The Illogic of Kassel (30 page)

I ended up devoting myself to writing the first words of my afternoon lecture in the Ständehaus. I decided it would begin like this:

I left for Kassel, via Frankfurt, searching for the mystery of the universe and to initiate myself in the poetry of an unknown algebra. I also left for Kassel to try to find an oblique clock and a Chinese restaurant, and, of course, though I sensed it was an impossible task, I also left to try to find my home somewhere within my displacement. And now all I can tell you is that it is from this “home” that I am speaking to you.

As soon as I finished these lines, I realized that Piniowsky had never written anything so authentic in his whole life. He was saying that he was at home, that the table in the Chinese restaurant was his destiny, and that he was giving the whole lecture as if he were sitting at his private gallows in the Dschingis Khan. As long as no one was asking about the logic of it all, he had the impression of knowing it all by heart; but if anyone asked him, he wouldn’t know how to explain it.

Not know how to explain it?

The Chinese logic of the place was him!

Or to put it a better way, the Chinese logic was me.

I was a bit nervous, too.

“Calm down, Piniowsky.”

65

Hours later, I crossed Karlsaue Park at a slow pace, and then walked through downtown Kassel until I ended up taking refuge in the hotel. I’d lost count of the hours spent on my own. Except for minor incidents, I was staying in a constant good mood, perhaps I would never again feel as marvelously good for the rest of my life. I increasingly attributed it to the creative atmosphere of the city, and to the works of art I’d seen over the course of those last days, and the recovery of the juvenile impulse that had once led me to break with the obsolete forms of so many dull, non-avant-garde artists.

Who had said that contemporary art was on the decline? Only the intellectuals of uncultured, depressed countries like mine could reach such backward conclusions. Europe had died—maybe the young madwoman in mourning had been right to wear black from head to toe—but art was very much alive in the world, it was the only open window left for those still searching for spiritual salvation.

As soon as I entered my hotel room, I went out onto the balcony and sent a new greeting toward
This Variation
. Since Kassel was inviting madness, seeming to open up many complex paths to my own Chinese logic, I decided to greet the dark room this time with the most horrible grimace I knew how to make. I greeted it the way I imagined one of the many Chinese mandarins of the ancient legends I’d read in childhood would have. I said as if speaking from a public platform:

“The twentieth century, a film from Germany.”

In the street my slanted words were perfectly audible, and some young people on their way to see Sehgal’s work in the annex of the hotel looked up.

Those were the words pronounced by an engrossed, very intense character in
Hitler: A Film from Germany
, an avant-garde film from the seventies made by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, one of the cineastes who had most impressed me in my youth and whom I remember asking for his autograph one night in the course of a long party in the port district of Barcelona.

After the Chinese grimace, I went back inside. I decided to lie down on the bed with my arms behind my head and my knees raised. I looked at the ceiling and stared at the cracks: at the German cracks, I said to myself. And then I started fixating on the peeling paint, the stains, and the chips. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like seeing anybody, much less speaking in public, or going outside, or even moving. However, there wasn’t much time left before I had to move, to go out, and give a lecture.

I remembered that not so long ago—on a day and at a time like this—I’d been overcome for the first time by this sudden apathy. I had thought I’d discovered I didn’t know how to live, that I’d never known how to live. That day, the sun beat down on the roof tiles of my house. I hadn’t yet met the people who would be decisive in my life and would help me to know a tiny bit how to be in this world, the same world I’d turn my back on many years later, on behalf of Piniowsky. . . . That day, sunk in the deepest depths of my tragedy, I spent an infinity of hours with my eyes glued to a white wooden shelf on which I thought there was a washbowl; I concentrated on that bowl, which later turned out to be imaginary, though by the time I found out I’d already spent hours thinking about that basin and death. It was the first time in my whole life that I had a serious anxiety attack, though with an undoubtedly slightly comic or ridiculous touch.

I got over this brief moment in which I’d remembered the day of my initiation in anguish. Then, I managed to recover my desire to see people, to speak in public, to go out, to move. But it served as a warning that any triviality might end up breaking my general state of great enthusiasm.

For a few moments, I imagined what my two Chinese neighbors might be doing in room 26. I thought I could hear a string quartet. Maybe they had found two lovers who were musicians. These things sometimes happen. Accompanied by the good music coming from that room, I stayed for quite a while reading page 193 of
Romanticism
, about “Aimless Journey,” a poem by Eichendorff, whose verses expanded on the traditional motif of a great voyage and the losses that sent Odysseus on his way, the motif from which the romantics extracted the voyage without arrival or goal, the endless journey, and that Rimbaud would continue with his “Drunken Boat” and Roberto Bolaño, among others, would prolong saying that journeys are roads leading nowhere; nevertheless they are paths down which we have to turn and lose ourselves in order to find something again: to find a book, a gesture, a lost object, maybe a method, with luck, something new, which has always been there.

“So the avant-garde doesn’t exist?” I asked Dalí when I interviewed him in his house beside the sea.

“No, but there’s Giorgione’s
Tempest
, which revolutionized everything.”

I looked at the clock. I didn’t have much time to keep reading or to do anything else, because it was almost time to leave for the Ständehaus and give my lecture. I thought it strange no one had phoned to arrange to take me there, but since that’s how things were, I’d better get used to the idea that I should get there under my own steam.

I looked at my emails again to see if there was a message telling me someone was coming to pick me up, but there wasn’t. I double-checked my Google map and the notes I’d made so I wouldn’t get lost downtown. I looked to see if there were any messages accidentally lost among the spam, but there were none there either. Then, precisely at that moment, my cell phone rang and it was Ada Ara saying she’d come by and get me at five. I relaxed, but not entirely, because it was very close to that time. In any case, I took the call as a good and almost providential sign, even thanking Ada for remembering me, for I had the impression, I told her, that going on my own, without anyone to accompany me, I would never arrive at the Ständehaus.

Then, remembering that the lecture should have a certain amount of content and seeing with some terror that all I’d prepared was the beginning (“I left for Kassel, via Frankfurt, in search of the mystery of the universe . . .”), I decided that in the first minutes of my talk, since I was going to be forced to improvise something, I would talk about how over the last few years I had learned to escape from my sole and exclusive obsession with literature and that I had opened the game up to other artistic disciplines.

This big opening up to other arts, I’d tell the audience, might never have happened if not for a telephone call I’d received seven years ago from Sophie Calle. I would tell them, at length, about meeting her at the Café de Flore, in Paris, and the strange proposal she’d made to me: to write her a story that she would try to live.

Then I would talk about Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and my modest collaborations in some of her brilliant installations. In my memory, above all her other works, was her setting for after a universal flood in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern.

In telling these two stories about my recent relationship with artistic disciplines other than literature, I hoped to fill as much time as possible. But in case I didn’t manage to fill it all, I could always start listing how many things happened to me in my life, even though I didn’t notice most of them when they were actually taking place, but rather as I went back over them and examined them under a magnifying glass; writing them up was the most interesting way to extend them—taking a long time over them and studying them in depth—to see how very true it was that we tend to think that things we ignored have no relevance but in fact they always do, they have a great deal.

While I was organizing this final part of the lecture, I inopportunely felt an impulse to go outside again and directly visit
This Variation
. I was somewhat disoriented. It might be said that the permanent good mood I was enjoying was very interesting, undoubtedly a great positive force, but it sometimes dragged me into an undesirable true bewilderment and chaos; it was as if on occasion the invisible wanted to take me pitilessly to the center of whirlpools that were getting more and more excessively wild.

The fact is, I suddenly felt this impulse to go outside and, for a moment—as if I’d sensed that I needed to hold myself back and reflect—I tried as hard as I could to cut it off at the root. I stopped to think of what is termed “physical magnitude,” which, according to what I’d read, characterized the movement called “impulse” in physics . . .

But this attempt at distraction was futile. Trying to immobilize myself was a wasted effort. Because in a few seconds, propelled by unexpected
physical magnitude
, I was out on the landing, going down in the elevator and waving to the girl at reception as I went outside (not the one who spoke Spanish, but a Japanese one; they’d swapped, and I made a note of it in my red notebook, as if it were a sign of something I should study in depth).

I was so convinced of having imbued myself with models of Chinese conduct that I entered Sehgal’s room as if I were just another component of the Ming dynasty. I tried to confuse the dancers who crouched in the shadows of the place. Someone from the Ming dynasty, I thought, would have had flat feet and walked slowly. I convinced myself of this, even aware that I knew nothing about the people who’d lived under the Ming dynasty and the only thing I could be sure of was that someone from then and there had to have other characteristics than the ones I was attributing to him.

In any case, I entered the total darkness of the room pretending to believe myself transfigured into a man from the Ming dynasty and hoping to confuse the hidden dancers, who, more invisible than ever, allowed me to advance without giving any indication of being there.

Confident and now breathing freely with relief, I decided to turn around, forgetting for a fraction of a second to keep moving the way I thought a flat-footed man in the long-ago Ming dynasty would have. Then, at that very moment, everything changed and someone whispered in my ear:

“
Last bear
.”

I had seen a film with that title. If that was what the dancers were talking about, it seemed to lack logic. The last bear? Or was it the
last beer
? I took two more steps in the darkness and headed toward the exit light. When I was about to reach outside, I saw something phosphorescent in the shape of a crescent moon and at first I tried to catch it, but I failed utterly. It completely dazzled me, and I ended up going outside with my sight cloudy while hearing again: “
Last bear
.”

Back at the hotel, I couldn’t get that whisper out of my head, and I even strayed down grammatical paths looking for hidden intentions in the two words. Finally, I calmed down very unexpectedly: a memory buried in time was resurrected, the memory of when I was little and my sister dared me to stay in a corner until I stopped thinking about a white bear. The more I tried not to think of the white bear, the more I thought of him. For years, I thought of that animal often. I forgot him the day I tried to mock that image, forcing myself to really see the way the language of logic laid traps for me. I forgot the bear then, but defusing deceptions immersed me in an even more disturbing obsession.

66

At the last minute, Ada Ara couldn’t make it, and María Boston showed up at the hotel to take me to the Ständehaus. She arrived accompanied by Alka, who I suddenly remembered had been introduced to me by Pim as “the person in charge of your visit to Kassel.” Since she hadn’t taken charge of me at all, everything led me to think that up in the offices of the organization—so invisible to me—they’d decided to relieve her of that job. Now she reappeared with Boston, more smilingly than ever. Each time I saw her, I wanted to ask her what she was laughing at, but I was aware that could lead to a tremendous, endless spiral of misunderstandings and linguistic short circuits. Of course, since arriving in Kassel I’d discovered a special pleasure in studying those short circuits that seemed to rebel against the logic of our common language. But I preferred not to study Alka too much because I sensed that could end up driving me crazy.

As we entered the Fridericianum, the invisible breeze welcomed us forcefully, as if it were an old friend (in fact it was), as if it had recognized us and was so pleased to see us again that it wanted to squeeze us in the most exaggerated way possible. Right then, I discovered that the exact title of Ryan Gander’s work was
I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorise (The Invisible Pull)
, which made me realize that this
need for some meaning I can memorize
could in time take on an immense significance. When I needed to better “memorize” what those glorious days in Kassel were like, I’d always have within reach the memory of that breeze that stretched through my mental fabric, leaving with me “a meaning” of renovation and optimism that would be difficult to forget.