He sat on the other end of the table, and I watched him, noticing how he always put his hand on the person he was talking to, a few seconds’ touch only, on the forearm or shoulder, and how he was beaming as he spoke. Then the smile and the enthusiasm could vanish as if cut off by an ax. The abrupt failure of interest — the humming during breaks in the conversation, the laughter that trailed everything he said — all created a kind of bubble around him, a zone of inaccessibility. Somehow this also applied to his home, where there was a remarkable mismatch between the size of the rooms and the furnishings. The effect was a bit like seeing a room on a movie set — up close it looked like any other room, but taking a few steps back, you realize that the room was inside a huge studio that did not relate to it in any way, but was merely a vessel for it and that feeling of “home” was leaking out of it in every direction.

He turned all his studios into artworks themselves, so it was as if he lived in his art, I thought. If Kiefer was similar to any mythological figure, it must be King Midas: All he touched turned into art. If that was a blessing or a curse, only he could know.

This January I saw the new paintings Kiefer had been working on. They were exhibited in the White Cube gallery in London. Kiefer was there, too, participating in a panel discussion. As the panel went on my eyes kept drifting up to the painting that hung behind the participants. It was enormous and reminded me of “Black Flakes” with its snow-covered plain, its rows of branches resembling runes, and its dark, apocalyptic sky. But there were seven red seals in the sky; they looked like bullet holes, and each of them was numbered. The panel discussion dealt with the relationship between science and art, and although it included both a pre-eminent astrophysicist and a mathematician, none of them managed to shed any more light on the relationship than the combination of landscape, bullet holes and numbers. Science describes the world in abstract terms, while the world is concrete, and only art, with its third language, is capable of bringing these two realities together. Not Kiefer talking, not Kiefer thinking, not Kiefer as a person, but Kiefer as a place. The place he enters when he is applying layer upon layer of paint, lead, straw and ash to a canvas. A place that emerged toward the end of the war and that has existed for nearly 75 years now. A place where mythology, history, religion, literature, things and landscapes are brought together, and the meaning that arises is infinite, because it is activated by each and everyone who sees it. It is a place positioned between the river and the forest. Everything is flux, Heraclitus said and wrote about the river. Everything is immutable and always the same, Parmenides wrote in response, and Heidegger, the great thinker of the forest, let his philosophy begin there with him.

At the now requisite dinner that followed the panel discussion, there was no ceremonial shouting of my name, no kissing on both cheeks, and I was no longer seated beside Kiefer. Had I disappointed him? Had my profile taken too long to complete? Toward the end of the meal, Kiefer came over to our end of the table, and the conversation turned to evolution. Suddenly he couldn’t think of a word, and looked around the table.

“What is it called when evolution changes? When great changes happen?”

No one could think of the correct word.