The Illogic of Kassel (10 page)

Maybe the most surprising thing was noticing that out of the blue I was recovering a sort of energy I’d describe as almost like solar power. The fact is, all at once I saw myself on Königsstrasse not knowing what to do with that sudden invisible impetus, which sort of came over me and was more than I needed. I felt like my arms had become excessively long and my legs were too far away from me. I couldn’t manage to locate myself, and the movements I was making contributed to that fact. Walking down the road in such a peculiar way gave the sensation of being insane as much as it did of being blown about by a breeze as invisible as it probably was invincible. Some of the people who had seemed to be looking at me before now seemed to be saying: It’s about time you got here, but you’ve made it in bad shape—you won’t recover from this now.

Luckily, a few meters from the hotel, my energy disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, and I went back to simply being the man who collapsed in the evenings and recovered in the mornings. Sometimes returning to normality, even if it’s to a pitiful former state, does us good. Who’d have thought it, but I felt calmer on seeing that the absurd, sudden energy had evaporated; I much preferred plain old anguish to having to feel my arms had grown excessively long, like the arms of a Quixotesque giant confounded by a windmill.

I entered the Hessenland and headed straight to number 27, my second-floor room; I went out on the balcony and immediately remembered what Boston had told me a few hours earlier: that from up there, I’d be able to see the entrance to the building that contained Sehgal’s dark room.

So what she had predicted came to pass. In addition I had proved that solitude was impossible, because it was inhabited by ghosts. I’d said goodbye to Boston, but in a way she was still there, now in my memory. I was on the balcony just long enough to establish a mental connection with the hotel annex, with the gloomy building next door that housed Sehgal’s room, a chamber I converted into a sort of lighthouse in the night, off in a direction I could look toward by going out on the balcony if I felt I was drowning in so much solitude (with ghosts) in my cabin.

It was better to have that invisible lighthouse than nothing, though, true enough, the cabin still remained to be built. Or not, since the best way to construct it was to imagine a life of thought in that hotel room. I must do this without further ado.

My model for the cabin was Skjolden, the place where Wittgenstein managed to isolate himself to hear his own voice and to prove he could think better there than from his chair in the university. Indeed, from the cabin, Wittgenstein began to address those wanting to start seeing things in a new way and not the scientific community or the general public. For him, thought could reach the level of an artistic gesture. His philosophical ideal was the pursuit of a liberating clarity, the opening up of consciousness and of the world; he did not wish to offer truth, but truthfulness; he wanted to offer examples rather than reasons, motives rather than causes, fragments rather than systems.

While I was thinking about Skjolden, I lay on the bed with my hands linked behind my head, looking at the ceiling. And then I remembered a friend who once told me that any form of exile for a spiritual man became a prompt for inner reflection. How good that phrase could have felt if I’d thought of it or remembered it in the morning, when I tended to be in a better mood. Even so, it did help keep me going. In the long run, I thought, one realizes that attending to one’s personal matters in a productive way is the most important thing in the world.

I looked at the clock and saw it was a good time to call Barcelona. My elderly parents told me the nationalist demonstration in Barcelona hadn’t been exactly nationalist but more pro-independence, at least that’s what the local television stations repeated ad infinitum.

It suddenly occurred to me to think that you can’t defend the freedom of the masses, only your own. Perhaps because I found myself on the threshold of my inner reflection, of the creation of the cabin, it was logical that talk of mass movements should startle me, just when the move I was preparing to make demanded individuality.

Then I phoned my wife and told her my day had in no way resembled an action novel, but things had constantly been happening to me. When she asked me what things, I could only say I had been joking. I didn’t want to tell her, for example, that I had no sooner arrived than the people of Kassel seemed to be expecting me, and this misapprehension had made me think of the day I drove to Antwerp with my nephew Paolo and, near the pretty train station, began to feel a wave of presentiment that the city would suffer some sort of retribution. These visions seemed anchored in reality, but from what ancestor’s remote past did they spring? Was it preposterous to imagine that I’d lived out previous existences in European cities and seen catastrophes coming? Was it crazy to sense I was back on streets I had traveled repeatedly in other times? Nothing could be ruled out in a place like Kassel, which, opening its doors to the ideas of the avant-garde, was implicitly rejecting any invitation to logic.

I didn’t want to tell my wife any of this, perhaps because these were things you don’t say over the phone. So I said goodbye and soon afterward began to notice—no doubt this was brought on by the lonely state I’d plunged into—that from outside, through curtains stirred by a gentle current of air, could be heard isolated cries, cradled on the wind. The reflections of light dancing on the ceiling seemed to forecast that a crack was about to open all the way across it at any moment. Perhaps the conversations of the guests in the room above would reach me clearly through that chink. When I was in Barcelona with John William Wilkinson, we’d thought I might set myself up on the top floor of the Chinese restaurant facing the forest, but now I could see that none of that was happening or would happen, rather the complete opposite: the place the dark forces seemed to have offered me to spy on wasn’t beneath, but above; it was as if Galway Bay were out there above the ceiling of that room. And there was one more problem. Seeing it properly, it was clear no such scenario existed, that the reflections of light on the ceiling had simply created it, perhaps connected with my lighthouse in the hotel annex, my lighthouse in the night.

22

I got up from the bed in order to escape from my private Galway Bay, and I had a depraved glance at Cela’s
Journey to the
Alcarria
: “The peddler has perfectly naked eyelids, without a single lash, and a wooden leg crudely fixed to the stump with thongs.” 

Afterward, I played the game of pretending to myself that what I’d read astonished me. Peddler, naked eyelids, wooden leg. I feigned surprise when I knew perfectly well that in reading Cela I was bound to encounter the medieval: another world a thousand light-years from where I found myself.

Then I went straight to the computer and looked up information about the city I was in, and the first thing I came across was material about the Documenta of 1972. If I read that 72 backwards, I got my room number. This didn’t exactly compel me to keep reading, but it did make me take more interest in what I read. An admirer of “that historic Documenta”—the one in ’72—claimed to have discovered in it that the latest members of the avant-garde belonged to the purest strain of romanticism, the beatniks in particular.

Suddenly, for reasons that still escape me today, my attention focused entirely on the beatniks. What did I know about those people? For a moment, I was disorientated by my own question. I only managed to leave the muddle of the beatnik mystery behind when I remembered I had that old copy of
Romanticism
, by Rüdiger Safranski, lying in my suitcase. Once again, I hadn’t made a mistake in choosing it for company. I opened it to the page where I could read that only as aesthetic phenomena are the world and existence eternally justified.

I thought: Didn’t I come to Kassel precisely to seek the aesthetic instant? Yes, but not only that. Besides, I’d never found that instant in my entire life so far, and everything seemed to indicate that things would go on the same for me after passing through Kassel. In fact, I didn’t even know what an aesthetic instant might really be, since up to that point I’d only managed to get glimpses of it, not much more. I paused to think. Why had I traveled to that city? I’ve come, I told myself, purely to think. I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come to mentally construct a cabin, a human refuge in which I can meditate on the lost world. I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come to read something about a peddler and his stump and an incurably gloomy Spain. I’ve come to discover the mystery of the universe, to initiate myself into the poetry of an unknown algebra, to seek an oblique clock, and to read about Romanticism. I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come to investigate what the essence, the pure, hard nucleus of contemporary art is. I’ve come to find out if there still is an avant-garde. In fact, I’ve come to carry out research on Kassel. I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come simply so that on my return home I can tell people what I’ve seen. I’ve come to find out what beatniks are. I paused thoughtfully again. I’ve come to get acquainted with the general condition of the arts. Again, I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come to recover enthusiasm. I paused a little less thoughtfully. I’ve come so I can narrate my journey later on, as if I’d been to the country estate in
Locus Solus
, or to the Alcarria, an Alcarria described by Roussel, for example. I’ve come to gain access to that instant when a man seems to take on, once and for all, who he is. I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come to leave my wife in peace for a few days. I paused thoughtfully again. I’ve come to hesitate. I paused doubtfully. I’ve come to find out whether there is any logic in being invited to Kassel to pull off a Chinese number. I paused thoughtfully.

I paused for even more reflection when I noticed that the pessimism that came over me so inexorably at that hour had begun to strongly take hold. I was beginning to see that the so famous aesthetic instant (I had thought that one day I would or wouldn’t know what it was) would never be within my grasp. Was it normal for my pessimism to increase so much in so few minutes? Unfortunately, yes. The onset of the black hours always erupted without warning, and straightaway I got to thinking that I didn’t have many years left and everything in my life had gone by very fast; why, just a few days ago, I was young and carefree, but it had all changed in a short time, this was now an incontrovertible fact, and I felt sad. When the black hours flared up almost punctually evening after evening, I could never avoid sliding relentlessly down the slippery slope of the most pessimistic and dangerous thoughts.

To top it all, I remembered something a friend told me (not such a good friend, to judge by his actions) whenever he wanted to depress me. He’d do this when he noticed I was already depressed. He said that during the night the essence of night does not let us sleep. I have never understood very well what the sentence meant, but I found it terrifying. I turned it over in my mind a few times. Preventing us from sleeping. Was that something at the very core of the night? Did the night only make sense when it managed to stop us resting? It was early to go to bed, but I was worn out; the final punishment of the walk to platform 10 had been brutal, and the dawning of consciousness there was so intense it had left me in bits. I now thought only of sleep, though I was very afraid I wouldn’t be able to attain it. In spite of the desire to lie down, I found the strength for something that turned out to be very banal compared to Pavel Haas’s music on the platform.

I found the strength for a final foray into Google, where I stumbled upon a photograph of Chus Martínez, whose face seemed to me essentially lively, making me guess (I wasn’t in the least bit mistaken) that this was someone who’d internalized her ability to have ideas as profoundly as someone once said that the whaler in
Moby-Dick
had internalized his harpoon.

I don’t know how long I spent, half asleep, looking at the photo of Chus; she had invited me to Kassel and we still hadn’t met, though there was every indication I’d have dinner with her on Thursday. The more I looked at her face, the more I saw it brimming with ideas, and ultimately that made me think about them thoroughly—about ideas, I mean, and their presence and absence in modern art. I remembered that, in the mid nineteenth century, no European artist was ignorant of the fact that, if he wanted to prosper, he had to interest the intellectuals (the new class), which turned culture into the topic most often addressed by its creators, and the sole objective of art became the suggesting and inspiring of ideas. Strolling around Kassel, one was left in no doubt that there at least, things were still under the influence of that mid-nineteenth-century transformation. Elsewhere, no. Because almost all over the rest of the world the intellectual had taken a nosedive, and culture had become extraordinarily trivialized. But in Kassel a certain romantic and Duchampian aura remained; it was a paradise for those who loved intellectual conjecture, theoretical discussions, and the elegance of certain speculations.

I’ve always been enormously entertained by theories, so I could feel satisfied. For a long time I didn’t get contemporary art, but here in Kassel I was overloaded with stimuli to investigate the position of that art. That said, as a young man, it bored me to look at a Rembrandt. Confronted with a painting by that admirable artist, I didn’t know what to say. But, if I saw a
readymade
by a humble imitator of Duchamp, all sorts of commentaries poured out of me and I started to feel, once and for all, like an artist too. The same thing, I recall, happened to me with Manet, an artist very influenced by Mallarmé and whose most significant disciple may have been—I dare say—Marcel Duchamp. Mallarmé told Manet: “Paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces.” That sentence prefigured the modern abandonment of the two-dimensional plane and the ascent of the conceptual to a position of dominance.