Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN I HAVE often boasted that I could sleep through any- thing, if necessary.. It was necessary this Tuesday morning in my favourite city of Dublin and I think I have now proved my somnolence against all challengers. Owing to the smoky atmosphere at last
night's party for the
Dearest Dracula cast, or possibly a bad shrimp, or even, just conceivably I suppose, the mixture over a long evening of pink champagne, draught Phoenix, bottled Guinness and an occasional medicinal Power's whiskey, I was obliged to spend the forenoon in bed. When- ever I take such a holiday, some Puritanic vestige insists that I pay for this desertion from duty by having my body still endowed with a selection of aches and pains after I have woken.
Invariably, I find that I have been sleeping with both hands bent right back like a seal's flippers, with my rib cage squashed into the shape of an old accordion, and with my face ribbed and pat- terned by whatever thick-knit sweater, hard- edged matchbox, key-ring or odd book I have idiotically left on my pillow. It is almost as if there were some family tradition, or fairy-tale pact, which decreed that on certain nights I was allowed to lose consciousness only if I promised to remain frozen in one awkward position throughout the night. I find that I often lie for slow eternities in that limbo between sleep and wakefulness, desperately trying to amass enough energy in one given muscle to be able, say, to straighten out two fingers. It was in this state, this very Dublin morning, that I realised that not only had I masochistically trussed myself like a roasting fowl, economically even insisting on using as bonds my own nerves and sinews, but I had also made myself captive to a hellish orchestra just outside my hotel room window.
Hammers seemed to be the most common in- strument—few of them, to judge by the impact, less than fourteen-pound piledrivers but all differentiated with wonderful subtlety by the variation in pace, and the diversity of material ,against which they are beating. (I can still hear them as I write in the bath, having retreated from the bed in order to obtain freedom of movement and without losing horizontal support, with a ballpoint on the backs of old handouts.) The heaviest—the bass drum or euphonium of the group—comes in measured, regular, dogmatic bangs, biting heavily and irresistibly into some impacted concrete deep underground as though chiselling out decay in the world's wisdom teeth. Then there is a fast, fluent, scampering hammer which speeds up its pace throughout each but as if its brazen insistence is always about to sue' ceed in shifting some ancient, rusted obstruction on a pipe as long as the horizon. This little sonarn, lodges itself like a little steel dart into my ninon:. gland, that mysterious third eye in the centre the forehead, where the cold ache, agonising but satisfying, blooms when you have eaten ice' cream too quickly.
Then there is the flat, dull, hollow, off-key clatter like a large bill-board being slaPP, wearily by a slave with a cricket bat. Beginner; and failures in the open-air percussion band, feel, must be chained in this group, doomed I_ batter away without a score, denied all opP°I tunities for any individual improvisation such aS is permitted to older, and hornier, hands. This is not so much a noise as a pressure of air on the ear-drums—it makes me feel as if I.am coming in too steeply to land in a jet plane. The biggest noise of them all (which must have lifted me asleep at least two inches off my bed and now creates tiny tidal waves in my bath, ripples my body hair like seaweed, and splashes warm spray into my open mouth) is a great chord of massed, aggressive Wagnerian hammers as if some local thunder god had picked up a bundle of girders the size of the Wicklow Mountains and dropped them between O'Connell Street and the sea. (By the way, if ballpoint manufacturers wished a bet- ter selling gimmick than the old writes-under- water legend, they should create one which writes when the pen is horizontal;or even better, with the point upwards, for the use of essayists who compose lying on their backs in the bath.)
All this agitation in the air is presumably con- nected with some building operations, near, or even in, the hotel—I cannot be quite sure, for when I lean out of the window there is not a ham- merer in sight—which would account for the occasional backing with the rhythmic effect of maraccas and tambourine which I have decided is produced by the pouring of sand and pebbles from an.iron wheelbarrow into a tarpaulin chute.
Th,
he slightly, stagy, rather overdone, falsetto scream which breaks out every now and then I have also tracked down in my aural memory—it Is, that building site stalwart, the proudly un- greased hoist-lift protesting as its steel cables run /awly against rough•metal.
,,I have an entirely unscientific theorem (or per- iPris pre-scientific—remember, I am the last of title Diehards, who still defend the Phlogiston Iheory) which runs like this—Noise is uncon- Uuned, non-working energy: the really efficient machine is a silent machine.' Those fools who ;par and crepitate around in their sports cars, Voiding out undigested power through their ex- haust pipes, are simply proving that their engines are wasting fuel. The millionaire's super-car, de- sOgned for the man who can afford to buy efficiency, overtakes them on the hill with only the token whisper from its internal combustion. I Would go further (and here I acknowledge I am lleading on mystical ground) and assert the true, good, beautiful, honest operation of a power on 1 body, or of a body on a body, will always be noiseless. Even a nail can be hammered, with only the smallest disturbance of the sound waves, it the weight of the hammer balances the re- sistance - of the material and the movement is
thought through by the hammerer like a Zen master firing his arrow. This is obviously why the silent screw is so much superior to the noisy nail.
In the ideal 'Socialist state (I dedicate this sen- tence to Peter Simple) would the hammerers out- side my window be producing only a muffled undercurrent of tapping and pecking? Could the elaborate, bravura display of explosive din be an unconscious protest against their exploitation —a Marseillaise sung with the muscles? The dis- cordant note here is the realisation that I can train myself to stand any random working noise they make, but it drives me crazy when they sing popular songs. However hard it may be for in- somniacs to believe, I think the evidence suggests the mind really does want the body to wake up refreshed. The dream is only one of several de-
vices invented by the mind to incorporate outside distractions and internal stresses into a super= ficially meaningful pattern which will allow the eyes to remain closed. Even when the body is awake, it is my experience that the mind can be trained to prevent accidental, unimportant strains and irritations, felt along the senses, from in- flaming the brain. By practice, this morning, I found I could eventually swallow, absorb and then neutralise each noise by isolating it for this essay, sicklying it o'er with the pale cast of art, then putting it up for sale like a cheap pearl. Now, I am slowly moving towards the vertical. If only I can bring my method to bear on those two painful hard-boiled eggs which have lodged behind my eyes, I might be able to reach the Press Office typewritter and then the GPO.
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