by Rob Doyle
A bird squawked and flew from a bush. The noise reverberated, ripples in the stillness. Then silence enfolded the forest, and I stood with my friends among the graves, imagining how it would be if I weren’t holding on to any of it.
I like these new photos, how they make my own city seem as foreign to me as it is to you. Phoenix Park flattened under grey skies; the north side like Berlin after the war. I wonder if this is how we are, only seeing afresh and feeling alive in countries where we weren’t born. It’s amusing that you felt compelled to go there to finish your book – I’ve always needed to get away from the place to write with any clarity.
I’ve resumed recording my dreams after a decade’s hiatus. I did it in my twenties, writing them down each morning when I was travelling in Asia. Writing out dreams is a drag, so now I use the voice recorder on my phone. Because I’ve been ill, with a scorched and bleeding throat, the recordings sound like the tapes of Colonel Kurtz they play at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, rasping his insane visions of slugs crawling across razor blades.
Speaking of dreams, I had a momentous one on the night of the full moon. I was in the countryside in northern France, sleeping with my girlfriend. I dreamed that she and I were shapeshifters who had travelled back in time from the 81st millennium, to fight in a cosmic war on terror. It was the type of dream that occurs only every few years, so freighted with emotion, so numinous and vivid, that when you wake up you know something deep has taken place. The difference with this dream was that I believed it was real even after I woke up, or half woke up. I was convinced not only that my girlfriend had shared in the dream, but that she had long known about the epic conflict it depicted. I lay there in amazement, waiting for her to open her eyes and acknowledge what had happened. When she did wake up I gave her meaningful, expectant looks. Gradually I realised she had no idea what I’d dreamed about.
To answer your question, I used to write mainly to hurt people, to violate them. Their happiness was intolerable to me – I couldn’t let them off the hook. And I did hurt them: that craving was slaked. Now I would say I prefer to contaminate people with my puzzlement. My friend Paul likes to say of his intentions as a painter: not to solve the mystery, but to deepen it. You make fun of, and probably despise, what you call my ‘alarming tendencies towards mysticism’. I don’t mind. ‘Register the cultural moment,’ you say, but increasingly I fixate on the essential, which is what’s fascinating where everything else is interesting. I let questions of relevancy take care of themselves. It’s not as if I’m shielded: the cultural moment is coming at me hard and fast.
Sometimes I still like to hurt, to abuse.
Demiurge
Every now and then I will attend a conference or a lecture on some topic or other, not so much out of an urgent interest in what the speakers have to say, but because it is imperative to get out of my silent room here in Paris, where if I stay too long I lose the sense of trusting myself. In such instances it is as if I am no longer me, but he and me, the two of us locked together like starved rats in a cage, one of us more cunning and satanic than the other.
At one conference I attended, my friend Michel gave a talk on literature in France after the 2015 terrorist attacks, concluding that it would be much the same as it had been before the attacks. Afterwards, milling about and drinking as much free red wine as I could, I listened as Michel and a colleague of his named Natasha discussed a show that was running at the Palais de Tokyo, by the artist Tino Sehgal. Natasha was not only an admirer of Sehgal’s work, she was part of the show too. Sehgal’s art is deeply interactive, she explained (I knew nothing about him); the only materials he employs are the bodies of the people who perform it. Intrigued, I decided I would check out the show later in the week.
I drank too much wine and, when I got home at 3 a.m., I couldn’t find any headache tablets. Foolishly I rooted in my bag of toiletries for the Seroquel pills my girlfriend had left behind after visiting me in Paris, Seroquel being an antipsychotic that is prescribed by some desperate psychiatrists as an off-label treatment for insomnia. My girlfriend had been prescribed the drug for both purposes in turn, but she had come to loathe Seroquel for its bludgeoning crudeness and had sworn off it. I knew from experience that the pills were potent, in the sense that a train running you over is potent. My rationale was that I would take only a third of a pill, then sleep right through the hangover and wake up smiling late the next morning. After biting off a segment, though, I looked drunkenly at the remaining crescent and thought: fuck it.
When I awoke it was dark. I felt impossibly heavy, as if my limbs were weighed down by chains. The pressure in my bladder forced me to shamble into the bathroom to piss. Then I curled back into bed. There really was a lot of street noise for the pre-dawn hours, I noticed foggily, reaching for my phone beside the bed to peer at its illuminated face.
It was 9:30 p.m. I was too groggy to feel more than a dull remorse at having slept through an entire day, though I did glimpse an image of myself in advanced old age, ruing my fecklessness. I felt as though I hadn’t slept at all, had taken the pill mere minutes ago and jolted forward a day, the earth having spun on its axis around me.
I made a pot of coffee and sat in bed with my laptop, brain circuitry slowly humming back to a semblance of normal function. I decided I would stay awake through the night and see the Tino Sehgal show the following day. Meanwhile I peered into my screen, reading all I could about Sehgal: interviews, commentary by art critics, the bitching or praise of his peers. Apparently Sehgal was something of a phenomenon, among the most lauded youngish artists on the contemporary scene. He lived and worked in Berlin, like so many current artists, and in interviews he sounded like a lecturer in critical theory, also like so many current artists. Towards dawn my phone pinged with a WhatsApp message from my girlfriend in Dublin. There was a perplexing series of emojis, including a banana and two of the aghast-cat faces she used relentlessly, and then the following:
Did we hallucinate a world?
I assumed it was another line from Philip K. Dick’s novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, with which, it would be no exaggeration to claim, my girlfriend had become obsessed. She was writing an essay about it, not to publish or show anyone, but for herself, to comprehend her fascination with this novel she had described to me as a ‘mystical text’, the key to some profound revelation about the nature of reality, language and God. She spoke of the book as if it were the Kabbalah, saturated in encrypted meaning that wizened initiates could pore over for centuries and still not exhaust. The book could drive the reader mad, she said; indeed it was a machine to drive the reader mad. I was fascinated by her fascination but unable, even after a close reading, to tell whether her sense of the novel’s eerie ontological depths was legitimate or just the refraction of her own incandescent, volatile mind. By way of reply I sent her an alien-head emoji.
Dawn broke as I read more about Tino Sehgal. It seemed he did not seek to undermine the museum as an institution, unlike many of his peers who, following the belligerent tendency of the twentieth-century avant-garde, condemned it as an engine for the reinforcement of bourgeois subjectivity. In museums, Sehgal observed admiringly, you were able to look around and say in the future-perfect tense, ‘This will have been the past.’
Around noon I cycled along Rue la Fayette towards the Palais de Tokyo, an art deco monster in the sixteenth arrondissement, across the river from the Eiffel Tower. As I was parking my bike, a great wave of exhaustion rolled over me. I needed to lie down, just for a moment – and why not right here, on one of the large stone blocks lining the museum’s courtyard. No one else was around. I gazed up at the low grey sky, listened to the quiet sounds: traffic along the Seine, the breeze. I closed my eyes, thoughts drifting like curls of incense. Now a pale girl was taking me by the hand and explaining that Tokyo was above all a ‘fatal city’, the place where I would meet my desires. Several Japanese women led me into a radiant, jewel-bedecked room, where they each held a card before them with a n
umber printed on its surface: 3, 34, 49, 88, 27. Every number indicated a different ‘trouble zone’, said the pale girl: I had all day to explore the ‘phenomenal realm’. I said I would rather stay with her; she replied that this was impossible.
I got to my feet and brushed myself off, chilled from lying on the stone block. Traffic sped past, into a tunnel between the Palais and the river. I wrote some notes in my black notebook. Then I crossed the courtyard to the entrance. The queue was surprisingly long for a weekday afternoon. As I neared the ticket desk I turned on data roaming. Another WhatsApp message:
That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning …
As I read it a new message appeared below:
All that most maddens and torments, all truth with venom in it.
I wrote back Indeed … Gotta go am at P Tokyo thing! followed by an aghast-cat emoji, then killed my internet connection. The girl behind the ticket desk looked at me expectantly as I pocketed my phone and took out my wallet. Absently I placed my notebook on the desk in front of me, in plain view of the two stylish twenty-something women queuing behind me. As I took my ticket I noticed the mislaid notebook and snatched it up. It had been open on the page I’d last written in:
THIS WILL HAVE BEEN THE PAST
Tokyo as ‘fatal city’, place where I’d find all my desires. Japanese women lead me into many-coloured room. Holding cards showing me numbers: 3, 34, 49, 88, 27. Desire for pale girl. Think back to therapist.
I glanced at the women. One of them was oblivious, handing over cash; the other met my eye and grinned knowingly – she thought I was part of the show. Pulling my hat down to my eyes, I gave her the most enigmatic, lingering smile I could muster: pretty hokey. I recalled what Michel had said, how the charm of Sehgal’s work was that you were never quite sure where it began – or where it ended. Then I turned and scuttled off past the gift shop and towards the exhibition hall.
The Palais de Tokyo is huge, and the idea behind the ‘carte blanche’ series to which Sehgal’s exhibition belonged is that the entire space – 22,000 square metres – is given over to a single artist. I pushed through a curtain of glass beads, like the entrance to a boudoir in an Arabian-themed porno, and joined a new queue, which I took to be leading into the show proper. Or perhaps this was the show, an endless series of queues – a commentary on consumerism and futility.
When I reached the top of the queue, a young guy in the room ahead broke from the group he was part of and singled me out, making continuous dance-like motions as he asked, ‘Quelle est l’énigme?’
I froze. The enigma? Jesus …
Assuming I hadn’t understood, he said, ‘Maybe English? So … What is the enigma?’
I had no idea what the enigma was. He was waiting for an answer. I repeated the question to buy some time.
‘Yes,’ he said, sadistically. ‘What is the enigma?’
Frantically I tried to think of anything at all to get this freak away from me and move the wretched show to its next stage. I should have gone to see some Impressionist paintings or something. I was too inhibited, too awkward, at bottom too Irish for this kind of carry-on. And still he was there, dancing like a twat, waiting for my answer.
‘The enigma,’ I finally muttered, ‘is … who are you?’
‘Your answer leads you … here!’
He flamboyantly directed me through the next entrance. I moved along, rattled by the encounter, doubting the wisdom of attending a heavily interactive show while jolted on coffee and not having slept. A little brown-skinned girl emerged from the side of the room and trotted alongside me as I made for the opposite door.
‘Qu’est-ce que le progrès?’ she said.
This wasn’t so bad. Little kids were all right: you could fool around, say silly stuff, it didn’t have to be embarrassing.
‘Le progrès,’ I improvised, ‘est l’évolution de l’esprit, la mentalité, et la moralité.’
She wrinkled her nose in derision. ‘Progress is the evolution of mortality?’ she replied en anglais, enunciating each syllable to emphasise how much of a silly fool I was.
Glancing about me, I felt like a paedophile, as I always do when left alone with kids, legacy of the anti-paedo hysteria that had seized the culture since the nineties – guilt is assumed and a child molester lurks behind every lollipop. But I was quite stirred by the answer I’d given and felt an avuncular duty to elaborate and edify.
‘Yes, that is progress. But not mortality – morality. It’s a struggle, I’ll admit.’
A massive black lad appeared – for a second I thought he was a nonce-basher. The girl informed him of my views on progress, then skipped off. So it was a relay effort – or else they had a protocol to keep little girls away from glazed-eyed loners on antipsychotics. My new companion led me through more rooms with blank white walls and bare cement floors. Interrogating me further, he established that I was Irish, and that, yes, I supposed I did feel that Ireland had evolved over recent years, in certain, very circumscribed ways. The interaction was a little stilted, and frankly I was finding it exhausting, craving, as I so often do, to be left alone, free of the enervating demands of human engagement. But the fucker wouldn’t let up: questions, questions. Then a third party joined us – an older man with thin white hair – and the black guy was gone.
Holy shit, was it going to continue like this for the duration? I’d avoided reading reviews of this show in order to preserve the surprise, but if a relentless series of one-on-ones was in store, I’d have to bail. Perhaps there was an emergency exit … Meanwhile the old boy was yammering away, recounting an anecdote about a book he’d read by an Arab author. Around the time he was reading this book, his wife left him and his father died, leaving behind a house in the countryside. My interlocutor felt entitled to the house, but knew he’d face resistance from his brother and sister. A meeting was held by the three siblings and their lawyers. Imitating the Arab hero of the novel, the man said little during the meeting, remaining inscrutable, letting his familial rivals talk themselves into the thick of whatever judicial spiderweb he had spun.
Frankly, the old codger wasn’t coming off all that well from the narrative – and he’d seemed so nice! – though perhaps I was getting it all wrong, had misunderstood something crucial (we were conversing in an Anglo-French melange). There was something about his sister being a ‘murderous slapper’, but again it’s possible I misheard. His story trailed off with him living in a house facing the sea: the house had three walls, and its fourth wall was the sea view. He liked to stand and watch the blue horizon that was framed by the walls, meditating on infinity. ‘That sounds very nice,’ I offered. We arrived at a door; he held out his hand. ‘Bonne journée,’ I said, confused.
Thank Christ: no one stepped in to replace him as I entered a large, high-ceilinged hall, like a vacant hangar, where scores of people were ambling about. After the series of rapid engagements, this, I felt, was something like the calm a river feels when it finally meets the ocean. Scanning the diffuse crowd, I had no idea who was part of the performance and who was the audience. I entertained a Truman Show paranoia that all of them were in on it, and I was the lone innocent.
I sat against a pillar to observe. Some people were talking in pairs or small groups, others roamed alone. At first the crowd circulated randomly, but now I noticed that five people towards the far end of the hall had begun walking backwards, fanned out in a loose parallel. Others joined them as they slowly made their way across the length of the hall. Now there were twenty or more, all walking backwards in a curving line. The effect was otherworldly, like a film in which the hero can see the spirits of the dead abroad in the world. Forty-strong, the flock of backwards-walkers drifted to the other end of the hall, as if drawn by a magnetic current. Most people had fallen silent to watch. There was the sense that something was impending: a climactic event, some species of crisis or revelation.
I took out my phone to capture the eerie row of figures in case I wound up writing
about all this (I no longer trust my memory, which plays by its own rules). After snapping it I enabled data roaming and read another message:
‘… the tower is everywhere …’
It took me a moment to realise that these words were not from Philip K. Dick but from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, a novel that had for a period obsessed me. The quote referred to a painting by the surrealist Remedios Varo that the heroine, Oedipa Maas, views in Mexico City and is thereafter haunted by. In the painting a group of maidens sit trapped in a tower, forced into the production of a vast tapestry that flows out the windows and over the landscape, into the surrounding void. In the novel we are given to understand that the tapestry is the very fabric of reality, traced through with the inexplicable hieroglyphs of being. In reply I bounced back a line my girlfriend had already sent me:
I sought refuge in a nightmare of meaninglessness.
To the side of the hall there was a dark corridor: I saw a woman walk in and vanish. As I followed her into the deepening black I heard music, weird and primordial, full of chanting and strange syncopations, like a rave in another solar system. I came to the entrance of a room that was pitch-dark. Stepping inside, I raised my hands before me and couldn’t see them. An archaic terror came over me and I resisted the urge to get out. The music seemed to come from many sources. I moved carefully into the darkness, feeling my way. Something brushed against my hand. Now I understood: the music was not coming from speakers or instruments; it was being chanted, shrieked and groaned by a mass of people all around me in the inviolable dark. There must have been a dozen of them – a shifting a cappella biomass. A voice near my head hissed freakish incantations. A glimmer of light appeared from a source on the ceiling: I could discern shapes moving around me, mole-people with night-vision eyes. The glimmer went out: purest black.
Back in the main hall, the group who had walked backwards were now running the length of the floor, weaving deftly between the scattered visitors like antelopes on a Eurasian plain. I followed another corridor and entered a large room. A few dozen people lined the walls, watching each other across the floor. A smaller group frolicked around before turning their backs to the rest of us. In unison they began to chant in English: