The Eyelid by S. D. Chrostowska

Author:S. D. Chrostowska
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coach House Books

Chapter Twenty-Two

We ended up at a pleasant bar, where light drugs were traded, and the clientele, neither cool nor all that young, was less distracted, practised in medicating the profound. The alchemy of the place was such that one’s sense of time was suspended, regardless of what music was playing, what one had taken, whether or not one was high, and whether the door was closed or open. This ambiance had everything to do with its name: le Rêve, the Dream.

We sat down for a drink and chatted with the current owner, ‘The Headless Woman’ (in tribute to Max Ernst), and none of it seemed quite real.

‘That’s what brings them here,’ she laughed, when I mentioned the effect her café had on me. ‘It’s long been a favourite with writers, you know. They flock here to daydream. To escape reality. And I’m happy to help.’

I asked how long the Dream had been around.

‘Oh, hard to say. It’s the kind of factual question I rarely get,’ she added, winking. ‘My guess is at least since the end of the last war.’

I asked Chevauchet to describe to me what the other customers were fantasizing about. To my surprise, he did not invite me to see for myself, as he did with dreams. He said they were cosmic reveries, of the type that are tricky to access and impossible to narrate – a state of mind at once profoundly solitary, asocial, and outside time, what the Neoplatonists called melancholia mentalis. I gave the washed-out faces around me the once-over, and since they betrayed nothing of the sort, I had no choice but to take him at his word. So, the gap between the ideal and what existed made one melancholy … Sensing my skepticism, Chevauchet assured me this was one of the last communal spaces where daydreams could be hatched like plots against reality.

The first of their kind had been the legendary Black Cat, le Chat noir. But the problem was that its two facets – the masonic and the aesthetic – which had gone international, did not communicate and collaborate. The diplomacy of the masons was completely obscure to the artistic youth that gathered there to stage their shadow plays. What the first conspired in spirit, the second should have vested in symbolic spectacle appealing to the senses. Obviously, neither masons nor artists – a.k.a. dreamers and daydreamers – alone could stage a revolution; only the two together.

‘It is a little-known fact,’ continued Chevauchet, ‘that the Black Cat was initially the Black Swan, in memory of 1789. The French Revolution – the original one – was like the “black swan” of the philosophers: something that had been thought impossible, inconceivable even, until it manifested itself, shaking the foundations of historical understanding, putting almost everything into question. This question mark needed a name, and since its shape was a bit like a swan (a cygne, being in French a homonym for “sign”), even though they had never seen one like it (for its

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