The Illogic of Kassel

44

It was there in Artaud’s cave that I remembered my old conviction — still holding true from what I could tell — that anyone who dedicated himself to literature had not renounced the world; the world had simply evicted him, or never admitted him as a tenant. Nothing serious, then; in the end, a poet was someone for whom the world didn’t even exist, because, for him, there was only the radiance of the eternal outside.

I was thinking all this, and it was as if the cries of the radical young German woman fundamentally appealed to me. I had to really force myself to move away from that unhinged ranter. I was helped by my tremendous accumulated fatigue as much as by the invisible breeze: for a moment they both seemed to have joined forces to try to hold my interest in everything except the shouting. And so I soon managed to dodge the young madwoman in mourning — with a slight twinge, because underneath it all I liked her madness — and I was able to concentrate on the video being shown in that artificial cave.

I noticed I continued to be interested in everything. Not long before, I’d even been interested in the soothing, ruddy sunset, which, going into the cave, we’d left behind and which plenty of people had been paying too much attention to, as though it were part of Documenta. My reaction to the anodyne sunset had been very emotional, as it reminded me of my father who, before going off to his daily labor year after year (which began at sunset), always sang “Pace non trovo,” and his voice in the shower rang out with a succession of squeaks caused by excessive sorrow (perhaps at not having dedicated himself to opera). It resounded with excessive volume and excessive despair.

I was also emotional inside Artaud’s cave, because on top of everything, each time I looked off into the distance, I thought I saw the sea. It was a receding sea, which revealed a more distant sea, and in the end only allowed me to surmise a series of seas without coastlines. This visual effect seemed to tell me I should dare to go farther, unafraid, far from any handful of dust or misunderstanding of this world, that I should dare to go toward other conjectures, also without coastlines.

Under the circumstances, I was barely able to follow the thread of the film by Javier Téllez: when I wasn’t sunk in conjecture about a series of seas without coastlines, I was imagining what I could say to María Boston and Ada if they suddenly decided to ask me what I thought that invisible breeze (which possibly contributed to preventing the collapse of my mental state) was like. If the question arose, I thought I’d tell them it was like that well-known current vibrating between two poles of the tiny voltaic column that made the first electric telegraph possible; that fiendish spark was capable of leaping miles and miles over mountains and entire continents.

I don’t know how it could have happened, but when we came out of that grotto, I thought I saw the star Sirius high in the sky, and then very soon afterward, as if there were a logical connection between the two, I again met the young madwoman in mourning proclaiming, in an increasingly imposing manner, her desperation over the destruction of Europe. Confronted by this juxtaposition, I was aware of being very conscious that I would long remember the majestic, somber beauty of the scene and that she was involuntarily forming a part of it; it would be one of the key images of my journey to Kassel. And that is because, among other things, on suddenly seeing the bereaved young woman’s shadow in the night’s first electric lights and taking into account the fact that Sirius was high up in the radiance of the eternal, the figure of the madwoman took on a strange sort of dignity for a moment, as if all of a sudden, there in the Kassel dusk, you could see that only she was telling the truth.