Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  Having followed the space shuttle’s blazing ascent, the telescope’s successful injection into the correct orbit, the unfurling of its dragonfly wings of solar cells and the initiation of its functions, no doubt the teams of scientists and technicians responsible for various aspects of this technological triumph sat back with a sigh of relief, and waited for the first sublime starscapes to appear on the monitors in the Goddard Space Flight Centre. And when they came, what did the stars look like? Squashed spiders! So said one astronomer I have seen quoted. An anguished analysis of the blurry images indicated that the great mirror was slightly too flat (by 2.2 thousandths of a millimetre) near its perimeter. Who was to blame? It seems that the error was due to a fault in an optical gadget used to check the curvature of the mirror. In this instrument a certain lens was out of position, by 1.3 mm. Somebody had omitted to insert a washer, or so it was rumoured.

  The Hubble is designed to be serviced in orbit as needs arise, by space-walking technicians tethered to a space shuttle, for the cost of bringing it back to Earth for refitting would be prohibitive. Three years after the initial launch a team of seven astronauts, trained in the use of some hundred specialist implements, were space-shuttled up, and over ten days installed a number of optical devices designed to correct the spherical aberration of the primary mirror. The cost of those washers must have mounted into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Since then, however, the Hubble has been an astounding success and still posts home avalanches of information on star formation and many other research topics, and especially on the early history of the universe, the unfurling of time and space.

  Such questions interest me deeply, but my wandering mind is as often drawn to a question that has been left behind, being a triviality. What about the fabled washer? I imagine one slipping from the fingers and then from the memory of some technician harassed by the everyday pressures of life on Earth as well as the Hubble project’s problems of schedule-slippage and cost-overrun? Did it lie, its glints and gleam unnoticed, on the floor of some ‘clean room’, until it was swept up and dumped with other waste into a dustbin? Or might some time-ridden space-stepper like myself have noticed it and carried it off as a memento?

  (2015)

  ★

  The Evening Star

  by Louise Glück

  Tonight, for the first time in many years,

  there appeared to me again

  a vision of the earth’s splendor:

  in the evening sky

  the first star seemed

  to increase in brilliance

  as the earth darkened

  until at last it could grow no darker.

  And the light, which was the light of death,

  seemed to restore to earth

  its power to console. There were

  no other stars. Only the one

  whose name I knew

  as in my other life I did her

  injury: Venus,

  star of the early evening,

  to you I dedicate

  my vision, since on this blank surface

  you have cast enough light

  to make my thought

  visible again.

  (2006)

  ★

  WARSAN SHIRE

  Myesha Jenkins is an American poet and activist living in Johannesburg. This poem is from her collection, aptly titled Dreams of Flight. I read it to myself before going to sleep at night; the poem comforts me and allows me to reimagine the dream and sleep state as restorative and transformative. A tender mantra-like poem, short enough to memorize and pass on to others as prayer, affirmation, as a prelude to dream healing. It is powerful in the way that it conjures childlike excitement for tomorrow, and for the future, a feeling that so many of us lose as we grow older.

  Transformation

  by Myesha Jenkins

  Who I was

  is not who I am.

  And who I am

  is not who I will be.

  Some bits falling off

  other parts sprouting.

  Inside this cocoon

  I dream of flight.

  (2011)

  Warsan Shire released her debut pamphlet, ‘Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth’, in 2011, and went on to win the inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize in 2013. In 2014, she was appointed as the first Young Poet Laureate for London and was selected as Poet in Residence for Queensland, Australia. Extracts from her poem ‘Home’ were read during 2015 by Benedict Cumberbatch both onstage as well as for a music single for Save the Children. In 2016, Warsan collaborated with Beyoncé Knowles Carter on the visual album Lemonade. Warsan’s debut collection will be published during 2016/2017.

  ★

  TAN TWAN ENG

  Despite its morbid title, I have always found this to be a comforting poem, entreating us to appreciate every moment of our lives. The poem is a short story by itself, a story of a man’s entire life glimpsed in one brief instant. The unknown airman has lived by his own rules all his life, and he will die doing the very thing he loves most. He knows it; he has accepted it. Every time I finish reading the last line, I breathe, I exhale, and I feel ready to drift away to a dreamless, peaceful sleep.

  An Irish Airman Foresees his Death

  by W. B. Yeats

  I know that I shall meet my fate

  Somewhere among the clouds above;

  Those that I fight I do not hate,

  Those that I guard I do not love;

  My country is Kiltartan Cross,

  My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,

  No likely end could bring them loss

  Or leave them happier than before.

  Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

  Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

  A lonely impulse of delight

  Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

  I balanced all, brought all to mind,

  The years to come seemed waste of breath,

  A waste of breath the years behind

  In balance with this life, this death.

  (1918)

  Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang, Malaysia. His debut novel, The Gift of Rain, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Man Asian Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It was also shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He is currently working on his third novel.

  ★

  ROBERT MACFARLANE

  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a French airman in the heroic age of flight. He piloted small planes by day and night across astonishing landscapes, including the Sahara and the Andes. Wind, Sand and Stars is his unforgettable memoir of those years. I first read the book twenty years or so ago, and one passage above all others has sung around my brain ever since: his description of finding his way by accident, in darkness, into a field of meteors. Nocturnal, dreamy, astral – it leads the waking mind into marvels, starlight and black space.

  Extract from Wind, Sand and Stars

  by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  By the grace of the airplane I have known an extraordinary experience . . . and have been made to ponder with . . . bewilderment the fact that this earth that is our home is yet in truth a wandering star.

  A minor accident had forced me down in the Rio de Oro region, in Spanish Africa. Landing on one of those tablelands of the Sahara which fall away steeply at the sides, I found myself on the flat top of the frustum of a cone, an isolated vestige of a plateau that had crumbled round the edges. In this part of the Sahara such truncated cones are visible from the air every hundred miles or so, their smooth surfaces always at about the same altitude above the desert and their geologic substance always identical. The surface sand is composed of minute and distinct shells; but progressively as you dig along a vertical section, the shells become more fragmentary, tend to cohere, and at the base of the cone form a pure calcareous deposit.

  Without question, I was the first human bei
ng ever to wander over this . . . this iceberg: its sides were remarkably steep, no Arab could have climbed them, and no European had as yet ventured into this wild region.

  I was thrilled by the virginity of a soil which no step of man or beast had sullied. I lingered there, startled by this silence that never had been broken. The first star began to shine, and I said to myself that this pure surface had lain here thousands of years in sight only of the stars.

  But suddenly my musings on this white sheet and these shining stars were endowed with a singular significance. I had kicked against a hard, black stone, the size of a man’s fist, a sort of moulded rock of lava incredibly present on the surface of a bed of shells a thousand feet deep. A sheet spread beneath an apple-tree can receive only apples; a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust. Never had a stone fallen from the skies made known its origin so unmistakably.

  And very naturally, raising my eyes, I said to myself that from the height of this celestial apple-tree there must have dropped other fruits, and that I should find them exactly where they fell, since never from the beginning of time had anything been present to displace them.

  Excited by my adventure, I picked up one and then a second and then a third of these stones, finding them at about the rate of one stone to the acre. And here is where my adventure became magical, for in a striking foreshortening of time that embraced thousands of years, I had become the witness of this miserly rain from the stars. The marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected.

  (1939)

  Translated by Lewis Galantière

  Robert Macfarlane is the author of a trilogy of books about landscape and the human heart: Mountains of the Mind (2003), The Wild Places (2007) and The Old Ways (2012), as well as Landmarks (2015), a celebration of landscape and language. His writing has won many prizes and has been widely adapted for television and radio. He is currently at work on Underland, a book about the worlds beneath our feet. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

  We change our posture some thirty to forty times on average during a night’s sleep, without realizing it. These stirrings fashion our innate need to ‘get snuggly’, as my young son adroitly calls it. It never ceased to amaze me, when he was two or three and would find his way into our bed of a night, how his tiny frame could exert utter dominance, apparently through a combination of wriggling and automatic dominion, over the kingdom of our ample bed.

  Sharing our bed – and putting up with someone else’s revolutions and manoeuvrings – is an act of true intimacy. Our bedstead is the domain of sleep, after all, a uniquely solitary affair. It is unsurprising then that the act of sleeping together is the precursor or natural follow-up to sharing our bodies. Indeed, the term sleeping with someone is now synonymous with sex itself, not catching forty winks.

  Our bodies are aroused during REM sleep, whether the dream we’re having is of a sexual nature or not. Boys and men, from infancy through to middle-age and beyond, host erections three to four times a night; women are similarly aroused during sleep, at least physiologically. Nobody has adequately been able yet to explain why the body vaults into such states during the night. They are mechanical commonplaces.

  If ever such tumescence should tip over, into a sexualised wet dream, it is as rude an awakening as we’re ever likely to have while fast asleep. More commonplace than such lustful visions are the romantic, lovelorn dreams that express our heart’s deepest longings. Sure, dreams are often more banal than that, especially once we pass the hormonal swerves of adolescence. Yet we have all been guilty of crimes of passion, while dreaming (if not in waking life). No wonder the object of a person’s affections is often called dreamy or a dreamboat.

  Once such intimacies have become familiar, we are about ready to share not just our beds and bodies with another, but also – accessing our truest vulnerabilities – our dearest dreams. And I don’t mean our reveries – however crude, rude, sublime or ridiculous – so much as our life-long ambitions. Our dreams have in this way come to mean also our goals, aspirations, the end-points for a lifetime’s toils. A dream-come-true expresses the height of human exultation.

  Yet dream originally meant none of this, but joy and music (as it, in large part, derives from the Old English dréam). So forget the workaday! In time to a circadian rhythm, dreaming is nature’s happy, sweet song. All of which sounds an awful lot like love.

  Play on!

  I read this poem to my wife on our wedding day – just the two of us, taking vows on a hazy sunlit clifftop overlooking the Pacific Ocean, our life-ahead glimmering.

  He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

  by W. B. Yeats

  Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

  Enwrought with golden and silver light,

  The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

  Of night and light and the half-light,

  I would spread the cloths under your feet:

  But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

  I have spread my dreams under your feet;

  Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

  (1899)

  ★

  My children, as toddlers, used to clamour to throw a coin into the fountain of our local park whenever we passed near it. I would hand them a copper each and then, once they had slung it into the water and tottered on towards the playground, wonder what on earth they had wished for (much as I used to wonder what they dreamed of as babies, especially as that is the time of life when REM, and dream, abounds at its most prolific).

  Yet I never once asked them. It really didn’t seem any of my business.

  Moreover, if they had told me, I feared that the wish – be it elementary or fantastical – had considerably less chance of coming true . . .

  Nicholson Baker is a master observer of life’s minutiae, rendering the everyday exquisite. In his essay ‘Coins’, Baker’s descriptions initially seem hum-drum but, as the piece progresses, a whole world opens up. It seems almost as if he is trawling a brainscape, not a fountain – fishing dreams like the sandman, not coins, and then depositing them safely into buckets. Those cents, nickels and dimes are like the tiniest plish-plashes of our consciousness. They reflect those dreams – whether sleeping or waking – that shimmer just beneath the mind’s surface, in all of us.

  Make no mistake, there is magic in Midtown Plaza: not least residing in that one coin for which he reserves the portentous syntax, ‘black it was . . .’

  Watch out for it.

  Or perhaps it was you that flung it there?

  Coins

  by Nicholson Baker

  In 1973, when I was sixteen, I got a job in building maintenance at Midtown Plaza, Rochester’s then flourishing downtown shopping mall. I spent a day pulling nails from two-by-fours – loudly whistling Ravel’s Boléro while I worked, so that the secretaries would know that I knew a few things about French music – and then Rocky, the boss, a dapper man with a mustache, apprenticed me to the mall’s odd-job man, Bradway. Bradway taught me the right way to move filing cabinets (you walk with them on alternating corners, as if you’re slow dancing with them, and when you have one of them roughly in position in its row, just put the ball of your foot low against a corner and step down, and the cabinet will slide into place as if pulled there by a magnet); and he taught me how to snap a chalk line, how to cut curves in Sheetrock, how to dig a hole for a ‘No Parking’ sign, how to adjust the hydraulic tension on an automatic door, the right way to use a sledgehammer, and how to change the fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling of the elevator. He wore funny-looking glasses, and he sang ‘Pretty, Pretty Paper Doll’ to the secretaries, embarrassing them and me, but he was a decent person and a good teacher. For reasons I still don’t understand he was disliked by one of the carpenters in the maintenance department, who referred to him as a ‘proctologist’s delight’.

&n
bsp; One afternoon Bradway gave me a beeper and told me he was going to teach me how to sweep up the pennies in the fountain. Midtown Plaza’s fountain had a fifteen-foot-high inward-curving spray, and there were four or five low mushroom fountains to one side, lit from below; the water went around and under a set of stairs rising up to the mall’s second level. People threw pennies in from the landing on the stairs and while standing at the railing on the second level, but mostly they tossed them in as they walked past. I had thrown in pennies myself. The thing to do when you wished on a penny was to thumb-flip it very high – the more air time it had, the more opportunity it had to become an important penny, a singular good-luck penny – and then watch it plunge into the water and twirl down to the tiled bottom of the pool. You had to memorize where it landed. It was the penny with the two very tarnished pennies just to the left of it – or no, was it one of the ones in that very similar constellation a foot away? Every day you could check on your penny, or the penny you had decided must be your penny, to see how it was doing, whether it was accumulating wish-fulfilling powers.

  So when Bradway said that I – a maintenance worker earning $2.50 an hour – was going to be sweeping up all the pennies, I experienced a magisterial shiver. We went down to the basement and got a pair of rubber fly-fishing boots, a black bucket with some holes in it, a dustpan, and a squeegee broom. Bradway showed me the switch that turned off the pump for the fountains. I pressed it. There was a clunk.

  Back upstairs the water was almost still. I stepped over the marble ledge and, handed the long pole of the squeegee, I began pushing around other people’s good luck. The bottom of the pool was covered with small blue tiles, and it was somewhat slimy, so that the pennies, moved along by the squeegee, formed planar sheets of copper, arranging themselves to fit into one another’s adjoining curves, until finally a row of pennies would push up, make peaks, and flip back, forming a second layer, and then another layer would form, and eventually there was a sunken reef of loose change – including some nickels and dimes, but no quarters – in one corner of the pool. ‘That’s it, just keep sweeping them toward the pile,’ Bradway said. He gave me the black bucket with the holes in it, and, rolling up my sleeves as high as I could, I used the dustpan to scoop up the change and pour it, entirely underwater, into the bucket. The sound was of anchor chains at the bottom of the sea. By doing as much of it as possible below the surface, we kept the penny removal somewhat discreet.