The Illogic of Kassel

14

Leaving Sehgal’s room behind, we crossed the garden of the old annex, walking along the corridor that led to the street.

Boston said she was a fan of strolling, of journeying on foot. It seemed so odd to her that the most natural and basic way of getting around could become the most luminous of activities; perhaps it was such a creative thing to do because it took place at human speed. Going for a walk, she told me, seemed to produce a clear mental syntax, a narrative of its own.

After this brief reflection, she went back to worrying about the impression Sehgal’s room might have made on me, she wanted to know how I’d felt.

“Well, look,” I said point-blank, “I have to tell you that without England’s resistance to Hitler, I wouldn’t be here today.”

That sentence was clearly a McGuffin, perhaps arising directly from the very art of walking. It came out as the first thing that entered my head. I realized that this art of journeying on foot facilitated, among other things, the ability to say things without thinking about them first; you said things, letting them literally fly out of your mouth. Unlike what we say after we’ve carefully formulated an idea, polishing it until we feel ready to let it go, the sentence that is unconsidered and born directly from a walk may be daring, strange, and seem at times as though it is not ours. On other occasions, it may even have an unexpected syntax that sometimes surprises us, because we discover it was overwhelmingly ours without our knowing it.

“Without England’s resistance?” Boston queried.

I kept quiet, I didn’t know what to say; in truth that McGuffin hadn’t felt like mine at any point. I kept quiet, but it was not an embarrassing silence. When two people walk along conversing, the silences are never tense, violent, or serious. It doesn’t matter, for example, if you don’t respond to something, because in fact everything follows its course without any excessive dramatization.

On our left-hand side, on an avenue that crossed Königsstrasse, Boston pointed out the stop for the Documenta bus. In the mornings, it could drop me for free at the door of the Dschingis Khan in fifteen minutes.

These were the words I most feared: Dschingis Khan.

Going to that Chinese restaurant felt like a schoolroom chore, and, on top of that, I had no desire to show anybody at all what I was writing. Perhaps that’s why I pretended I hadn’t heard, staying very focused on my walk.

A few seconds followed, during which I looked solemnly at the ground. We were heading down Königsstrasse toward the Fridericianum, the central museum, or temple of Documenta. I felt I was walking along resisting everything and particularly going into the Dschingis Khan.

“Sehgal’s dark room is the closest room you have to your hotel bedroom,” Boston said, accompanying her convoluted sentence with beguiling diction and an attractive slight smile.

I didn’t understand why she said that, but for precisely that reason the sentence stayed more firmly engraved on my memory; I think I retained it in the hope of understanding it later on, as in fact did happen. When I returned to the hotel two hours later and went to my room with the idea of starting to turn it into a “thinking cabin,” I remembered her phrase straightaway. I remembered it as soon as I saw that, in effect, you really could lean into the street from the balcony and see the entrance to the building where the dark room was to be found.

“And are you going to write about this?” she asked, as we slowly continued making our way down Königsstrasse toward the Fridericianum, about a twelve-minute walk. Write about what? Oh, she said, I’m asking whether you’re thinking of writing about your direct connection with Sehgal’s dark room. Well, possibly, was all I said in reply, perhaps a little thrown because the question seemed related to the idea of showing my texts to visitors at the Dschingis Khan. But later I realized that perhaps what she was really asking me was to write for her. Why not? Was it then true that one could take a girl captive by writing? Luckily, thinking things through more carefully, I very soon saw I’d get nowhere if I considered wanting to take Boston captive. So, making the most of my common sense, I calmed down, telling myself that by no means had she asked me to subjugate her. I then chose to explain to her that I planned to shut myself up in my hotel room in the evenings and turn it into a place of isolation, a space well-suited to reflection: a place similar in the imagination to a cabin where it would be easy to devote myself to thinking, to meditating on joy, for example, and seeing it as something possibly within the nucleus of all creation; the location was as similar as possible to a space where I could think of my relationship with the lost and irreparable world. Perhaps I would write something there but I didn’t think so; my objective in that room-turned-cabin was not to write, but to think.

On hearing this, Boston couldn’t refrain from a kind, beautiful laugh, really very friendly. She shot me a friendly glance. (I’d started to uncomplainingly put up with that type of fond glance “toward the old man,” which some women had thrown my way with sad affection lately.) And I realized that sometimes her natural happiness surpassed the charm of her marvelous voice, which was really saying something. It seemed to her, she said without letting slip her expression of strange satisfaction, that there was nothing less conducive to meditation than staying sitting in a closed room or a “thinking cabin,” or a fretting cabin, or whatever I wanted to call it.

She said it in such a captivating way, it might even be the case, I thought, that she was absolutely right. But I did not want her to notice I’d admired the wisdom of her words, so I acted as if I’d heard nothing. I pretended not to have taken in what she’d said. And while I was pretending, I started to turn over in my mind the fact that somebody had brushed up against me in Sehgal’s dark room and that I had thought at the time about resisting a second touch. It was not something to pass over with indifference. Maybe this was a touch, I said to myself, I would find hard to forget.

Today, I think things would have gone better for me if at that juncture I’d already read — I did not read Chus’s piece until that evening — that “art is art, and what you make of it is up to you,” that peculiar McGuffin from Chus Martínez that could also be interpreted in this way: “The touch has already happened, and now it all depends on you, let’s see what you can make of it.”

But at that point I still hadn’t come across Chus’s sentence. Happening on it that night, I associated it with something Boston had said to me during the afternoon about Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s desire that participants in Documenta 13 be left to make something, and that there should be no artistic brief to mold their intervention. Through that association, everything caused me to wonder if perhaps Carolyn and Chus, with their strange invitation to the Dschingis Khan (an invitation without sense or instructions) had deliberately brushed up against me, to see if I were capable of turning their Chinese proposal into something creative, or what amounted to the same thing: a fertile and properly productive way of making something of it.