I noticed it was hard to say which of the two of us was the more fervent enthusiast. I’d arrived there in a great mood, but Chus’s vitality, her desire to have an influence on every point, every angle of the art world, did nothing but get me even more revved up. And, in the middle of so much animation — conversing with Chus was very strange, because it was as if we’d spent our whole lives talking like this — I don’t know how it was that she asked me something about the world, I think she wanted to know how I saw it.
That question caught me completely off guard. At that moment, I was thinking of the incredible amount of sleep I had to catch up on and how my fear had begun to inspire the joy that was now my traveling companion. It was logical that this should alarm me because on one occasion of great fulfillment and unbridled happiness, on one warm afternoon in the past, after a great seaside feast by the Mediterranean, I’d felt this unique moment so strongly, I’d thought of committing a theatrical suicide along the lines of Heinrich von Kleist’s, which he’d staged like a play. It was as if I already knew — I do know now, but didn’t so much back then — that early Romanticism was the only beautiful Romanticism: mad, imaginative, rapturous, and profound. The fact is, I thought a death by my own hand would allow me to never get away from the ecstatic beauty of that powerful afternoon: a ridiculous beauty, because after lunching copiously that day, at the very moment I thought of killing myself I was tasting a melon.
“How do I see what?”
“The world,” said Chus.
It seemed as if she had realized perfectly well that I was Piniowsky. She was almost handing me my answer on a silver platter.
“I no longer think anything of the world, Chus. Nothing at all. It’s perished.”
“Really, nothing?”
“I think I’ve become like Marcus Aurelius. He announced one day that he had stopped having any sort of opinion about anything whatsoever.”
“Then you don’t have an opinion about me, either?”
I noticed again that with her excessive enthusiasm, she might be playing another dirty trick on me. I sensed that with my Marcus Aurelius quote I’d made a fool of myself. An avant-garde author like I claimed to be would never quote someone like that. Or was it the reverse? Wasn’t it very avant-garde not to be intimidated by a classic? Besides, Marcus Aurelius had written Meditations, and that went beyond the classification between classic and modern. .
I calmed down when she wittily summoned up the figure of Petronius, who, she said, reminded her — admitting an unmissable disparity — of my Marcus Aurelius.
Petronius, said Chus, one day told Nero that he was ever so sorry but he was totally fed up hearing him recite his “doggerel verses, wretched poems of the suburbs” and also seeing his “Domitian belly.” Of course, after such interesting words, Petronius committed suicide.
Well, yes, I said to Chus, when I think of the world, I no longer think anything about it. I’m tired, even tired of having to see the world’s deplorable belly of a Domitilo. Domitius, Chus corrected me. Of a Domitius, I said. And then she wanted to know what I’d seen of interest so far in Documenta. I immediately started talking to her about Sehgal’s This Variation and how much it had impressed me. I was so emphatic that Chus was on the verge of not believing me. But I finally managed to get her to see that the sparkle of the authentic was in my words, I was not deceiving her. And then Chus, more relaxed, said that, regarding Sehgal, she was more than convinced we needed other voices in art, because what we’d been hearing for a long time, she said, were monotonous repetitions of things we already knew. What was urgent was inspiration from ideas, an energy that was different. .
“An impulse,” I hastened to say.
Never in my life had I said anything with such assurance, such self-confidence, with such happiness. And it seemed to me that the word sounded smooth, like a whipcrack. It began to expand with potential in the night, inviting us to flee down paths without logic. And for a moment — it felt like forever — I thought the word “impulse” was more than a single thing racing down those logic-less paths. Expanding, its physical magnitude was greater than the plain old, succinctly dry impulse — that is, the single run-of-the-mill impulse inhabiting our dictionaries. Newton had given it its second sense and opened a new door, and now whoever desired could bask in the glory of this new type of impulse, so different from the one known up till then.
55
“There is a logic to be changed,” said Chus in her unique way of talking. “If you are feeling that you’re being pushed and have been for hours by an invisible impulse, which you consider neither normal nor Newtonian, what you have to think is that you’re in the grip of the third sense of impulse.”
And somewhat later:
“I don’t think people have any problem with art; in general they don’t have any problem with culture. It’s politics that creates the problem, it doesn’t really know what culture is. When there’s no money, people simply treat it as if it were an added extra, no? And that is the logic that needs to be changed. If artists are intellectuals, then obviously they’re not a luxury, they’re a necessity, they can change our lives. And today more than ever we need other voices, because the ones we’re hearing just tediously repeat what we’ve been hearing all our lives. What we need are new ideas, a different energy. We need to listen to those who are formulating something new and trust them and say: ‘Okay, maybe I don’t fully understand you, but I believe in what you’re proposing, at least it sounds different.’ We have to give opportunities to those who’ve been silenced and to the insane, to tell them to carry on, to not look at them with mistrust and cynicism or with an air of having seen it all before. That’s precisely what we’ve lost; we believe that it’s all been done before, refusing to see that there is still ingenious, complex, wise art that pushes our limits. We need to listen to artists. Never before has it been so necessary as in our time. Artists are the opposite of politicians. Do you remember Flaubert’s letter about going to the palace to see Prince Napoleon, but he’d gone out? I’ve heard how they talk about politics, writes Flaubert, I’ve listened to them and it’s something immense. Human stupidity is so vast and infinite!”
56
For a while, as I was eating my tortellini, we got marvelously caught up in Chus’s idea that art was essentially thought more than experience, which led her to conclude that artists should play a fundamental role in our society, as should poets, if art and poetry weren’t the same thing. As for politicians, they all came off looking really bad.
It was perhaps the key moment, the most fascinating of my trip, because I noticed how her words were gradually restoring a lost atmosphere from my past, a former climate of rupture with conventional art, a way of considering things that I’d almost forgotten. It was as if I were reencountering what I would enjoy encountering most, my inner truth. It was a truth, however, that I’d been constructing on the basis of four initial misunderstandings. Maybe that’s why many of my past mistakes began to file through my mind and I remembered the supposed avant-gardist I was for years and dreamed of being, as well as my yearning to go beyond provincial rupturism.