Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

NIGHT THOUGHTS

Somewhere in the middle of the night you wake up.

Is it bad digestion? The need to relieve yourself? A nightmare? An over-charged mind, which keeps telling you that you have some duty to perform? An over-stimulated imagination? All of these things or none of them?

Anyway, the fact is that you wake up in the middle of the night, and you cannot go back to sleep.

It is pitch black. The street lamps have long since been put out. Your village is far from any other.

You lie there in the dark for a while, thinking and wishing you could go back to sleep. But you can’t.

You pray.

It doesn’t help.

You light the candle you keep near your bed. You try to read. Your mind will not focus. You keep getting distracted by the shadows the candle throws on the walls and ceiling. Your mind works on them fantastically. You relate them to the odd creaks you can hear in other parts of the house. It is easy to imagine ghosts. It is easy to imagine some night creature hiding in the dark.

“This will never do,” you think. “I will use my Reason. I will get up and face the night.”

Taking your lighted candle, you move into your study. You pull aside the thick drapes, draw your chair to the window and blow out the candle. You let your eyes adjust. It is not pitch black after all. It is night’s particular kingdom. There is a lean crescent moon low on the horizon. There is no wind. The sky is clear. There are many stars. They move slowly, but they move. You sit there long enough to see a constellation rise and establish itself over a tree. It is completely silent – except for a sheep’s bleat from a near field, and once the incongruous squawk of a night bird.

You become acquainted with the night. You listen to its silence. You know its physical presence. It is at your elbow. You think night thoughts. The world of day is far away. You rise to this other enfolding reality. Night, the silent witness, the silent watcher, the other world, the other reality. Silence and starlight and you communing with them.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Somewhere in the middle of the night you wake up.

Is it bad digestion? The need to relieve yourself? A nightmare? An over-charged mind, which keeps telling you that you have some duty to perform? An over-stimulated imagination? All of these things or none of them?

Anyway, the fact is that you wake up in the middle of the night, and you cannot go back to sleep.

“Bugger”, you say, as you want your sleep and you know you will be unduly grumpy and tired when afternoon comes.

The orange light of the nearby city hangs over your suburb and penetrates your bedroom curtains. The streetlights are on all night. There is never real darkness. There is never real quiet, either. Every so often a car hushes past. There is the distant hum of a motorway. Be grateful for small mercies, though. At least it is quieter than at full day.

You go into your study and pull aside the drapes. Moon, stars, but too much light pollution here to see many of them. They are notional.

Reading is not an option. Your mind is too unfocused, too tired.

You wake up the computer. You check your e-mails. Touts, publicity, free offers. You delete most of them. You check out Facebook. Trivia, chatter, holiday snaps, gossip. You’ve had enough. You watch the BBC news on live feed. A scandal. A political shuffle. Terrorism. Deaths. An air crash. A piece of showbiz puffery. The world moves.

It is always day somewhere. It’s always day here in your study. Day can’t be turned off.

We have killed the night. We have killed night thoughts.

You write a poem about it.

THE SWITCH

                        i

The old parish stretching

from candle to candle

in bucolic darkness

had Death walk its acres

to gather its children

in uncured diseases.

The physick they fed then,

the leeching,  bloodletting

stocked churchyards with corpses.

Death was a companion

familiar as toothache

and scrofulous ague.

And after Death,  Judgement

when Night Thoughts were mortal

and ghosts walked the copses.

                        ii

Digestion ruined by small beer,

the cotter falls down on rammed earth

at 2 a.m. in penitence

to ask God’s mercy on his soul.

A nightmare spiked him in the dark.

The Devil leered from unmown fields.

Sin was a snake spilling its seed

from pouches like his itching crotch.

Up in the parqueted vicarage

the parson’s wife groans in her sleep.

Her husband’s left the bed again

to force Church Fathers in his skull.

Jerome, Aquinas, Chrysostom

console him for his poor degree

and ease his pain by candlelight

when nightmares touch his heart with fear.

And nearer dawn, when fear’s subdued,

he turns to Moderns for relief -

Joseph Butler or Tillotson

to help him turn a polished phrase.

His sermons are all curative.

Their urbane chat takes him from where

pure evil is a tactile force

and something’s moving in the dark.

                        iii

Who cares for nightmares now? At 2 a.m.

a law of physics is the creaking wood,

the shifting tiles, a pusscat on the prowl

and voices, partygoers going home.

Graves never yawn. The dead lie still and rot.

Ghosts are engravings in foxed storybooks

and childhood’s monster underneath the bed

is promptly killed by flicking a light switch.

Why stress on Death? Kill headaches with a pill.

There’s nothing fruitful that can compete with

the all-night telecast and foreign news.

Night Thoughts are nerve ends. Please go back to sleep.

            (From the collection The Little Enemy, published by Steele Roberts, 2011)