The Illogic of Kassel

66

At the last minute, Ada Ara couldn’t make it, and María Boston showed up at the hotel to take me to the Ständehaus. She arrived accompanied by Alka, who I suddenly remembered had been introduced to me by Pim as “the person in charge of your visit to Kassel.” Since she hadn’t taken charge of me at all, everything led me to think that up in the offices of the organization — so invisible to me — they’d decided to relieve her of that job. Now she reappeared with Boston, more smilingly than ever. Each time I saw her, I wanted to ask her what she was laughing at, but I was aware that could lead to a tremendous, endless spiral of misunderstandings and linguistic short circuits. Of course, since arriving in Kassel I’d discovered a special pleasure in studying those short circuits that seemed to rebel against the logic of our common language. But I preferred not to study Alka too much because I sensed that could end up driving me crazy.

As we entered the Fridericianum, the invisible breeze welcomed us forcefully, as if it were an old friend (in fact it was), as if it had recognized us and was so pleased to see us again that it wanted to squeeze us in the most exaggerated way possible. Right then, I discovered that the exact title of Ryan Gander’s work was I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorise (The Invisible Pull), which made me realize that this need for some meaning I can memorize could in time take on an immense significance. When I needed to better “memorize” what those glorious days in Kassel were like, I’d always have within reach the memory of that breeze that stretched through my mental fabric, leaving with me “a meaning” of renovation and optimism that would be difficult to forget.

Swayed by that old friend and the cheerful force of its invisible pull, I told Boston that in Sehgal’s room, that same afternoon, someone had whispered Last bear twice in my ear. It didn’t seem to surprise her too much. More than that, it gave her an idea to take me to a white room in the Fridericianum where Ceal Floyer’s sound installation ’Til I Get It Right was.

I asked her for the best possible translation of Last bear—I was sure it was very simple — but there was no way to get her to tell me, because she insisted on talking to me about an old work by Ceal Floyer that she’d liked very much; she’d seen it three years ago in Berlin and it was called, if she remembered correctly, Overgrowth. It was a bonsai photographed from below and projected on a slide that increased the image to the size of a normal tree, as if situating the spectator beneath, or rather the bonsai above, or both. It seemed, said Boston, a marvelous way to take apart the stupid act of manipulating a tree to dwarf it. Ceal Floyer’s work restored its proper size at the same time as alerting us to the number of sinister people we come across in life who try to pulverize our aspirations, whatever they might be. .

My only aspiration at that moment was still for her to translate Last bear into Spanish for me, but she didn’t seem to be up for that task and preferred we talk about ’Til I Get It Right, another phrase, she said, that seemed like a slogan. In ’Til I Get It Right, you could hear the American country singer Tammy Wynette repeating continuously: I’ll just keep on / ’til I get it right.

I asked Boston why we hadn’t gone to see and hear this on the first day. And I saw that Alka was laughing, as if she knew what I was talking about. You can’t do everything at once, said an ironic Boston.

In Ceal Floyer’s white room, the artist’s need to always search out the difficult was exposed, which reminded me of the afternoon at a talk when a woman in the back row asked me when I planned to stop sinking my poor, lonely characters in the fog. When I get it right, I’ll stop doing it, I told her. And then I informed her that fog and solitude were not my principal obsessions, I’d simply started a series of books that always prowled around that image of the solitary man in the mist and I felt I had to conclude the series. The woman then reproached me for the darkness of my texts. Señora, please, I said angrily, don’t you see how dark and complex the world is? But a little while later I noticed the daylight, which was soft and beautiful. And I thought: If one could only see everything with such clarity.