The Illogic of Kassel

7

Over the following hours I searched for information on the thirteenth edition, which only had a week left to run. I was interested to find out that Documenta 13 had brought together two hundred artists, philosophers, scientists, critics, and writers, who had presented an enormous number of works and been involved in all kinds of events, many of them simultaneous. Some had lasted for weeks. They were held or conducted not only in Kassel but as far afield as Canada and Afghanistan. Nobody could even dream of seeing it all. In Kassel alone the exhibition had spread over the entire urban area, throughout Karlsaue Park, and even into the forest beyond the huge park — that is, it had spread over all the usual spaces, and was also in others never utilized before at Documenta.

Karlsaue Park was an immense space, with gardens, paths, and canals located symmetrically in front of the summer palace, the Orangerie. Evidently, I read in an online newspaper, Kassel 2012 reproduced “that sublime postmodern condition: the sense of one’s own infinitude that comes from experiencing the disproportionate, pointing toward what we’ll never apprehend or comprehend.” I read this, and for a few moments my occasionally postmodern mind concentrated on certain “experiences of the disproportionate” I had seen up close and on the impossibility of taking in, of hanging on to, of partially or totally comprehending the world. I ended up wondering whether traveling to Kassel might not be the greatest opportunity I’d ever had to approach — almost to caress — a certain total reality: at least that of contemporary art, which was no small thing. But a little while later, I wondered why I wanted to take in so much.

Then, perhaps so I wouldn’t be so scared about those six days ahead, with their more than possible promise of a radical solitude, I told myself that as soon as I arrived in Kassel, it would be advisable to find what one might call a “thinking cabin” for the evenings. It might suffice to remember the words of an enamored Czech to his fiancée: “I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious, locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp.” I thought I should know how to convert my hotel room at dusk into a sober isolation chamber, suitable as a place for reflection.

Please understand me. The world was in very bad shape in September 2012, in terrible shape when I traveled to Kassel. The economic and moral crises, especially in Europe, had deteriorated utterly. One had the feeling — as I write this, one still does — that the world had perished and was irremediably in bad shape, or at least would be for a long time to come. This inevitably contaminated everything and created an atmosphere of fatality, leading me to see the world as something now tragically lost. At my age, it was easier to look at things like that, because everything seemed hopeless; any idea of changing things seemed to lead one to unending, fruitless efforts.

By way of simple self-defense, I’d decided to turn my back on the lost and irreparable world, which is why the idea of trying to set up a place of meditation in the evenings in Kassel seemed sensible to me, certainly much more so than the world; in my “thinking cabin” I could devote myself to pondering joy, for example, to try to see it as something close to the nucleus of all creation. The cabin would help me to concentrate on art. Here, after all, was an opportunity to try to modestly emulate persons I’d admired for certain gestures: persons who had known in their time how to submerge themselves in those tiny spaces so suitable for solitary reflection. Wittgenstein, for example, retired to Skjolden, Norway, to a cabin he built himself in a completely isolated place. He retired there to delve into his despair: to intensify his mental and moral distress, but also to stimulate his intellect and reflect on the necessity of art and love and also on the hostility of the world toward those necessities.

The book I had first thought to take with me to my German cabin concerned precisely the joy of art when it revealed its essential seriousness (not about the world, but entirely about art). In the end, I left this book in Barcelona and brought Camilo José Cela’s Journey to the Alcarria instead. It was an outlandish choice, because of the contrast I’d found between the modernity and sophistication of Kassel and the belfries and terrible cripples of the world of my compatriot Cela. But I wanted to take a book that told of a journey so different from my own, and that one met my criteria.

At the last moment, I also stuck a copy of Rüdiger Safranski’s Romanticism: An Odyssey of the German Spirit into my luggage. Ever since I read it for the first time, I’ve always enjoyed going back to read fragments in which the author explained Nietzsche’s world, how Nietzsche thought it necessary to live without illusions, and at the same time, in spite of having discovered life’s great futility, to be passionately fond of it. Romanticism always allowed me to return to a phrase of Nietzsche’s that over time had become one of my convictions: “Only as aesthetic phenomena are existence and the world eternally justified.”