There are a great many reasons not to wake up in the morning. I'm whispered them in my dreams.
Some of the reasons are long spiraling things, inextricably complex, discursive. They require diagrams to explain and the diagrams need annotating and the annotations often require footnotes that are filled with citations and references to medieval cosmogonies or post-colonial interpretations of pre-socratic texts or suicide notes.
Some of the reasons are ineffable, amorphous and abstract. One's tempted to call them 'undefined' but in truth their vagueness is necessary. They can't be diagrammed and any attempt to do so would come out as a picture of a tired dog or a sleeping rabbit. But they are limpid and ardent, most persuasive and intelligent in the moment they're grasped but completely absurd in the next. Analysis coagulates them; explanations twist and contort their shape.
Most of the reasons are simple but small: the bed is warm, the body's stiff, the sheets are soft, and so on. These aren't the best reasons but they're like pegs in the ground that act as anchorage points for the wires of larger arguments.
There are a few reasons _for_ waking up but most of them are founded on rituals and are truly more traditions than reasons. If one rejects tradition then only two, admittedly heavy, reasons remain. The urge to produce and the urge to consume.
A nice reason to wake is to eat, to bite into a juicy warm red thing. I'm often persuaded my time spent sleeping was wasted when I hear of the roasted animals and tree pluckings found at ebullient feasts I've missed. Those raucous confluences of flaura and fauna, splattered on plates, then fingers, then mouths!
However, the urge to produce is mostly a product of boredom and bored sleep is such a rarity that this reason starves in disuse.
It is clear to see that all we have left to wake up for (the urge to consume i.e. greed) is hugely outweighed by all the multitudinous reasons we have for remaining asleep.
Thus I almost despair at sleeps incapacitating effect on rationality! None of these marvelous reasons matter once sleep has set in because the decision to sleep or slumber cannot be decided! Even if it could, the decision could not be acted upon!
No, instead of only waking after deciding to satisfy the urge to consume, one wakes at the bang of a door! One wakes at the brush of a hand! At the ring of an alarm!
Nobody has ever decided to slip in to wakefulness for a bit of food. Nobody has ever chosen to slide across from sleep to consciousness for a warm drink. We're all hurled in to wakefulness, crying and naked. It happens everyday, all the time, even now as you read this somebody's being grabbed by the scruff of their neck and violently dragged in to waking. May I reflect on the tyranny of waking for a moment?
A tyranny whose shadow blots out all sight of reason.
I don't choose to wake.
And I wouldn't.
