Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

There was a strange peace, seemingly resulting from the absence of the loudspeakers that during the day disseminated the uproar of the bombings of FOREST (for a thousand years. .) . It was very peaceful and I didn’t know if it would be worth going to the enigmatic calm of Untilled , which I was increasingly seeing as my personal Manderley. Everything in it reminded me of the atmosphere of the famous opening scene of Hitchcock’s film Rebecca : “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. . The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done, but as I advanced I was aware that a change had come upon it. Nature had come into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers. On and on wound the poor thread that once had been our drive. And finally, there was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been. .”

Untilled was also arrived at by a winding path, which hadn’t worried me in daylight, but I guessed it might cause me some problems visiting at that hour, for there was a slight mist and the moon wasn’t casting much light. Finally I decided to risk it. After all, I said to myself, I hadn’t gone that far to turn back at the last moment. I remembered reading that Huyghe was constantly anxious about forces we so often know are lurking in the fog, the smoke, the clouds. Had I not always had this anxiety too? I’d had less anxiety about clouds than about fog or smoke, but that didn’t prevent me from thinking of the words of the aviator Daniele Del Giudice in Takeoff: The Pilot’s Lore : “Remember that beneath the sea of clouds there is nothing but eternity.”

Some of my fictions start, or end up, in cloudy or misty lands, in Manderleys of the spirit, in extraordinarily secretive and silent places. In these fictions, there are misty nights in port cities like Detroit, thick fog through which a solitary hero glides until finally entering a bar.

I was going toward Untilled in the hazy night, walking with cautious steps toward that strange territory. Deep down, I felt that traveling toward Huyghe’s uncultivated place was turning out to be like moving toward a certain atmosphere of my own fictions. More than that, perhaps I was moving toward pages I hadn’t yet written; it was like traveling toward the future without seeing anything.

I tried to turn my way of walking into a performance as well, as if Chus’s binoculars could see me where I was and I thought she might be pleased by her image of me as a one-eyed metaphysical excursionist in an interminable, sinuous ascent.

When I arrived at the threshold of Untilled territory, the first thing I tried to find out was whether there was anyone else in that sordid place. There wasn’t. I was as alone there as Robinson on his island. That shifting earth would probably have to wait some hours before another man’s foot would leave a print in it. Neither of the dogs was there. Really, it was to be expected, Documenta couldn’t expose itself to the risk that someone might steal those animals. I’d reached the place and didn’t actually have anything to do there; I could have left. But I immediately thought that would be turning my back on uncertainty and I stayed. I absolutely didn’t have to worry about being bored, I thought, I could be well occupied all night just wondering, for example, what kinds of things God had got up to before He created the world.

I sat down on one of the piled-up logs, in a corner of Untilled , beside the chunks of reinforced concrete. I was aware that what I was doing was a bit crazy or, to put it a better way, illogical. But my state of euphoria was in crescendo , and I felt in marvelous harmony with almost everything in Kassel. Almost everything bewitched me, exactly at the time when I should have been laid completely low by my anguish. My contact with contemporary art, or whatever it was that had achieved that miracle, had left me in an extraordinary state, though I had no doubt that, sooner or later, I’d return to my habitual nighttime melancholy; that was the way it had to be. Otherwise, without that sadness that hit me every evening, I’d be nothing.

Hidden in the moonlit woods, the last conspirator of a dream on dug-over land, I slowly and treacherously whispered the song that said that to get out of the forest, we had to get out of Europe, but to get out of Europe, we had to get out of the forest. I thought I discovered that without the two dogs at that hour, the environment of decomposition — possibly a metaphor for our cultural decomposition — lost some of its force. The night was infinitely more powerful than that environment.

I looked for the little mound of rubble on which I’d seen the young blonde German woman announcing the news of the death of Europe. When I thought I’d found it, I looked up toward the starry canopy that I felt was the only thing that could really accompany me in my solitude. And though at that moment I didn’t remember his name (Brian Schmidt), the Australian astronomer came to mind who had discovered, along with other colleagues, that, fourteen billion years after the Big Bang, the universe was accelerating, not slowing down, all owing, perhaps, to a dark energy, just as was happening with my mood, which I felt to be accelerating all the time, pleasantly unstoppable, as if my interest in everything kept expanding, and, because of this — possibly because of this dark energy — I couldn’t close my eyes, thus perhaps confirming what that friend had said: it is night’s own essence that keeps us from sleeping.

I wasn’t at all uncomfortable in spite of being in a place that normally would have struck me as terrifying. I had a thought for that astronomer, who said he was exploring the very frontier of knowledge, penetrating the new and, therefore, daring to commit errors. As if I were the actual astronomer, playing at what I imagined that Australian did when he was alone with the stars, I began to pose to myself a problem, which I was obviously not the first person in the world ever to pose.

A question I wouldn’t know how to classify, whether philosophical, logical, Cartesian, mathematical. . it consisted of wondering if one could prove what one stated. For example, one might look toward the nearby statue of a reclining woman on a pedestal beside a puddle and state the following in a moderately loud voice: “On the face of the statue on the pedestal there are bees.”

So far all was going well, but the trouble began when I asked myself what form my verification might take. Would a quick look from various different angles suffice, or did I have to touch the beehive that took the place of the statue’s face with my hands, then touch the pedestal, and so on? Here were two ways of considering the matter. One said that, even if I put my mind to it, I’d never be able to completely verify my proposition, because deep down, a back door was always kept open, an uncontrollable flight, and the possibility remained that one might be mistaken. Another view said: “If I could never completely verify what I’d stated, then I didn’t mean anything by the proposition either. Therefore, it meant absolutely nothing.”

I didn’t know what to go with. Even though I knew I was obsessing too much over the matter, I posed the question to myself again, this time changing the proposition:

“I am sitting on a log at night.”

Then I asked myself how I could verify that. Was a glance at the log enough, or did I have to touch it with my hands, checking that it could serve as firewood in the winter, and so on? Here, two ways of considering the matter opened up again, the same two that had become apparent with the statue beside the puddle.