More and more, he muttered instead of addressing me, plaintive words not meant for my ears, questions left dangling – like ‘At what price…?’ which he for once succeeded in finishing: ‘…do you buy solidarity?’ He was alluding, of course, to Greater America’s union with Onirica, to its coming, ever-deferred transformation. So preoccupied was he by his para-worldly cares and rising complications (of which I still had only the slimmest conception) that he sometimes seemed light years away. Minutiae could worm their way into his mind and obscure the big picture, the gestalt, the synthesis. They were like the petites perceptions noted by Leibniz – tiny impressions and alterations of the soul, normally too minuscule, numerous, unvarying to notice – which, blown out of proportion somehow, coloured his entire vision, fixing themselves, in their obsessive return, in his memory.
He would remark, for instance, on the light in a room: ‘Did you make a note of it, burning with poetic ecstasy? I hope so.’ I did my best to keep up, but how could I? In the quaint stone house in which we stood, a lone oil lamp fought off the inner gloom. Any ecstasy it may have had was lost on me. ‘Whenever I see a river in a dream,’ he said on another occasion, ‘I look for whether it flows, rough and brisk, like the foreground of a painting, or whether it is motionless, neat, unelaborate, tying the background like a ribbon, or maybe just a line of filiform silver, the mere suggestion of a river…’ – differences so subtle they seemed to me wholly without consequence.
More traces of his own forgotten, unconscious states than objective indexes of another’s individuality, such wee perceptions, the way he attended to and unfurled them, were a window on his peculiar sensibility and method. I began to imagine that every one of his passions and decisions could ultimately be traced to the things he found remarkable and singled out for reflection in the dreams of others, things of which their dreamers themselves were unaware. He once confessed to lacking an unconscious, vaunting his complete awareness and perfect memory – for precisely such things. He was self-transparent, ‘leaping over my own shadow rather than jumping at it,’ he boasted in jest. But I had my doubts. Not only were the effects of these perceptions on himself opaque to him, he did not even recognize their opacity. I further wondered if the small impressions he gleaned on his rounds were not perhaps of the same character and order of magnitude for their dreamers – and if, by his exaggerated attention to their dream expressions, he did not end up ‘catching’ and sharing them. Was it not owing to their existence and subliminal effects at every moment, I reasoned, that the present – waking, and perhaps dreamt as well – was at once perpetually charged with the past and big with the future, as Leibniz thought? Was this not, in fact, how every age, every epoch, ‘dreamt the future,’ as Chevauchet was fond of saying?
He wanted this future dreamt more directly. Dreaming it was supposed to both anticipate and bring it about – ‘awaken’ it. Elements of night- and daydreams would be realized in the course of our waking up. This business of awakening was no mere metaphor for mental vigilance; it was also literal and meant coming out of slumber. One opened a new pair of eyes, through which the world not only looked, but actually was, different.
This was indeed the nub of his doctrine, and its weakness. Dreams could not simply map out the future. They were unrealizable, since realization entailed imposing upon them the traditional, logical and physical, demands of rationality. It was bad faith pretending otherwise. Worse, to insist on awakening as the turning point, as the only way dreams were made good on, appeared, as time went on, complicit with the status quo – in a way that settling scores with it in dreams did not. To have commerce with ‘normal’ consciousness and action was to court compromise from an uneven footing. I suspected that, even in the best case, such a negotiated future could only be a letdown.
The leaven turning dreams into ascendants, or ‘rising signs,’ was hope.
‘It is in its dreams,’ he said, taking a fresh run at it, ‘that society reflects its conditions of existence and expresses its desire to surmount the bad in them. But without hope, their “active principle,” dreams are not enough to transform reality. The criticism of the status quo that is implicit or explicit in them needs activation.’
As he saw it, real action remained unfinished, and the revolutionary past, as a result, unfulfilled. Assuming there was still hope left, was there enough of it?
Chapter Thirty-One
He was nothing if not persistent, His Excellency Chevauchet. He kept at it. Given the setbacks and waning confidence in the success of his mission, his resolve and vitality often amazed me. I had been accompanying him daily on his travels for many months now. With each passing day, daydreams appeared to him more ‘in their true light’ – hopelessly compromised by the very fact of arising in a ‘bad totality.’ I myself had already remarked that the less time one had to night-dream, the more one-dimensional and threadbare became one’s diurnal creations. Nocturnal dramas giving expression to repressed wishes and fears acted as a valve, releasing much of the pent-up eroticism and violence, and bypassing morality altogether. They conformed to the crude image Sigmund Freud cast of them. Without this outlet, natural daydreams (such as they were) risked being turned into vehicles for base desires, monopolized by sexual or even murderous fantasies in the breast. Nothing higher would germinate in them; nothing concerned with the world outside oneself or containing the seeds of a universe.
But there was something still more worrisome: the nether extension of voluntary servitude. The dreams we traversed practically demonstrated that freedom could be captured even in its last bastion. It was not merely that its symbols had changed; freedom no longer spoke through them.
Finally, there was the numbing effect of ubiquitous, ‘universal’ information. Here is how Chevauchet once illustrated it to me:
‘One cannot dream of the most beautiful girl in the world in ignorance of who or where she might be. She has not gone unnoticed; she has already been identified; someone, some headhunter most likely, has already hunted her down for the cover of a magazine, already modelled her for a ci avatar, where she can be devoured, feeding the fantasies of millions upon millions.’
Information was spectacle, mass entertainment, a constant screen interposed between world and mind. It left nothing to the desiring imagination, since whatever was worth being shown was spectacularly overexposed and, no matter how sensual or luxurious to begin with, all but stripped of its aura – coming preconsumed and predigested in ways that often were unimaginative, trailing behind it virtually, like a tail there was no getting around. Why even make the effort to imagine anything for oneself? Who needed daydreams when one had virtuality?
The effect of virtual reality on the sales of luxury (superfluous) goods was not surprising. The switch over to virtuals, ever cheaper to produce, had been smoothed by ci and by a campaign marketing them as more environmentally friendly than the ‘real thing.’ Such sensory solicitation and oversaturation were lethal to daydreams that did not revolve around commodities.
‘The death of imagination in ordinary women and men,’ as Chevauchet liked to put it, was taking place before our very eyes. He even had a special word for it: fantacide.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chevauchet never spoke about his past. It was always present for him, and if he could have it his way, it would always be autumn. I could not help wondering how long he had been around, if time indeed was applicable to his existence – as what I took to be his winding down suggested it was. How long ago did he appear, if appearance was indeed his mode of being? Was he an original, or did he have models, predecessors?
The little I learned of his origins was fascinating. He was born in 1939 in a Pyrenean village, a war child raised in hiding on account of his racial profile. This underground childhood, passed en cachette, determined his mistrust not only of authority but of hard reality, from which ever after he was in static flight: at first, a fugitive, to escape detection, and later, for refuge in the happiness of dreams.
Th
e faraway war came to an end, yet the early experience of hiding and shelter, of moral clarity and political polarity, of having to distinguish enemy from friend, and an imagination that more than made up for his inability to pass the time reading, marked him forever. This vita imaginativa was not, he stressed, a ‘limited life,’ since his objective confines spurred him to push back against the limits of fantasy to compensate for the poverty of his everyday. He compared it to the effect of losing a sense like sight, the remaining senses finding ways to balance the loss by their own development. The only difference being that with the loss of physical freedom – not itself a sense but a midwife to the senses – one needed to compensate for all of them. Failing this adaptation, under such circumstances, life would have been impossible.
In the end, I knew next to nothing about Chevauchet’s family and personal history. I did learn he had been married and had one child, and deeply regretted both. He thought the notion that one cared about the future of the world more if one had children, and the more one had of them, was patently false:
‘The things we are willing to change and are exhorted to do for their sake, the social gains which may or may not, in turn, carry over to their children, are few and insignificant and often outweighed by the losses. We leave the world to them a greater mess than when we found it. We may make wiser lifestyle choices and model sociability and civility for a time. Few of us, however, are moved to pursue a righteous path to foster our children’s sense of planetary responsibility. We must already have been set on such a path by destiny, and are likelier to step off it when a child enters the picture. After all, we are expected to think no sacrifice too great for it. There are, of course, exceptions – advocacy and philanthropy sparked by a child’s handicap or by the experience of adoption. This should not blind us to the fact that when we project onto our children our unrealized dreams, which, incidentally, they are unlikely to fulfill, we absolve ourselves of the duty to take an active interest in the world, to intervene in it – we prefer to stay in our own little corner of living hell rather than attempt to change it. Our interest is, from then on, mediated through them, moderated by what is good for our child, whom we protect and monitor like a big investment rather than as a part of humanity. Parenthood, by focusing us narrowly, reinforces both capitalist and statist instincts – prosperity and security for a few, for the rest fear of poverty and anarchy. Our self-interest is thereby redoubled. I can find no good social reason, but only excuses, for reproducing. Better to have disciples than children.’
Shortly after May 1968, Chevauchet moved to Paris and started a publishing house to promote critical theorists and anarchist philosophers, both dead and living. I assumed he had his share of ideals and ambition. The experience of militant dreaming in those days prepared him for his ‘succession,’ as he called it, to the ambassadorial place.
‘At any given time, there are at least two politically conscious Oniricans: the ambassador (mentor) and his successor in training. The man who would hand over the baton to me I met abroad, on a trip to Moscow. I was part of a French delegation invited by the underground independent labour union smot to meet Russian dissidents recently released from psychiatric hospitals and prisons. It was autumn 1988, perestroika, and we had hopes for unification with a realm of fantasy.
‘On my last afternoon there, I struck out on my own on a walk to Neskuchny Sad, the oldest corner of the famous Gorky Park. Excited to see a foreigner (the giveaway being a francophone edition of the Moscow News I had purchased in the lobby of my hotel), a man struck up a conversation with me in fluent French. He was planning a “trip” – in other words, to defect – and wanted my telephone number, which I was only too happy to give him.
‘A week later, we saw each other again, this time in Paris. I asked if he had a place to stay. He said he was living in an embassy, and that it was not the Russian one. Travel restrictions allegedly did not apply to him: he could come and go as he pleased, and no one back home had so much as an inkling of his absence.
‘Kolnikov, for that was his name, was no ordinary dissident. He dropped enough hints. Luckily, he was not mistaken when he said I was “ambassador material,” ripe to represent Onirica. I hope I did not disappoint him. Come to think of it, you too would make a fine ambassador …
‘The rest, as they say, is history. Two years later to the day, in mid-November, a fever carried him away. He was so fired up by the Autumn of Nations, the events in Poland, Germany, China …’
As for me, I was growing accustomed to the drift of his ellipses.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The months of spring saw a slew of attacks on wishful thinking and the creative imagination. Their authors skewered every ‘utopist’ and ‘visionary’ known to history, no matter their politics. They took an axe to cinema, the ‘dream factory,’ and to poetry, ‘the medium of prophecy,’ denouncing their practitioners as charlatans pulling wool over people’s eyes.
This genre of hatchet job was not new; oneirocriticism, already practised among the ancient Greeks and Islamic mystics, had become a fixture of intellectual life, under one name or another, in the nineteenth century. It had lost none of its popularity among modern reformists. But the extent to which the media had mainstreamed this brand of lettered butchery, and feasted on the meat of it, gave us cause for alarm. Constructive criticism of the ‘dream-lefties,’ the hated oneiro-gauchistes hostile to the status quo, was out of the question. The only acceptable way to comment now was damagingly and destructively. Another world was impossible. There were no alternatives. As long as you railed against the do-gooders and their air castles, or cried bloody murder while pointing to anarchists, naming names when necessary, you were guaranteed an avid audience.
I had been reading everything I could get my hands on of this literature to learn the language of the enemy (the maxim of she who had taught us, French schoolchildren, English). It was highly toxic writing, and, considering the nullity of its content, well executed. It called, in voices amplified with every iteration, in the dated idiom characteristic of these fanatical conservatives, for a new Prohibition. The cure for society’s woes was to kick for good the ‘opium of the masses.’ But the tenor of the metaphor was not, as in the days of Marx and Lenin, religion. It dug deeper, much deeper, and came up with … sleep.
Sleep was the source of all idleness; sleep was a drain on the economy; sleep induced illusions that competed with the demands and duties of reality; sleep enfeebled the will and was for the weak; sleep interfered with technical innovation, and with the swift completion of pressing public projects. In short, sleep was evil, and evil – sleep.
Bene dormit qui non sentit quam male dormiat: he sleeps well who feels not how ill he sleeps. Those for whom the few stolen minutes of slumber were a relief from oppression and the torture of overwork, and who were by no means a visible minority, had every right to feel threatened. The pamphlets denounced them as a ‘menace,’ ‘melancholics,’ ‘spaniels,’ ‘dog-faced,’ ‘bags of bones,’ and ‘canaille.’ I could have sat down and written the primer for this novel lingua imperii. Insomnia was no longer ‘voluntary’ but ‘recommended.’ ‘Closing one’s eyes’ became synonymous with ‘conspiracy.’
Such perversions of language by the professed ‘friends of the people’ were as rife as their spread seemed unstoppable. And, as anyone else who followed the discourse sedulously could have predicted, by midsummer, insomnia went from ‘recommended’ to ‘mandatory.’ It was to usher in a ‘great and full awakening’ – physical, moral, spiritual, and of the ‘dormant,’ untapped faculties – an eye-opening available to everyone like Holy Communion (the religious overtones clearly calculated).
To prevent interference with this universal illumination, sleeping under any pretext, on any occasion, was outlawed – all for the ‘greater good of society.’ Selling people on insomnia took such duplicitous slogans as One man who does not sleep makes two men, and two is always better than one. These ‘two-in-ones’ were mechanical, their bo
dies relieved of organic torpor. Bodies ruled by their organs were abject and wretched; bodies controlling their vital functions were godlike, and saw their powers multiply. The mind, no longer stultified by sleep, underwent fission, unlocking its unused capacity. A world peopled by savants awaited!
All ‘estates’ – not just the elites – would get ‘the boost,’ a new drug called Potium, to partake of this beatific state of high-functioning sleeplessness. Yet the social structure was to be no better for it. A new hierarchy emerged. On the bottom, there were the underdogs, as you might expect. Higher up, the ‘technicians’ enjoyed a self-evident utility. Above them, finally, sat the ‘specialists’ – measly technocrats with significant, publicly defined administrative duties. With this new nomenklatura came a new nomenclature. The Minister of Education became ‘Virtual Literacy Specialist.’ The Ministry of the Interior now went by ‘Specialty for the Maintenance of Public Order and Consciousness.’ And the top brass of the ruling asp, Alternative Socialist Party, hid behind the superlative ‘Specialty of Specialties,’ with the Office of Prime Minister (that holy of holies) predictably retitled ‘Office of the Chief Specialist of Specialties.’
As for the ‘Specialist of Occupations,’ he scrapped the luxury of the thirty-five-hour workweek: the workers of the future could easily put in twenty hours per day, in several shifts, with breaks for three square meals. Downtime in any shape or form was frowned upon, and was on its way out. Freedom through work! Work liberates! – these mottoes were only vaguely familiar, and chanting them with an upbeat air was enough to make them contagious. Gainful employment was, of course, not guaranteed. Productivity, we were assured, did not need remuneration to ‘count’ in the eyes of ‘leaders of industry.’
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