Squatting down, I read the bit of paper the machine had spit violently onto the floor. I thought at length about the group in the forest: that improvised community I’d seen around Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s loudspeakers.
That message from Bastian Schneider was just right. When I finished reading it, I went outside the house and saw the park spread out below; the view was slowly narrowing on the horizon. A moment arrived, and I had the impression that with each blink of the eye the space grew narrower still. Even in the most immediate vicinity, soon there wasn’t the slightest line or figure. And I thought: no doubt about it, we are at the center of the center of what was once a center. It’s also beyond question that we’re in the last season of the avant-garde, or perhaps the penultimate one. And the last does exist, but its whereabouts are unknown; being clandestine suits it.
I thought of the world of summer and the world of death and birth, of the world of collapse and recovery, of storms and calms: of the infinite cycle of ideas and action, of infinite invention, of supposedly endless experimentation. And because a dust cloud seemed about to swamp the place, I remembered the fearful handful of dust with which, according to T. S. Eliot, the Western tradition had come to an end. It was a fine dust that blew around out there, from left to right, from right to left, from everywhere to everywhere, reaching the heights and drifting down murmuring.
I would have given anything to know what it murmured.
42
An hour later, in a theater at the Orangerie, I was bewildered to see the Finnish singer M. A. Numminen adapting Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and blowing it to bits with jazz, pop, and punk rock.
I could hardly believe what I’d just seen. The swift and efficient destruction of the Tractatus. When I realized Numminen had wrecked the book, I tittered nervously, almost foolishly, and Boston had to calm me down. I haven’t had much sleep, I reminded her, as if that might serve as some sort of excuse. Well, she said, don’t forget you have a dinner date with Chus. I felt it was by no means certain I’d make it to that appointment alive, as my weariness was sapping my strength. On this occasion, unlike a year ago, I’d be going out at night without the assistance of Collado’s tablets.
I went back to thinking about the Finn, Numminen, and recognized that none of us Anglo-Saxons or Latinos could understand his vein of humor; he was, for us, an incomprehensible comedian, albeit an extremely good one. I didn’t quite know why, but he certainly was. Why, why was I sure? I didn’t know how to shake off this doubt.
When Numminen left the stage, it was Boston who laughed, although not in such an unbalanced way as I had; she was laughing because she’d just read Numminen’s bio in the program notes. The translation of his biography must have been taken straight from that anarchic Google tooclass="underline" “M. A. Numminen was given birth to in 1940 in Somero, Finland, and studied philosophy, the sociology and the linguistics at the University of Helsinki. . He has composed philosophical intimacies, movies of pen, poems, and experiences in genius and tango.”
Philosophical intimacies? Movies of pen? It was strange to see new genres of writing seeming to be invented daily. The encounter of genius and tango seemed an attractive combination to me, however unlikely it was that either Boston or I would ever end up fitting in anywhere. But surely it might be an enviable thing to experience genius and dance it in the form of a tango. Coming out of the Finnish show, we exchanged these jovial comments on the Orangerie terrace, noting that the storm had finally moved off.
Then Boston showed me she knew more than I thought by talking about a book by the Argentinean J. Rodolfo Wilcock, The Temple of Iconoclasts, in which (in one of the stories) a Catalan director named Llorenç Riber — a big fan of rabbits (he put them into all his work) — was summoned to Oxford to direct the stage version of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and many thought at first it was an almost desperate undertaking.
We had some coffee — rather a lot in my case — and set off in the direction of Rosemarie Trockel’s pavilion to see her piece Tenattemptsforonesculpture, a work Boston didn’t know how to explain to me; perhaps it had no explanation, though I decided to take it upon myself to interpret it as something that spoke about how choosing a daring path is often a good way out of adversity: an idea I made a mental note of, as I had the feeling it was something I’d already done at certain points in my life, and it would be a good thing for me to keep in mind.
Soon after, we saw the sculpture Scaffold, Sam Durant’s gigantic gallows. That horrifying place was swarming with children: they were climbing all over the vast structure, confusing it, I think, with an amusement park. In the future, the world will belong to these children and resemble a lawless playground, I thought, all the while linking Scaffold to my red couch in the Dschingis Khan, that seat I tended to associate with a gallows.
We also saw the inverted, belowground reproduction (by the artist Horst Hoheisel) of the magnificent fountain financed by the Jewish businessman Sigmund Aschrott. The original had been erected in the middle of the city and was brutally demolished in 1939.
We took a long and agreeable turn around Karlsaue Park. The park was getting busier all the time — a lot of people were arriving at the last minute for Documenta’s final weekend, and it was increasingly packed. We decided to head into downtown Kassel, and there we bumped into Lara Sánchez, blogger for the Spanish newspaper, El País. She had just seen Fatigues, the very show by Tacita Dean we ourselves were going to.
Despite beginning to feel worn out and fearing for my appointment with Chus, not to mention my mental stability, we paid a visit to the outdated, ugly branch office of a bank, the least poetic place in the world. It was in this old financial center that Tacita Dean had left her wonderful drawings on large chalkboards, which were a very intense green color and reminded me of the extraordinarily vivid green from my dream in Sarzana: that chalkboard-green that suddenly turned into the green of a doorway fitting into a pointed Arabic arch, on which my friend Pitol was inscribing, slowing down the rhythm of his hand, the poetry of an unknown algebra.
Tacita Dean was the only participant in Documenta whose work I knew something about, because two years earlier I’d seen The Friar’s Doodle in Madrid, an exhibition centered on motifs she’d photographed that were engraved onto the colonnade at the cloister of the Abbey de Silos.
I’d been to see The Friar’s Doodle on Dominique González-Foerster’s recommendation and discovered an exhibition that interested me very much, focused on the strange traces of carvings a few unknown men had made in the stone of the pillars there over the centuries. Marks had been made by individual artisans in order to work out the price of their labor; there were rudimentary boards for playing games on, probably the work of stonemasons to amuse themselves while waiting for the newly carved columns to be set into the fabric of the building. There were also rough sketches of ornamental designs for the cloister.
While thinking about those carvings at Silos, I saw that a lot of people were forming a line to see Tacita Dean’s Afghan chalkboards. Once again, María Boston resorted to those passes that got us in fast. As the line was in a narrow passageway, everyone was keeping a strict eye on everyone else, and it didn’t seem okay to simply jump ahead of people who’d been waiting their turn for a couple of hours. I adopted a serious official demeanor, as if I were secretary to officer Boston on her routine inspection of the site.