Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

I was not consoled by the knowledge that I had the whole cabin, the whole night, in which to find that out; perhaps I had the premonition that besides those essentially simple questions (simple questions posed only in order to avoid trickier ones), the night might be a difficult one. It was. In fact, it was very difficult, a night of complete anguish. It turned out hard and grueling, filled with insomnia, terror, an imaginary journey down a strange track with grassy dunes and great cliffs. Nothing that I saw or imagined or breathed in this environment helped to sweeten things. I soon understood it had very probably been a mistake to try to set up a cabin precisely for those hours when melancholy most controlled me.

How could I have been so stupid? For hours on end, I was tormented in that darkened room by the image of two orangutans, one fertile and the other sterile, that I believed I’d seen somewhere that morning. It was not an easy night. The melancholy of the evening wasn’t content to remain until the wee hours when I normally started to feel sleepy, but extended itself practically until dawn.

Having slept for just an hour, I got up the next day and immediately discovered, unexpected as it may be, that I was once again in an excellent mood, perhaps because the very idea that a new day was beginning, that splendid Thursday, could not have been more pleasant to me.

Collapse and Recovery, I thought. I couldn’t help thinking that Documenta’s motto was being played out by my own body.

Later, after a lengthy breakfast, I visited Sehgal’s This Variation . I’d proposed to myself the idea of going every morning of my stay in Kassel without fail. I entered the large building adjacent to my hotel and walked down the short corridor, now almost familiar to me, toward that neglected garden, to the left of which was the entrance to the dark room. According to the receptionist at the Hessenland, the room had been a modest dance hall in its day.

Now right inside Sehgal’s dim space, I took six rapid steps toward the back of the room of spirits. Nobody brushed against me this time, and again I made the mistake of thinking there were no dancers in there. I paused in the pitch dark. As on the previous occasion, I laughed into the darkness. And suddenly, everything changed. I noticed with horror that someone at the back of the room tried to imitate a whinny and I was given or imagined a mental picture of a woman two centuries back, sitting in a trap, driving a chocolate-colored mare on a trip through the south of France. It was as if I’d visualized one of my own memories, but it wasn’t an image I’d ever seen before. As quickly as it arrived, the image was gone, and I was left asking myself how that sort of memory, which was not my own, could have come to me. Was it Autre’s? No, because Autre was also me, or at least I’d invented him some hours earlier.

Disconcerted, I took another step. Then, almost immediately, I began to hear a wan foxtrot coming from the back of the room that ended up turning into a little Peruvian waltz. The person who had come in behind me stumbled against my hesitant body by mistake and almost sent me flying. Then, possibly frightened, she turned around and left the dark room at once, and I went after her, toward the light outside, as if in hot pursuit.

On leaving the room, I didn’t see anyone ahead of me, just more light, just the craziness of light, that was all, though that was no small thing. I put out of my mind what had just happened and lingered in the doorway, listening to the end of the waltz, but then the music stopped dead. I did the same, brought up short, and remained there motionless for a few seconds, after which I raised my eyes to the ice-gray sky and saw a bird pass, and then another, and then many more, and it seemed to me they were all flying toward the Dschingis Khan.

Back on the street, I passed the hotel. First, I asked for an umbrella in reception. Then I decided to head for the outskirts, as if out in that area far from the city I might find something more associated with the avant-garde than anything I’d seen up to that point.

Soon afterward, I took the bus to the Dschingis Khan, which was not at odds with my desire to go in the direction of the outskirts. No sooner had I sat down in a good seat than I looked to the sky and saw the birds were following the same route, no doubt because (as everybody knows) birds always travel toward the outskirts.

On the bus, I started leaving my memories of the previous bad night behind, the remembrance of an extremely difficult session in the cabin. I suspect the most overwhelming thing about those sleepless hours wasn’t just meditating on Europe’s tragic fate, but also perceiving that I wasn’t wrong to see myself transformed into a total Kassel native, one more citizen of that provincial German city. Once again, I told myself that my habit of informing everybody I was from whatever place I found myself in had made me the victim of my own words and ended up doing me real harm. The proof was that it was suddenly no trouble to see myself as a humble and eloquent, melancholy Kassel citizen, who spent the night hours meditating on the solitude stretching away beyond time in the feeble light of his fatherland. .

With visions this terrifying, it’s understandable I barely slept a wink all night. I saw the world slipping through my fingers. I felt it was undesirable to have it with me any longer. I wanted to hurl it on any old galactic garbage dump, or perhaps into a Euro Sex Shop, or a butcher’s in the Black Forest, or a carpet store in El Paso, or a laundromat in Melbourne. I did not know what to do with the world.

I spent the night turning over awkward questions in my mind and I was incredibly restless, sometimes twisting in a ridiculous, tragic way between the sheets, transformed into a sort of neurotic Sinbad, old and forgetful, devoted to summoning up, in a series of litanies, all the cities I’d ever laid eyes on. I remember myself that way, simultaneously tragic and comical. A homegrown Sinbad or a Kassel-made one, if you prefer, dedicated to evoking, from inside his precarious cabin, with a rosary-like rhythm, solitary refuges to which in times gone by great anguished minds had withdrawn to think.

But what really drove me to the most dogged insomnia and a near fatal nervousness — I went on remembering on the bus heading in the direction of the Chinese restaurant — were the visions that followed one another in front of my astonished eyes. However little credence I gave them to start with, I was unable for many hours to push them away. It all began when I suddenly felt enveloped in a deadly silence and noticed that not a breath of air stirred inside the cabin, not a sound could be heard, not a squeak, nothing. The utter conviction that Europe had long since been wrapped in a shroud hit me all at once. Or, more accurately, the feeling had slowly crept up on me over the last few hours. I was in the center of Germany, in the center of Europe, and there, in that center, it was more obvious than anywhere else that everything had been cold and dead and buried for decades, ever since the continent allowed itself to make its first serious unpardonable mistakes. Everything had been wiped out in the center of that actually inanimate territory, where by day (as I’d been able to observe during that now past and very regretful morning and afternoon), the sun had remained unchanging at its zenith and, nonetheless, had stayed hidden behind a haze that seemed to have been hanging in the air for centuries, traces of a sort of dust as fine as residual pollen, from an earth that was disintegrating with terrifying slowness.

You are in Europe and Europe is not here, said a singsong, obsessive inner voice, which seemed keen to do away with me at all costs, simultaneously reminding me that the weight of our most recent terrifying history was too much, a history in which horror was the dominant presence.