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What leads to sleep has the shape of rhythm, of regularity and repetition… . The only processes that belong to sleep are those of respiration and circulation… . When it goes to sleep, the body is rocked to the rhythm of its heart and lungs… . Rocking movements put us to sleep because sleep in its essence is itself a rocking, not a stable motionless state. Lullaby: one charms, one enchants, one puts mistrust to sleep before putting wakefulness itself to sleep, one gently guides to nowhere—swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.
In this meditation on the lullaby, Jean Luc Nancy (2009, pp. 29-30) engages a rhythmic mode of being that departs from the waking self and detaches itself from the “you” and from the world. The “lullaby” that performs the night ritual, within both body and soul, approximates a primal world, measured only by the repeated beat of “respiration and circulation,” which puts wakefulness to sleep.
Nancy's phenomenological narrative of dropping into an endless pursuit of an imaginary “home” does not sound alien to our ears. Even though we are subjected to the mechanism of social media and at times deprived of biological and cosmic rhythms, many of us have often entered sleep with some sort of lullaby. The “swaying of the world which makes the cradle” on which Nancy reflects may be familiar to us both as (grand) parents and as adults who have been blessed with some kind of early lulling experience.
We may note that the dumb rhythmic signals (“respiration and circulation,” “cadence,” “rocking”) mentioned in the above passage are all vocalized by means of the lulling or
lulled voice: swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.1 The voice that is to wrap the sleeper who resists sleep may be attributed either to the one attending them or to the sleeper herself who has interiorized the lull. In her book, The Acoustic Mirror (1988), Kaja Silverman, the cinema and psychoanalytic theorist, conceptualizes the image of the infant held w