Enrique Vila-Matas: The Illogic of Kassel

Karlsaue Park was an immense space, with gardens, paths, and canals located symmetrically in front of the summer palace, the Orangerie. Evidently, I read in an online newspaper, Kassel 2012 reproduced “that sublime postmodern condition: the sense of one’s own infinitude that comes from experiencing the disproportionate, pointing toward what we’ll never apprehend or comprehend.” I read this, and for a few moments my occasionally postmodern mind concentrated on certain “experiences of the disproportionate” I had seen up close and on the impossibility of taking in, of hanging on to, of partially or totally comprehending the world. I ended up wondering whether traveling to Kassel might not be the greatest opportunity I’d ever had to approach — almost to caress — a certain total reality: at least that of contemporary art, which was no small thing. But a little while later, I wondered why I wanted to take in so much.

Then, perhaps so I wouldn’t be so scared about those six days ahead, with their more than possible promise of a radical solitude, I told myself that as soon as I arrived in Kassel, it would be advisable to find what one might call a “thinking cabin” for the evenings. It might suffice to remember the words of an enamored Czech to his fiancée: “I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious, locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp.” I thought I should know how to convert my hotel room at dusk into a sober isolation chamber, suitable as a place for reflection.

Please understand me. The world was in very bad shape in September 2012, in terrible shape when I traveled to Kassel. The economic and moral crises, especially in Europe, had deteriorated utterly. One had the feeling — as I write this, one still does — that the world had perished and was irremediably in bad shape, or at least would be for a long time to come. This inevitably contaminated everything and created an atmosphere of fatality, leading me to see the world as something now tragically lost. At my age, it was easier to look at things like that, because everything seemed hopeless; any idea of changing things seemed to lead one to unending, fruitless efforts.

By way of simple self-defense, I’d decided to turn my back on the lost and irreparable world, which is why the idea of trying to set up a place of meditation in the evenings in Kassel seemed sensible to me, certainly much more so than the world; in my “thinking cabin” I could devote myself to pondering joy, for example, to try to see it as something close to the nucleus of all creation. The cabin would help me to concentrate on art. Here, after all, was an opportunity to try to modestly emulate persons I’d admired for certain gestures: persons who had known in their time how to submerge themselves in those tiny spaces so suitable for solitary reflection. Wittgenstein, for example, retired to Skjolden, Norway, to a cabin he built himself in a completely isolated place. He retired there to delve into his despair: to intensify his mental and moral distress, but also to stimulate his intellect and reflect on the necessity of art and love and also on the hostility of the world toward those necessities.

The book I had first thought to take with me to my German cabin concerned precisely the joy of art when it revealed its essential seriousness (not about the world, but entirely about art). In the end, I left this book in Barcelona and brought Camilo José Cela’s Journey to the Alcarria instead. It was an outlandish choice, because of the contrast I’d found between the modernity and sophistication of Kassel and the belfries and terrible cripples of the world of my compatriot Cela. But I wanted to take a book that told of a journey so different from my own, and that one met my criteria.

At the last moment, I also stuck a copy of Rüdiger Safranski’s Romanticism: An Odyssey of the German Spirit into my luggage. Ever since I read it for the first time, I’ve always enjoyed going back to read fragments in which the author explained Nietzsche’s world, how Nietzsche thought it necessary to live without illusions, and at the same time, in spite of having discovered life’s great futility, to be passionately fond of it. Romanticism always allowed me to return to a phrase of Nietzsche’s that over time had become one of my convictions: “Only as aesthetic phenomena are existence and the world eternally justified.”

“Make sure you see the works of Tino Sehgal, Pierre Huyghe, and Janet Cardiff. I’m told they’ve outdone themselves.” Alicia Framis, an artist friend drawn to avant-garde ideas, wrote this to me three days before I’d be leaving for Kassel. I’d never heard the names she mentioned, but understood they must be artists that might be of interest to me, and would provide me with something of which I really was entirely ignorant. (This made me enthusiastic about traveling to Germany to enter that universe.)

“William Kentridge’s project The Refusal of Time in a warehouse at the old station is worth seeing,” another friend wrote just a couple of hours after Alicia Framis’s email. And a good friend from Getafe sent me, at the end of the day, a message commenting on how interesting she’d found “Mark Dion’s stunning library, and, most of all, an oblique clock by an Albanian sculptor.”

To convince myself that it was going to be a really great trip, I began to think that there was common ground between the great expeditions of yesteryear and the solitary one I was embarking on with my sights set on Kassel. There lay the danger, an indispensable element of any worthwhile journey. Because danger, I told myself, always brings the pleasure of feeling fear. And fear is fantastic, especially fear at the prospect of finding oneself faced with strange, unfamiliar things, maybe even new ones.

All good journeys incorporate the infinite pleasure and great excitement that moments of great fear also produce. I began to think about this and felt excited from the moment I sensed that I was traveling to Kassel with a unique sensation: an intense and maybe terrifying pleasure similar to what I felt one night casually heading down a dark alley completely unknown to me. There, I suddenly noticed a breath on the back of my neck, dry but phantasmagoric, because I spun around and there was no one there. Knowing I was actually alone in that alley, I kept walking, but found it impossible to act like I hadn’t noticed; it was impossible to overlook the fact that the ghostly breathing was still there: cold, icy, rasping, discreet. How to describe it better? There was nobody there, but it felt like someone, with noticeable regularity, was huffing, and his glacial breath, in a very odd way, God knows, was landing directly on the back of my neck.

Two days before leaving for Documenta, I went, as I did every Sunday morning, to meet some people on the terrace of the Bar Diagonal, and there, John William Wilkinson (Wilki to his friends), mishearing and thinking that I was staying in an apartment in Kassel directly above a Chinese restaurant (from where I could look out over a forest), said to me — he said to all of us there — that what I was about to live through reminded him of the Irish poet John Millington Synge.

“Explain yourself!” we all said immediately.

This demanding repartee was characteristic of our tertulia . We endeavored with admirable tenacity on these Sunday mornings — naturally we knew it was in vain, but we made the effort anyway — to leave nothing unexplained.

The great Synge, Wilki told us more or less — but I’m sure he made it up, and, on top of that, now I’m twisting his words — was a guy, or, to phrase it better, a poet of notable talent, who traveled at the end of the nineteenth century to the Aran Isles, located at the mouth of Galway Bay on the west coast of Ireland. On one of these islands, Inishmaan, he stayed in a rough cottage with a beautiful view that can still be visited today. He also spent time on the second floor of a big house on Inishmaan that no longer exists. There, a discreet hole in the bedroom floor allowed him to listen to conversations and arguments, all of which were in Gaelic. For five summers, he spied on these neighbors’ chats without understanding anything because he didn’t know a word of that language, but he was convinced he understood everything perfectly. He was so sure that he understood anything spoken in Gaelic that he ended up producing (out of everything he heard and compiled over the summers) his famous anthropology book The Aran Islands . This book, which Synge finished in 1901 and published in 1907, describes the thought and customs of that remote Irish island lost in the middle of the Atlantic (that strange paradise, until then barely desecrated by any outsider). The text reflected, among other things, the belief that beneath the surface of the islanders’ Catholicism it was possible to detect a “substratum” of the ancient pagan beliefs of their ancestors.