Chapter 10: Celine

Cycling in towards the studio, I was happy. Not with the grey October sky, nor with the traffic, nor with the constant insinuation of adverts into my line of sight. These were annoyances of no consequence while I was golden. I flew, rather than cycled; every breath filled my body with eternal youth, a radiant glow that I could feel all the way down to my toes. Poor Daniel had no sleep after I had woken from my dream fully restored, fully human, and reunited with my wellspring of lust and creativity. And soon I would be channelling that inner radiance onto canvass. If ever a depiction of a Chrysanthemum had expressed love and lewdness, in streams of pollen and cups of petals, then it would be the one I intended to paint today.

The removal, then restoration, of my source of joyful energy had been an experience that had convinced me that my unconscious – everyone’s unconscious – could be considered a being in its own right. Between us, we had defeated Neo and restored our mutually fulfilling connection.

Perhaps unconscious was the wrong term. Because of the DreamAds hood, I’d learned that there was someone else in my mind (or a very different version of myself), someone perfectly conscious who I only really got to talk to in dreams. This id – no, I would call her Celine – Celine was not at all how I had previously imagined my unconscious to be, an incoherent chaos. In fact, she had a superior understanding of most subjects, art especially, but even of subjects like politics. Celine was smart, connected to the sublime, and heard and saw far more than I did. And Celine loved me. Had my best interests at heart. When Oscar Wilde said, to love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong relationship, he probably wasn’t thinking of the love of the subterranean inner id for the lonely and complex ego who thought she was in charge of the body. It worked though. I could feel an affection aimed towards me from deep inside, mind you, it was a rather condescending affection.

Now that I had become attuned to that feeling, I could tell that Celine had become restless. She wanted me to do something other than having sex and painting. Something… vengeful?

I cycled along Thomas Street and right past the entrance to NCAD, with its five high stone arches, each with a wooden door (four of them permanently sealed). If the Romans had designed an entrance for five chariots to prepare for a race in an amphitheatre beyond, they would have come up with something like this row of wide archways.

Shortly after passing NCAD, I turned downhill and freewheeled the last hundred metres to the thick, metal door of the studios. My motions in unlocking the door, lifting in my bike, relocking the door, carrying the bike up to its alcove were so automated that I hardly noticed myself doing them. My thoughts were still on the distinction between ‘me’ the ego, and my other half, the id. My twin. Everything good in my life now seemed to be a result of our working together.

Once in my cubicle, I concentrated on my new painting, sketching for some time with a 4B pencil before allowing myself the deliciously sensual feeling of applying gold and yellow paint to the image on the canvass. This wasn’t the time to worry about the expense of the thick daubs of colour: on it went as needed to stun the viewer with the image of a subtly anthropomorphised flower as it opened to the sun and the pollen of its companions on the most glorious day of its life.

Throughout the morning I was aware of Celine. A minor character from a Jane Austen film came to the surface of my mind, someone I could picture very distinctly although I could not remember his name. He was a man who was far more interested in the deeds of the government in London than local affairs of the heart. Always with a newspaper in hand and rarely offering more than a grunt, the character only paid attention when the people around him moved beyond the trite to speak with real depth. In a similar fashion, much to my disappointment (this might be my best painting ever), I felt that Celine wasn’t all that interested my work. Her attention was on something she considered far more important. The fate of humanity?

Taking a break around lunchtime, I was sorry to see that Tony wasn’t in the alcove under the stairs. So I hurried past Paula with just a quick hello and went up to his studio. Not wanting to be the person on business from Porlock I hesitated, then, although it felt like I was spying, I checked the room through the keyhole. He was there, sat at a table covered in autumnal leaves, sorting through them. I straightened and knocked.

‘Cyn!’ Tony’s voice and eyes were filled with genuine pleasure. ‘I was thinking about you when I saw the news. Come in, come in. Would you like a tea?’

Soon we were sat at a corner of his table, hands on our mugs. Tony’s scarf today was orange and I envied it, not so much for the vivid colour but for the warmth. Come November the owner of the building would switch on the boiler that gave heat to the rooms; the warm air being channelled through enormous vents could be felt throughout the building as a distinct current. In October though, the studio rooms were at their coldest.

Tony wanted reassurance that I hadn’t been harmed by DreamAds and I explained that somehow I had managed to help my id escape imprisonment and I felt better than ever.

‘I call her Celine,’ I added, thinking he might laugh. ‘My comrade in defying DreamAds.’

Tony’s expression was amused. ‘You think she’s a separate personality?’

‘Deep down, not really. Though interacting with her really does feel like I’m dealing with another person.’

‘Well, I understand that. Let’s suppose her to be your soul.’ A shy expression came to his face and Tony looked into his mug as sweetly as if he were looking at the infant Jesus. ‘Communicating with your soul would indeed feel like talking to another person, a parent perhaps. Someone who knows everything about you.’

I reached across the table to touch his clasped hands. ‘Honestly, Tony, Celine isn’t my soul. She’s too vulgar, condescending and annoying. Especially given that she’s got access to a creative world that I can only reach through her.’

This amused him. ‘She does love you though?’

‘Oh, definitely. But you’re right, there is something parental about it.’

At this, Tony nodded and drank up his tea. ‘Can you leave the DreamAds programme now?’

That was a good question and even while painting it had been in my thoughts from time to time. ‘I probably could go back to the courts and make a defence that it’s medically unsafe. The funny thing, though, is that I feel motivated to do more than just drop out. I’m not usually like this, I’m not a campaigner like Daniel, but I want to make a stand. That asshole, Neo, tried to force products into my dreams and he would have cut me off from my creative self if he could have managed it. For that alone, I want to get back at him. If I could stop the entire program, I would.’

‘Quite right.’

‘I don’t see how though. Maybe a court case? But what can I prove? That I wasn’t able to paint? That’s intangible. That I lost my libido? I can hardly get my partner or lovers up  to testify about my love life.’

This type of thought was less to Tony’s taste than discussing souls, I could tell, though his eyes changed only a fraction. ‘Why don’t you ask Celine what she wants you to do?’ he suggested.

The world seemed to wait upon my response. Even the walls of the studio were listening and they spent decades asleep. Every sense of mine was on high alert. There was no doubting the importance of the question. ‘I should do that.’

‘Shall I get my Tarot cards?’

I shook my head. ‘They won’t work. I’ve tried. It’s difficult.’ I paused and Tony waited. There was a understanding presence about Tony that allowed me to try to put into words the elusive nature of my relationship to the hidden personality within me.

‘Bear with me, because I’m only just working out what I’m trying to say and it’s difficult to say, even though I do have a grasp on it, intuitively I mean.’ I licked my lips. ‘There’s something about direct contact between us that Celine recoils from. If I find a way through to her, it only works in the moment. As soon as I develop a code – like Tarot cards; or eye-catching colours, red for no, green for yes – our communication ossifies into something meaningless. Trying to hear her is a really subtle experience. The more precise my messaging technique, the more quickly her genuine voice dies, and what I get is a story of my own invention with nothing from her. Only if I stay loose and don’t insist on a semiotic approach, does she manage to get through to me.’

‘Semiotic?’

‘If the thoughts I’m having carry a message that can be interpreted, they are semiotic, they have symbols that have a meaning quite different to the story of the thoughts that carry them. Like if I’m daydreaming about climbing a rope-wall and the pattern of the handholds and footholds are a map and I realise I want to visit Cork soon. If I look for more maps and messages, though, the daydream becomes empty. Celine has to be free to swim and the more I put clear meanings onto whatever medium it is we are using, the more the ocean she moves in freezes up.’

‘I think I understand you. There might be a parallel with painting. People – the art galleries – say to me all the time, why don’t you paint another Realagattio? As if I can just repeat a formula that worked every time. There wasn’t a formula!’ He slapped the table. ‘Which, by the way, is why I prefer Duchamp to Warhol.’

This was an old argument. I didn’t want to get into it again. ‘Exactly. Like, I was daydreaming of an old boyfriend and holding onto him as we rode his bike dangerously fast. For a while I could feel Celine close to me and I know I was being encouraged to be brave. The white line flowing beside me was a confinement and we had to escape it. But every time I’ve tried the same daydream since, there’s been nothing.’

‘You need to surprise yourself.’

‘Right.’

‘For me, there’s something else too.’ Again that downward, confessional look. ‘LSD taught me also to try to step outside the picture. Be orthogonal to it. You think you are laying down lines and paint like placing dominos. Sometimes – and this always feels so beautiful when it happens – I see the dominos not on a plane but in three dimensions and I see the thousands of them that link into my painting from the additional dimension but will never be seen, only intuited, by future viewers of the painting.’

I felt the grip of a powerful shudder and my eyes filled with tears. A dream had entered into my thoughts that I had forgotten. ‘You’ve made me recall dream. Daniel and I lived in a golden palace. It was love. Yet I suddenly noticed there was a huge iron door, just standing on it’s own, unsupported, and with a great bolt across it. If you could open that door, it would be a portal. Everyone moved around the palace avoiding the door without even noticing it was there. I had been like that for years. Now it was obvious, I couldn’t believe how blind I’d been.’

‘When your mind is too narrow, you miss the obvious.’

‘Exactly.’

‘I’ve a suggestion.’

‘Yes?’

‘Let’s try some word association. Perhaps you can address your unconscious that way.’

‘Celine.’

‘Celine,’ he agreed.

‘All right. How do we go about this?’

‘I’ll say a word or phrase and you say the first word that enters your mind.’

I felt excited. Every opportunity to communicate with Celine was a pleasure. ‘Go ahead.’

‘Cyn?’

‘Love.’

‘Daniel?’

‘Lo… wait. Door. The door in my dream. It was his. Not mine.’

‘Neo?’

I wanted to stop the game, work out properly that the iron door was keeping me away from something. That it was Daniel’s door. Tony, however, was pushing on, perhaps deliberately keeping me off balance for this to work more effectively.

‘Evil.’

‘Evil?’

‘Banal.’ Neo was not diabolical.

‘Celine?’

‘Love.’

‘DreamAds?’

‘Destroy.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Vengeance.’

‘Art?’

‘Manifesto.’

‘Politics?’

‘No.’

‘Love?’

‘Hate.’

‘Court case?’

‘Atlantis.’

That threw him. I knew why I had said that though I didn’t want to stop to explain. I just had this image of Greek-style men in robes disputing earnestly, not realising their entire world was about to be engulfed with raging waters. A court case just wasn’t anywhere near the answer.

‘Rain?’

‘Spears.’

‘Gold.’

‘Bow.’

‘Fire.’

‘Chariot.’

‘I’m stuck, sorry Cyn. I’ve run out.’

‘Oh don’t be sorry, I understand her much better. Celine spoke to me.’

‘Good, good… and what did she say?’

‘Short version. The world must be turned upside down. We’re going to found a new Jerusalem.’