The Illogic of Kassel

21

I already knew how to get back to the Hessenland unaided, I told Boston, I just had to stay on Königsstrasse. Two kisses and farewell. Boston didn’t specify a time, but she said she’d come pick me up from the hotel the next morning to take me to the Chinese restaurant. Just as I’d feared, it was clear no one was going to save me from the trip to the Dschingis Khan. Over the course of the afternoon, I’d avoided asking her anything to do with what I privately called “the Chinese number.” I’d done so, foolishly thinking that I’d get out of the whole nuisance that way. But the ostrich approach doesn’t always turn out to be useful and, ultimately, when we were saying goodbye, I saw how “the Chinese number” ended up bobbing to the surface and, what’s more, it did so at the moment that packed the most punch, just when I thought I’d outmaneuvered it completely.

It was late now, and everything was starting to get dark.

I observed that for the first time in my whole life it wasn’t fun to feel as though I were inside someone else’s novel, in this case, a book by Robert Walser. Although it was poetic to think that, as in The Walk, it was late and everything was getting dark, it nevertheless seemed more appropriate for this to be experienced by whoever wrote it, in other words by Walser, and not me. And yet it was unsettling to see that what was happening to me was exactly what happened to the happy narrator in that book: it got dark, and I suddenly thought it better to stop walking. Usually I was already at home when darkness fell, so it followed that my melancholy there in Kassel was in fact similar to Walser’s.

Maybe not everything is so sinister and strange, I said to myself, trying to keep from having an anxiety attack in the middle of the street. Right then, it was a question of being able to cover — relatively calmly, with all the calm in the world — the distance separating me from the Hessenland. A somewhat forced calm, perhaps, but it could be useful if I at least managed to stave off the first onslaught of melancholy. And I did, I deflected it; I observed I was still enjoying everything I saw in the street instead of being depressed by it. But very soon afterward, sensing I was all alone, I began to feel low. Underneath it all, I am Chinese and I’m going home, I thought. And those things became still further complicated for me, as I did not dare to look at the people on the street, because once more it seemed some of them were saying: it’s about time you got here.

“Were you expecting me?” I wanted to shout at them.

I was sure they were looking at me strangely. Might it not be the case that some of them really were waiting for me and had made an agreement to pretend otherwise if I finally decided to inquire about it? I wanted so much to say to them: “I know you’ve been expecting me for days. I noticed it as soon as I got here.”

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.