I went so far as to think the vociferous young woman had reason on her side. Was she reasonably mad? Nothing was further from the spirit than rationality, and for that very reason, rationality was the peak of madness. The young blonde woman in unrelenting mourning was, moreover, quite right to remind us that Artaud was a pioneer when it came to identifying Europeans as the living dead.
Artaud screamed, too. Or was I thinking of Humboldt, that Saul Bellow character who used to reminisce about the day Artaud invited the most brilliant Parisian intellectuals to a conference and when he had them all gathered there, he read nothing, but went up on stage, simply yelping at them like a wild animal? It seemed Artaud went on letting out deafening shrieks, while the Parisian intellectuals remained sitting there, petrified. Yet, for them, it was an exquisite act. And why? Humboldt said that in some way Artaud had understood that the only art that interested intellectuals was one that celebrated the primacy of ideas. Artists had to interest intellectuals, the new class. That’s why the position of culture and of the history of culture had become the main theme of art. And that’s why a refined French audience respectfully listened to Artaud while he screamed. For them the sole objective of art was to suggest or inspire ideas. .
If I thought hard about it, hadn’t I acted that way too, since arriving in Kassel? From the word go, I’d been pleased by the prospect that theories running through Documenta might inspire me with ideas for my own work. In fact, I suspected that some of those ideas had already permeated my personality and, like a powerful drug, had left me in such a pleasant condition that my habitual despondency at that hour didn’t even dare to put in an appearance. That was one of the things that was happening: despite it being close to dusk, anguish didn’t arrive punctually for its usual appointment with me. It was without a doubt totally unusual; maybe anguish was just running a little late.
What was happening was that anguish appeared to have vanished and been secretly replaced by a great admiration for the complexity of what I’d seen in Kassel. That complexity had become part of my new personality. It was as if what was happening to me there had a direct link with those words of Mallarmé to Manet: “Paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces.” The effect on me of some of the work at Documenta was altering my way of being.
That stunning complexity, that Alcarria of art, was truly a marvel, and I was seeing it with the eyes of Raymond Roussel.
So I was sorry to have to wreck the gloomy predictions so many friends were making about the end of art, which they unfortunately confused with the end of the world, an entirely different matter. It seemed to me that art was still holding up perfectly well, and it was only the world, with its two dizzying tsetse flies, that had crumbled.
44
It was there in Artaud’s cave that I remembered my old conviction — still holding true from what I could tell — that anyone who dedicated himself to literature had not renounced the world; the world had simply evicted him, or never admitted him as a tenant. Nothing serious, then; in the end, a poet was someone for whom the world didn’t even exist, because, for him, there was only the radiance of the eternal outside.
I was thinking all this, and it was as if the cries of the radical young German woman fundamentally appealed to me. I had to really force myself to move away from that unhinged ranter. I was helped by my tremendous accumulated fatigue as much as by the invisible breeze: for a moment they both seemed to have joined forces to try to hold my interest in everything except the shouting. And so I soon managed to dodge the young madwoman in mourning — with a slight twinge, because underneath it all I liked her madness — and I was able to concentrate on the video being shown in that artificial cave.
I noticed I continued to be interested in everything. Not long before, I’d even been interested in the soothing, ruddy sunset, which, going into the cave, we’d left behind and which plenty of people had been paying too much attention to, as though it were part of Documenta. My reaction to the anodyne sunset had been very emotional, as it reminded me of my father who, before going off to his daily labor year after year (which began at sunset), always sang “Pace non trovo,” and his voice in the shower rang out with a succession of squeaks caused by excessive sorrow (perhaps at not having dedicated himself to opera). It resounded with excessive volume and excessive despair.
I was also emotional inside Artaud’s cave, because on top of everything, each time I looked off into the distance, I thought I saw the sea. It was a receding sea, which revealed a more distant sea, and in the end only allowed me to surmise a series of seas without coastlines. This visual effect seemed to tell me I should dare to go farther, unafraid, far from any handful of dust or misunderstanding of this world, that I should dare to go toward other conjectures, also without coastlines.
Under the circumstances, I was barely able to follow the thread of the film by Javier Téllez: when I wasn’t sunk in conjecture about a series of seas without coastlines, I was imagining what I could say to María Boston and Ada if they suddenly decided to ask me what I thought that invisible breeze (which possibly contributed to preventing the collapse of my mental state) was like. If the question arose, I thought I’d tell them it was like that well-known current vibrating between two poles of the tiny voltaic column that made the first electric telegraph possible; that fiendish spark was capable of leaping miles and miles over mountains and entire continents.
I don’t know how it could have happened, but when we came out of that grotto, I thought I saw the star Sirius high in the sky, and then very soon afterward, as if there were a logical connection between the two, I again met the young madwoman in mourning proclaiming, in an increasingly imposing manner, her desperation over the destruction of Europe. Confronted by this juxtaposition, I was aware of being very conscious that I would long remember the majestic, somber beauty of the scene and that she was involuntarily forming a part of it; it would be one of the key images of my journey to Kassel. And that is because, among other things, on suddenly seeing the bereaved young woman’s shadow in the night’s first electric lights and taking into account the fact that Sirius was high up in the radiance of the eternal, the figure of the madwoman took on a strange sort of dignity for a moment, as if all of a sudden, there in the Kassel dusk, you could see that only she was telling the truth.
45
“The horror, the horror,” whispered Kurtz, that Conrad character holed up in the Congo. For a moment, Momentary Monument IV struck me as the twisted prolongation of that madman’s harsh mental landscape, but also an outrageous landscape that fit well with the figure dressed in mourning shouting about the destruction of Europe.
Momentary Monument IV was an immense mountain of industrial ruins, for which Lara Favaretto claimed responsibility. The monstrous agglomeration of four hundred tons of scrap was piled up on the other side of the Hauptbahnhof and protected by tense security guards who, at the possibility of a predictable accident (children were the most likely potential victims), made sure no one attempted to climb on that criminal heap of sharp, old bits of metal.