I'm not really sure what's been happening in the last several months, maybe longer. Either below me or next to me a neighbor awakens anywhere between three and four in the morning. Doesn't make much noise, but I have heard his or her alarm go off. Okay. I was convinced that the neighbor used the alarm to get to an early morning job on time. I'm a light sleeper, and don't - didn't - awaken to the alarm's sound all that often. When I did, I usually rolled over and fell right back to sleep.
The alarm seemed, at first, to be a radio station, all news or talk radio. No music, until early this summer - I write near the end of September, just FYI. Because I usually fell right back to sleep I assumed that the alarm was turned off after a few minutes or so, perhaps after the fellow tenant had heard news headlines and/or the weather.
Recently - more than a month ago, maybe 6-8 weeks? I began to find it more difficult to sleep after the alarm sounded, and grew aware that the sound of the news, and added music too, was not turned off for at least an hour. I heard more, listened longer and more intently.
To the best of my ability I'll try to describe the music, which had become dominant. Bells, church bells maybe, ring out, some talk that I cannot make out, followed by a powerful singer, a tenor, accompanied by what I take to be an all-male chorus. I'd call it operatic, but while the voices are powerful and on pitch they are not as refined as the voices of professional opera singers.
The listener did not blare out the music, so softly that it was only around maybe 10-15 days ago I began to make out a few of the melodies - I never heard the lyrics - rousing renditions of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", "God Bless America", and most frequently "The Star Spangled Banner". Other songs too, but I didn't recognize them.
To be continued if I dare.
(then a pause in writing this to ponder for a few days)
...OK, I dare. Why listen, I asked myself, to patriotic songs for an hour after awakening? In the middle of the night? And was just one person listening...or maybe more?
Three bracketed conditions/caveats to consider before you continue reading:
1. [For better or worse, many longtime apartment dwellers, including myself, who started apartment living in 1970 - and I've remained so up to today - often do NOT get to know one another - a mumbled greeting perhaps while passing on the stairs, but no more.]
2. [I am a Yankee liberal, living in a southern State that is among the deepest shades of red in the U.S. I have not made many friends here, primarily because after preliminary chats they have revealed themselves as Trumpists first class. And they take their politics, if that's what it is - more like hero worship? adoration for a demi-god? - very seriously.]
3. [I'm 76 years old, retired for 11 years, and I live alone on the top floor (of three) in an apartment complex in Greenville SC.]
I began to theorize that there was more than one person - a small group, perhaps - involved. And...hold on...that they constituted a cell, as in "communist cell" or the like, in this case a Trumpist cell. Below or next to my apartment lived a small group of far-right conspirators, maybe even terrorists, who in the dead of night quietly plotted how they might join the battle for whatever Trump asked of them, and concocted plans to aid and abet such a person, whispering among themselves to the strains of patriotic music, plotting, say, a successful version of January 6.
I should point out that I didn't think to do anything about it, I didn't even lose much sleep over it. But I believed it.
And it came to pass that these meetings began to start earlier, closer to 2 am, and to last longer. Hmmmm...
Finally, early on a September night, Something suddenly dawned on me - an epiphany! On this night I was awakened even earlier than usual, about 12:30 am. Sure enough the bells rang, the singing began - just after I awoke. I was gobsmacked!
I realized that whatever "it" was, it did not occur in the apartment below or next to mine. The plot, the conspiracy, most of all the music, had been going on inside of me. In my brain!
How did this "dawn" on me? Well, I hear much better in my right ear than in my left - not enough so that my GP or my ENT doctors think I need to get a hearing aid. But when I roll from my left side to my right into my pillow I can hear much better in the first position than I can in the second. For many years I have been using CDs like "Bach at Bedtime" and "Dolcissima et Amorosa" - gentle lute music from the Italian Renaissance - to help me fall asleep, and I've been quite aware of the difference in volume depending on which side I was sleeping.
My eureka moment came when I realized that the music I was hearing night after night was playing at the same volume in my right and left ears.
Aha! Oh, no...
Thus it was that I, a liberal who disdains conspiracy theorists, Q-anons and their ilk, concocted a conspiracy theory of my own!
Fill in the blank quiz, if you like, or multiple choice: stupid, dumb, naive, embarrassed? - all of the above, and then some.
Problem solved? Yes...there is no person (not to mention a group) who lives below or next to me that is alerted by an alarm in the dead of night to plot insurrection, no one even who merely needs to get up and ready for an early morning job. In fact there HAD been such a person living below me who did use his alarm in the middle of the night to be on time for his early morning job, but that was at least 5 years ago. That person is long gone.
But really solved?...well, no. Not entirely, because while it is very faint, and while I hear it only during complete silence (right now, as I enter text into this blog foe example, "There is now this music in my brain. And it may never come out." *
"Sweeney hears music that nobody hears." **
Reality? Obviously not. Dream? I wish! Madness? Temporary maybe...but what's with this music!?!
The two notes (*, **) just above are are paraphrases from the theatre.
Note one - the last line of Equus. I played Dysart many years ago - I was very good.
Note two - Sweeney Todd, from the ballad that begins the musical - I saw the original cast. It was very good.
