"The night," wrote my friend Kevin Sampsell in his opening to The Insomniac Reader, "seems so limitless with possibilities, so unpredictable, and fraught with the unknown and hidden." This dark frontier, Kevin goes on to explain, is a shifting process where things and people look and act "different," becoming erratic and out-of-character. Routinely associated with sleep, the world of the night often reflects the domain of the unconscious even without the assistance of the dream. Under this absence of the sun our intimate and private selves no longer need to haunt us, they can possess us.

While a teenager I wandered aimlessly through the night, drifting within the suburban environs of Milwaukie and Gladstone, along roads that appeared hostile and off limits during the day. I don't recall why I started. Maybe it was insomnia, or perhaps it had something to do with searching, similar to Patsy Cline in her famous song. As business-as-usual grows more intolerable these solitary walks have become more habitual, a frequent part of my waking life.

Portland at night resembles a void, yet even a city such as Portland has its nocturnal crowd. At night an intoxicated thug fighting with the police becomes heroic, rather than arrogant; a teenage girl urinating in the middle of an empty boulevard seems horrifically erotic; an unseen drummer, pounding in the South Park Blocks, sounds haunting and passionate; while a hideous modern sculpture, when covered by child-like chalk drawings of faceless lions, pumpkin-headed men, whales that look like vegetables, and quotes from Bertolt Brecht, appears mysterious and ancient under the lustrous moonlight.

One peculiar night in the summer of 2002, while passing through the Portland State campus, I found an object hanging from a tree that looked like the upper half of a pupa left over from a very large butterfly. Perhaps four feet tall and two or three feet wide, the object appeared to be made of medical gauze and plaster, while its interior was covered with a blue fabric. In some ways the object, because of how it moved in the wind, reminded me of the corpse of a cattle, skinned and hung in a slaughterhouse.

The night is a Rorschach shroud where our desires find expression. I have nothing but contempt for the day.

I remember at a very early age when I called my mother from a friend's house only to have the most bizarre conversation. I had dialed a wrong number, and when the woman I was speaking with realized I was not her son she abruptly ended the conversation. This was my first experience with the irrational problem of wrong numbers and my immediate reaction was that of curiosity. However this curiosity was quickly overcome by a feeling of anxiety that ceased only after I dialed the correct number and reached my mother. It is evident to me now that already at that early age I was programmed with a certain fear of chance, and the prospects of misdialing again nearly petrified me.

In Franklin Rosemont's esoteric gem An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers, he sees these wrong numbers not as something to be ignored, but rather, like a slip of the tongue, a problem to be examined by playful, adventurous, and poetic means. For Rosemont wrong numbers are not annoyances, as utilitarian logic would have it, but possibilities to overcoming the atomization of our present social condition. In a world where we are emotionally estranged from each other and from ourselves, wrong numbers can be seen as objectively offered moments. Similar to the ever-present corner Paul Garon once spoke about, these moments are pregnant with surprises, and can break through the fetters of modern living with their impulsively poetic potential.

Ever since Goethe’s Werther it has been hard to conceive of suicide any other way than as an act of self-repugnance. Promoting caricatures of desolate adolescents overdosing on aspirin or slitting their wrists, the dominant culture has depicted suicide as a pubescent problem, easily subdued by drugs or time. However, in this era of suicide bombings this notion couldn’t be further from reality. As the psychological institutions are so fond of telling us, the pain that drives people to suicide is only a temporary condition. But what they fail to clarify is that this pain is only as temporary as the fraudulent world that produces it. Suicide is an extreme form of opposition to business-as-usual. It’s a rejection of one’s fate, like walking off the playing field in the middle of a fixed game.

The blueprint of the prevailing social structure is this fixed game, and those in power are determined to make it an eternal state of affairs. The psychological institutions only support this social structure, numbing those who suffer rather than healing them. Their solutions for depression, boredom, isolation, stress, anxiety, dead time, and the other catalysts of suicidal behavior are simply chemical forms of conformity. True healing, the permanent solution to this temporary problem, starts with the transformation of our immediate surroundings, how we interact with those around us, and how we live our lives. True healing will only be brought about by the total transformation of this miserable world into one powered by the pleasure principle without compromise. Suicide may not be a part of this transformation, but it is proof that such a transformation is necessary.

Yet, for those who lack optimism in change, who feel they have no options other than their proscribed fate, suicide is a solution. It can be seen as a refusal to let those in power have the last word, like Haymarket martyr Louis Lingg who, in an act of poetic boldness, is said to have blown himself up the night before he was to be executed using a cigar packed with dynamite. Drastic flashes of self-empowerment such as Lingg’s are both expressions of contempt for an absurd society, and rejections of the unlivable.

It’s no secret that this western world has an oppressive disposition. Forced to sell our vitality simply to stay alive, we are detached from our deepest internal drives by the false identities and fixed roles survival requires. Underlying this psychological separation from who we really are and what we really want is an assortment of societal, sexual, and mental repressions intended to make us better, more obedient slaves, and to cement us in our exhausting servitude. The institutions of domestication are the principal distributors of neurosis worldwide.

Deliverance from this labyrinth of confusion and anxiety relies on total war against the monsters of the whole despotic order. This struggle is mental as well as physical, and absolute success demands the alliance of the id with the conscious self, reinstating everything the superego, that internalized tyrant, has taken from us. This war isn’t just about reclaiming the environment around us; it’s also about liberating the occupied territories within us.

The quintessential aim of the surrealist revolution is this emancipation: a homecoming for the raw power of passion, the wilds of the imagination, and the hunger for the Marvelous. It is at this point, where poetry and mad love permeate, that the ego and the internal magnetically come together like two feral lovers. This radical synthesis is not a form of escapism, but a return of the repressed, and the only solution to the current crisis of consciousness.