The Illogic of Kassel

67

After a long search through the Fridericianum we came upon Salvador Dalí’sLe grand paranoïaque. I seemed to observe that the voice singing I’ll just keep on/’til I get it right was continuing at my side and seemed to form part of the painting, the same way that in Kentridge’s drawings, there was always a trace of the previous drawing.

The voice only disappeared when we arrived at a room with paintings of apples that Korbinian Aigner had grown and painted when he was a prisoner in Dachau. Within that huge insanity he managed to create four new varieties of apples, designating them KZ 1 to 4 (KZ is the German abbreviation for concentration camp).

Once more, the horrors of the Nazi delirium showed up in a Documenta piece, on this occasion in a very special way. Those admirable, simple little paintings of apples left one impressed by the human capacity for resistance in the midst of difficulties; even in extremely adverse circumstances, to create art is the one thing that actually intensifies the feeling of being alive.

I looked at those apples, noticing that fragments of Le grand paranoïaque seemed to have lodged in them as if the apples too needed the trace of a previous work of art to feel more complete. I reflected on human courage, thinking of the case of a young woman from Moscow, a specialist in English romantic literature, who I’d been told had been sent to a prison in the Brezhnev era to a cell with no light, no paper or pen, because of a stupid and completely false denunciation; that young woman knew Byron’s Don Juan by heart (seventeen thousand lines or more) and in the darkness she translated it mentally into Russian verse. When she got out of prison having lost her sight, she dictated the translation to a friend, and it is now the canonical Russian version of Byron.

I thought about the totally indestructible human mind and that we should meditate on everything better and be happier. And while I was thinking this, I felt the air of the breeze, which seemed to turn the corners of the galleries of the Fridericianum, catch up to me fully. It was exactly at that instant when I saw the young blonde woman who’d announced the death of Europe walking past, serene and silent, in her elegant mourning. I was shocked to see her this time so calm, so appeased, without her lost look. I observed her closely in case I was mistaken. But yes, it was her. She realized she was being observed and flashed me a slightly complicit smile, as if saying, It’s me, you’re right, I’m the one who believes that Europe has been dead for centuries.

I was about to carry on walking when I stopped and asked Boston whether she’d noticed that we’d just crossed paths with the madwoman in mourning whom we’d first seen at Untilled, and then later, on another occasion, at the door of Artaud’s Cave. It’s true, said Boston, without attaching any importance to it, she seems calmer now, we could invite her to your lecture, I think she goes to all of them.

She said it with a smile, possibly as a joke. Just ask what her name is, I said, I’d just like to know what she’s called. Boston assigned Alka that mission, which she carried out immediately without any problem: she went over to where the madwoman in mourning was, asked her name, received a reply, and came back. The blonde had told her she was called Kassel. Are you sure, Alka? She nodded, she was sure, she said, the blonde’s name was Kassel, she’d repeated it three times.

A little while later, when Alka — maybe this was also part of her job — told us it was ten to six, we left the Fridericianum almost at a run. It felt like the last straw that I should have the feeling — there in Kassel, where I’d always had more than enough time for everything — that I was going to be late for something.

We were rushing, but as we passed the Documenta-Halle, we lost a few seconds stopping to see Kristina Buch’s The Lover, an enclosure full of plants that Boston wanted to show me. If not for her, I would never have noticed that apparently anodyne enclosure, which turned out to be a whole Documenta installation. I confirmed that often what moves us tends to arise in the most insignificant-seeming circumstances: in what looked like merely a big container full of weeds, Kristina Buch had grafted plants that attracted butterflies who lost their characteristic liberty and went on to spend the sad lives of hostages, trapped by the plants that so loved and nourished them and, therefore, also tyrannized them with their overwhelming love.