The decommissioned museum seemed to stand for the general state of the entire strip between Clichy and Pigalle. The adult cinemas and sex shops with live window displays – it was all on the verge of going down history’s great drain, to join the official brothels or maisons closes, the catch-as-catch-can halls, and the cabaret-haunts – Heaven, Nothingness, Hell (Le Ciel, Le Néant, L’Enfer). Gone were the ‘spaces of sleep,’ as these last were known back in the day, when Montmartre was still a hotbed of revolution; vanished their macabre illusions and phantasmagorias, the coffin tables and chandelier of skull and bones, to which laughter and song had been the living accompaniment. It was there that young poets held nightly hypnotic séances of oracular group ‘slumber’ in a prelude to Surrealism.
The artists were mostly gone now, the idling transvestites, too, came and went, and only the odd African marabout still handed out to passersby his promise of healing, love, and success. The lurid Paris of old, hardly a trace of which remained, had to be taken on faith. The souls we passed were conscious of the surrounding obsolescence. Their reveries mourned the genius loci, which at one time solicited the free expression of desire and sexual liberty. Without it, they felt at sea, yet unfree.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Next, Chevauchet took me by Rue du Temps perdu, the street of Lost Time, which, by then, existed only in the memory of some sentimentalists. He seemed deflated by the fact that, in those few who still remembered it, the place provoked regret: to think of all the time lost to daydreaming!
Chapter Twenty-Five
We carried on. It was only a matter of time, Chevauchet said, before we came across someone with oppositional leanings, whose fantasies were the targeted projectiles he was after. He sought ‘a true poet,’ with dreams that were mobilizing, communicable, who brashly proclaimed, ‘I live my dream as reality!’
It had crossed my mind previously that the door through which poets passed was one whereby a psychopath could easily enter. They had been known to keep company. But I kept such thoughts to myself, wary of crossing him.
We were heading down what was formerly Rue des Maléfices, one of the most garish zones in the city, vandalized and defaced by graffiti, spiced with urine and excrement. After the closure of the university, the area became home to the Anarchabêtes, a sect of petty thieves and rebel poets – anarchists – who squatted the site of the bookshop Shakespeare & Company, and who, like other partisans of anarcho-mutisme – when they were not speaking in tongues, babbling under the influence – communicated exclusively by manual signs.
The season was changing again. We passed a pair of sphinxes, hailing from warmer climes, drafted here by orientalist whimsy to pose as terrestrial gargoyles that, chilled to their stony core, vomited water all day long. They adorned an old fountain to Napoleon – a hero of wakefulness, having famously economized on sleep.
Nearby, in one of the covered passages, a little boy stopped to window-gaze. Attracted by mere craving but detained by a dream, he stared longingly at the pretty boxes of exotic chocolate, which had the power once held by postage stamps to take one on faraway voyages.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The early-morning mist scattered as we crossed the Seine via the Île Saint-Louis, our stepping stone. We turned left immediately thereafter, walking some distance to the southeast, before drawing up, at Chevauchet’s bidding, at the middle of a city block. I looked up. Barely noticeable above an unexceptional doorway and styled in classical Latin capitals were the words ARENAS OF LUTETIA.
Several steps into the courtyard put us inside an oval amphitheatre, and we made for the seating area, only a section of which survives. It was the idea of calm. We were alone but for one other person, their gender indeterminate, sitting in a great coat twenty paces away and watching the sunny arena like a harbour, asquint. I looked out as well and saw the sand where gladiators used to cross swords turn moist and the basin fill up with water. Some moments later, two ships blew in, shaking out their sails like immense wings, their long masts quivering and dark oars paddling like the webbed feet of a swimming bird. They were flanked by a flotilla of smaller, less muscular vessels. These, too, were armed, and presently the naumachia began. But the crews manning them, wearing fierce expressions, were too large for the naval battle to look convincing. The more earnestly they sought to imitate reality, the more outlandish the show seemed. And I could not help thinking that, given their basic disproportion, the illusion would have worked better as farce – rather than straining for a spectacle of the first order.
My mind gradually strayed from the ludicrous skirmish likely conceived by our neighbour. The water, instead of giving me a shimmering Fata Morgana of my own to play with, bathed the ships in reflected light, occasioning a reverie in which they were real swans, craning their necks as they took the measure of their enormous wingspan. White, they wore their black markings like visors.
Chevauchet’s face – when, taking my eyes off my swans for an instant, I turned toward him – showed displeasure. Nothing of what we had conjured transcended gratuitous fancy, indulged for the sake of amusement. Summoning the lacklustre image of a historic event in miniature and of two swans mating – neither was a dream of beauty that bore the promise of happiness.
But as I went back to imagining the birds, so majestic, and yet, in their courtship, so graceless, in this Gallic theatre, discovered and preserved centuries later in ‘the capital of modernity,’ the voice of a poet called to me from a less distant past:
Old Paris is no more (the form of a city
Changes more quickly, alas! than a mortal’s heart)
They were Baudelaire’s swans I saw, escaped from their cage – a sign! His verses had come to life on their own, as my mind, dreaming, confirmed the truth of their sentiment.
There was nothing concrete about my reverie, nothing definite. Yet I desired with all my heart to dwell in it, and in the layers of the city that induced it, as they had Les Fleurs du mal. I had scarcely left the sleepy arena when another poet, Jean Paulhan, enjoined me from a plaque with still loftier words:
Passerby who come before this, the first monument of Paris, imagine that the city of the past is also the city of the future and that of your hopes!
I tried as best I could to communicate to Chevauchet my fleeting impressions. Though he was still visibly disappointed in me, he conceded they may have been beautiful. The thing was, they were wholly devoid of volition.
‘Poetic fantasies,’ he said, ‘be they the most melancholy, take us only so far, and no further. They leave us dissatisfied. There is something missing. Trying to lay hold of it, we rally. And that is only as it should be.’
He had joked, recently, that a diplomat’s bed was big enough for two. For the first time since our meeting, I sensed I had let him down, which implied he had plans for me. I felt personally responsible, as though I had neglected my duties, was not doing what had to be done.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Threading through waking dreams differed in many respects from dream-hopping. Night-dreams were diversions for sleep, escapes from darkness. Daydreams, as vain hopes, chimeras, distractions in a waking state, were resistances to attention, absences from the day. Their fully fledged form put them closer to frenzy or lunacy than to the meditative activity they had come to designate. They proved, at any rate, thinner, less visually creative, and more ephemeral when dreamt than did night-dreams. It was impossible to find a foothold in them. One did not have the experience of penetrating a self-contained world, but of being carried some distance on the powerful wings of strange desires or suddenly shot through with them. Rather than letting us pass, as we did through dreams, they passed through us or lifted us, at the unhurried pace that is theirs. Their tenor (if I can call it that), even when melancholy, was typically positive and associative, so that one did not lose one’s bearings as in oneiric states. Most important of all, they were overwhelmly pleasant, far sweeter than dreams, and too often made up of images their subject found gra
tifying, such as figurations of harmony and delight. On that basis alone, they were more agreeable to experience second-hand.
All of these generalizations were true enough, but even from my limited exposure there were other, more pertinent conclusions to be drawn. Chevauchet seemed out of touch with the actual direction most reveries were taking. When imagining fulfilled wishes, for example, they were no longer adventurous but conservative. When concerning projects, they were not boldly spinning their future but cocooning and protective. Many were simply too self-absorbed to sustain the hopes Chevauchet placed in them. Yet he remained convinced that these were exceptions, or at least in the minority, and that we had merely caught them at a bad time. He had no problem condemning such ‘dreams dumped in a puddle,’ of a feather with those from ci.
Meanwhile, he himself, it struck me, dreamt with blind conviction and ever greater urgency of reveries of which there was little evidence: reveries that were noble and other-centred. As he fantasized changing the world based on them, the tip of my tongue balanced only one word, which it did not let fall: la-la land. There was something about Chevauchet’s idea of community that could keep him going forever, notwithstanding evidence to the contrary. This was the quixotic quest for a solution: the one, elusive fantasy that, truly selfless, would be just, and universally claimable; a rara avis; a great exception, where all noble human dreams came together and whose content could never be qualified. If only it were found, all the sleepless, white nights, all the tossing and turning, all the nightmarish visions that haunt dream-land would be made good at last.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
That day we made one final stop, on the grounds of the Hôpital Sainte-Anne. Chevauchet revealed he had high hopes for the reveries of the mad – a turn in his thinking so of a piece I should have anticipated it.
‘There are great artists among them,’ he confided, ‘great poets. They spend so much of their time sleeping and wandering aimlessly, their rational faculty dulled by medication. They pass fluidly between day- and night-dreams, from one into the other. The boundary generally so clear to us for them barely exists.’
We entered the hospital’s grounds from Rue Cabanis and strolled up and down the leafless interior alleys. These were named after such luminaries as Maurice Ravel, Antonin Artaud, and Gérard de Nerval, not all of whom had spent time within its walls. City life was shut out of this parklike ensemble, creating an oasis of tranquility. The lawns were freshly trimmed, the roads and sidewalks spotless, and only those buildings whose facades were in need of cleaning showed signs of their age. The patient body was a mix of ‘traditional’ inmates, confined and incurable, and ‘contemporary’ habitués, in and out, as in a spa. For these reasons, one had the impression – more intense than almost anywhere else in Paris – of being in two or even three superposed historical periods simultaneously.
The modern mad – whose mystical fantasies (issuing as they did from dreariness and longing) had once pointed the way to happiness, to utopia, and cast an unforgiving light on the pedestrian, self-seeking lives of the sane – were mad no more. As a plaque put up by the hospital’s PR team proudly stated, ‘It is at Sainte-Anne that the first treatments for the gravest mental disorders were developed.’ The words were a caption to the oracular ravings of Jeannot, a young peasant who, shortly before taking his own life, had etched them into the oak floor of his room. On permanent display for its historical value, his work stood as ‘a testament to the gravity that these illnesses can have without care being adapted to the needs of the individual patient.’
The two patients whose path we crossed, and into whose thoughts we could tune, were perfectly in possession of their senses and feeling fully restored to the world. I was confirmed in my impression when, following in their footsteps, we came to a small subterranean gallery exhibiting artwork from the hospital’s own collection. Art therapy, pioneered here, and for which Sainte-Anne had become renowned, continued to this day. But among the particular set of drawings, paintings, and scrolls on view, none was recent.
One piece especially caught my eye, for it seemed to encapsulate what was missing from this place where the ill no longer mingled with the lost. It was a small croquis – souvenir for a fellow patient presumably about to leave the premises. Dedicated to Monsieur Fouron by one René Ernest Bredier and dated September 1942, it showed a middle-aged man, fully dressed down to his slippers, reclined on his side, with one hand in his trouser pocket and the other tucked underneath his head, his eyelids drawn. In this pose, floating on the idea of a bed, the folds and shadows formed just so by his clothes and rendered faithfully in pencil, he resembled a shrivelled leaf fallen to the ground in early autumn.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
‘Out of season!’ was how Chevauchet described his work at the time, casting about for an explanation of his failure to get anywhere close to the utopian fusion he was seeking. He had observed once before of autumn that it was the best time of the year for diplomacy. In autumn, the light induced whole suites of reverie. As if to compensate for the impending loss of foliage, fall’s ‘riots of colour,’ its unrecorded ‘sonatas’ and ‘symphonies,’ elevated the spirits and gave rise to a ‘late’ optimism.
Winter had been long, and he looked forward to spring. Even I could see the seasonal impediments to his mission. There was the lack of light, to begin with. Contrary to what might be thought, winter favoured not daydreams but dreams following one another in close succession over long stretches of sleep, delving so deeply, and so sunken in consequence, that our descent proved tricky, to say nothing of a plunge from a daydream, so vertiginous it took my breath away.
Winter, season of discontent. But I wanted to know what it was a season for. Chevauchet’s replique was brief:
‘Sleep and death. These days, mostly not sleep.’
Surely it had some other use, I insisted, some silver lining, and could be turned over for our purposes and the general good.
The other half of the problem, it then emerged, was the relentless cold. With geoengineering gone wrong, people were too preoccupied with keeping warm to relax and let their minds drift.
‘One day it will get so cold that Hell itself will freeze over,’ he stated, trying his utmost to sound both plausible and prophetic. ‘You will see. They are cooling you down on purpose because they are doing it artificially.’
That afternoon, snow fell in spades. As if answering a challenge, it gave everything a thick fleece. Hard reality showed through where it was cleared or melted. The slickness of the asphalt, its glistening blackness by night, attracted victims with its solidity like a dark magnet. The fluffy white fairytale never lasted long. The snow-clad house, standing for comfort and happiness, provoked petty acts of vandalism. And through even a single broken window, the cold crept in, killing the dreamlife inside. There was no end in sight to the justified resentment with which the ‘seasonally appropriate’ freezing temperatures and grim hunger sabotaged the dreams of the poor, which contained the highest quotient of resistance.
‘Another Little Ice Age could finish off their useless fancies,’ quipped Chevauchet with dark irony.
Chapter Thirty
These fantasies of the poor, as rare and precious as they were in such bitter meteorology, Chevauchet thought anemic.
‘They are entirely circumscribed by the realm of necessity: material needs, food, shelter, warmth. What have they to bind them to Onirica? Frayed and loose ends. Nothing but residue.’
There could be no doubt about it: he was close to despair. He saw (how rightly, I would soon know) the crackdown on sleep-time as the world’s systematic and final disenchantment. With the new surveillance methods in place, he worried over what would become of Onirica, the embassy, and the entire mission if he should lose his ground. Dreamers who hosted him not long before were unavailable, and those who could be counted upon to remain asleep were now farther apart and fewer. He needed to know that he had always somewhere to land, another dreamer he could call on, a ‘rendezv
ous’ where he could appear should one of his longstanding hosts forego dreaming and, under pressure from the authorities, renounce sleep, cutting off Chevauchet’s way home. Brief general awakenings did not pose a mortal threat to him; he could still tarry on the edges of consciousness until sleep again engrossed his host. But with the repressions against sleep intensifying, his life was in jeopardy, making difficult all dream diplomacy.
There were of course still dreamers he could depend on, such as me. He was my guest. I was reliable – this must be how he initially chose me, although we never discussed it. He must have known that sleeping was my ‘keystone habit’ and nothing could keep me from it, not even a gun pointed at my head. But he needed legion like me, as he needed space to operate, and the operation of coupling night- to daydreams was an exceedingly delicate one, tolerating no missteps.
‘If worse came to worst, and there were no human dreamers left,’ I asked naively, ‘could not animals do the dreaming in our place?’
I imagined animals as so many seeders, sowing dreams in those lacking them.
But this was not a durable solution. The embassy, Chevauchet’s outpost in reality, needed both dreamers and daydreamers. Animals – be they dogs, swans, or horses – were incapable of complex reverie and, in any case, should not have to do the work of men. They could not take over our responsibility.
As for infiltrating ci, my cautious suggestion, he would not hear of it.
Chevauchet’s voice, I noticed, was growing raspier and weaker in its determination. At times, he would lose it completely. ‘They want to kill off all the dreamers!’ he croaked, and I did my best not to show the pity I felt toward him. His physique, too, seemed diminished. His coat hung loosely from his shoulders as if there were no substance filling it, the inside hollow like the cape of a ghost, a cavity for the wind to swirl leaves in. This I took as a sign less of exhaustion than of disillusionment – a serious malady that in him, who harboured all illusions, could prove fatal.
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