Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

I carried on walking, at first with no particular destination in mind. It may be true, I mused, that there are few young people today who draw inspiration for their lives from what contemporary poets are saying, while in the seventies an interesting minority took poetry as the most dependable guide to life. It may also be true that at the end of the eighties something very serious happened, which resulted in the arts, especially poetry, losing its leading role. That might all be correct, but if there was something I had long detested, it was those fatalistic voices gathering to project their own personal catastrophes upon the world. I prefer to enter Tino Sehgal’s dark room to see how some people are rescuing art from such a lamentably sure collapse.

Very soon afterward, I decided to head for that dark room, which was my sinister lighthouse in the night. That morning I began to see it as a place that could also be stimulating by day. And making my way toward it, I started to wonder whether our fatalists’ lucid impression that we’re experiencing a dead time in art meant one had to live through it alarmed, scandalized, distressed, and without humor.

I was reminded of Stanislaw Lem and of his History of Bitic Literature , published in Paris in five volumes. In his book about the future (in this case, now our past), Stanislaw Lem said that from the end of the 1980s, from the “fifteenth bynasty ” of “talking computers” onward, it was shown to be a technical necessity to give the machines periods of rest during which, free from “programming instructions,” they could fall to “babbling” and “random shuffling,” and, thanks to this erratic activity, regenerate their capacity.

As if Lem’s prediction had come true, it couldn’t be clearer that in the eighties, creators of all sorts were freed from “programming instructions” and entered into paused, dead time. In fact, I’d heard it said to students of “bitic literature” that relaxation was as indispensable for talking machines as an awareness of the danger of losing the power of speech was for the literature of the future.

I was walking down the last stretch of corridor to the garden of the Hessenland annex when I asked myself if it might be the case that, in the creative field, we had found ourselves in a period of repose born out of technical necessity, a period from which — talking machines as we undeniably were — we would all emerge more than revived. So why so much ominous chatter? Was it so infuriating to live in a time of “babble”? Perhaps we were in a moment in which we were recovering speech. Was it really so painful to be “randomly shuffling”?

I seemed to see that underneath it all, this dead time was still a more than positive place, a laboratory in a state of ferment, a perfect space in which to greet the returning poets who had perhaps already started to transform our life. Didn’t we sense them already among us? Hadn’t I detected them on my first visit to that room of Sehgal’s that I was now preparing to visit again? And if they hadn’t come back, that didn’t mean we had to despair. By bringing us such interesting relaxation, this period of repose that was technically necessary might even do us some good.

It was becoming increasingly obvious to me that walking cleared my head and allowed me to dare to speculate with an open mind. I was going along so intent on what I was thinking, I bumped into a chair in the corridor leading to Sehgal’s room, and somebody looked at me as if to say: It’s about time you got here, but you blunder around.

Finally, I went into This Variation , my second incursion into the place that generated in me so many contradictory feelings. I thought because of the early hour, there would be nobody in there, and I entered too confidently. I marched in blindly, but somehow sure. I chose to go in a straight line, moving forward about two meters and, just when I was about to turn around, I heard some singing issuing faintly from the back of the room; then it started to get a little higher pitched and began to seem like a sort of reedy Hare Krishna chant with a mellow and surprising reggae beat, which eventually transformed into what I thought sounded like a foxtrot.

It started to become clear to me that there were people, or phantoms, in the dark practicing dance steps. Suddenly, two of these people, whom I could only sense, of course, became my escorts. Taking me by both arms, they gently whisked me much farther into the room and left me at what I imagined was its far end. They achieved what usually never happened to me in the morning: my anguish resurfaced bit by bit; it didn’t stay for long, but it brought with it certain consequences.

Standing probably at the far end of the room, in the most absolute darkness, I remembered a day in a village in La Mancha, close to the Ruidera Lakes, when I saw two men in black jackets with silver buttons removing a coffin from a back courtyard; inside the coffin, beneath a floral-patterned cloth, lay what looked by any reckoning to be the body of a man over seventy years of age.

In Sehgal’s room, the singing suddenly stopped. Impenetrable silence. I felt nostalgia for the foxtrot. The dancers, who had been in the dark so long and could possibly see me, seemed to have paused, standing absolutely still, like ghosts. Not wanting to lose the mood, but with a certain amount of trepidation, I said out loud: “You are in Germany.”

And then I tried to touch the wall that might be in front of me with both hands but I didn’t find one. I swiped around, like a poor tiger in the gloom. I decided it made no sense to go any farther, and in the end I laughed in the darkness. Not long after, I felt what one perhaps feels the day it’s all over: completely outside of this world, which at the same time had me thinking I had grasped the internal structure of life, as if a lightning bolt were lighting it up. Nothing more. It was brief, but extremely intense. Now I knew everything I needed to know about my death, although I quickly forgot it. Then I left the dark room and saw that the daylight was like the bolt of lightning that had momentarily illuminated me inside the room.

I took a turn around the block trying to reflect on what I’d just experienced. I felt the chill of an early September morning. Could the contemporary avant-garde frighten a person to death? I realized there was still absolutely nobody out on the street, so I returned to the Hessenland.

I had not only regained my usual morning cheer but also found myself far more euphoric than usual; I took no notice of this, not wanting to give it any importance. There, in the very doorway of the hotel, I literally bumped into Alka, who was bringing me a note telling me María Boston couldn’t come to fetch me that morning (she was backed up with work at the office), and Pim Durán would come instead, arriving about eleven o’clock.

There was more than an hour until the cheerful Pim arrived. I didn’t want to spend all that time with Alka in the lobby, so I decided to go ahead with what I’d planned, which was to go up to my room. I noticed that a Chinese man in reception — probably an artist or journalist — was checking in and incessantly asking questions nobody knew how to answer. I jotted that down in a small red notebook I’d called Impressions of Kassel . It wasn’t the first time I wrote something in that book. In fact, since leaving Barcelona, I’d been sketching scenes — I don’t draw well, but it doesn’t matter — and noting plenty of things down, as if I guessed that maybe one day I’d decide to work up some impressions of it all.

In the elevator, two plump Chinese women, who were quite young, with no apparent link to the man of a thousand questions, got in as the metal doors were closing. They got out at the same floor as me and went into room 26. Seeing we were neighbors, they smiled broadly, which made me think there must be something ridiculous about me, or rather, that in China the fondness for laughing and smiling was prodigious, although we somewhat befuddled Westerners were still not in a position to understand what they were laughing about or what could make them so happy.