figures, that buzzing of their heads which expressed itself in a manner that was obviously just barely perceptible: when Burgmüller listened to the telamones, it often seemed to him as if he were hearing with his eyes.

      The telamones lived, as he soon found out, in a version of the world that was at first neither understandable nor apparent to him: movements in that world flowed with infinite slowness, and indeed their understanding of existence seemed to involve hardly any motion at all. E.g., for one of the marble arms to make a fist so that its stone hand could punch some passerby in the head, or else if one of them wanted to give an inconsiderate loudmouth a pert slap with the back of its stucco hand, or else tear the seat from the pants of a disrespectful slob peeing at the feet of their lonely evenings and nights, they would need, depending on their position and location, at least two to three years, or even twenty to thirty, and in extreme cases two to three centuries.

      The by no means crippling, infinitely slow pace of their days and years was the necessary precondition for their existence and protection. The same purpose that air served for Burgmüller—something to breathe, but which also held his biosphere together in and with the atmosphere—was served in the telamones’ case by the inestimable time at their disposal, time that they even conceived of in a material sense; yes, they needed whole piles of eternity around them in the form of time clouds that they also somehow “breathed,” but “breathe” is again of course an entirely wrong word, because time held their biosphere together by not only being consumed but also being gathered into millennia and epochs, which remained always present, circling around them like smoke, those densely steaming centuries, the number of which determined the density of their atmosphere, whose every wheezing season and vapor trail fluttered inexhaustibly for decades—and this very dense chronospheric shell could not be measured with the conventional concept of infinity, because its inhabitants would often inhale and exhale in a single minute the time-space network of more than a hundred or a thousand years, which for them had passed imperceptibly . . . yes indeed, how to spend the time was no problem for them at all.

      They had no objection to Burgmüller’s spending his, in telamonic terms, ridiculously short time with them.

      Soon afterward, he spent several uninterrupted days and nights with them, but once again, far into the evening, his eyes fell shut on him, and so he spent the following night too, until far into the next day or evening, maybe even longer, he didn’t know, lying in the protection of their fixed shadows, in the marble folds of their back courtyards.

      When he woke up again, all of them were terribly upset about him, at a loss as to how to explain his presumed illness, from which he had just recovered—some of them had almost written him off already as having died some sort of motionlessly crumbling, timeless death, as having collapsed into a pile of rock debris at the foot of a cliff, as having died in a way clearly puzzling to them because it involved a loss of time.

      In any case, they had been very worried about him, had feared he would just remain lying there, would dissolve into little scraps of air that would in turn evaporate and flow away into the evening, but he got up again at last.

      It was only a little nap, said Burgmüller, he’d been very tired, more exhausted than he had been in a long time, and he’d slept better than he had in ages; was that really so unusual to them, why were they all suddenly so concerned about him, or had he done something to offend them?

      Slept? Tired? But what did it mean?!

      I fell into a deep sleep, he explained, and tried to define such concepts as rest and recuperation, and the degree to which they were needful.

      Sleep?! But what was it, and what purpose did it have, and where did it all lead to?!

      At first, Burgmüller wanted to tell them a little about his already forgotten dreams, but they didn’t understand—Dreams? What are those?—until Burgmüller finally grasped that the telamones up to that point in their existence had never heard anything about sleep, about sleepers, or about sleeping dreamers, because until then every sort of tiredness or exhaustion had remained completely unknown to them.

      No, until then they hadn’t known what sleep is, what it’s good for, what and whom it serves; and why should they have known even the slightest thing about it, after all? Nothing even remotely like falling asleep had been included in their blueprints; even the faintest hint of telamonic tiredness would bring the buildings of half the city to their knees: one night of marble sleep would cause everything to cave right in, a single dream would bring catastrophe, desolation, mountains of rubble, collapsed walls, burned buildings, the remains of sunken cities from recklessly forgotten wars; yes, it would have been exactly like a war, a telamonic sleep war of the caryatids against the city.

      Even the word “sleep” had been unknown to them, it didn’t occur in their language.

      They had never been tired, never exhausted, but rather were trapped in petrified wakefulness, immured by the need for an eternally preserved insomnia. That’s why Burgmüller had to make a great effort at first to explain things in a way they could begin to understand; he began with the word “sleep,” and for weeks he explained again and again what was meant by it, what it designated, represented, in order to give them an understanding of it, along with all related phenomena, and he did so lovingly, and was precise down to the last detail, so that, at least on a hypothetical basis, sleep would be understandable—or more understandable—to them.

      The phenomenon was completely new and puzzling to the telam-ones; they were soon so fascinated that they demanded he tell them more and more about it . . . slowly but surely, they were starting to see sleep as an expansive, hitherto unsuspected art form, now presented for their appreciation, and which they couldn’t help but regard with astonishment and great admiration.

      Yes, that was a good time in his life, perhaps one of the best, all told; under his highly esteemed professional direction, almost all the caryatids and atlantes in the city undertook theoretically rigorous and pure sleep research, and as the chairman of their stony meetings, Burgmüller would give detailed lectures about sleep that proved immensely popular and were a great success, as were the follow-up dream seminars about all the phenomenologies associated with this area of the discipline: dozing, deep sleep, afternoon naps, daydreams, and the dream-night, which is to say the sleep period before and after midnight—in the coming days and nights, their zeal for any knowledge related to the subject became evident in their plasterwork: They were wide awake.

      Soon afterward, the telamones approached Burgmüller with the particularly