Men, women: black, white; tall, short; fat, thin. These are are some of the binaries of human nature, writes Kevin Myers. There is another, far more fundamental one.
Nightgrinder and non-nightgrinder. Nightgrinders are physically and mentally superior to their binary opposites. They are usually people of astonishing beauty, with refined manners and remarkable intellect.
Michelangelo was a nightgrinder, as was Leonardo. So too was Shakespeare. WB Yeats also. Ditto Oscar Wilde. All the Bachs were nightgrinders, save their cousin Peadar, who was a bookie in Mullingar. Handel nightground for Germany before nightgrinding for the Hanoverians in London. No one is quite sure why nightgrinding is the mark of genius, but it is.
The original words of the Angelus ran: "The Angel of the Lord appeared unto Mary, and declared, thou shalt be a nightgrinder." And a nightgrinder she became - a Virgin Nightgrinder, to be sure, but a nightgrinder nonetheless. This was why they couldn't get a room in the inn, because the innkeeper, being a backward, non-nightgrinding primitive, had a bee in his bonnet about nightgrinders.
So the Holy family trudged off to the manger, where the three wise men were able to find them by following the din of the Virgin Mary nightgrinding.
Admittedly, not all nightgrinders have such a distinguished son as she did, but nightgrinders invariably produce stock of noble quality and lofty men. Naturally, most artists are nightgrinders, for nightgrinding is evidence of the mind at work from dusk till dawn, while the body sleeps. Beethoven was able to write the Ninth Symphony when he was stone deaf because his teeth ground it out to him in his slumbers, and the entire work vibrated through his cranial bones into his brain, where it stayed until morning came, and he reached for his quill.
In the first folio of Hamlet, the famous soliloquy was not the essay in existential wistfulness which most people think; originally, it was "To grind or not to grind: that is the question."
Cromwell, being a non-nightgrinder, a bore and a dullard, suppressed the original version, and commissioned Milton to write new words. Milton wasn't at that point a nightgrinder, but he soon became one: and he celebrated the productivity of his unconscious mind with the poem Comas, where his restless brain famously asked: "What hath night to do with sleep?"
Where is all this leading us? To a confession, that is where. To the admission that I am a nightgrinder. Have been all my adult life. I was nightgrinding when Seamus Heaney got stuck with his first volume of verse, and I nightground his way out of a poetical pickle for him. Bobby Ballagh was sitting for two full years paralysed before a blank canvas, until I came to his rescue with a few painterly thoughts dreamt up between my molars. My bicuspids helped out Neil Jordan after he hit writer's block halfway through his first selection of short stories, Nights in Termonfeckin. "No, no, no," tapped out my teeth - dot dash dash dash dot, rudely, in coarse mode - to my slumbering brain. Nights in Tunisia, it insisted. The rest is history.
The problem for us nightgrinders is there is only so much mortar-and-pestling you can do with your teeth before they begin to wear away. You have never seen photographs of Leonardo or Shakespeare in middle age because they were so shy about the steady erosion of their incisors. So it has been with me; my teeth have been vanishing as I gnashed through the night: grind grind grind, ghosting Chinatown, Groundhog Day, The Usual Suspects, Wallace and Grommit and, of course, the Harry Potter series, the credit for which I nobly allowed to be claimed by other, lesser creatures, albeit ones still owning proper-sized teeth.
Thus came the day when my dentist looked into my mouth and saw what appeared to be small knitting-needle heads vanishing into my gums. Worse, all the creative grinding had wrecked one root-canal, and was threatening to do the same with the rest of my mouth. Two alternatives lay before me. The first was to continue to grind my teeth into oblivion, leaving me with a mouth like a frog's, the other was to get my teeth crowned.
Crowning is a terribly simple business. Step one: enter the Central Bank with a Kalashnikov assault rifle. Step two: leave with the entire contents of the main vault. Step three: go to your dentist. Step four: give him or her all the money. Step five: promise to pay the rest later. Step six: he amputates most of each tooth. Step seven: he puts temporary crowns on the stumps he has artfully left protruding from your gum. Step eight: he. . .Well, actually, step seven is as far as I've got. (Step eight is when the final crowns arrive).
But I can tell you this for nothing: the aftermath of step seven reminds me of a friend who, after bathing in a bitterly cold sea, looked downwards while he was changing and realised in wild dismay that he'd got someone else's micky.
That's the way I feel about my mouth. It's not mine anymore. It feels as I've had a gob-swap with President McAleese. If we don't see any of her in the next few days, that'll be the explanation. She's gazing at the mirror, horrified, wondering where these horrid gums, studded with misshapen little white peas, came from.
From me, Your Gracious Majesty.
But my mouth now looks as it did when I was a young man. All I need now is a doctor who crowns bodies and a hairdresser who crowns scalps.