Bed: The Essay, Part I

Now that "Bed: The Etymology" and "Bed: The Painting" have primed and prepped our thoughts and imaginations, I will open our more global discussion of the bed by mapping out the various valences of symbolism and signification of this primal and principal piece of furniture. Consider the order relative, though I think that it roughly obeys some kind of logic.

Valence 1: Sleep, or The Biological Self

At its most apparent, the bed is pure organismic functionality. As organisms of Kingdom Animalia, and especially as organisms in Class Mammalia, we need significant amounts of sleep. While the science of sleep still remains shrouded in much mystery, scientists have amply observed that organisms deprived of sleep become sick and eventually die. Whether we sleep to conserve energy or to "recharge our batteries," the bed serves and is reserved for this most basic of man's biological needs. As such, the bed first and foremost represents our identity as biological creatures with immediate, habitual requirements.

Valence 2: Others, or The Cultural Self

As organisms with complex societal structure, technology, and language, we have ritualized sleep. Humans have largely and historically slept in a common area with their tribal or familial units. And this behavior is not confined to early humans, as a number of modern, especially non-industrialized, cultures share sleeping space with kith and kin. The modern, industrialized human exhibits these customs for newborns and for siblings. And of course, the modern couple typically shares its bed. One of the signatures of the emergence of a serious modern relationship occurs when the couple decides to move in with each other; they thusly sleep in the same bed. One of the signatures of the dissolution of a modern relationship occurs when the couple can no longer sleep under the same sheets. Young children often experience significant anxiety when they begin to learn to sleep alone. Many of us can recall slipping into our parents' or parent's bedroom when the terrifying mysteries of the night, of dreams, of being alone overwhelm us. Many of us can recall the youthful dread of bedtime as we stalled to perform our nighttime routines when older siblings and parents continued their evenings. And more generally, each culture has developed its more global ritual of working hours and sleeping hours. The bed, therefore, signifies our cultural selves—that we live with and rely upon others in necessarily organized structures.

Valence 3: Sex, or The Sexual Self

This valence needs little explanation, though it warrants much discussion, which I will tend to in "Bed: The Essay, Part II." Nearly as primal as sleep is sex, and so the bed is the domain of intimacy and situs of sexual union. To enter "a woman's bedchamber", "to lie down with" another, "to bed" another, to "get laid"—all are common phrases directly conjoining the bed and sex. The bed thus literally and figuratively signifies the sexual self.

Valence 4: Privacy, or The Discovered Self

Perhaps this valence is mostly indicative of a modern Western, perhaps even American, household, but I believe it is present and pervasive enough to merit its own category.

During adolescence, the youth begins to undertake the project of individuation, through which the youth starts to assert himself or herself as an individual separate and distinct from his or her parents. We thus have the common yearning of the young adult who shares a bedroom with a sibling for his or her own room. The adolescent bedroom provides the physical boundaries for the individuation project. The teenager decorates and arranges his or her room with their own symbols of individual identity; the teenager seeks out his or her room to achieve the solitude from the rest of the family necessary to fulfill the project. The privacy of the bedroom thus provides the teenager with the environment and the materials to promote and assert their self-discovery.

While adults may have lost or outgrown the initial individuation or angst that drives teenagers into their bedrooms, the bedroom is equally their province of privacy. Most obviously, the bedroom provides the privacy requisite for sexual activity. But the adult (and adult couple) craves privacy in non-sexual manners as well. I have observed two common phenomena of the master bedroom in the modern American household. First, the bedroom is frequently set off from the rest of the house, and often set off from the other bedrooms. Second, the master bedroom is frequently minimal and simple in its decor. Both of these phenomena I believe are explainable in terms of the adult's need for solitude and separation from the demands of adult life. The first phenomena achieves the physical separation. The second phenomena, I think, is the attempt of the adult to construct one environment relatively free from the constant bombardments of adult responsibility, from the constant torrent of distractions and noise of modern life. This provides the adult with a stripped-down, noiseless, stuff-less, information-less psychic clarity.

Whatever the case, the bedroom—and its focal bed—makes possible some kind of sanctuary, refuge, or den of privacy that the individual, self-aware of himself or herself as an individual, needs for psychic health. In this capacity does the bed serve as a symbol of our selves as discovered individuals who require privacy, temporary separation, temporary solitude from others, from the world.

Valence 5: Purpose, or The Transactional Self

I think this valence can best be summed up in the almost truistic question: What makes us get out of bed in the morning? In other words, what purpose drives us to be, in Heideggerian language, a "self-in-the-world"? For most of us, I believe this purpose takes the form of work. First, work furnishes us with the monetary means, in our modern era, to obtain the food and shelter in order to secure our basic, organismic needs. Second, work furnishes us with the means to partake of man's diverse manifold of cultural creations, to partake of the world as self-aware beings who can marvel at the miracle of being alive and at the miracle of the universe. Third, and ideally, work furnishes us with the answer to the question rankling in all our breasts: Why am I here? A profession, a vocation, work—no matter how humble or how noble—forms that (sense of) meaning, mattering, purpose that fuels us to go to sleep in order to rest up, leave our tiredness behind, and get out of bed to be a self-in-the-world. In order for our lives to be for something. Perhaps this valence is most romantically apparent in the lives of artists, teachers, agents of social justice, doctors, and all of those workers guided by the purpose to create and change.

Nevertheless, the bed in this valence serves as a kind of symbol "in the negative," as we are defined by what compels us to rise from it to interact with the world, with existence. And this is why I have termed its corollary aspect of selfhood the "transactional self," an emendation from my original "economical self." We leave bed in order to pursue that transaction of purpose between the world and our selves-in-the-world.

Valence 6: Illness, or The Vulnerable Self

What happens when we cannot get out of bed? We have fallen prey to some kind of illness. Physically sick, from a common flu to terminal cancer, we are in many ways reduced to supine bodies, sometimes with lucid consciousness, sometimes not, confined to our beds. In the extreme scenario, we are condemned to the miserable strangeness and alienness of a hospital bed. And physically ill, too, when we are the victim of personal injury, of sheer accidents, of being thrown into a world of violence and war, of being born into a life of indigence.

When we are psychically ill—I intend no judgement or derogation in my use of the work "ill"; I use the word literally to convey the sense of being in some way removed from what is considered the norm—when we are psychically ill, it is as if we are reduced to supine minds confined in a body confined to a bed. Psychically sick, too, when we are born into traumatic childhoods of abuse and neglect, into the arbitrary cultural psychoses of racism and social inequality.

Demoralized by worklessness, dehumanized by grief or guilt, depressed, overwhelmed by dread of life or of death, adrift, lost, wandering aimlessly as ghosts of our selves, or the victims of senseless, impersonal chaos, we see no reason and feel we have no purpose to get out of bed in the morning. In its valence of illness, the bed is a symbol of our bodily and mental imperfections, our brokenness, our fallibility. In its valence of illness, the bed reveals our vulnerable selves—selves vulnerable to a world teeming with randomness, uncertainty, and inexplicability.

Valence 7: Death, or The Mortal Self

Finally we arrive at the valence lurking spectrally behind all the valences: the bed as a symbol of death and a reminder of our mortality. I think we can read each valence through the lens of this death valence. Utter deprivation of sleep and complete isolation from others lead to death. The denial of sexual expressiveness, "bed death," the unhealthy repression of sexuality, impotence, infertility, the overgrowth or perversion of sexuality—when our sexual (and procreative) selves confront significant distortion, it is as if a vital part of us dies. The loss of individuality and obstruction to healthy solitude and distance from others and the world, along with the absence of purpose and meaning in our transactions with the world, can render us symbolically dead to the world.

"Deathbeds," "final repose," "resting in peace," "the big sleep," "eternal rest, "laid to rest," "requiem": the language of the bed, implied through the register of sleep and rest, is here intertwined with the often euphemistic language of death. Then there is the appearance of the corpse prepared to look peacefully asleep in the final bed that is the coffin. And, lastly and morbidly, there is the most frightening fact we all face: What is to guarantee that when I go to sleep tonight I will wake up in the morning?