Enrique Vila-Matas: The Illogic of Kassel

I spent a long, very active time pretending to be an astronomer who, instead of looking at the stars, posed this problem to himself. It was perfect to play at something so illogical in a city like Kassel, which did not invite logic. It was not very connected to logic, for it demanded that the invited creators operate within the avant-garde parameters of a high-grade madness.

I remembered my last visit to the wonderful city of Turin in northern Italy. I’d been struck by how contained and elegant that place was — actually a French city, due to the long shadow of the House of Savoy. Etched in my memory was the serenity of its daily life, which one sensed as a dangerous creator of unexpected absurdities or impressive outbreaks of madness, like Friedrich Nietzsche’s, when in January 1889 he left his hotel and on the corner of Via Cesare Battisti and Via Carlo Alberto, sobbing, hugged the neck of a horse being whipped by its owner. That day an unstable border broke open for Nietzsche, which had seemed to separate rationality from delirium for several centuries. That day, the writer distanced himself definitively from humanity, however you want to look at it. To put it more simply, he went crazy; although according to Milan Kundera, maybe he was just apologizing to the horse for Descartes.

The great Italo Calvino, Turinese by adoption, saw in this perfect, geometric city an invitation to logic. “Turin is a city that entices a writer toward vigor, linearity, style,” he wrote. “It invites logic, and through logic opens the way toward madness.”

In Kassel, I thought, something different was happening. The city invited illogicality, opening the way toward an unknown logic.

I spent many hours reflecting on how to verify various propositions. I no longer know how many hours I spent completely entertained by this game. The subject of verifications came to an end after I put forward a proposition that demonstrated that mathematics was either inconsistent or not entirely complete.

“I am an indemonstrable truth,” I said to myself.

Just by saying this, I had the impression I had ruined the prestige of mathematics, the formal science that, starting with axioms and following logical reasoning, studied the properties and connections of abstract entities.

If I was an indemonstrable truth, mathematics wasn’t what it was purported to be — it wasn’t the superior language, the language of God, as some call it.

A few hours went by before I finished off mathematics and began to feel my mind distorted by unwanted interference; I became intimidated — I find this word very fitting — by a rare chinoiserie: the torturous story featuring two tsetse flies of Pekinese origin, a nightmarish tale undoubtedly proceeding from the impact — I wasn’t so aware of it at the time — the vision, hours earlier, of those two minuscule, sleep-inducing insects I’d seen trapped in the Fridericianum in a gigantic display case.

That Chinese tale — a sort of dream that was putting me to sleep — was probably caused by my own weariness (generator sometimes of the most incredible nightmares). In the end, I gave in to the tsetse pressure and nodded off. The time flew by, and when I came to my senses, the first thing I saw — I thought I was still in my dream — was the docile, pink-legged dog at my side. Totally confused, I attributed the vision, the whole dream, to the proximity of the Dschingis Khan, which after all was very close, right behind Huyghe’s territory, on the edge of the park, beside the Fulda River.

I realized it was getting light and I had somehow managed to live and dream on the outskirts of the outskirts of art, like a secret conspirator in the Kassel night. In spite of the two tsetse flies seriously tormenting me, I felt a certain pride in what I’d achieved: staying so long in such a difficult place hardly designed for nocturnal use. As for the dog, I ended up seeing it was the real one, she was really there, alive and well, wagging her tail.

I touched her.

“The dog is an indemonstrable truth,” I said.

I observed that she was still there, indifferent to what I was saying, converted into an immovable, indemonstrable, immutable truth: a truth that, being a dog, moved.

And the other dog, the less media-friendly one? Just as I was wondering that, the caretaker of the two animals appeared. He wasn’t just in charge of the dogs; he kept the forces of nature in harmony, in that complex but balanced territory, all in a tense equilibrium.

He spoke French and had a shaved head with an impressive diagonal scar; his ferocious appearance contrasted with his affable character. He’d been sleeping, he told me, in a hut nearby, with the two dogs. He’d been staying there since Documenta started, prudently taking the dogs in each evening when it got dark.

Was I there to steal the dog with the pink leg? I didn’t know if he was serious or joking. The question offended me, I said. Imperturbable, he asked the same question again. It’s my duty to know these things, he said, the hound has many admirers. I asked: If I had come to steal her, what would happen? I asked him. You’re pretty old to be doing things like that, he replied. I’d put your head in the beehive and the bees would do away with your urge to take the hound home. I don’t have a home, I said, just a cabin, but I don’t sleep there because I can’t think inside it. I’m not sure he completely understood these last words, spoken in my broken French. He looked at me first with profound astonishment and then with contempt.

The hound seemed to get bored with our conversation and went for a walk around the territory. I was observing her closely, and at first she actually managed to surprise me with her apparently infinite eagerness for all smells. When she found something that caught her attention — always an enigma for me, because I couldn’t understand what was so alluring in what she was smelling — her snout stuck to it with absolutely amazing obstinacy, with such anxious, frenzied enthusiasm, the rest of the world seemed to have stopped existing for her.

The dog was like a little Piniowsky. Obstinately interested in everything and prisoner of a great enthusiasm for whatever crossed her path, she seemed ready at any moment to ignore the whole damned world. I reached the conclusion that she was enjoying herself and that was all there was to it. She seemed to be living on a permanent high, lost in a nasal nirvana that she couldn’t detach from.

The caretaker seemed obsessed with keeping other people’s affections away from his hound.

Suddenly, he came over and started to tell me a story.

“Once,” said the caretaker, “I took a night train from Paris to Milan. I traveled in one of those classic compartments they used to have, those little four-man pigsties. In Paris there were only three of us. One of the passengers was a curly-haired young man with a parrot in a cage that said ‘ Je t’aime, je t’aime ’ to him every once in a while. The little creature seemed to know only this one phrase. When it came time to turn off the light in the compartment, the young man put a pink cover over the cage and told me that he’d had a similar parrot before but had to get rid of it because it refused to say loving words to him, which had led him to discover that he wasn’t loved. What a drama, I commented. I had to do away with him, he said. And while he gave me horrible details of how he’d suffocated the bird, the murdered parrot’s successor — now hidden under the cover — punctuated the story every once in a while by saying ‘ Je t’aime, je t’aime .’

“In the middle of the night, the train stopped and a fourth passenger boarded who was very careful not to wake the rest of us and politely got undressed quietly in the darkness. All of a sudden, when the fourth traveler had just lain down in his berth, the voice of the enamored parrot rang out again through the whole compartment, from the depths of his hiding place: ‘ Je t’aime, je t’aime .’