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.
With every curve the bus took on the Auedamm, the strength of the invisible push carried me mentally further along. I felt at times an almost subconscious joy and now I imagined sitting at my table in the Dschingis Khan, making sure Autre wrote something about how radical solitude drives some people to an anguish of such proportions, it makes them wish the world produced something more than just anguish, perhaps something we don’t yet know and have to seek at all costs.
The new, perhaps?
I remembered Chesterton said that there was one thing that gave radiance to everything. It was the idea of something around the corner. Perhaps it is this desire for something more that propels us to seek the new, to believe something exists that can still be distinct, unseen, special, something different, around the most unexpected corner; that’s why some of us have spent our whole lives wanting to be avant-garde, because it is our way of believing that in the world, or maybe beyond it, out beyond the poor world, there might be something we’ve never seen before. And because of this, some of us reject the repetition of what has been done before; we hate them telling us the same as always, trying to make us know things all over again that we know so much about already; we loath the realist and the rustic, or the rustic and the realist, who think the task of the writer is to reproduce, copy, imitate reality, as if in its chaotic evolution, its monstrous complexity, reality could be captured and narrated. We are amazed by writers who believe that the more empirical and prosaic they are, the closer they get to the truth, when in fact the more details you pile up, the further that takes you away from reality; we curse those who prefer to ignore risk, just because they are afraid of loneliness and getting it wrong; we scorn those who don’t understand that the greatness of a writer lies in his promise, guaranteed in advance, of failure; we love those who swear that art lies solely in this attempt.
It is the desire for there to be something more and this desire leads us without fail always to seek out the new. And this endeavor, this eagerness, this toil—I started to use this word I found and liked in some lines by Yeats — this toiling was something that was in me since those summers of my youth and is still there; I think it is my center, the very essence of my way of being in the world, my stamp, my watermark: I’m talking about that ongoing concern for seeking the new, or believing that the new can perhaps exist, or finding that newness which was always there.
There is eagerness in this voice that speaks for me when they ask me about the world.