Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

It was a difficult night. And my eyes were like lighthouses. Europe was infested with ghosts, like the ones in Sehgal’s dance hall, and it was laden with symbols from the past. Europe, already a tragic composite, would never again manage to feel part of the world in a good or natural way, in fact would never again manage to feel on earth in any way at all.

At last, I could sleep, albeit only for an hour. At seven o’clock, I dropped off, and that drop drowned out my horror. I woke an hour later, and in a great frame of mind, which surprised me because nobody expects to find himself suddenly feeling so good after one hour’s sleep.

“Life is serious, art is joyful,” I said out loud, and then imagined cannon fire waking the whole of Kassel.

Time moved like lead and so did the whole city, but my buoyant mood didn’t flag for a second.

Among other things, I wasted no time discovering that on the bus — unlike in my meditation space in the cabin — thinking turned out to be simply relaxing, and even helped most of the phantoms from my night of insomnia to evaporate. I should have had more sleep, but I wasn’t tired. I sat at the front of the bus that morning, giving thanks to God and Duchamp for the existence of theories in art, conscious, too, that much as I’d had to put my shoulder to the wheel and knuckle down to the actual practice on so many occasions, the theoretical would always be my great passion. I was sitting there at the front when I decided to move down to the back, convinced the windows were bigger and I’d see the landscape better.

At that point it became Autre who was looking out at the rainy highway. And, quick as a flash, Autre thought up a character who resembled me and was supposedly part of the avant-garde, which was why he traveled at the front of the bus. I was feeling more and more lively thanks to my unexpected mental strength that seemed to increase the farther the bus ventured into the outskirts.

On reaching kilometer 19 of the Auedamm, we stopped for a few brief moments outside the Dschingis Khan. I looked at the place through my window and felt an immense weakness: an uncommon fatigue swept over me just at the thought that I was going to get off where nobody was waiting for me and where there might even be someone who would hate me, taking it as a given that I was a writer of no great interest.

Even so, I stood up with the intention of getting off the bus, but something compelled me to sit back down again at once. From my recaptured seat, I carried on looking in utter amazement at that place that appeared so innocuous, so insubstantial, so dreary in the rain. I still remember the horror, the tremendous horror, with which I regarded it.

Then the bus continued on its way. I was so utterly alone, knowing I was going to continue that way for so many hours, that I felt the need to see myself from the outside, precisely in order to be accompanied at least by the person who imagined he was seeing me. And that was how I ended up seeing myself: as the main character in a scene from an old Wim Wenders movie, one of those films in which the characters travel on every sort of public transport, looking out the windows of a multitude of different vehicles, with infinite longing, at cold German cities.

The bus continued on its way and I discovered that the route on that line was circular, so twenty minutes later we stopped again at kilometer 19. That time I was closer to getting off than before, but seeing again how dull and dreadful the place was in every way beneath the rain, I still didn’t alight. That morning I was interested in everything, but I couldn’t manage that sinister place. I went around another eight times on the bus, each turn lasting twenty minutes; some three hours in total sitting on public transport, resisting facing my Chinese destiny alone.

And the oddest thing was that I didn’t even have time to regret not having the books from my suitcase with me, Journey to the Alcarria or Romanticism , that is, not having something I could read on such a long and obsessively circular trip. The thing was, I was very well entertained by the repetitive run through the outskirts of the city, due to a faint but strange euphoria, which, although it was slight, subjected me to a hitherto unknown mental activity. I imagined that I went into the Dschingis and felt not only Chinese and as though I were going home, but that once again my arms had become excessively long and my legs were too far away from me. Totally Chinese and totally monstrous, I saw myself going into the Dschingis and looking at the round table with its vase, discovering that none of it was nearly as bad as I’d thought. Was that the effect of my tendency to see things in a positive light in the morning? That’s what I asked myself, imagining this scene on the bus, while outside the rain got heavier and heavier.

In that scene, totally invented from my seat on the bus going around the Auedamm, a young Chinese waiter looked annoyed and led me through the Dschingis Khan to my table for the damned invited writer. I noticed right away there was no respect for writers in that dive, but I didn’t find his attitude worrying and simply thought the guy envied me and wanted to take my place in the restaurant, possibly because my soft red couch looked very appealing on that rainy day. Then I forgave the jealous man and took out my notebook, pencil, and eraser. I read the first thing I’d written. (“Change your life completely in two days, without caring in the slightest what has gone before. Leave without further ado. When all’s said and done, the right thing to do is take off.”) Then I wrote a few sentences about the worrisome problem of poor communication, though no doubt it would be better to say it worried Autre, since it didn’t bother me one bit. Why should I concern myself about it, anyway, when I was a poor lonely soul from a sad Wim Wenders movie? Sad? Actually, quite the reverse. I’d better correct that, as in fact I was actually going along uninhibited and happy there on the bus and all I needed was to start singing like I was a radio. What’s more, I wanted to, because the piped music on the bus kept repeating, as if wanting to overwhelm its passengers, the intensely nostalgic soundtrack from Out of Africa .

What a contrast, I thought, to a few hours earlier, what a contrast to the torment of last night when my radical isolation had started to impinge on my state of mind, causing me, out of pure desperation, to react against it and, by way of a natural defense mechanism, to try to create, all through that never-ending night, a potent mental antidote or an “emetic” against my demoralization.

I was thinking, or rather imagining, along these lines, and the longer I sat beside that window watching the rain falling, the more my imagination seemed to visit the Dschingis Khan. With my euphoria, my interest in everything heightened (except in personally going to that damned Chinese restaurant), the world seemed thought-provoking, worthy of study, utterly fascinating; there was nothing around that could not be praised. I judged everything, or almost everything, adorable; it was as if I were immersed in a complete celebration of the very fact of living, as if it were a year later and I’d decided to try a third of Dr. Collado’s tablets, discovering over the last few months that he’d substantially developed his invention and ended up creating a happy pill that made the world seem less imperfect. Or perhaps it was the force of the same breeze from The Invisible Pull that was creating an extra impetus in me and making me see things with a certain enthusiasm. Or maybe the slight euphoria came from my intense and permanent contact recently with different works of art, different ideas and new concepts that I’d been seeing and discovering in Kassel and which had come to form part of my world. In the end, so many hours looking at such unconventional art had left me with very positive feelings. And it only remained to be asked — if it actually needed asking — whether there really was anything new in all that had been seen. The answer was no, but it hardly mattered. I had been fascinated by most of it, surely because I preferred to think it was the newest thing for thousands of miles around. Without my fascination for the new — or everything that at least tried to seem that way — I could not live, I’d never been able to, at least not since I found out that the new existed or could exist. And this was something that Kassel had the virtue of reminding me, because, through intermittent memories, it had brought back to me the bleak days of my extreme youth in Cadaqués, especially that day I saw a golden reflection of the sun in the mirror of a restaurant where at that exact moment the widows of Duchamp and Man Ray were having lunch. Back then, I didn’t know what sort of work their husbands had left behind, but there were photos on the restaurant walls of one or another of them — enigmatic cultural traces — and I wanted to be a foreign creator like them too; I wanted the air of difference about me that I imagined these artists had always shown, and, if it wasn’t too much to ask, when the summer was over, I wanted not to have to return to “backward” Barcelona. I wanted to be an avant-garde artist. I mean this is what I understood at the time by “someone breaking away from the dried-up artistic reality of my city.” And, as I desired all this, I thought that the most direct way to become “avant-garde” would be to adopt an air like that adopted by Marcel Duchamp or Man Ray in those photographs at the restaurant: dressing, for example, as I’d seen Duchamp, in a different white shirt every evening, a sort of uniform of the avant-garde.