The Illogic of Kassel

40

When I opened my eyes and discovered her looking at me, somewhere between horrified and amused, I remembered — still befuddled by sleep, the sentence about nobody sleeping on their way to the scaffold. The striking thing was that I’d ended up being the exception to the rule and slept right there beside my own gallows. A few seconds had to pass for the situation not to seem quite so serious. After all, the bus journey had given me such an enormous jolt, and not having slept a wink all night weighed so heavily on me that in the end it wasn’t so strange I’d ended up completely exhausted, slumped on my Chinese sofa, on my personal scaffold.

I quickly went back over the most positive aspect of that awakening: I’d managed to keep my excellent state of mind, as it had lost nothing of the high it had reached before I flopped onto the couch; in other words, I continued to feel extremely interested in everything and appreciated being alive like never before. Being so interested, I was even entranced by Boston’s dumbfounded expression. You could tell my involuntary “Chinese number” had shocked her.

“The thing is, I couldn’t sleep last night,” I said.

“Were you engrossed in the cabin?”

Confused, ashamed, reining in my good mood, and at the same time trying to shake off the stupor of the Chinese nap, I resolved right there that, next day, when I had to sit down to write at that table, I would turn myself into another Documenta installation and set about pretending I was asleep.

It would be an installation that paid homage to the deep sleep I had just at that moment woken from, beneath Boston’s almost protective gaze. To do it, to refine the Chinese number that paid tribute to my sleep of the day before, I would try to pretend the whole time that I was sleeping in the style of Benino (that figure from Neapolitan nativity scenes, the shepherd who slumbers eternally on and is aware of nothing). In reality, I would be devoting myself to meditation, in other words to covert cabin work, knowing (as I’d recently found out) that thinking during the day was much more relaxing and more productive than at night.

From the outside — that is, in the eyes of possible spectators — no one would know I wasn’t actually sleeping but awake, isolated inside a perfect cabin, in this case a mental one, which perversely existed out in public.

A sign on the table would give some explanation of that installation and have everyone believe the writer was asleep and not thinking about anything. The sign, then, would assert the opposite of what was happening and say I was a guy who was completely convinced that — as an atheist schoolteacher had taught me — no religion was ever good for anything; sleep was more religious than all the religions put together, perhaps because when we sleep we are truly closer to God.

No doubt about it, that installation (which I was making up as I went along for the following morning) would contain a deceit, by making out that I professed that religion of sleep.

There’s no meditating on anything here, not even on the figure of the sleeper, the sign on my table might also say.

Or perhaps (this would be Autre’s version): Here lies a genuine attempt to go toward nothing, literally toward nothing.

Or rather this: When we sleep, we’re closer to Duchamp.

I set about removing some irritating bits of sleep from my eyes, and just then noticed Boston had started looking at me with a great deal more compassion than she’d shown a minute earlier. She doubtless saw me as an old, bald, fat sleepwalker in that foreign city, and most likely at that very moment she was feeling very sorry for me. I could have made her feel even sorrier — or rather, more horrified — if she’d known that, while she was looking at me so compassionately from on high, I was seeing her from below as a representation of Documenta in the form of a housewife with curlers in her hair, with all the neuroses of a nosy, bourgeois woman. .

The avant-garde in curlers.

In the end, what happened was that my scant faith in the existence of a visible avant-garde was weakened still further. If anything remained, you’d have to go look for it among the silent conspirators I’d seen, for example, in the woods adjacent to Karlsaue Park, who seemed to me to be moving through the outskirts of the outskirts: ultrasecret accomplices, as weightless as the invisible breeze at the Fridericianum; surely they were the last members of the avant-garde, although none of them were interested in being classified that way.

From my supine position, I kept my gaze fiercely on the housewife with curlers, who seemed to want to dislodge me from the red divan.

“But what is our man of the cabin thinking?” she asked.

In her sarcastic note of affection, I seemed to detect that she thought my recent solitude had unhinged me. Or maybe she didn’t think anything of the sort and was simply a pleasant girl who’d always treated me very well and had actually shown me utter courtesy, elegance, and goodness. Had she simply given me the gift of the immense pleasure of hearing her voice, generously instructing me in what there was to see in that park of strange inventions and a thousand marvels (which ended up reminding me of the country estate in Locus Solus, the novel by Raymond Roussel)?

Even if it were so and she were just a charming woman with an unrivaled way of talking, even if there were scarcely anything to worry about, I couldn’t bear the idea that there existed the slightest possibility of her seeing me at that moment as an Italian nativity-scene figure at the most central Chinese chapel of rest in Europe.

I turned over on the couch.

“And don’t leave me all alone again!” I shouted at her.

That was a mistake. On a journey there is always one mistake that stands out above all others. Since I was a boy — a shy one like any other — I’ve always tried to hide from everyone the fact that I was very lonely. But I had ended up snapping at Boston and I couldn’t turn back the clock.

She smiled.

“I think,” she said, “that is entirely beside the point.”