As we entered the Fridericianum, the invisible breeze welcomed us forcefully, as if it were an old friend (in fact it was), as if it had recognized us and was so pleased to see us again that it wanted to squeeze us in the most exaggerated way possible. Right then, I discovered that the exact title of Ryan Gander’s work was I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorise (The Invisible Pull), which made me realize that this need for some meaning I can memorize could in time take on an immense significance. When I needed to better “memorize” what those glorious days in Kassel were like, I’d always have within reach the memory of that breeze that stretched through my mental fabric, leaving with me “a meaning” of renovation and optimism that would be difficult to forget.
Swayed by that old friend and the cheerful force of its invisible pull, I told Boston that in Sehgal’s room, that same afternoon, someone had whispered Last bear twice in my ear. It didn’t seem to surprise her too much. More than that, it gave her an idea to take me to a white room in the Fridericianum where Ceal Floyer’s sound installation ’Til I Get It Right was.
I asked her for the best possible translation of Last bear—I was sure it was very simple — but there was no way to get her to tell me, because she insisted on talking to me about an old work by Ceal Floyer that she’d liked very much; she’d seen it three years ago in Berlin and it was called, if she remembered correctly, Overgrowth. It was a bonsai photographed from below and projected on a slide that increased the image to the size of a normal tree, as if situating the spectator beneath, or rather the bonsai above, or both. It seemed, said Boston, a marvelous way to take apart the stupid act of manipulating a tree to dwarf it. Ceal Floyer’s work restored its proper size at the same time as alerting us to the number of sinister people we come across in life who try to pulverize our aspirations, whatever they might be. .
My only aspiration at that moment was still for her to translate Last bear into Spanish for me, but she didn’t seem to be up for that task and preferred we talk about ’Til I Get It Right, another phrase, she said, that seemed like a slogan. In ’Til I Get It Right, you could hear the American country singer Tammy Wynette repeating continuously: I’ll just keep on / ’til I get it right.
I asked Boston why we hadn’t gone to see and hear this on the first day. And I saw that Alka was laughing, as if she knew what I was talking about. You can’t do everything at once, said an ironic Boston.
In Ceal Floyer’s white room, the artist’s need to always search out the difficult was exposed, which reminded me of the afternoon at a talk when a woman in the back row asked me when I planned to stop sinking my poor, lonely characters in the fog. When I get it right, I’ll stop doing it, I told her. And then I informed her that fog and solitude were not my principal obsessions, I’d simply started a series of books that always prowled around that image of the solitary man in the mist and I felt I had to conclude the series. The woman then reproached me for the darkness of my texts. Señora, please, I said angrily, don’t you see how dark and complex the world is? But a little while later I noticed the daylight, which was soft and beautiful. And I thought: If one could only see everything with such clarity.
67
After a long search through the Fridericianum we came upon Salvador Dalí’sLe grand paranoïaque. I seemed to observe that the voice singing I’ll just keep on/’til I get it right was continuing at my side and seemed to form part of the painting, the same way that in Kentridge’s drawings, there was always a trace of the previous drawing.
The voice only disappeared when we arrived at a room with paintings of apples that Korbinian Aigner had grown and painted when he was a prisoner in Dachau. Within that huge insanity he managed to create four new varieties of apples, designating them KZ 1 to 4 (KZ is the German abbreviation for concentration camp).
Once more, the horrors of the Nazi delirium showed up in a Documenta piece, on this occasion in a very special way. Those admirable, simple little paintings of apples left one impressed by the human capacity for resistance in the midst of difficulties; even in extremely adverse circumstances, to create art is the one thing that actually intensifies the feeling of being alive.
I looked at those apples, noticing that fragments of Le grand paranoïaque seemed to have lodged in them as if the apples too needed the trace of a previous work of art to feel more complete. I reflected on human courage, thinking of the case of a young woman from Moscow, a specialist in English romantic literature, who I’d been told had been sent to a prison in the Brezhnev era to a cell with no light, no paper or pen, because of a stupid and completely false denunciation; that young woman knew Byron’s Don Juan by heart (seventeen thousand lines or more) and in the darkness she translated it mentally into Russian verse. When she got out of prison having lost her sight, she dictated the translation to a friend, and it is now the canonical Russian version of Byron.
I thought about the totally indestructible human mind and that we should meditate on everything better and be happier. And while I was thinking this, I felt the air of the breeze, which seemed to turn the corners of the galleries of the Fridericianum, catch up to me fully. It was exactly at that instant when I saw the young blonde woman who’d announced the death of Europe walking past, serene and silent, in her elegant mourning. I was shocked to see her this time so calm, so appeased, without her lost look. I observed her closely in case I was mistaken. But yes, it was her. She realized she was being observed and flashed me a slightly complicit smile, as if saying, It’s me, you’re right, I’m the one who believes that Europe has been dead for centuries.
I was about to carry on walking when I stopped and asked Boston whether she’d noticed that we’d just crossed paths with the madwoman in mourning whom we’d first seen at Untilled, and then later, on another occasion, at the door of Artaud’s Cave. It’s true, said Boston, without attaching any importance to it, she seems calmer now, we could invite her to your lecture, I think she goes to all of them.
She said it with a smile, possibly as a joke. Just ask what her name is, I said, I’d just like to know what she’s called. Boston assigned Alka that mission, which she carried out immediately without any problem: she went over to where the madwoman in mourning was, asked her name, received a reply, and came back. The blonde had told her she was called Kassel. Are you sure, Alka? She nodded, she was sure, she said, the blonde’s name was Kassel, she’d repeated it three times.