Fireflies. Luis Sagasti
and it’s self-evident that he’s an alter ego of Vonnegut. Billy can travel to different moments, both past and future, of his own life. It happens to him involuntarily. In the novel’s first pages, Vonnegut writes that many years after the war, the aeroplane carrying Billy Pilgrim from Ilium to Montreal crashed into the peak of Sugarbush Mountain in Vermont. All those on board died except Bill. The accident ‘left him with a terrible scar on the top of his skull’.
After this accident, Billy Pilgrim began to say that he had been kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore.
In October 1992, the state museum of Gelsenkirchen published a selection of work by Joseph Beuys entitled Mensch, Natur und Kosmos. The volume includes a short introductory study by the art historian Franz van der Grinten, and consists of a series of watercolours painted by Beuys between 1948 and 1957, sketched on file cards or in notebooks. The largest measures thirty-two by twenty centimetres and, even though it’s a high-quality publication, the pencil outline of most of them is so faint that the forms are hard to distinguish. Crows, women, water and trees, painted as if with moonlight. In the earliest drawings, however, the lines and the colours are more dynamic. On the cover there is a particularly energetic drawing: a crow, the first in an unseen series, two women, perhaps, and in the background an erupting volcano or a tree, who knows, all sketched out with abrupt, blue, nervous lines.
There is a sometimes astonishing similarity between the watercolours painted by Beuys after the war, around 1955, and the sketches for The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. A yellowish-amber hue predominates in both, and the figures are weightless and unsupported. The bodies are barely defined by patches of colour. In the case of Saint-Exupéry, who was not a painter, it is obvious that they are sketches, a first attempt at something that is far from definitive. In contrast, Beuys, who by now has returned from the war, knows he can do nothing but sketch, nothing but promise what will never be realised; his watercolours are an image of what is to come (and what it is hoped never does come). One of Saint-Exupéry’s drawings is of a sleeping fox; the marks delineate the restless outline, over and over, the line itself vacillating; or rather, the fox is not sleeping, though it gives the impression of doing so; or, to put it better, no fox could ever sleep with such an agitated, hesitant body. Beneath it on the same page is something that looks like a puma. It is upside down, as if it were buried underground and digging itself out to meet the body of the fox.
Beuys prefers to draw other animals. Elks, for example. Beneath the deer on the front cover of his Early Watercolours, there is a sun, its rays piercing the animal. Many of Beuys’ drawings are barely decipherable, just charcoal on tracing paper. Even so, his confident hand is always in evidence. For the German artist, an animal is a kind of angelic being. This idea comes not only from his reading of Rudolf Steiner, founder of the philosophical current known as anthroposophy, but also from his time with the Tatar nomads. Indeed, while he was delirious with fever in the forests of Crimea, wrapped in felt and smeared in fat, an elk appeared to him. A giant one, like the megatherium species. A megatherian elk or megaelk that starts to dance before his eyes. Beuys hears the Tatar tambourines and flutes made with the bones of these very elks. He said later that as soon as the melody ended, the elk transformed into a shaman. He shivers because he’s hot and he’s cold. The Tatars begin to pack up the camp swiftly and silently. It seems someone has warned them the Russians are approaching. They damp down the fires. From above, a stampede of fireflies appears. The Tatars flee towards the west, which is where Beuys’ plane came down. They put him on a horse, laying him crosswise over the horse’s back and tying him down. Beuys presses his stomach against the animal’s flank, and when it begins to trot he abruptly vomits.
‘I vomited up the stars from the shaman’s tent. Yellow and white stars.’
Everything is thick and shiny.
Billy Pilgrim will return to Dresden, to the slaughterhouse five where his life was saved, on several occasions. On one of his journeys through time he has the bad luck to be abducted by an alien civilisation that takes him to the planet Tralfamadore, where he is exhibited in a kind of intergalactic zoo together with a woman named Montana Wildhack. Vonnegut tells us nothing about how they got there, nor about how they freed themselves. Pilgrim’s daughter thinks the war has driven her father crazy.
Slaughterhouse-Five can be read in many different ways. The three leading candidates are: as the hallucinations of a soldier injured in the war, as the ramblings of an old veteran, and perhaps as an extraordinary tale of autobiographical science fiction – if such a thing could exist outside of the work of Philip K. Dick. However it is approached, though, the most interesting pages of the book are those dedicated to explaining the literature of Tralfamadore. ‘Brief clumps of symbols separated by stars […] each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message, describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other.’ Without causes or effects: ‘what we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time’.
In some sense Joseph Beuys never left the forests of Crimea, and some of his most celebrated performances bear witness to this fact. In May 1974, in the Block Gallery in New York, he performed I Like America and America Likes Me. In protest against the Vietnam War, Beuys decided to avoid setting foot on U.S. soil as far as possible. He arrived at John F. Kennedy airport, was put straight into an ambulance and then taken directly to the room containing a coyote, where he remained for three days. Beuys covered himself with a felt cape. He carried a stick and never took off his hat.
A few years earlier he presented his most famous performance: How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. This is the first time Beuys appears in public without a hat. With his head covered with honey and sprinkled with gold dust, he holds up a dead hare and tries to explain the meaning of art to it. His head is illuminated, as if a soft, sweet light were emanating from his war wounds.
Light is coming out of Beuys’ head.
Like the horns of Michelangelo’s Moses: a marble light that transforms him into the Devil, into Lucifer.
Shamans travel into the skies in search of the sick person’s soul in order to return it to their body.
Where did the hare’s soul go? Is there a heaven for hares? When you’re little you imagine there must be a heaven for animals. Never a hell. Your pet dog doesn’t go to hell. Though the only thing we are sure of is that hell is full of monstrous, repugnant animals. Not heaven, though; there are no animals in heaven. Except for in clan cultures: the great bear, the great reindeer.
Fly up to the heaven of the golden hares.
Sometimes, the return to Crimea is more traumatic: Beuys suffers from severe convulsions, exhausting spasms, which he ends up turning into performances. One of these becomes the December 1966 work Manresa, in which Beuys presents one half of a cross wrapped in felt and the other drawn on a blackboard. Felt and fat are placed at each corner. As he paces about the room, Beuys asks after the third element; that is, the precise midpoint between intuition and reason.
Months earlier, he had visited the Spanish city of Manresa, where in 1522 Saint Ignatius wrote his Spiritual Exercises. There, Beuys suffered a sudden attack, a kind of nervous breakdown. Draped over the back of the horse trotting through the wood, he has nothing left to vomit. It’s not only his stomach that feels empty but his whole body, as if he had no organs. Dozens of hares accompany him. The scene resembles a panel from the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. The procession is led by a hare that is sometimes an elk and that never loses its light. Beuys’ head is swathed in felt. It is throbbing. And the pain is like boiling water running down the furrows of his scars. Behind him he hears voices closing in on him. There is no snow on the trees. Everything is mud and noise.
He wakes up in the hospital in Manresa. Beside him is Per Kirkeby, the artist he had come on holiday with. Beuys looks at him and smiles, unconcerned. The ceiling of the room is pale cream in colour. He wants to leave.
The haiku is the closest we have come to writing the way they do in Tralfamadore. Expressing in an instant what happens over time. The motionless stone that shimmers in the light: this stone both is and is not this stone and so it will go on, regardless of the fact that 2500 years ago the Greeks began to argue about the nature of things and the discussion has never let