The Naked Now

I’m about to ruin the next five minutes of your day. Here goes.

You are blinking. Constantly. With your eyes. There you are. Blinking. Eyelids battering away at your face. How do you even see properly?

Oh! And swallow. You have to swallow too.

How often do you swallow? Well – you’re going to find out. Because now you’re acutely aware of it. And so, as I type, am I. And now it’s taking an effort to do it. What’s that about? How was I doing that a second ago without realising, and now it’s like heaving a great lug of muscle about inside my head. Help!

It’s OK – it’ll be gone in a little while. Soon you’ll be distracted by a kitten or a sandwich or a terrorist atrocity and the whole blinky-swallowy festival of noise and effort will recede into the background, managed by your body like Norton antivirus doing a check for porn. Which is good, because (gulp) it’s a horrible (blink) effort, isn’t it? Gulp. Blink. Let my body deal with it.

But it’s also kind of more scary, I think, that we do forget about it. It’s a weird reminder that our bodies get on with loads of this stuff all the time and don’t even ask us. My heart beats while I sleep, chugging happily away like a fat little monster. Wounds heal. Food digests. Blood wanders up and down my arms and legs, asking if everything is OK and if anyone needs anything from the shops.

People talk about ‘knowing themselves’, especially as they get older. I’ve done it. “The great thing about being in your forties is that you really start to know yourself.” But, like so much I say, it’s absolute nonsense. Imagine the horrible reality of actually knowing yourself. Becoming suddenly aware of every blink, every swallow and every beat of your heart. Feeling the blood charging up and down your veins. Realising the constant fizz of neurons firing, the constant chatter of your brain micromanaging every tiny operation that keeps your nervous system from collapsing like lazy spaghetti. And no respite. No letting it fade into the background. An eternal hell of being aware of yourself.

You’d go mad. A great deal of what we do relies upon a cheerful ignorance of how any of our actions actually happen. How am I standing up? I mean, I know it’s theoretically about balance and positioning and stuff but that’s just what I’d write if I suddenly had to show my working in an exam. In reality, I just kind of… do it. I tell my body to stand, and somewhere a team of brain cells get it together to carry out what I can only assume is a terrifically complicated set of sums. And even that’s a lie. I don’t tell my body to stand at all. I just assume it will know what I want and let it get on with it.

I guess what I’m saying is, thank goodness for a certain level of ignorance. And I guess I’m saying it because recently I’ve had a number of really weird moments  - moments where I felt like I lost that ignorance. Moments where I became suddenly, horribly aware that I was existing in the present tense. And I’ll tell you what – it freaked the hell out of me.

Most of the time I’m not really in the present. I’m sort of vaguely aware of what’s happening, but it’s all perceived through this weird mist. At any one time I’m remembering some events, looking forward to others and imagining alternatives where things are different and I have a cowboy hat or a flat in Cardiff Bay. The present is buffered by expectations, memories and daydreams and rarely has the chance to impact meaningfully upon my psyche.

Then, occasionally, for whatever reason, the real, actual moment scrapes through. Dreams and memories melt away. I look around and I think, “This is happening now. These people are talking to me in real time. Shit! What do I do?”

I have little information on this aspect of life. It’s not some future event that I’m imagining happening, like my wedding day or what I’ll say if I ever meet Tom Baker – things I’ve considered in great detail. The first involves smashing through a window like Billy Idol, landing on a motorbike and riding up the aisle, playing electric guitar. The second features me crying like a child and saying thank you until he goes away.

And it’s not a thing that happened in the past, like that time I tried to explain widescreen aspect ratios to Andrew Brown and wanted to weep with frustration at his lack of comprehension. “Why are there black bars at the top and bottom of the TV?” he kept saying. “Why don’t they fill those bits in?” Because that’s the shape of a cinema screen you cretin! "But why don't they just make it the same shape?" How would they do that? Where would that extra visual information come from? Aaaaarrrrgg!

Idiot. Where was I?

Oh yes. It’s really weird looking at someone talking to you and becoming aware that the conversation is actually happening in the present. My subconscious is so used to my complete lack of interest in things that it usually takes care of it all for me. I just hear words tumbling out of my mouth and kind of casually observe the process as if I’m watching TV. “Hmm,” I think, “That was surprisingly sexist. Ooh, listen, I’m claiming to like jazz.”

On the rare occasions that I am slammed without warning into the unvarnished present, I have no idea what to do. I panic. For a start, I’m never 100% sure that I’m not just remembering this in super high definition detail. Then I feel utterly terrified at the responsibility of being present, in time. Who’s allowing this? I could do anything. What if I punch the person I’m talking to? What if they tell me something sad and I just laugh and say “I’m glad that happened to you - I hope it happens again.”? What if I stand up in church and shout “You’re all a bunch of bastards”?

I’m not even exaggerating. The power of realisation is blistering. If this is ‘now’, then nothing is set. I can disrupt all of this so easily. Without the comforting numbness of temporal dislocation I have no framework, no reference. There’s a reason why memory and fantasy combine to couch the present in cotton wool. I need to be kept confused and slightly out of synch.

And then there’s eternity.

Once in a while I will lie in bed and remember that I exist in time. And that either I will die and be dead forever or the afterlife exists and I will live forever. And that both are impossible to fit into my tiny mind. A terrifying chasm of existential fear opens up around me and I freak out completely. How can I not-exist forever? How can I not not-exist? How is anything meaningful unless it ends? And what happens after it ends?

And then, salvation. Sleep claims me. My thoughts drift and now I’m in a hotel and Tom Baker is eating cheese at the next table. Andrew Brown’s wife is stroking my face and I feel both guilty and delighted. I try to tell her about his inability to understand aspect ratios but my voice comes out like birdsong. And now I’m due on stage, and have to play saxophone… I can’t play saxophone…

I dream. Or some of me does. Elsewhere, the rest of me keeps it all running. Heart beating, blood moving, swallowing.


Goodnight. If you can.