The Illogic of Kassel (4 page)

At the last moment, I also stuck a copy of Rüdiger Safranski’s
Romanticism: An Odyssey of the German Spirit
into my luggage. Ever since I read it for the first time, I’ve always enjoyed going back to read fragments in which the author explained Nietzsche’s world, how Nietzsche thought it necessary to live without illusions, and at the same time, in spite of having discovered life’s great futility, to be passionately fond of it.
Romanticism
always allowed me to return to a phrase of Nietzsche’s that over time had become one of my convictions: “Only as aesthetic phenomena are existence and the world eternally justified.”

8

“Make sure you see the works of Tino Sehgal, Pierre Huyghe, and Janet Cardiff. I’m told they’ve outdone themselves.” Alicia Framis, an artist friend drawn to avant-garde ideas, wrote this to me three days before I’d be leaving for Kassel. I’d never heard the names she mentioned, but understood they must be artists that might be of interest to me, and would provide me with something of which I really was entirely ignorant. (This made me enthusiastic about traveling to Germany to enter that universe.)

“William Kentridge’s project
The Refusal of Time
in a warehouse at the old station is worth seeing,” another friend wrote just a couple of hours after Alicia Framis’s email. And a good friend from Getafe sent me, at the end of the day, a message commenting on how interesting she’d found “Mark Dion’s stunning library, and, most of all, an oblique clock by an Albanian sculptor.”

To convince myself that it was going to be a really great trip, I began to think that there was common ground between the great expeditions of yesteryear and the solitary one I was embarking on with my sights set on Kassel. There lay the danger, an indispensable element of any worthwhile journey. Because danger, I told myself, always brings the pleasure of feeling fear. And fear is fantastic, especially fear at the prospect of finding oneself faced with strange, unfamiliar things, maybe even new ones.

All good journeys incorporate the infinite pleasure and great excitement that moments of great fear also produce. I began to think about this and felt excited from the moment I sensed that I was traveling to Kassel with a unique sensation: an intense and maybe terrifying pleasure similar to what I felt one night casually heading down a dark alley completely unknown to me. There, I suddenly noticed a breath on the back of my neck, dry but phantasmagoric, because I spun around and there was no one there. Knowing I was actually alone in that alley, I kept walking, but found it impossible to act like I hadn’t noticed; it was impossible to overlook the fact that the ghostly breathing was still there: cold, icy, rasping, discreet. How to describe it better? There was nobody there, but it felt like someone, with noticeable regularity, was huffing, and his glacial breath, in a very odd way, God knows, was landing directly on the back of my neck.

9

Two days before leaving for Documenta, I went, as I did every Sunday morning, to meet some people on the terrace of the Bar Diagonal, and there, John William Wilkinson (Wilki to his friends), mishearing and thinking that I was staying in an apartment in Kassel directly above a Chinese restaurant (from where I could look out over a forest), said to me—he said to all of us there—that what I was about to live through reminded him of the Irish poet John Millington Synge.

“Explain yourself!” we all said immediately.

This demanding repartee was characteristic of our
tertulia
. We endeavored with admirable tenacity on these Sunday mornings—naturally we knew it was in vain, but we made the effort anyway—to leave nothing unexplained.

The great Synge, Wilki told us more or less—but I’m sure he made it up, and, on top of that, now I’m twisting his words—was a guy, or, to phrase it better, a poet of notable talent, who traveled at the end of the nineteenth century to the Aran Isles, located at the mouth of Galway Bay on the west coast of Ireland. On one of these islands, Inishmaan, he stayed in a rough cottage with a beautiful view that can still be visited today. He also spent time on the second floor of a big house on Inishmaan that no longer exists. There, a discreet hole in the bedroom floor allowed him to listen to conversations and arguments, all of which were in Gaelic. For five summers, he spied on these neighbors’ chats without understanding anything because he didn’t know a word of that language, but he was convinced he understood everything perfectly. He was so sure that he understood anything spoken in Gaelic that he ended up producing (out of everything he heard and compiled over the summers) his famous anthropology book
The Aran Islands
. This book, which Synge finished in 1901 and published in 1907, describes the thought and customs of that remote Irish island lost in the middle of the Atlantic (that strange paradise, until then barely desecrated by any outsider). The text reflected, among other things, the belief that beneath the surface of the islanders’ Catholicism it was possible to detect a “substratum” of the ancient pagan beliefs of their ancestors.

More intrigued than usual, I listened to the wonderful Wilki, for I still hadn’t figured out what link he could be making between an Irish poet on an Atlantic island and me, who was only going to a sort of Chinese cubicle in Germany (though in any case I fully trusted that he might have found one).

Synge’s experiences over five summers on Inishmaan, Wilki went on telling us, formed the basis of many of the plays he wrote about rural farming and fishing communities in Ireland. In fact, his works helped create the unmistakable rural style of Dublin’s famous Abbey Theater for the following four decades. And everything indicated (Wilki concluded) many parallels between Synge’s vagabonds and Samuel Beckett’s tramps. In fact, part of Beckett’s inspiration—although maybe the author of
Molloy
never came to know it—proceeded from the imagination that overpowered Synge when he “listened” to the conversations of his downstairs neighbors on Inishmaan in such a singular and inventive way.

I don’t understand, I said. But a very short while later, helped by Wilki himself, I began to see more clearly when he said that he knew what I had to do in case I found myself staying by chance above the Chinese restaurant and there was a discreet hole in the floor of my room.

Very simply, Wilki answered his own question, you must never lose sight of what you hear in German or Chinese down below in the Dschingis Khan, for it could come in very handy in creating an anthropological theory on the ideas and customs of that place.

“Explain yourself! Explain yourself more!”

The other
tertulianos
, animated now by the whisky, repeated the initial demand, as if wanting to help me. And they asked him not to overburden me with so many responsibilities as well. That encouraged me to intervene, telling Wilki I did not believe it was even minimally probable that in my room I would find a hole in the floor. You’ll be able to find it, he responded unflustered, you’ll see with time how you manage to find that hole.

I admired his quick answers, as well as the ease with which he could introduce new concepts into the
tertulia
, as on that almost historic day when he explained—particularly to me who’d never heard of such a thing—what a McGuffin was. Maybe for this reason, I decided to reply with a McGuffin when he dropped his imperturbable sentence, predicting that I would know how to find the hole in the floor.

“Careful, Wilki,” I said, “because the commander didn’t marry her in the springtime.”

From student to maestro. A McGuffin through and through. Nevertheless, Wilki again found a quick reply and began to tell us, just like that, the advantages of spring weddings. We were flabbergasted. What was he talking about? As incredible as it seemed, Wilki had begun to calmly list, as if knowing them by heart, the various advantages of getting married in the springtime. He made the conversation compelling, as if the Sunday morning
tertulia
actually had a much greater energy than it displayed, and moreover, a perfect internal coherence.

10

That night at home I watched a television documentary about the growing power of modern China until my wife went to bed, when I started investigating Kassel. I learned that all the telescopes in the French-sounding Orangerie Palace were pointing toward
Clocked Perspective
, a piece by the Albanian artist Anri Sala, located in Karlsaue, two kilometers away. Beside the telescopes, an 1825 G. Ulbricht painting of a castle hung amid several clocks; the painting featured a real clock, and though the castle was seen at an angle, the clock surprisingly met the viewer face-on. Anri Sala—undoubtedly the Albanian my Getafe friend had referred to in her recent email—had corrected this error in his sculpture, and his clock told the correct time on its slanted dial, matching the angle of Ulbricht’s painted castle.

Two hours later, I fell asleep thinking I was going to Kassel to look for the mystery of the lost and irreparable universe, to be initiated into an unknown algebra and to search for an oblique clock. I dreamed that someone asked me insistently if I didn’t believe that the modern taste for images was nourished by an obscure opposition to knowledge. The question could be formulated more simply, I kept thinking. But in that dream, it grew increasingly twisted and bothered me infinitely, the intellectual side of it seeming so unnecessarily complex. In the end, everything was bothering me. I was returning very tired from my journey to the center of the labyrinth of contemporary art’s avant-garde, where I’d found myself in a pure nightmare, within a sort of quagmire, in which the same movement was repeated over and over again: in an intensely red Chinese room, I was implacably submitting the concepts
home
and
feeling at home
to an endless, skeptical scrutiny.

The intellectual plot of the nightmare had been so intricate that I was delighted to wake up and discover the real world was much simpler, I’d even go so far as to say much more idiotic.

It was five in the morning, and, since I was suddenly wide awake, I went to my study and began to reread the copy of Kafka’s
The Great Wall of China
and Other Short Works
that I had in my library and hadn’t opened for years. I found there, among those other short works, one I didn’t remember called “Homecoming,” written in Berlin in 1923. I remember the emotion I felt as soon as I started to read it, because I realized that in some way the piece contained an explanation of why, in a letter to his fiancée, Kafka had written that somewhat mysterious phrase that he was Chinese and was going home. In fact, I had the impression—strengthened by the time of day—that this story, written in 1923, had been written for me so I would read it one day, when the hour came for me to travel to a Chinese enclave in the middle of Germany:

I have returned. I have passed under the arch and am looking around. It’s my father’s old yard. . . . I have arrived. Who is going to receive me? Who is waiting behind the kitchen door? Smoke is rising from the chimney, coffee is being made for supper. Do you feel you belong, do you feel at home? I don’t know. I feel most uncertain. . . . The longer one hesitates before the door, the more estranged one becomes. What would happen if someone were to open the door now and ask me a question? Would I not myself then behave like one who wants to keep his secret?

Did Kafka write this for me? Well, why not? I remembered that simple and guileless question he had pondered on a certain occasion:
Could it be that one can take a girl captive by writing?
Seldom has anyone formulated with such ingenuousness, such precision, and such depth the very essence of literature. It was the very task that Kafka was going to affix to writing in general, and to his own writing in particular. Because contrary to what so many believe, no one writes to entertain, although literature might be one of the most entertaining things around; no one writes to “tell stories,” although literature is full of brilliant tales. No, one writes to
take
the reader captive
, to possess, seduce, subjugate, to enter into the spirit of another and stay there, to touch, to win the reader’s heart . . .

Franz Kafka, son of the businessman Hermann Kafka, seemed there in front of his father’s house to perceive that, in spite of appearances, the home did not belong to him. One can easily imagine him hesitating for hours before the big old house and finally not entering, but devoting himself to pursuing his tenacious search for a place, for a home that perhaps he’d never find by actually going home, but that he might find one day along the way.

11

On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, the national day of Catalonia, I left home so early, it was still nighttime, a completely dark night. A police car drove past, and I imagined that, seeing me getting furtively into a taxi with my suitcase, it would be hard for the policemen not to suspect me of some strange undertaking.They might be thinking: What reason could that guy who looks Catalan have for abandoning the city so surreptitiously on a day like today? There was to be a big patriotic demonstration in Barcelona that day and expectations were high, as was the tension, which was why police cars were circulating in the predawn hours.

Climbing into my taxi with my suitcase as quickly as possible, I looked like I was skipping town. Maybe I was the only citizen who was leaving. I was sure there was more to life than the nation; after all, I was traveling to the very center of the contemporary avant-garde, I was going to Kassel, via Frankfurt, probably to look for the mystery of the universe and be initiated into the poetry of an unknown algebra, and also to try to find an oblique clock and a Chinese restaurant and, of course, to try to find a home along the way.