BEAVER By Johnny Rodger For various reasons I did not sleep well. A full account of my restlessness last night in all its details as irritating as they were irregular, would nonetheless, be liable to leave the wrong impression. The listener might be inclined, that is to say, to believe that these circumstances related were all that mattered. And I can in no way be sure of that. On the other hand such a detailed account might well lead the attentive listener to feel pressured by an overwhelming force of evidence and consequently to suspect too strong and heavy-handed an interest to be marshalling all this evidence to their attention. They might in turn infer that there was some other, more true, and hence more sinister explanation lying below the water level, as it were, of my deliberations. They’d probably be right in their suspicions. Only don’t ask me about that invisible ‘handed’ interest. I could give you such an account for my sleeplessness for every night of this week, of last week, or any week you care to mention. For each of those nights the reasons or combinations of them would be different, and each set of reasons could, without fault, on examination by any fair and impartial judge be deemed sufficient cause for that particular insomnia. Are none of these then the real reasons for this general insomnia? Are my concerns, my understandings, my rationalisations and my proofs to myself all entirely superficial? They happen to be sufficient in each case to convince me, yet the condition endures, returns each night, and outlives the reach of every single evident cause I come up with. New evident causes supersede the exhausted ones for sure, and perhaps it is not inconceivable that an inordinately long series of disparate circumstances and causes have combined to produce an exceptional consistency in result.
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Yet why should I refuse to deny that is unlikely? The invisible ‘handed interest’ theory would claim, on the face of it, to take a longer term, less superficial view. It would seem to imply either that there is another deeper and more authentic cause for this sleepless condition and that the manifold of other hitherto evident causes have merely been coincident to this principal and true cause and perhaps also part of a conspiracy to conceal it; or that the very notion of cause itself is inappropriate in explaining my chronic sleeplessness. I set to work of a morning anyhow. The work involves a deal of lifting and carrying – dragging mostly – of heavy weights: of manoeuvring those weights into position in a bulky and complex structure: of labouring on rough terrain and in water against a strong current. I don’t complain about this, I rather revel in it as did the generations before me and as will, no doubt, those to come after me.Yet make no mistake, though we enjoy it, this is no sport but our ongoing daily struggle for survival through the ages in an uncongenial environment. But that’s life, you might well say – could there ever be such a thing as a perfectly congenial environment? Life by definition is surely a kicking against a universe of pricks? Yes, but the particular pricks of our environment point us always out towards an existence of extreme precariousness. We eat, walk and sleep on a delicate and intricately fitted out framework of our own making, which is the only stable and co-ordinated system of refuge points in a world of otherwise endless turbulence.You don’t necessarily have to be a mathematician to calculate how your next move can be weighted not to destabilise nor displace any one of thousands of connected points of structure and bring your whole world tumbling down about your ears. But it helps if you have a nifty set of front paws for grabbing and swinging off quickly, a broad tail to lay out flat and calm
things down, and a wide webbing on the back feet to power away from dangerous falling logs when it all goes to pot and you land in the drink. What is most vital however, is that the beaver is always alert, agile and quick witted. But how is one who suffers from insomnia, who hasn’t relaxed a muscle nor shut an eye for months on end to stay both sprightly on their feet and mentally on the qui vive for irregularities and disturbances of the log-water equilibrium from dawn to sunset? Thus far, I must admit, I have found my condition to be more irritating than actually debilitating. I have not discovered myself to be clumsy or weak in the handling of the daily materials, I haven’t dozed off on the job nor even noticed that my attention has wandered from a particular task in hand, and nor have I found myself to be bearing the brunt of an unusual suite of workplace accidents. At the same time I am not unaware that under the given condition I cannot be the most competent judge of the quality of my own consciousness. That’s why I decided to gather some empirical evidence. Hence the references above to reasons for and causes of my insomnia. It is best, I considered, to be rigorously scientific about this. I sat up all night taking notes on my condition, and in the morning, or later that same day, I would return to those notes, go over them, rework them, and attempt to push them to a logical conclusion. But no conclusion was forthcoming. And without a fixed, clear, and final conclusion the claim to rigor was evidently an illegitimate one. Not only that but the science itself was like a runaway machine once you started it – going on madly producing an infinite regression of explanations and never able to stop at the one ultimate cause. Take the simple example of the night I had an itchy ear. On the face of it I was being kept awake by an incessant and, for the time being, incurable prurience in the fur behind my right ear. The question naturally arises as to whether this itch was truly the cause of my sleeplessness that night, or if it was merely an accompaniment, and one exacerbated only by my
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being awake to its originally harmless and only mildly irritating pulsation.Yet even if we accept the itch as the true cause of the insomnia our consideration then inevitably regresses to the question of the cause of the itch. And so on … A perhaps more complicated example would be one like the night of the upset stomach. I did not know whether to hang my snout or my hind end – flattened tail and all – out from the logs over the flowing river. I paced up and down under the night stars. I fancy that I even solved a couple of niggling engineering problems as I went over the same ground again and again; relodged a loose plank and bedded the structure more securely into its boggy founds with my repetitive stress. But after those cold, damp hours out there on my own with the elements nothing extraordinary – in the physiological sense – had come of it by morning. I had neither vomited, that is to say, nor … well, I leave the rest to your imagination, or lack of it, for there were, as I said, no extraordinary evacuations. But what, then, were those pangs of nausea that came and disappeared with the hours of darkness? Were they the cause or an effect of my insomnia? I had thought during my sleepless elaboration on the aetiology of the stomach pains that accompanied my continuous toand-froing on the logs that night to make a direct connection between my diet and the nausea. It seemed obvious: a bit of badly decomposed vegetable matter trapped in some twist of the gut. But why this particular one bit of green and not any other, and not every other night? Surely my guts were used to this kind of fare, and had seen it all before as it were, for I hardly could be said to partake of a varied diet. Perhaps in that case, the guts had had enough of the same old weedy thing, and had simply packed in. But was I already old enough to be overtaken by decrepitude? A thousand of such petty and ultimately fruitless lines of enquiry crammed my thoughts that night, but though in the clear light of day I dismiss such frantic soul searching, I still cannot nonetheless claim to have answered definitively any of the myriad concerns.
But nor is it any better when I turn from such a spiral down into solipsistic obsessions to attempt to deal strictly with the ‘facts’, as they say, of the objective material world. For my own fact-gathering mission, my latter-day empiricism, has, it seems to me, been an entirely inadequate method for maintaining any sense of consistency and integrity. I asked myself – still sticking to the facts – why I didn’t sleep? And the obvious answer was that my stomach hurt. Why did my stomach hurt? Because I had eaten an unclean food, as it were. Why was the, otherwise wonted, food unclean? Because … And so on, quite literally in this case, ad nauseam.You see, in sum, that the enquiry takes me further and further away from myself and what are my immediate concerns here on the logs. So is there a real world beyond the dam and the fast flowing river? Assuredly. And is it an infinite world? Evidently so. It’s no wonder then that I didn’t get to sleep knowing that I not only have set tasks to perform here in the morning, but that I also have an endless untended stretch of chaos for a neighbour. But would I discover that real and messy world for myself were I to float out towards it on a raft pumped full of the hot air called reason? It’s doubtful if I’d ever get the peace of mind. I am strengthened by the discipline and order of my daily work on the delicate framework of the logs, but I cannot sleep here. But why do I juxtapose these statements? The least unsustainable thing I could say is that I did not sleep last night but have so far been unable to give you a full account of my restlessness. But nor did I sleep the night before, nor the night before that … What does it all mean? Will there be no end to sleepless meaning?
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