The Illogic of Kassel

64

The bright clarity evaporated as soon as I opened my eyes, but the Chinese logic remained in place.

That was my home along the way.

I remembered the Hungarian professor with the unruly hair in a Russian short story I had read a few months ago. He affirmed that if we isolated the stray, passing thought of indiscernible origin, then we were beginning to understand that we were systematically unhinged, that is, that our madness was an everyday matter. The students of this professor loved the idea of daily madness. As for the professor, wouldn’t he also be an expert in the Chinese logic of place?

In the depths of our minds was the enormous bestial, territorial back room, full of irrational fears and murderous instincts. That’s why we invented Reason, to oppose the great muddle, the general emptiness that is so lethal. At least that’s what the Hungarian professor in the short story said, and every time I remembered that story, I liked to think that the professor was entirely right, which would mean that deep down he wasn’t; but it was better to believe him, for if what he said weren’t true, one might end up outside oneself or out of one’s room, no more and no less than how I’d ended up the night before at Untilled, the night spent out in the open.

I looked at my watch. It was past noon. They still hadn’t called me on my cell phone; luckily they hadn’t phoned while I was sleeping and dreaming, so I was able to get some rest. I felt excessively enthusiastic, which didn’t take long to create a conflict for me when I began to smile at the waitresses. It was deplorable (it goes without saying). The worst of it was that I was attracting attention. I was acting stupidly and my euphoria might end up arousing suspicion. So I tried as hard as I could to control myself. Everything seemed to indicate that when I wasn’t at my desk in Barcelona, I felt empty, like a skinned, boneless hide, lurching through life. Even so, I tried to improve the situation. With elbows propped up on that Chinese corner table with its vase, I pretended to search for something I could write on. From so much pretending, I ended up searching for real. I finally thought I should say something on that oh so overused idea that nobody can step twice in the same river. I’d heard it so many times and I’d never been convinced. I remembered that in my role as a writer in public I could write whatever I wanted to in my notebook and, as if debating that commonplace about the river you step in twice, I finally wrote:

“Hummm. .”

Thirty times I wrote that out as a drill. In another thirty lines, in a somewhat cynical homage to Germany, I strove to reproduce a Goethe phrase:

“Everything is there, and I am nothing.”

Then I carefully described in my notebook the carpet of larch needles I’d walked across before I got to Untilled territory. It was an even more masochistic exercise than the previous two; I hated writing lingering descriptions that belonged more in other eras of narrative history. But I thought that the one there, writing in the Chinese restaurant in public, much as he was called Piniowsky like me, couldn’t be anything more than a conventional writer and, therefore, he should believe in the “power of descriptions.” This so unbalanced me (nobody likes to turn into a poor, old crock) that I had to say to myself several times:

“Calm down, Piniowsky.”

On the other hand, though what I was writing wasn’t all that serious, not a single person approached to see, which, occasionally, slightly undermined my self-esteem (even if it was the other Piniowsky’s morale). I called Barcelona and calmed down, but not enough. A friend wanted to know why he had to tell me everything that was going on in the city and why I wouldn’t tell him anything about Kassel. Because, I told him, absolutely nothing has happened to me since I got here, nothing at all, I’ve barely spoken to anybody. I walk around, sleep. My life lacks action, I told him, but I was thinking that surely, in a very Borgesian way, everything that was happening to me — which was nevertheless very little — was happening to the other Piniowsky.

I let the conversation with my friend dwindle down of its own accord, just die out. And so I didn’t tell him anything about my red couch like a scaffold or the lecture I needed to prepare and might not prepare for. I was undoubtedly right not to tell him, for that friend surely wouldn’t have understood what I was talking about. When I finally said goodbye and hung up, I stared at the figure of a dragon over by the door and remembered that some oriental dragons were said to carry the palaces of the gods on their backs, while others were known to determine the courses of the streams and rivers and protect subterranean treasures. I remembered the dragon at the entrance to Parque Güell in Barcelona, which I saw so often when I lived in the upper part of my city, and which sometimes, for no reason, I imagined secretly alive and ceaselessly devouring pearls and opals: something impossible, for it was simply a sculpture to which more and more tourists, especially Chinese tourists, were becoming addicted every day.

I ended up devoting myself to writing the first words of my afternoon lecture in the Ständehaus. I decided it would begin like this:

I left for Kassel, via Frankfurt, searching for the mystery of the universe and to initiate myself in the poetry of an unknown algebra. I also left for Kassel to try to find an oblique clock and a Chinese restaurant, and, of course, though I sensed it was an impossible task, I also left to try to find my home somewhere within my displacement. And now all I can tell you is that it is from this “home” that I am speaking to you.

As soon as I finished these lines, I realized that Piniowsky had never written anything so authentic in his whole life. He was saying that he was at home, that the table in the Chinese restaurant was his destiny, and that he was giving the whole lecture as if he were sitting at his private gallows in the Dschingis Khan. As long as no one was asking about the logic of it all, he had the impression of knowing it all by heart; but if anyone asked him, he wouldn’t know how to explain it.

Not know how to explain it?

The Chinese logic of the place was him!

Or to put it a better way, the Chinese logic was me.

I was a bit nervous, too.

“Calm down, Piniowsky.”