The Illogic of Kassel

34

Hours later, in the basement of the supermarket Pim recommended for buying food for my “thinking cabin,” I was assailed by staircase wit.

Crafty as this staircase wit always was, it didn’t let up until I remembered Pim’s words as we were saying goodbye to each other at the Orangerie, when she told me that this edition of Documenta, so extravagant, ended up imposing a Shakespearean truth: this time was out of joint. I had shown myself in complete agreement with that, but down there in the basement, suddenly forced to reexamine the moment of my parting from Pim, I began to think about what I might have added or even countered had I been a little more agile in that instant.

Why hadn’t I said this or that to her? Once again, I told myself that writing was born out of that staircase wit and was essentially the story of a slow-maturing revenge, the long-winded tale of putting into writing what we should have put, at the time, into life.

I could have said some of this to Pim in the Orangerie when she spoke to me of time being out of joint. She had told me they wouldn’t be able to catch up with me again until three o’clock the next afternoon, that either she would call me, or maybe Boston, whoever was able to get away from the office first. .

I could have said so many things at that moment, but I said nothing, maybe I was too taken aback at the news I was going to be all on my own for so many hours, which at first (without my being overly aware of it) brought on a slight desperation, which later gave rise to a need to find ways to fill the empty hours ahead and make out it didn’t matter to me that, for example, I’d have to go to the Dschingis Khan the next morning alone and, once there, literally have to make something of it.

That need to sidestep anguish decisively marked the hours that followed, during which I went slightly crazy. Noticeably disoriented on emerging from the supermarket, I dashed out of there so fast that two minutes later, I’d already discovered in a panic I was going down the wrong street: I found myself on Goethestrasse, a Kassel thoroughfare I didn’t know at all, and this despite having committed to memory, almost by fire and sword, the instructions Pim gave me in case it so happened that, on leaving the supermarket, I made a mistake and ended up getting hopelessly lost. Nobody had mentioned the name of that street to me. I was completely lost. Pim had foreseen various errors I might make and even drawn an improvised map, but Goethestrasse wasn’t included in any of her possibilities for getting lost. This aggravated my feeling of abandonment. Then I was surprised to realize that clearly, one way or another, there in Kassel, the inhabitants of the place, instead of telling me it was about time I’d got there, had begun to see me as just another native of the city, and because of that, it would be difficult for me to get anyone to understand, being so obviously from there, how I had gotten lost and might have to ask the way to the exceptionally central Hotel Hessenland.

It was curious, of course, to observe that my doubts about whether or not I was in Germany had unexpectedly developed into the clear perception that everyone there saw me as just another German.

Urgently needing to see whether I could find Königsstrasse again, I went full speed ahead past a whole host of places, including the Bellevue Palace — with a museum dedicated to the brothers Grimm (pride of the city, those two wrote their best stories in old Kassel) — and also the Bali Cinema (I didn’t even look to see what was playing, though I later learned that the Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra was showing episodes of The Three Little Pigs there, a two-hundred-hour-long movie, the title of which alluded ironically to three moments of great significance in the creation of Europe, embodied in the figures of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Adolf Hitler, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder). I went so fast, I passed a lot of places without being able to pay attention to anything other than the intensity of the light in the street, which was diminishing by the minute in a terrifying manner. I breathed more easily when I came upon a short alley that gave me a glimpse down a side street, at the end of which I thought I could see the longed-for Königsstrasse. The dark alley wasn’t as dark as the one where I’d once discovered delight in an icy breathing, a dry, glacial blast that went straight to the back of my neck and let me know the pleasure of fear all at once, in its purest and most sublime form.

While I was heading down that murky alley, I remembered my friend who said that you never arrived at literature by chance. Never, never, he repeated, it’s pure destiny, a dark destiny, a series of circumstances that make you choose, and you always knew it was the path. Nice thinking, I said to myself. It was highly likely I had arrived at literature due to that blast to the back of my neck in the dark alley; in other words, I got there because of my delight in that icy, glacial breathing, suddenly received as a dry blast, a blast from no one in that solitary place.

A while later, I entered my cabin and went right out on the balcony to greet Sehgal’s work, This Variation. It was drizzling again, as it had been hours earlier, and I felt the presence of a current of fresh air, not at all unpleasant, but ultimately chilly, and decided to go straight back into the room. Once inside, I lay on the bed with my hands linked behind my head, and after a few moments of which I remember nothing, I went back to thinking that for the artists with the most innovative spirit, the truth was simply out there. But this time I asked myself where these outskirts lay. From inside my discreet delirium — to tell the truth, it was the result of my fear of the solitude in store for me — I struggled to recover my proper equilibrium. Anguish and melancholy, for their part, had advanced inexorably, and as the shadows loomed more profoundly over the city, my whole mind became even more confused.

Where did I think the outskirts were? I answered myself as well as I could, thinking that first one had to know how to move through unexplored territory, far from the center of culture, from the market, which was as well known as it was hackneyed, that this was something that should be asked of everybody with disruptive ideas. But I wasn’t long in asking myself what exactly “unexplored territory” and “everybody with disruptive ideas” might mean.

I was not consoled by the knowledge that I had the whole cabin, the whole night, in which to find that out; perhaps I had the premonition that besides those essentially simple questions (simple questions posed only in order to avoid trickier ones), the night might be a difficult one. It was. In fact, it was very difficult, a night of complete anguish. It turned out hard and grueling, filled with insomnia, terror, an imaginary journey down a strange track with grassy dunes and great cliffs. Nothing that I saw or imagined or breathed in this environment helped to sweeten things. I soon understood it had very probably been a mistake to try to set up a cabin precisely for those hours when melancholy most controlled me.

How could I have been so stupid? For hours on end, I was tormented in that darkened room by the image of two orangutans, one fertile and the other sterile, that I believed I’d seen somewhere that morning. It was not an easy night. The melancholy of the evening wasn’t content to remain until the wee hours when I normally started to feel sleepy, but extended itself practically until dawn.

Having slept for just an hour, I got up the next day and immediately discovered, unexpected as it may be, that I was once again in an excellent mood, perhaps because the very idea that a new day was beginning, that splendid Thursday, could not have been more pleasant to me.

Collapse and Recovery, I thought. I couldn’t help thinking that Documenta’s motto was being played out by my own body.

Later, after a lengthy breakfast, I visited Sehgal’s This Variation. I’d proposed to myself the idea of going every morning of my stay in Kassel without fail. I entered the large building adjacent to my hotel and walked down the short corridor, now almost familiar to me, toward that neglected garden, to the left of which was the entrance to the dark room. According to the receptionist at the Hessenland, the room had been a modest dance hall in its day.

Now right inside Sehgal’s dim space, I took six rapid steps toward the back of the room of spirits. Nobody brushed against me this time, and again I made the mistake of thinking there were no dancers in there. I paused in the pitch dark. As on the previous occasion, I laughed into the darkness. And suddenly, everything changed. I noticed with horror that someone at the back of the room tried to imitate a whinny and I was given or imagined a mental picture of a woman two centuries back, sitting in a trap, driving a chocolate-colored mare on a trip through the south of France. It was as if I’d visualized one of my own memories, but it wasn’t an image I’d ever seen before. As quickly as it arrived, the image was gone, and I was left asking myself how that sort of memory, which was not my own, could have come to me. Was it Autre’s? No, because Autre was also me, or at least I’d invented him some hours earlier.

Disconcerted, I took another step. Then, almost immediately, I began to hear a wan foxtrot coming from the back of the room that ended up turning into a little Peruvian waltz. The person who had come in behind me stumbled against my hesitant body by mistake and almost sent me flying. Then, possibly frightened, she turned around and left the dark room at once, and I went after her, toward the light outside, as if in hot pursuit.

On leaving the room, I didn’t see anyone ahead of me, just more light, just the craziness of light, that was all, though that was no small thing. I put out of my mind what had just happened and lingered in the doorway, listening to the end of the waltz, but then the music stopped dead. I did the same, brought up short, and remained there motionless for a few seconds, after which I raised my eyes to the ice-gray sky and saw a bird pass, and then another, and then many more, and it seemed to me they were all flying toward the Dschingis Khan.

Back on the street, I passed the hotel. First, I asked for an umbrella in reception. Then I decided to head for the outskirts, as if out in that area far from the city I might find something more associated with the avant-garde than anything I’d seen up to that point.

Soon afterward, I took the bus to the Dschingis Khan, which was not at odds with my desire to go in the direction of the outskirts. No sooner had I sat down in a good seat than I looked to the sky and saw the birds were following the same route, no doubt because (as everybody knows) birds always travel toward the outskirts.