The Illogic of Kassel

58

I sat down on one of the piled-up logs, in a corner of Untilled, beside the chunks of reinforced concrete. I was aware that what I was doing was a bit crazy or, to put it a better way, illogical. But my state of euphoria was in crescendo, and I felt in marvelous harmony with almost everything in Kassel. Almost everything bewitched me, exactly at the time when I should have been laid completely low by my anguish. My contact with contemporary art, or whatever it was that had achieved that miracle, had left me in an extraordinary state, though I had no doubt that, sooner or later, I’d return to my habitual nighttime melancholy; that was the way it had to be. Otherwise, without that sadness that hit me every evening, I’d be nothing.

Hidden in the moonlit woods, the last conspirator of a dream on dug-over land, I slowly and treacherously whispered the song that said that to get out of the forest, we had to get out of Europe, but to get out of Europe, we had to get out of the forest. I thought I discovered that without the two dogs at that hour, the environment of decomposition — possibly a metaphor for our cultural decomposition — lost some of its force. The night was infinitely more powerful than that environment.

I looked for the little mound of rubble on which I’d seen the young blonde German woman announcing the news of the death of Europe. When I thought I’d found it, I looked up toward the starry canopy that I felt was the only thing that could really accompany me in my solitude. And though at that moment I didn’t remember his name (Brian Schmidt), the Australian astronomer came to mind who had discovered, along with other colleagues, that, fourteen billion years after the Big Bang, the universe was accelerating, not slowing down, all owing, perhaps, to a dark energy, just as was happening with my mood, which I felt to be accelerating all the time, pleasantly unstoppable, as if my interest in everything kept expanding, and, because of this — possibly because of this dark energy — I couldn’t close my eyes, thus perhaps confirming what that friend had said: it is night’s own essence that keeps us from sleeping.

I wasn’t at all uncomfortable in spite of being in a place that normally would have struck me as terrifying. I had a thought for that astronomer, who said he was exploring the very frontier of knowledge, penetrating the new and, therefore, daring to commit errors. As if I were the actual astronomer, playing at what I imagined that Australian did when he was alone with the stars, I began to pose to myself a problem, which I was obviously not the first person in the world ever to pose.

A question I wouldn’t know how to classify, whether philosophical, logical, Cartesian, mathematical. . it consisted of wondering if one could prove what one stated. For example, one might look toward the nearby statue of a reclining woman on a pedestal beside a puddle and state the following in a moderately loud voice: “On the face of the statue on the pedestal there are bees.”

So far all was going well, but the trouble began when I asked myself what form my verification might take. Would a quick look from various different angles suffice, or did I have to touch the beehive that took the place of the statue’s face with my hands, then touch the pedestal, and so on? Here were two ways of considering the matter. One said that, even if I put my mind to it, I’d never be able to completely verify my proposition, because deep down, a back door was always kept open, an uncontrollable flight, and the possibility remained that one might be mistaken. Another view said: “If I could never completely verify what I’d stated, then I didn’t mean anything by the proposition either. Therefore, it meant absolutely nothing.”

I didn’t know what to go with. Even though I knew I was obsessing too much over the matter, I posed the question to myself again, this time changing the proposition:

“I am sitting on a log at night.”

Then I asked myself how I could verify that. Was a glance at the log enough, or did I have to touch it with my hands, checking that it could serve as firewood in the winter, and so on? Here, two ways of considering the matter opened up again, the same two that had become apparent with the statue beside the puddle.

I spent a long, very active time pretending to be an astronomer who, instead of looking at the stars, posed this problem to himself. It was perfect to play at something so illogical in a city like Kassel, which did not invite logic. It was not very connected to logic, for it demanded that the invited creators operate within the avant-garde parameters of a high-grade madness.

I remembered my last visit to the wonderful city of Turin in northern Italy. I’d been struck by how contained and elegant that place was — actually a French city, due to the long shadow of the House of Savoy. Etched in my memory was the serenity of its daily life, which one sensed as a dangerous creator of unexpected absurdities or impressive outbreaks of madness, like Friedrich Nietzsche’s, when in January 1889 he left his hotel and on the corner of Via Cesare Battisti and Via Carlo Alberto, sobbing, hugged the neck of a horse being whipped by its owner. That day an unstable border broke open for Nietzsche, which had seemed to separate rationality from delirium for several centuries. That day, the writer distanced himself definitively from humanity, however you want to look at it. To put it more simply, he went crazy; although according to Milan Kundera, maybe he was just apologizing to the horse for Descartes.

The great Italo Calvino, Turinese by adoption, saw in this perfect, geometric city an invitation to logic. “Turin is a city that entices a writer toward vigor, linearity, style,” he wrote. “It invites logic, and through logic opens the way toward madness.”

In Kassel, I thought, something different was happening. The city invited illogicality, opening the way toward an unknown logic.

I spent many hours reflecting on how to verify various propositions. I no longer know how many hours I spent completely entertained by this game. The subject of verifications came to an end after I put forward a proposition that demonstrated that mathematics was either inconsistent or not entirely complete.

“I am an indemonstrable truth,” I said to myself.

Just by saying this, I had the impression I had ruined the prestige of mathematics, the formal science that, starting with axioms and following logical reasoning, studied the properties and connections of abstract entities.

If I was an indemonstrable truth, mathematics wasn’t what it was purported to be — it wasn’t the superior language, the language of God, as some call it.

A few hours went by before I finished off mathematics and began to feel my mind distorted by unwanted interference; I became intimidated — I find this word very fitting — by a rare chinoiserie: the torturous story featuring two tsetse flies of Pekinese origin, a nightmarish tale undoubtedly proceeding from the impact — I wasn’t so aware of it at the time — the vision, hours earlier, of those two minuscule, sleep-inducing insects I’d seen trapped in the Fridericianum in a gigantic display case.

That Chinese tale — a sort of dream that was putting me to sleep — was probably caused by my own weariness (generator sometimes of the most incredible nightmares). In the end, I gave in to the tsetse pressure and nodded off. The time flew by, and when I came to my senses, the first thing I saw — I thought I was still in my dream — was the docile, pink-legged dog at my side. Totally confused, I attributed the vision, the whole dream, to the proximity of the Dschingis Khan, which after all was very close, right behind Huyghe’s territory, on the edge of the park, beside the Fulda River.

I realized it was getting light and I had somehow managed to live and dream on the outskirts of the outskirts of art, like a secret conspirator in the Kassel night. In spite of the two tsetse flies seriously tormenting me, I felt a certain pride in what I’d achieved: staying so long in such a difficult place hardly designed for nocturnal use. As for the dog, I ended up seeing it was the real one, she was really there, alive and well, wagging her tail.

I touched her.

“The dog is an indemonstrable truth,” I said.

I observed that she was still there, indifferent to what I was saying, converted into an immovable, indemonstrable, immutable truth: a truth that, being a dog, moved.