Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

Death was before us like the bird singing just then, filtering through in an unequal contest with Schubert’s music. Death was playing no tricks and plainly visible, but the general resistance, the effort not to succumb to its awful, murderous song, was admirable. The imperceptible breeze ran serenely throughout, getting stronger every minute, perhaps because it was a current that advocated life. Indeed, the conspirators in the forest appeared to be getting stronger and stronger in this lull. Even so, my disquiet didn’t seem about to evaporate so easily. There were flashes of vitality within the forest group, but a certain inner disquiet persisted. I remember the circumstances of that moment well. The truth is, I always remember my own unforeseen anguish with mathematical precision: I was in the forest, I lost myself mentally in a tangle of undergrowth. I heard the cry of a tawny owl in the area bordering the woodland, and then nothing, absolutely nothing. I went on to the esplanade and saw that Europe was a lifeless expanse and then accepted that the dawn light of morning had turned into darkest night. I think I perceived a song far off in the distance that I learned in childhood and that comes back to me from time to time, above all now that I’m getting old. It’s a song that disturbs me because it says there is no escape: 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.

Hours later, in the basement of the supermarket Pim recommended for buying food for my “thinking cabin,” I was assailed by staircase wit.

Crafty as this staircase wit always was, it didn’t let up until I remembered Pim’s words as we were saying goodbye to each other at the Orangerie, when she told me that this edition of Documenta, so extravagant, ended up imposing a Shakespearean truth: this time was out of joint. I had shown myself in complete agreement with that, but down there in the basement, suddenly forced to reexamine the moment of my parting from Pim, I began to think about what I might have added or even countered had I been a little more agile in that instant.

Why hadn’t I said this or that to her? Once again, I told myself that writing was born out of that staircase wit and was essentially the story of a slow-maturing revenge, the long-winded tale of putting into writing what we should have put, at the time, into life.

I could have said some of this to Pim in the Orangerie when she spoke to me of time being out of joint. She had told me they wouldn’t be able to catch up with me again until three o’clock the next afternoon, that either she would call me, or maybe Boston, whoever was able to get away from the office first. .

I could have said so many things at that moment, but I said nothing, maybe I was too taken aback at the news I was going to be all on my own for so many hours, which at first (without my being overly aware of it) brought on a slight desperation, which later gave rise to a need to find ways to fill the empty hours ahead and make out it didn’t matter to me that, for example, I’d have to go to the Dschingis Khan the next morning alone and, once there, literally have to make something of it .

That need to sidestep anguish decisively marked the hours that followed, during which I went slightly crazy. Noticeably disoriented on emerging from the supermarket, I dashed out of there so fast that two minutes later, I’d already discovered in a panic I was going down the wrong street: I found myself on Goethestrasse, a Kassel thoroughfare I didn’t know at all, and this despite having committed to memory, almost by fire and sword, the instructions Pim gave me in case it so happened that, on leaving the supermarket, I made a mistake and ended up getting hopelessly lost. Nobody had mentioned the name of that street to me. I was completely lost. Pim had foreseen various errors I might make and even drawn an improvised map, but Goethestrasse wasn’t included in any of her possibilities for getting lost. This aggravated my feeling of abandonment. Then I was surprised to realize that clearly, one way or another, there in Kassel, the inhabitants of the place, instead of telling me it was about time I’d got there, had begun to see me as just another native of the city, and because of that, it would be difficult for me to get anyone to understand, being so obviously from there , how I had gotten lost and might have to ask the way to the exceptionally central Hotel Hessenland.

It was curious, of course, to observe that my doubts about whether or not I was in Germany had unexpectedly developed into the clear perception that everyone there saw me as just another German.

Urgently needing to see whether I could find Königsstrasse again, I went full speed ahead past a whole host of places, including the Bellevue Palace — with a museum dedicated to the brothers Grimm (pride of the city, those two wrote their best stories in old Kassel) — and also the Bali Cinema (I didn’t even look to see what was playing, though I later learned that the Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra was showing episodes of The Three Little Pigs there, a two-hundred-hour-long movie, the title of which alluded ironically to three moments of great significance in the creation of Europe, embodied in the figures of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Adolf Hitler, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder). I went so fast, I passed a lot of places without being able to pay attention to anything other than the intensity of the light in the street, which was diminishing by the minute in a terrifying manner. I breathed more easily when I came upon a short alley that gave me a glimpse down a side street, at the end of which I thought I could see the longed-for Königsstrasse. The dark alley wasn’t as dark as the one where I’d once discovered delight in an icy breathing, a dry, glacial blast that went straight to the back of my neck and let me know the pleasure of fear all at once, in its purest and most sublime form.

While I was heading down that murky alley, I remembered my friend who said that you never arrived at literature by chance. Never, never, he repeated, it’s pure destiny, a dark destiny, a series of circumstances that make you choose, and you always knew it was the path. Nice thinking, I said to myself. It was highly likely I had arrived at literature due to that blast to the back of my neck in the dark alley; in other words, I got there because of my delight in that icy, glacial breathing, suddenly received as a dry blast, a blast from no one in that solitary place.

A while later, I entered my cabin and went right out on the balcony to greet Sehgal’s work , This Variation . It was drizzling again, as it had been hours earlier, and I felt the presence of a current of fresh air, not at all unpleasant, but ultimately chilly, and decided to go straight back into the room. Once inside, I lay on the bed with my hands linked behind my head, and after a few moments of which I remember nothing, I went back to thinking that for the artists with the most innovative spirit, the truth was simply out there. But this time I asked myself where these outskirts lay. From inside my discreet delirium — to tell the truth, it was the result of my fear of the solitude in store for me — I struggled to recover my proper equilibrium. Anguish and melancholy, for their part, had advanced inexorably, and as the shadows loomed more profoundly over the city, my whole mind became even more confused.

Where did I think the outskirts were? I answered myself as well as I could, thinking that first one had to know how to move through unexplored territory, far from the center of culture, from the market, which was as well known as it was hackneyed, that this was something that should be asked of everybody with disruptive ideas. But I wasn’t long in asking myself what exactly “unexplored territory” and “everybody with disruptive ideas” might mean.