Cells, p.5
Cells, page 5
Of all the rooms in my family home, I came closest to liking the kitchen. Why not the sitting room, which had big windows looking onto the gardens and a sofa to lounge on and a long dining table to draw or paint at and hundreds of my mother’s books? I cannot explain it, except to say I was not comfortable there. It was where I went to watch television (two channels, RTÉ One and Two, no video player because my mother was against them) or to do my school projects (my books and papers spread out on the dining table) but not to sit. Not to be. If I wanted to sit or to be, I did so in the kitchen. I think the reason for this was, unlike the other rooms of the house, the kitchen had personality: my mother’s. This did not show itself in the cabinets (ordinary) or the appliances (‘I would hate a dishwasher’). But rather in the ugly old armchair in the corner where she sat in the evening and rubbed cream into her legs and methylated spirits into her feet. And in the stack of shelves where she kept her reference books for her crosswords, and her collections of short stories, and her poems, and her spiritual texts, stuff for browsing. And, on the other side of the room, in the wonky extension, the side table that was filled with art-related clutter: her easels and her jars of brushes and her boxes of pencils. And, my favourite element, the walls, which were filled with interesting posters that she had bought at museum gift shops or that my siblings brought home from their trips abroad. Judith Slaying Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi, for one, used to grace the space above the table where we ate our meals. (The painting shows Judith grasping the hair of the supine Holofernes as she slices her long knife through the muscles of his neck, while his blood jets out onto his white pillow in three thin, delicate lines.) In addition, Blu-Tacked onto the fridge door was an ever-changing selection of postcards from galleries around the world. Things like, a still from Matthew Barney’s Cremaster. A photo of a Giacometti sculpture. A black-and-white portrait of Beckett. And even, for a while—on my honour—a reproduction of Courbet’s L’Origine du monde.
As I say, I have lived outside Ireland for most of the past twenty years. In leaving, I was disowning the broken-down house I grew up in. Repudiating the material evidence of my parents’ straitened circumstances and, at the same time, the bourgeois pretentions of the surrounding estate that made those circumstances so pronounced. For two decades, I moved around Europe, rarely staying in a place longer than a couple of years, always careful to avoid any living arrangement that too closely resembled the suburban lifestyle I had left behind in Dublin. At each of my stops, I lived either in rented rooms or in the homes of my boyfriends. I have never had an entire flat to myself, nor have I ever owned one. Most of the places I lived were ordinary, some were elegant, a couple were spectacular, unforgettable, but even there—especially there—I was never wholly free of the feeling that I was a guest, an invitee, present only at the pleasure of someone else; I was constantly aware of the fact that, if and when I got bored or things went wrong, I would be the one packing my suitcases and getting a plane back to Square One.
Throughout my tour, my attitude to money was, at least on the face of it, matter-of-fact. At the outset, my sole concern was that my earnings should cover the bare cost of life in whatever place I wanted to be. Subsequently, when I began to write, money came to signify the ability to buy time for that. At no point did I put effort into acquiring money for the sake of having it; money was only ever a means to an end. Being able to feed myself I considered a success; reaching the end of the month with a roof still over my head, a triumph. What this meant in practice was a lot of rent payments on the credit card (which the bank had handed to me with a stratospheric upper limit during the Celtic Tiger). These payments I carried out with the terrifying confidence of the bourgeois who believes with all his heart that, when the credit finally ends and the emergency arrives, cosmic justice will intervene and pronounce in his favour: all claims against him annulled. At the same time, rather predictably, I was curating for myself an outward attitude of indifference to the concept of home ownership (and ownership in general). Property was something that other people, the system people, worried about. I was an exception to the rules of the salary-and-mortgage regime. I did not need to worry about any of that because, when the time came, a home—a room, a cell—was simply going to fall out of the heavens onto my lap. That was what I, in my innermost self, believed. (And what, if I stop and look closely enough, I can see I still believe.)
In fashioning this double-faced mask of indifference and entitlement, I had had some training at home. In her discourses, my mother had not disguised her distaste for people whom she considered to be overly concerned with making money, especially those who hoarded their wealth in property. This distaste, however, was at base a kind of fascination, similar to that of the prig for pornography, whereby she would comb through the property section of the newspaper and point out everything that was harmful in it: ‘Who on earth needs three reception rooms? It’s obscene.’ She could see everything that was wrong with capitalism’s fetishisation of property, and she wanted to believe herself above it, yet equally she would rather have died than give up her middle-class house, irrespective of its rotten condition, to return to the working-class estate of her youth.
Today, beneath my veneer of indifference to property ownership lies a wish—suppressed but, when prompted, quick to come to the surface—for exactly that which I am trying to appear indifferent about: a home of my own. On those occasions when the mask slips and I allow myself to express this wish, I notice that I try to be as ‘modest’ or ‘realistic’ as I can plausibly be. All I really want is a small, well-located studio with a door onto a balcony. But, given that I am in my forties, penniless, in debt, and back living with my mother, and given the real price of a small, well-located studio in the twenty-first-century European city, this apparent modesty, this so-called realism, is really just a grandiose delusion—a pink princess castle—in perverted form.
Visually, the room that appears in my Big Dream does not directly correspond to any room in my family home, in either of my grandparents’ houses, or indeed in my mother’s current flat. In the dream, I am a visitor to the room. I am aware that it belongs not to me but to my agent, R. Having never been to R’s home in waking life, I in my dreaming state have constructed a composite of a number of different rooms that I have visited in the past, and have made these the property of R. Both the yellow paint on the first wall and the fireplace on the second wall of the room are features I associate with certain desirable homes I have been to on my travels, and which represent for me warmth, comfort, money, social status, and also a certain type of liberal parenting which encourages children to take up space and voice their preferences and identify themselves in the objects they choose to have around them. In this sense, the room in my dream is a series of overlapping memories which together function as a fantasy, a hallucination of a wished-for object.
As tidy as it sounds, this analysis would probably be rejected outright by Freud. For, as adamant as he is that all dreams fulfil a repressed wish, he is equally convinced that any wish represented in a dream must be an infantile wish. This would suggest that the room in my Big Dream cannot be a direct representation of my wish for a material house, as that is an adult wish. Rather, the room must be the expression of a much earlier impulse, one that pre-existed any awareness on my part of the concepts of house or belonging, or indeed of a world beyond my present sensations:
Cans, boxes, caskets, cupboards, and ovens correspond to the female abdomen, as do caves, ships, and all manner of containers. Rooms in dreams are usually women, with the description of their various entrances and exits leaving us in no doubt as to this particular interpretation. Interest in whether the room is ‘open’ or ‘closed’ is easily understandable in this context.
If there is any truth at all to this, then the room in my dream must represent the wish to be enveloped once more in my mother’s embrace. To be suckling as a baby at her breast. To be re-enclosed within her womb. To be re-joined to her, to be re-folded into her, so that the meeting of my needs is, one more time, her sole concern and the entirety of my experience.
Returning to Ireland, moving in to her flat, being confined with her in this tiny space for an extended period: for years such a scenario was my nightmare. Yet here I discover that, in actual fact, it is my dream and therefore my wish—that is to say, I do not want it to end, I want it to go on until I am satisfied, until I have had my fill. Tomorrow, as today, I will lose my temper with her and want her to soothe me. Tomorrow, again, instead of answering her questions, I will grunt at her and want her to comprehend me. Though she is old, I will want her to be young, for my benefit, so that I can be helpless again and make her responsible for my feelings. And when she fails to fulfil my wishes, which will be often, I will watch these failures and will make sightings within them of her imminent end, and, within that again, glimpse the moment of being back at the beginning with her.
This feeling of déjà vu [Freud again] has a particular significance. There, the place is always the mother’s genital region; indeed, of nowhere else can one claim with such certainty to have ‘been here before’.
I cannot deny the existence in my psyche of this compulsion to repeat the events of infancy and childhood. There is within me the instinct to restore an earlier state of things, the retrogressive urge to rid myself of consciousness and the responsibilities that attend it, and to be once again, if not exactly inanimate, then certainly helpless and in the protection of a benign force. But I also know this is not the whole picture. Opposing this conservative instinct that impels me towards repetition, there is another force (maybe many others) which drives me towards change and development. A force which, by keeping my mind saturated with images of an imagined future, pushes me forwards, towards their realisation. This second force is what compelled me to leave Ireland in the first place. So forceful was it—so threatened by the opposing drive that would keep me attached to previous states—that it obliged me to hate the land I was leaving and to promise never to return there. Without hatred to motivate me, the force seemed to say, I would stay stuck where I was and never make the necessary move.
What I have since learned is that this hatred of my past is really just an acknowledgement of an element of my psyche that will never be eradicated. Within the instinct to step out, to turn away, to leave behind, there will always remain traces of a contrary instinct: one which will send me searching for the way back. And vice versa, in longing for the past, I am also longing for a route out of it. These two longings are infused one into the other; they cannot survive of and for themselves; their continuance depends on their ongoing, mutual antagonism.
Jung, in his dream analyses, implies that awareness of a room in a dream rarely comes without the further awareness of other rooms, whether or not those rooms are actually seen. For Jung, rooms are not hermetic but permeable; the experience of being in a room is equally the experience of passing through it, while the act of passing through a room is, in turn, the act of searching. In one particularly striking dream that he describes, he finds himself in the upper storey of a house, in a finely furnished salon. As much as this salon pleases him, a curiosity about what lies beneath impels him to leave it. Downstairs, he finds an even older room, the form and contents of which greatly interest him, though not enough to extinguish his drive for further exploration. Descending again, he finds another room, older and darker than the one before, and below that, another, older and darker again.
In my Big Dream, I am prey to a similar feeling of dissatisfaction with the room I find myself in, a similar need to move on. In the dream, the room is home but does not belong to me; it is a desirable façade; it is both closed and open, bright and dark, and this doubleness is maddening; the only thing that keeps me from despair is the intuition that there are other rooms, just out of view, which I can escape to.
In this sense, my dream, like Jung’s dream, is a depth-dream. The difference, however, is that Jung’s dream moves on a vertical axis, mine on a horizontal one. Because Jung’s rooms are stacked one on top of the other, his search is reminiscent of an archaeological excavation, digging ever deeper downwards, as if towards an origin or core. My room, on the other hand, is set on a plane. There is nothing above or below. Instead, through the gap of the missing walls, shrouded by darkness, there is an infinite stretch of ground on which, for all I know, there are built an infinite number of other rooms.
The artist Louise Bourgeois devoted the final two decades of her artistic production to the creation of a monumental cycle of works, collectively called the Cells. The Cells are architectural spaces constructed using reused and converted materials, such as domestic and industrial doors, wire-mesh screens, fencing, window frames, and mirrors, which, on their own or in various combinations, allow the viewer varying degrees of physical or visual access to the interior. Inside are a variety of personal effects, all of which carry meaning specific to the artist’s own life, arranged in such a way as to evoke childhood scenes, or rather childhood traumas. In this respect, the Cells are archives (of pain). Repositories (of pain). Boxes (of pain). Rooms (of pain).
The first time I saw a large number of the Cells exhibited together—spread out horizontally on a single floor—was at a retrospective in Paris in 2008. Normally, I prefer to go to exhibitions alone, at least on a first visit; this time I greatly regretted my solitude. My encounter with the Cells so overwhelmed me, left me so bouleversé, in such pain—until then, the strongest emotion that visual art had ever evoked in me was a sort of dumbfoundedness—that I felt a desperate need to explain to someone what I had just seen and why it was affecting me in this manner. To that person I would have said that the Cells captured, better than any artworks I had seen hitherto, the dual nature of the house. The house as a place of safety, a shield from the public gaze. And the house as a place that silently bears witness to the occurrences within, absorbing the activities of its inhabitants, preserving traces of their personalities, storing up their emotional lives. The contents of the Cells, coming as they do from a different country, a different style of life, a different epoch, did not resemble those of my family home; nevertheless, I recognised in their pattern and their ordering, in their blending and their juxtaposition, in their communicating and their clashing, the episodes and the moods of my own childhood. Was it the same for the other viewers? Were they also seeing into their own infant cages? Did they take in everything? What were they overlooking?
My second meeting with the Cells, which came nearly a decade later, at another major Bourgeois show, this time in Bilbao, was as devastating as the first. At one point, while viewing a Cell entitled Passage dangereux, I was overcome by a feeling of grief—I stress, a rare occurrence for me—and had to leave the exhibition space. My friend, who thankfully had accompanied me to the museum, found me on a bench by the lift with my face in my hands. We sat in silence for a time before he said, ‘What’s happening?’ (The perfect question; I will always love him for it.)
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think it’s the little details. The tiny scraps that Bourgeois has thought to include in the Cells, which in themselves appear insignificant, but which are, I think, the emotional nodes of the works. The nerve centres. They touch me so deeply I can hardly bear it. Do you know what I’m talking about? The amulets, and the medals, and the locket? The bits of tapestry, did you see them? The bones jammed into the holes in the wire?’
He touched me on the shoulder, then I had a cry, and after that we sat in silence for a while longer, and I thought about what, if I were ever to construct a ‘cell’ of my own, I would put into it. Which objects from my family home would I include? The bathroom mirror, yes, and the cracked plaster and the exposed rafter and the poster of Judith Slaying Holofernes, definitely, and L’Origine du monde and—
Rearing up, then, was the memory of an object so awful, so disgusting, so enraging that I had suppressed it for almost twenty years.
The blue carpet.
‘I’ve just remembered something,’ I said to my friend. ‘Have I ever told you about the blue carpet?’
It had appeared in the house a couple of weeks after my father’s death. Literally, appeared. The doorbell rang. I went downstairs to answer it, but my mother had got there before me. On the step outside: a middle-aged woman, well-dressed. I sat on the stairs to get a better look at her. I had never seen her before, and after that day I never saw her again. She must have been in the house during the wake, though, and seen the state of the carpets, for she had come to replace them. ‘I’ve just put down a new carpet in my own house,’ she said, ‘but the old one is in grand shape, a waste to throw away. I thought you might like it.’ She gestured towards the gate, where a white van was parked, and two workmen were already unloading her unwanted carpet. Panicked, I pulled my mother into the sitting room. ‘You’re not going to let this happen, are you?’ My mother did not answer me except to stare at me with a dazed expression, one which said, I have seen so much happen recently, and none of it is in my control. From the hall came the sound of the workmen marching in. ‘You have to stop them,’ I said. ‘You have to say no. For once in your life, say fucking no.’ But she did not listen to me and she did not say no, so the hammering began, and the carpet was unfurled and stapled into place, in record time it seemed, in the hall and up the stairs and on the landing: a thick plush of royal blue with an orange paisley-like motif. On seeing it, I was consumed by a rage that was nothing less than a loathing for everyone and everything, above all my mother. I retreated to my (hated) room, perhaps wanting tears but failing to find them in the waves of black anger rolling through me, so big, so loud, that in truth I felt dangerous to myself. Long before, I had realised that, if I was going to survive in this world, I had to get far away from my mother, from this room, from this house, from Ireland, but it was only then, as I ground my teeth and pounded my fists into my mattress and called my mother the most terrible names, that I understood that my going would be for good: once gone, I would never return.
