The Illogic of Kassel

35

On the bus, I started leaving my memories of the previous bad night behind, the remembrance of an extremely difficult session in the cabin. I suspect the most overwhelming thing about those sleepless hours wasn’t just meditating on Europe’s tragic fate, but also perceiving that I wasn’t wrong to see myself transformed into a total Kassel native, one more citizen of that provincial German city. Once again, I told myself that my habit of informing everybody I was from whatever place I found myself in had made me the victim of my own words and ended up doing me real harm. The proof was that it was suddenly no trouble to see myself as a humble and eloquent, melancholy Kassel citizen, who spent the night hours meditating on the solitude stretching away beyond time in the feeble light of his fatherland. .

With visions this terrifying, it’s understandable I barely slept a wink all night. I saw the world slipping through my fingers. I felt it was undesirable to have it with me any longer. I wanted to hurl it on any old galactic garbage dump, or perhaps into a Euro Sex Shop, or a butcher’s in the Black Forest, or a carpet store in El Paso, or a laundromat in Melbourne. I did not know what to do with the world.

I spent the night turning over awkward questions in my mind and I was incredibly restless, sometimes twisting in a ridiculous, tragic way between the sheets, transformed into a sort of neurotic Sinbad, old and forgetful, devoted to summoning up, in a series of litanies, all the cities I’d ever laid eyes on. I remember myself that way, simultaneously tragic and comical. A homegrown Sinbad or a Kassel-made one, if you prefer, dedicated to evoking, from inside his precarious cabin, with a rosary-like rhythm, solitary refuges to which in times gone by great anguished minds had withdrawn to think.

But what really drove me to the most dogged insomnia and a near fatal nervousness — I went on remembering on the bus heading in the direction of the Chinese restaurant — were the visions that followed one another in front of my astonished eyes. However little credence I gave them to start with, I was unable for many hours to push them away. It all began when I suddenly felt enveloped in a deadly silence and noticed that not a breath of air stirred inside the cabin, not a sound could be heard, not a squeak, nothing. The utter conviction that Europe had long since been wrapped in a shroud hit me all at once. Or, more accurately, the feeling had slowly crept up on me over the last few hours. I was in the center of Germany, in the center of Europe, and there, in that center, it was more obvious than anywhere else that everything had been cold and dead and buried for decades, ever since the continent allowed itself to make its first serious unpardonable mistakes. Everything had been wiped out in the center of that actually inanimate territory, where by day (as I’d been able to observe during that now past and very regretful morning and afternoon), the sun had remained unchanging at its zenith and, nonetheless, had stayed hidden behind a haze that seemed to have been hanging in the air for centuries, traces of a sort of dust as fine as residual pollen, from an earth that was disintegrating with terrifying slowness.

You are in Europe and Europe is not here, said a singsong, obsessive inner voice, which seemed keen to do away with me at all costs, simultaneously reminding me that the weight of our most recent terrifying history was too much, a history in which horror was the dominant presence.

It was a difficult night. And my eyes were like lighthouses. Europe was infested with ghosts, like the ones in Sehgal’s dance hall, and it was laden with symbols from the past. Europe, already a tragic composite, would never again manage to feel part of the world in a good or natural way, in fact would never again manage to feel on earth in any way at all.

At last, I could sleep, albeit only for an hour. At seven o’clock, I dropped off, and that drop drowned out my horror. I woke an hour later, and in a great frame of mind, which surprised me because nobody expects to find himself suddenly feeling so good after one hour’s sleep.

“Life is serious, art is joyful,” I said out loud, and then imagined cannon fire waking the whole of Kassel.