Joe Bennett: Bed is a place of unconsciousness that we shouldn’t disturb with words

To simply drift off to sleep with someone habitually is an act of trust, says columnist Joe Bennett. Photo / 123RF

OPINION

Larkin’s Talking in Bed begins thus:

Talking in bed ought to be easiest.

Lying together there goes back so far,

An emblem of two people being honest

Of course, he goes on to observe that talking in bed is not “easiest”, that even “at this unique distance from isolation” it is hard to find words that are both true and kind, “or not untrue and not unkind”.

Brilliant, of course, because Larkin is always brilliant. But for once he’s missed the point. And the point is that words do not belong in bed. Words are things of daytime. Words belong to an upright conscious world we think we have control of and think we can understand. Words are part of that control and understanding.

But bed is different. Bed is horizontal. Bed is a place of unconsciousness. Before we go to bed we divest ourselves of words just as we divest ourselves of clothes. Two people in bed being honest is two people being silent.

We sleep for a third of our lives. We love to sleep. To deprive someone of sleep is a form of torture. Insomnia is an illness. We measure our houses by the number and size of the rooms devoted to sleeping. And to sleep with someone else, not to talk with them, not to have sex with them, but to sleep with them, habitually, wordlessly, is life’s greatest intimacy and consolation.

I was once on an overnight train from Paris to the south of France. Dozens of passengers woke in the morning to find they had been robbed. Thieves had gone through two sleeper carriages, slitting open bags and cases, fishing valuables from under mattresses and pillows, from under the heads and bodies of sleepers, and not one of them had woken. The platform at Nice railway station that morning was rich with distress. People felt not just robbed but violated. The world had turned on them while they slept. Their throats could have been slit as easily as their bags. You sensed their sense of their own vulnerability.

So to sleep with someone else is an act of trust. It is to allow someone in to your place of most alone, the place of nakedness and surrender, where you display a raw unguarded self. In sleep we don’t distort our breath to words. We just breathe in and out like any other animal.

And that is much of the pleasure. In sleep no one pretends. The breathing of the other in the dark, the rhythmic breath of sleep, is all that need be said and it makes perfect sense.

It may also be an echo of the womb. The womb is Eden, our first and safest place, the place against which we measure all later places. Eden is warm like a bed and comes with the reassurance of another beating heart.

When we are born, said mad King Lear, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools. It’s a fine line but it isn’t true. We cry because we have left the comfort and the company of the womb and are become alone. We cry because we can never go back, though we will spend the rest of our lives trying. And the closest we ever get is to lie with another in the strange oblivion of sleep.

And then what places we go to. Unleashed from consciousness our minds are free to wander and create, to be themselves, to tell the dreams we didn’t know we knew. Such wordless genius.

But also to let loose the horrors, the mares of the dark, the incubi that haunt us, so that we writhe and thrash on the hot bed, held by terror, galvanised by it, wholly in thrall to it. It is then that a sleeping partner wades in to the dream to rescue us, wrapping an arm around, easing us out of nightmare with the press of flesh.

And then the two lie side by side in darkness, consoler and consoled. And that there in the silent reaches of the night is the true emblem of two people being honest, grateful for the touch, the company, the not-being-alone, with, to quote another Larkin poem, ‘nothing to be said’.