AFTERTHOUGHT
Sensual Pleasures
By ALAN BRIEN
I'vn always thought my- self, in a quiet way, some kind of connoisseur of 'sensual pleasure. There seems to me hardly any activity, if savoured and relished and lingered over, which will not yield its dividend of physical satis- faction. But falling asleep
and falling awake especi- ally send warm, slow, peristaltic squeezes of enjoyment along the skin of my body. Controlled delay is the secret of almost all carnality, I find. At the beginning of a nap, that sensation of being launched in a spongy, downy boat on to a dark, silken sea is heightened if you can train yourself to draw back once or twice just before the chocks are finally hammered away, float up to the surface of consciousness and down again and up again like a somnolent water- snail. It is sometimes even worth starting off in a slightly uncomfortable position, with an awkward pillow in the small of your back or a stiff sofa arm behind your neck, for the final relief of being able to alter it and thus sever the last link with the bright, garish, noisy world outside yourself.
Ideally, of course, your snooze should be some kind of dereliction of duty. Nodding off in a lec- ture, when the speaker's boring voice wavers in and out of focus so that he appears to be talking some surrealist gibberish that is almost great poetry, is always a treat—though the seats are rarely comfortable and you look an idiot, if not a criminal, jerking and nodding in We open. A spice of danger is not the least of the ingredients of a good cat-nap—in the RAF, I drilled myself to wake up in the classroom with the words 'stomach pains' at the front of my mind. And many a time I surfaced into an unnatural quiet- ness, hearing my own snore dying away in my ears, only to be given the benefit of the doubt through this medical excuse. Fading away at the theatre is much more comfortable, and less public. A useful test for the drama could be elaborated from the experience—any play where nothing is lost by a five-minute blackout twice in the first act deserves to be dozed through.
Few women may credit, or welcome, the idea but I believe there is a special delight in sliding into sleep listening to the voice of someone you love burbling on. I would not say it is the greatest compliment you can pay anyone but I think it is a compliment someone pays to you to talk you into oblivion. High among the pleasures of sleep- ing with a woman is sleeping with a woman. Pro- perly regulated, the return of wakefulness can be just as voluptuous as its departure but again the pace should be deliberate and dawdling. To tune in gradually to the hiss and crackle of frying bacon, the musical tinkle and jangle of ice in a glass, cool lips just grazing your eyelids, the sun, naked and new, warming the chill from your pores—just the resurgence and reaffirmation of life after living-death is a sensual refreshment.
Even going to work in a cold climate has cer- tain compensations for the thoughtful hedonist. The great secret is to preserve that protective envelope of sleep enclosing the body for as long as possible. Any washing should touch only those portions of the skin which are going to be ex- posed to the Arctic outside, and then the flannel must glide over the surface like a duster over a masterpiece of sculpture. Beyond the door, in the raw, clean air, where every drum of the heel and click of the gate resounds crisply as if in a con- cert hall, and your clothes crystal over as with icing sugar, you carry with you still the snug, luxurious aroma of the bedroom. (Do strange girls ever look more exciting and sexy than in the early morning when they are only a few minutes away from their pillows and sheets?) But the real thrill is ahead, the sinking down into steamy gregariousness of the bus like a communal dor- mitory, the seeping through of body warmth from the muffled comrades around you, and the gradual
return of a slumberous torpor which never quite becomes sleep so that you wish the journey would go on forever. I can feel it all so vividly that I could almost go back to Sunderland and take a job—there's a drug for you.
Eating, drinking, excreting and making love are obvious examples of sensual entertainment known to everyone—though not everyone will admit to enjoying the third activity. I have never quite gone to the extent of Keats who is claimed to have peppered his throat, to increase the con- trast, before drinking a tumbler of claret. (I would have admired his winemanship more if he had chosen one of those white wines, just slightly chilled, which taste like water from the Garden of Eden, such as Chenonceaux.) But I think he was on the right lines—without anticipation, there is no true realisation of pleasure. Just think- ing about my morning cup of tea and glass of orange juice with my eyes closed, while my throat cakes up and all the veins and arteries seem to be drying out, is a small, regular prelude to mild but pure self-indulgence. No taxi ride is ever ap- preciated until you have been tramping for ten minutes in a drizzle and the knees of your trousers are just becoming damp.
Talking or thinking about the exact nature of your enjoyments, and arranging them in hier- archies of preference, is also in itself a sensual diversion. I can always make my mouth water by debating the evidence for either side in that eternal, insoluble conundrum—is pork better hot or cold? Books too, actually stir up in me such a hungry appetite sometimes that I force myself to put the current volume aside for ten minutes and stare at the ceiling to make the ex- perience last—a form of literary carezza. Often 1 go back several pages, and delay the climax I can sense is on its way, by reading the passage all over again. I prefer to approach a book as if I were intent on its seduction—I like to be hori- zontal on some pneumatic material, arranged within reach a glass of wine or whisky, an apple or some cheese, perhaps my one head-spinning cigarette of the day, and some pleasant, un- demanding music in the background.
I began this piece by suggesting with my open- ing phrase that I was not such a connoisseur of physical comfort as I had always believed. The reason for this doubt is my new discovery of the almost disgraceful luxury of massage. I cannot think why I have only just realised its value late in life. I have always enjoyed stroking and being stroked by girls. I suppose the idea of surrender- ing myself to the firm, strong, very nearly pain- ful, pleasure of being massaged by a man seemed somehow epicene, if not obscene. There was also the small question of the cost. But now I have convinced myself that if rats live longer when regularly rubbed, then I will too. The money is a medical investment, a necessity to my career, and I shall try to charge it as an unavoid- able expense in my next tax declaration. But whatever it is, I love it. Before I took the risk, I asked a friend of mine how he found massage and he replied. It makes me feel like Marilyn Monroe.' I said, 'You mean Marlon Brando surely.' He thought about this a bit, then he said, 'No, I mean Marilyn Monroe.' I can almost see what he means—massage seems to be always sculpting a new, beautiful you from the old. flabby you so that you expect to see in the mirror afterwards a vision of dazzling sexual attractive- ness. So far as I can observe, it has not changed my appearance one jot. But the illusion, the fan- tasy anticipation, that Pygmalion is at work on your rubbery clay is your reward. A new sen- sual pleasure after the age of forty is a rare wind- fall—may the heavens blow down many more!
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