The Illogic of Kassel (32 page)

Just when I started to feel that sensation of stability, I saw—first with surprise and then with fear—that young Kassel, the frightening blonde in mourning, had entered the hall. She settled down—in a manner of speaking, because I’ve never seen anyone sit in a less settled, more dislocated way—in a seat in the back row. She didn’t seem to need simultaneous translation, she seemed to be following my words attentively, and every time I pronounced the word “Kassel” she stirred in her seat as if she felt alluded to.

I tackled the story of Sophie Calle and told how thanks to her phone call, my ever-delayed yearning to escape from literature and open up to other artistic disciplines finally became reality. Perhaps thanks to that, I said, I was here, in Kassel, such a legendary place for me ever since I’d first heard people talking about it back in 1972, when the best minds of my generation spread the rumor that the essential and most audacious avant-garde in history gathered here: it was a subversive breeze that would change everything.

I told them that at the meeting in the Café de Flore, Sophie Calle showed me a book by Marcel Schwob, which featured a text on the imaginary life of Petronius, the Roman poet, who according to Schwob, when he’d finished writing sixteen books of adventure stories, read them to his slave Syrus, and Syrus laughed and hooted and clapped, and when Schwob finished, the two of them agreed to live those written stories out in real life.

I opened a parenthesis here to tell them that Jules Renard—observing that at the end of his life, Schwob traveled to Samoa with his Chinese servant Ting to contemplate the tomb of one of his favorite writers, Robert Louis Stevenson (and in the end he didn’t see it)—wrote this: “Before he died, Schwob lived out his stories.”

Closing the parentheses, I returned to the afternoon in the Flore with Sophie Calle, when she invited me to imitate Syrus and Petronius, and I immediately accepted her proposal to write a story that she would try to live.

Then I talked about Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, of my friendship with her and my small collaborations with some of her installations, such as the one she did in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, where she depicted an apocalyptic London in the year 2054.

Although in fits and starts, I was delivering a lecture, and figured I’d filled about half my time, when I suddenly started to feel an indescribable emotion: given the excitation of my mood, I was communicating to everyone my great enthusiasm for this glorious moment of contemporary art.

As I spoke, I felt noticeably more and more authentic. And I seemed to see in a very obvious way that calling myself Piniowsky had made me reencounter my own self and that my previous name, my name of so many years, had come to be a huge burden to me, because in reality it was nothing more than the name from a youth that had gone on too long.

The entire audience was either confused or calm, except for young Kassel, who was fidgeting in her seat in the back row and seemed increasingly restless; she looked disappointed and I didn’t know why, though I feared it was because she grasped too well the lack of rigor in my extremely improvised talk. But I was not prepared to modify the method I was employing to communicate with my audience, who, by the way, seemed only to be listening to me to try to figure out what the hell I was talking about. Maybe they thought I was on drugs: I might have looked it, because my enthusiasm bordered on the supernatural.

Trying to keep my distance from what the madwoman or the rest of the audience might be thinking, I devoted myself to narrating the infinitely profound impression that William Gaddis’s novel
The Recognitions
had made on me; most especially, the treatment of the characters had left a strange trace on me, particularly one of them, a certain Wyatt who suddenly stopped being Wyatt to hide beneath the name of Reverend Gilbert Sullivan, and later behind the name of a certain Yak, who soon went on to be called Stephan (though only somewhat later do we recognize him by that name).

Could we say that Wyatt was Wyatt at every moment? Was it the same Wyatt in each part of
The Recognitions
?

I asked this question, and as I did so, I looked up for a moment and saw that the audience was looking more and more astounded, as if wanting to warn me not to carry on down that path.

“Wyatt!” shouted Kassel from the back row, and I’d never heard a shout inviting less logic.

Even so, I carried on. I began to talk about contemporary writers, about those I claimed could all be called Wyatt and had supposedly inherited the sacred flame of literature, but only on rare occasions could we see that they were indeed Wyatt. To explain such a huge debacle, I said, we had to talk about the abandonment of moral responsibilities on the part of all living writers, but that argument, not necessarily wrong, was insufficient to explain so much desertion and disaster. It was quite true that at present all contemporary writers, instead of taking up positions against capitalism, were working in tune with it; they were all well aware they were nothing if they didn’t sell books or if dozens of admirers didn’t show up when they signed copies of their novels. It was no less true that liberal democracies, by tolerating everything, absorbing everything, made any text futile, no matter how dangerous it might appear to be . . .

Here I stopped because I felt on the verge of asphyxiation; I’d suddenly been talking in a sort of compulsive outburst. I’d felt extremely uncomfortable at every moment as well, especially since I detected the absolutely false tone of my melancholy: I had wanted to deploy a sullen discourse, as I tended to do lately when I made literature, and I simply felt like a faker speaking so sadly.

When I regained my composure, I made a humorous allusion to “Collapse and Recovery,” explaining that more than once during the days I’d spent in Kassel, I had physically played out Documenta’s motto.

Then I talked about Paul Thomas Anderson’s film
The Master
, which I’d seen the first day of that month at the Venice Film Festival, and which had impressed me with its moving description of people who were lost, unable to recover after the Second World War.

The Master
brilliantly described the mental climate of recovery. I would undoubtedly think of this film if one day I had to write about finding in Kassel these optimal circumstances that allowed me to leave behind a creative collapse and enter into a process of Recovery, leading me to mental spaces where euphoria sometimes seemed limitless. Then I spoke briefly—dispensing with any taciturn tone that might sound false—about some of the works at Documenta that had helped me rethink my writing, concentrating especially on Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s installation in the woods,
FOREST
(
for a thousand years)
.

I spoke about this work and the random subversive groups it created, how I’d been overcome by the impression of being on a battlefield hearing, as if it were all happening right there, the yells of men in hand-to-hand combat, the overflying airplanes, the breathing, real footsteps through dry leaves, the nervous laughter, the wind, twigs snapping in the densest part of the forest, thunder of an approaching storm, the noise of ancient battles, bayonets tearing through the air, consternation . . .

And in the background of it all, I said, an obsessive song warns us that to get out of the forest, we have to get out of Europe, but to get out of Europe, we have to get out of the forest.

If these last words of my lecture had suddenly blended with the glacial, heartrending cry of young Kassel, everything would have been perfect.

But it didn’t go like that; I looked toward young Kassel and she was simply scratching her head.

The floor was opened for a discussion, which was soon closed. There were no questions and only Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev took the floor to tell me in French that the whole lecture had struck her as “Martian.”

She didn’t specify whether she meant “admirably Martian” or just Martian, but since my joy and frenzy for life were ongoing, I chose to take it as a compliment.

69

Hours later in the hotel, I would read on the Internet in English, without understanding any of it, a summary of that lecture written by someone on the Documenta payroll. The Spanish version supplied by Google Translate was strange, as was to be expected, but it helped me to believe that I really had delivered a lecture in Kassel, even if, according to what it said, it wasn’t exactly the lecture I’d planned to deliver, but a slightly different one:

A literary analysis of the event of the lecture by the Catalan writer could only fairly be said to have demonstrated the potential of a resourceful event like the Ständehaus, where an insomniac has spoken to demanding listeners calling for shortwave radio headphones. In the medium term, you can expect the Catalan writer to publish from behind prison bars his account of his flâneuresque steps through Kassel and his Chinese home, and infamous adhesion to a subversive breeze.

70

In
Untilled
, one had the experience of not knowing whether one was stepping on a work of art, or whether it was all real or imaginary. I felt the same way leaving the Ständehaus and saying farewell to the whole curatorial team that had gathered there. I found out from Chus that they’d arranged for a taxi to take me to the Frankfurt airport the next morning so I could avoid the train.

I said goodbye to the whole curatorial team, with a special hug for Boston, who was moving to London in a week. She said she hoped to see me again one day somewhere. Maybe we’ll end up having dinner with the McGuffins on a foggy night, she said, smiling. I’ve always hoped to find that fog one day in London . . .

The taxi was coming to pick me up at seven in the morning, an early hour, and the sole representative of Documenta there would be Alka, coordinator of my stay. I looked at the Croatian woman, who immediately smiled at me, and who, moreover, seemed content that we were talking about her, though she didn’t give the impression of knowing what we were saying.

Minutes later, after all the farewells, I began to walk aimlessly around downtown Kassel, feeling lonelier than ever in that city. It was all over, and I had too many hours to kill before the taxi would arrive the next morning. It would have been ideal to leave immediately. After an hour of wandering, I came out onto Königsstrasse by surprise and decided to set out for a fixed destination. I headed for the Gloria Cinema and once again was fascinated by its anachronistic foyer and box office that sent me back into the past. I stood there almost hypnotized. No matter how much time passes, I thought, I’ll never figure out the exact reason for the great magnetism exerted over me by the façade of the Gloria Cinema, so similar to the neighborhood cinemas of my childhood.

I was standing there half hypnotized when, to my astonishment, I saw the lights go out in the windows with the posters in them. I saw a man up on a ladder starting to change the letters to the next day’s film. I waited until I could read it:
Shanghai
. Directed by Mikael Håfström. A Chinese title and, if I wasn’t mistaken, a Nordic director, probably Swedish.

I stayed there a while longer, and a childhood memory came to me: halfway through a movie, I heard a bell ringing and started wondering if it had rung in the movie or if it came from outside, from the steeple of the neighborhood church.

Then I left. I left the Gloria’s foyer as if it didn’t matter to me, when actually I felt very moved because I had the impression I’d left behind something very important to me. I left and began walking back the way I came. Finally, now somewhat tired, after contemplating Horst Hoheisel’s reproduction of the fountain for a long time, I sat down on the terrace of a café on Friedrichsplatz. I called Barcelona and said I had a taxi for the next day. All I had left, I said, was the most tedious part, the return, now that it was all over.

What hadn’t ended at all, I suddenly noticed almost incredulously, was my creative mood and absolute enthusiasm for almost everything. Sitting on the terrace of that café, from my position of vigilance over that big public space, I suddenly realized everything that evening was splendid, magnificent, marvelous. I lacked adjectives. The sun, though now setting, still shone a little. The streets transmitted a contagious joy of bustling people. An agreeable breeze moved the leaves of the trees in the square. I loved most of the things I noticed, and I did so almost instantaneously. I did have disdainful glances for people I saw rushing past, as if wanting to make them comprehend it was incomprehensible that they weren’t stopping to contemplate such beauty.

I sat on that terrace for about an hour, contemplating things I’d been going over for years now, although perhaps tackling everything with an excitement and complexity far greater than I had at other times. I wondered how long that great vital impulse would last and also what could have happened to humanity that made it so difficult to give literary interest to joy, to the excitement of being alive, to the exaltation coming from what we were seeing.

Leaving that terrace, I went to the hotel. I had a thought for
art itself
, which seemed to me to definitely be there, in the air, suspended in that moment, suspended in life, in the life that went by as I’d seen the breeze go by when art went by.

I was walking up Königsstrasse, wondering why glorious moments always announced storms or misfortunes.

It was late now, and I suddenly noticed that everything had gone dark.

I had a sudden, complete sensation of being orphaned. As if a tiny break had caused a switch in the cheerful rules of the day and my mood had changed in the most radical way.