Читать книгу Currency of Paper - Alex Kovacs - Страница 5
ОглавлениеObserving the Progress of Time
(1950)
Maximilian Sacheverell Hollingsworth wondered if he could dictate the entire course of his life on a single day. After some deliberation, a process lasting the length of a Wednesday morning, he concluded that it was possible. Suddenly, with no prior warning, it seemed to him a matter of some urgency to plan all of the details of his adulthood whilst he was still a young man. Brimming with optimism, he hoped that it was simply necessary to decide what he most wanted to do and in which order. Immediately he set to work upon the drafting of a plan.
At noon he sat inside a public house in Bloomsbury. This was a place populated only by solitary male drinkers, isolated men wearing ruffled coats and smoking pipes emitting circles of smoke that hovered and drifted in an unfurling cloud above their heads. Grey sunlight dissolved into the dingy huddles of shadows thrown from the battered furnishings. In studied silence the barmaid washed empty glasses and placed them in long neat rows along the dark mahogany shelves. Maximilian sat at the left end of the bar, beside the thick length of rope that dangled from the mouth of the silent brass bell, drinking a succession of pints of bitter ale, his gaze directed out towards the street in the hope of discovering fresh inspirations. With the progress of his imbibing he felt the slowness of the afternoon unwinding down the length of his spine.
No matter that his plan had to exclude innumerable torments and banalities which he was destined to encounter, that it could not possibly survive for years on end without mutations and excisions, that in many of its details it was probably lacking in all pragmatism, all that was significant was the necessity of forming a definitive set of strategies, a declaration of intention based upon his genuine desires, distillations of urges that he had possessed since he was a child. In all the foolishness and idealism of youth, he forged a series of eternal vows.
Disappearing without leaving a single clue to his whereabouts, he would dedicate himself to the completion of numerous projects, living out a life crowded with impossible undertakings and miraculous pursuits, all incognito, with no one privy to his role until after his death. He would investigate arcane branches of knowledge, brand every neglected street and alleyway with his footsteps, consecrate secret temples to the gods of wisdom and delirium, serve as an unseen philanthropist to thousands of people.
Ordinary ambitions did not interest him. He possessed no desire to excel within a regular field, to build any sort of successful career. Instead he would perform acts of a kind that had barely been encountered before, challenging the boundaries of what it was possible to do within the span of a lifetime. His projects would perhaps fall within the category, broadly speaking, of “art,” but would refuse to utilise the terms or follow the strictures of any artistic establishment or school. Primal experience, rather than formal aesthetic statements, would be his priority: experiencing it, guiding it, making a gift of it to others. All would be done in secret and no one else would be permitted to see his work for what it was until he had died. Only then would he reveal the extent of his labours to those who were prepared to listen.
Having broken all contact with his aristocratic family and their milieu, Maximilian found himself employed for forty hours each week at a printing works in Dagenham. His time there was dominated by a series of awful mindless repetitions, cycles of tedium that almost succeeded in destroying him. Already he had been there for nearly two years and he was finding it difficult to see quite how he would escape. Entering the workplace each morning was so dispiriting that it felt like he was being repeatedly punched in the face. Headaches would soon settle in for the duration of the day. Exhaustion clung to his limbs, became engrained, a part of the mechanics governing his body motions.
The little education that he had received was due to his own appetite for the reading of books. His attempts to build an intellect within the confines of his room became the great secret that he shielded from his colleagues. Passing his days at the printing works largely in silence, on the few occasions he was required to speak he would imitate a working-class accent with whichever monosyllables seemed necessary. He was a cipher to his colleagues; no one had any idea that when he returned home he was engaged in the furious processes of study. Towers of books, perennially in danger of collapsing, reached up towards his ceiling. Every night he would read for hours on end, often until he could no longer adequately focus his eyes upon the words that lay before him.
On that fateful Wednesday in Bloomsbury, time he had stolen for himself by feigning sickness, all of his energies were poured into the completion of his plan. In the space of three hours he weighed up the relative importance of each of his ambitions, estimating how long he would need to devote to them. He then placed them into a timetable that ran to exactly fifty years, with each individual year taken into account. Some of his schemes were grand enough to take up months or years at a time, whilst others were minor, relatively insignificant actions that might be performed in the space of a few minutes. As soon as the words had been declared upon the page, rendered elegantly in black ink with his fountain pen, it seemed certain to him that they spoke of the truth, that what they described would one day exist. Even before he had finished writing them, the plans began to possess a definitive hold on him, a mysterious authority that few other forces could lay claim to.
He imagined the span of his entire life. How would it feel to wake up each year and discover that he was older? To observe his features in the mirror as time gnawed them away? Recently, as a consequence of thoughts like these, he had found himself obsessed with the minutiae of the era into which he had been born. He noted its conventions of form, observable in newspapers and advertisements and bus tickets. How long would it take for fashions to change? Which course would they take? Would he notice when they did?
In one sense, the idea of learning how the future would alter such details caused him great excitement. Every year ahead would possess its own peculiar character, for him individually as well as on a much wider scale. He hoped that he would prove to be capable of noticing the changes as time moved on. A part of him was frightened of remaining fixed to his current mental co-ordinates, of never evolving in tandem with the shifts of history that everyone else acknowledged. He was determined to never fall into any sort of complacency.
Looking up from the pages of his notebook, he registered the details of his surroundings for the first time in more than an hour. Many of the old men were still present, emptying their glasses of drink as slowly as they could manage. Despondently, the barmaid leafed through a newspaper. Maximilian smiled to himself. Whilst the rest of the world remained locked in perpetual stasis, he had shifted the course of his life. His plan was complete. Soon the bar would be closed for the duration of the afternoon.
Emerging back out on the street, he came upon a burst of pigeons, scattering in profusion as they broke into flight. Strolling across Bedford Square he peered into the well-polished windows, encountering scenes presided upon by men wearing suits, framed within black brickwork and cream-white arches, figures moving with the authority of learning and money, enclosed by definitive partitions of black railing, their offices looking out onto a giant oval-shaped park that could only be entered by key holders.
Visitors spilt out from the great doors of the British Museum, thronging the courtyard with footsteps and murmuring before walking away down Great Russell Street towards many separate destinies. A few streets away the beacon of Senate House appeared to him, the bulk of its body rising towards the skies with malevolent grandeur. Wandering amongst the university buildings, he gazed upon the rooms in which he imagined extraordinary conversations taking place, occasions that could leave indelible imprints upon those who had been present. Sensing the scale of the mass of rooms surrounding him, he considered the silences of the libraries, the academic offices holding bookcases and dishevelled piles of papers, the scientific laboratories and hospital wards and the residencies of eminent families. He wanted to be a part of this manic activity.
Nearby, a pullulating cloud of wood smoke emerged from the back garden of a house, drifting over the brick walls, winding itself into the grey air hanging over the stretches of lawns and pavements, seeping into Maximilian’s nostrils, a scent which was destined to stay with him for the duration of his days.
A Short Essay Written by the Protagonist
(1951)
1. The conditions are now in place for capitalism to flourish once more. Inevitably it will do so, escalating further and further, until we finally face collapse.
2. The task now for anyone with any sensitivity and intellect should be to oppose this state of affairs in any way that they can.
3. The consequence of a society that places money at its centre is that forms of mental and physical slavery come to dominate human life.
4. Certain forms of expenditure are undoubtedly for the public good. Nevertheless, all that is moral in such cases is the intention that lies behind a given act of spending and the performance of that act. Sums of money cannot become moral in and of themselves.
5. Finally, money is impossible to define. It appears in such a vast range of contexts, being utilised for so many different reasons, that any objective explanation of its ultimate character becomes elusive to those who seek it.
6. The vast majority of ways in which money circulates have enormously destructive consequences. Human relationships inevitably suffer as a result, becoming insipid, superficial, mechanical reductions of what is possible. Tenderness is rarely achieved on the scale it could be because individuals are trapped within the structures of employment. In the current system most human beings have little knowledge of the full spectrum of the emotional and intellectual vocabulary that the species is capable of achieving.
7. Paradoxically, the only way for anyone to overcome the punishing effects of a world dominated by money is for them to acquire a large amount of money for themselves. Otherwise, different forms of poverty and slavery will ensue.
8. Money, considered from one perspective, can be seen as an enormous collection of numbers, somewhat arbitrarily selected by fate.
9. The usual ways in which money circulates are routinely accepted by society as the proper state of affairs. Given such an absence of reason, certain acts usually condemned as immoral have the potential to become moral if performed for the right reasons. Certain forms of larceny and fraud fall into this category.
10. Any free-thinking individual must do everything within their power to escape the obscene working conditions that prevail in the free-market system. This is equivalent to, and no less imperative than, for example, fleeing your country because it has descended into war.
11. Certain acts of labour are necessary and society must acknowledge those who perform them. That this acknowledgment must be financial in nature is an assumption whose basis in reality has not yet been demonstrated to any satisfactory extent.
12. When money is the sole objective of an action, a certain degree of idiocy is inevitable.
13. Money shows its true face in the context of mass production. There, it becomes clear that money necessarily poisons all that it touches.
14. Every advertisement could be replaced with a work of art.
15. The state requires that an individual be in possession of a certain amount of the currency that it has itself created and controlled the distribution of. The only moral argument for such an arrangement is that it would seem to encourage an individual to contribute a certain amount of his or her labour to society. However, one may nonetheless obtain money through means no less legal but in no way related to the performance of labour as it has been thus far defined. No limits have been placed upon these means, or those who exploit them.
16. If Members of Parliament wish to order millions of people to “participate in the national economy,” then it is surely only fair that they should themselves contribute a certain number of hours of labour to the “necessary” factories, offices, and kitchens that they have forced into existence.
17. There is no good reason for governments not to introduce the concept of a “maximum wage” into law, with the parallel dictum of a “minimum wage” existing at a level not far underneath. The result would be societies of relative material equality in which both excessive wealth and poverty would have no place.
18. The horror of menial work as currently practised should not be underestimated. To spend forty hours a week or more engaged in unceasing cycles of senseless repetition, as do most human beings, is a destructive form of existence for anyone to have to endure.
19. In a more just and sane society it would be compulsory to partake in forms of whichever necessary menial work existed, distributing the quotas of such work fairly, whilst simultaneously providing the opportunity for educational and creative pursuits on a no less equal basis.
20. Throughout its history, money has been synonymous with anxiety, intolerance, selfishness, anger, mistrust, and, of course, greed. That these states of mind are considered necessary consequences of the economic system in which we live is simply unacceptable. No system predicated upon such emotions can be considered salutary or, indeed, rational.
21. Money is the great patterning and organizing force in the world. It shapes the narratives within which most of us must live; it dictates the ways in which our bodies move and speak and think, thereby excluding an infinity of possible subjects and stances. We should attempt to challenge and overthrow these narratives.
(1952–1998)
Merely setting foot in the Dagenham printing works each morning was an activity that soon became loathsome to Maximilian. The proprietor of the business, one Mr. Bradley, was a corpulent white-haired man who was often engaged in the act of wiping sweat away from his forehead with a handkerchief. Most working days would see him sitting in his little office, fiddling around with figures in his notebook, or, simply, doing as little as he possibly could. Occasionally he would emerge from hiding in order to attend to his workers, frequently shouting abuse at them with a booming, guttural voice that challenged the roar and whir of the machinery by which they all were dominated.
In the evenings, Maximilian would shuffle back to his room, his clothes and hands covered with ink, his limbs aching from the day’s boredoms and exertions, his mind exhausted and spent. When in this state, he was barely capable of any intellectual activity at all. Slumping on his bed, dejected, he would stare vacantly up at the ceiling, following the elaborate maze of cracks gradually forming there. Lighting a cigarette, he would watch the smoke rise and curl into spirals before him as he attempted to marshal energies he usually found he no longer possessed.
After spending a couple of months teaching himself how to pick locks, Maximilian began to break into the printing works in the middle of the night. He was working on a private project, a pursuit which kept him almost as busy as his “real” work: learning the art of counterfeiting. It was only through counterfeiting that he saw any likelihood of obtaining freedom. In all, he spent just over a year breaking into the works, entirely between the hours of two and four A.M. on weekday evenings only, hours when he was certain to encounter no one, but which were nevertheless wracked with paranoia and adrenaline. Returning to the building later in the morning, he would fight through waves of exhaustion, doing his best to pretend that he was alert and attentive.
Once he felt assured of his abilities as a counterfeiter, he began to produce an enormous quantity of currency that he initially kept inside a number of boxes hoarded underneath his bed. Once these had accumulated to the extent that he could afford to buy his own printing press, as well as property in which to operate it, he would turn his back on the premises of Mr. Bradley. However, it seemed to take a preternaturally long time for that point to be reached. His progress was exceedingly, unexpectedly slow and many months of boredom and toil ensued, until it seemed as if each working day was spent sleepwalking, and that there would never be any end to his ordeal.
It was during this period that Maximilian first found himself drifting into a state of complete solitude. Wary of his pastime being discovered, he no longer allowed anyone to enter his room. Feeling a general contempt for the direction that society was taking, he turned his back on the very few friends that he had, eventually refusing all meetings without exception. After only a few months of this, he could no longer even contemplate any other way of living.
Finally, in March 1953, he believed that he had printed enough banknotes to resign from Bradley and Co. That spring, Maximilian made a number of preparations for his future. Visiting a tailor in Marylebone, he bought himself his first suit of any genuine quality. Attired thus he began to scour properties all over the East End, paying particular attention to the factor of privacy. Settling upon a warehouse overlooking Hackney Marshes, he soon installed the equipment that he required and began his lifelong task of printing a relentless stream of illegitimate banknotes.
By paying great attention to every last detail of design, as well as keeping abreast of every change enacted upon UK currency, Maximilian produced replicas that were so exact, so perfect in every respect, that only the most attentive and experienced of cashiers noticed that a given slip of paper being passed between one hand and another was not in fact the authentic work of the Bank of England. No business ever found itself in trouble on account of Maximilian’s actions. For forty-seven years he was entirely successful in using his notes without the slightest problem arising.
He took many elaborate precautions, of course, with the whole enterprise, not wanting to put the life that he was building for himself at risk. He would always wear a pair of leather gloves when handling the notes, and he was careful to wear only drab, plain clothes, always assuming an expression of bland contentment. His manner and appearance were so ordinary that it was almost impossible to remember him afterwards.
As a rule, he would never make a purchase in the same shop within a span of ten years. This required an enormous amount of travelling from one part of the city to another, an activity which he pursued doggedly on a regular basis for a number of decades, often passing through the hundreds of forgotten London suburbs, an itinerary that included Wanstead, Ilford, Barking, Bexley, Farnborough, Sidcup, Teddingon, Hayes, Ruislip, Stanmore, Enfield, Wanstead . . .
He only printed notes of a low denomination because these aroused fewer suspicions. When spent they would generate a great deal of legitimate small change which he would discreetly collect in his briefcase and then take back to deposit in one of the many crates of money that were secreted in his warehouse at Hackney Marshes. If he wished to make a major purchase, he would always draw upon his pile of legitimate currency, most of which found its way over time into one of the many bank accounts that he kept, each bearing relatively paltry sums.
Maximilian often marvelled that the majority of people pay so little attention to the money that passes through their hands. Few people bother to hold a banknote up to the light and examine just what it is they’re holding. This seemed more and more remarkable to him over time. How could so many manage to be blind to the forms that these slips of paper took?
Frequently, he found himself admiring the complexity of British banknote designs, particularly those which had arrived after the onset of decimalisation in 1971, an event which had necessitated several months of extremely hard work in order to produce suitable replicas. Only rarely did anyone consider that on the banknotes printed after this date the Queen mysteriously manages to maintain her youth; that on close scrutiny her eyes are revealed to be composed of a series of spirals, making her look like a victim of hypnosis; that detailed illustrations of various historical figures are made up of a complex series of colours, dots and lines; that the paper is thick and waxy, printed on a special cotton weave rarely encountered in any other context in British life; that each banknote has a separate number, a thin strip of silver, a watermark, a shining hologram; that on each side of each banknote a variety of different typefaces are employed—sometimes for the space of a single word alone; and that on each banknote is printed the phrase “I Promise to Pay the Bearer”—an entirely out-dated reference to the origins of paper money as simple promissory notes . . .
Maximilian often had cause to consider all of this. He came to the conclusion that to even notice such details was to challenge the moral authority of the banknote. Thoughts such as his might potentially move an individual towards the idea that their banknotes could exist in different forms, that, indeed, they did not have to appear in the world at all. Which is not a line of thinking that most citizens want to pursue for very long. Perhaps because it leads in short order to feelings of confusion and anger, to feelings of alienation, to a sense of separation from all of the many other people willing to accept the role of the banknote within their lives. Maximilian presumed that most people were anxious to protect themselves from the cognitive dissonance that might be caused by pursuing the many potential convolutions of thought hidden beneath the surface of the world. Instead, he felt, everyone instinctively taught themselves to ask as few questions as possible, in the hope that this would bring as much lightness and prosperity as they were capable of attaining.
He never had any qualms about his career as a counterfeiter. Maximilian thought that it was absolutely necessary to challenge the moral authority of money. In his opinion such a system had to be held responsible for many instances of suffering, exclusion, degradation, ignorance, vanity, ugliness, violence, and poverty. In his own oblique way, by behaving as a criminal, he felt that he was staging a protest against this state of affairs.
Every time that he spent one of his own banknotes, he bought himself a newspaper. Over time he gathered these together on the second floor of his warehouse, arranging them in bundles and rows, carefully labelling them by month and year, keeping the tabloids separate from the broadsheets. The newspapers provided an index to his life. Sometimes he liked to walk from one end of the collection to the other, beginning in 1952 and ending in 1998. As he progressed, the colour of the paper gradually shifted from brown to yellow to white, with hundreds of barely discernible shades of each colour forming a spectrum of decay. The typefaces, layout and size of the words shifted with the whims of fashion. Photographs gradually took up more space, then became clearer, were eventually printed in colour. Society itself travelled from one era to another and then to another. Entire years and decades raced by in a matter of footsteps. His entire adult life was documented here and the memories that the newspapers provoked were different each time he ventured up to the second floor.
To enter the newspaper room he had to pass through a narrow trapdoor, his head peeping into the long cone of light thrown from the only window. Atoms of dust would rise in drifting circles, waver softly in the gaseous brown air, settle onto forgotten objects. He spent many hours there alone, idling. Hours when he would trace a finger over surfaces, following patterns and shapes found in the skin of the floors and walls. The smell of ancient paper mingled with the dust and rotting carpets. The room was lit by a single bare lightbulb precariously dangling from a thin length of wire. In odd moments of inspiration he had scrawled flurries of words in pencil on to the dirty beige walls. These were sometimes quotations from the news stories he had read, their dates and page numbers written at the bottom and circled. On other occasions he wrote hurried passages and fragments inspired by literary works.
His collection of newspapers became a resource that he would consult with regard to a multitude of purposes. If he wanted to generate ideas, objects, or phrases at random he would choose a particular date and then open the relevant newspaper to see what it contained. When, on a given evening, he wished to remember a certain year, he would go upstairs and linger in the attic. He found that it was the incidental details that most stimulated his interest and provoked the most potent memories. The choice of certain words, a particular font, the cut of a dress in a photograph, these could all bring back the look and feel of a particular year or period, evoking the often unconscious textures and attitudes he had absorbed, though not always aware of them at the time.
He never cut out any clippings from the papers; he found that he preferred the beauty of a complete and untarnished issue. He cherished the illusion of being able to open a newspaper “as if upon the day itself”. This constituted one of his principal and favourite methods of time travel. When he concentrated, he was capable of convincing himself that he had actually taken up residence in a past year. It came down to nothing more than playing some music recorded in that year, looking over some old photographs, reading the relevant newspaper. And there it was, the year existed once more. If he then spent the rest of the day indoors and busied himself with a task that could conceivably have occurred in 1956, then for all intents and purposes he had successfully transported himself to 1956. Once more he would find himself living through its many pleasures and disappointments.
Surveying the many stacks of paper, Maximilian would often grin. It was a matter of some satisfaction to him that his activities in this one particular, not especially auspicious building had opened into a multitude of other events, stretching far beyond the boundaries of the present moment. From here he had begun to construct his own invisible world. All that he had known after a certain age had found its origins in this location.
Details of Some Principal Coordinates
(1953)
Parliament Hill, NW3
On five occasions that summer, Maximilian ventured here at night, bringing a deckchair with him, in which he would sit for some hours, gazing down upon the city spread-eagled below, forming a series of irreverent Morse code messages with a heavy torch.
17 Bisham Gardens, N6
Where through the front window Maximilian had once seen an enormously obese man, wearing a pink bowtie and white braces, being given a singing lesson by a teacher possessing a rather stern countenance, who was seemingly fond of jabbing his fingers into the air and making many excited remarks in Italian.
Putney Library, SW15
One of Maximilian’s principal haunts at this time, where he would often leaf through a standard guide to astronomy of the period, a volume which he had not been able to locate at any other venue and which contained particularly beautiful illustrations of comets.
133 Amhurst Road, E8
Location of a public house which Maximilian always entered when following a route that he frequently walked that year (a walk that was planned to every last detail, which was circular, and which he only took on Saturday afternoons, the day and time for which it had been expressly intended).
Brompton Cemetery, SW10
The place in which Maximilian had decided he would most like to be buried. This was due to the cemetery’s centrality, relative modesty, and the beauty it offered the visitor when approached at dusk in winter.
314 Grove Green Road, E11
A junk shop with window displays that Maximilian was often drawn to because of their absolute lack of order and decorum, indeed of any sense of composition whatsoever. Certain fascinating objects remained in perpetual window repertory, and of these Maximilian became particularly fixated upon a wooden figurine of a Japanese dancer, dressed in a navy-blue kimono, one foot lifted, frozen in air, its left hand clutching a pink chrysanthemum.
12 Caversham Road, NW5
Maximilian saw the head of one of the residents of this property briefly emerge from a window, an image perceived through a pair of binoculars after an extensive series of rovings through doorways, drainpipes, steeples, and chimneys.
The Oval, SE11
Maximilian enjoyed spending the entire day here during cricket matches, being ostentatiously preoccupied with anything other than sport. He would sunbathe, watch the animated faces of the many gathered spectators, eat packets of nuts, and read novels, but only rarely would he pay any attention to the vicissitudes of the cricketers parading in the foreground. As far as he was concerned, their presence was required to provide an ambience that would flavour his other, more pressing activities.
96 South Ealing Road, W5
A tailor’s shop, home to a mannequin that Maximilian felt bore a startling facial resemblance to him. He liked to come and visit this individual, almost a perfected version of himself, physically speaking, and compare his own sartorial choices and general demeanour with that of his double.
6 Isabella Street, SE1
Final destination of a paper aeroplane bearing a handwritten message whose trajectory commenced within the immediate proximity of an adjacent address, and which, in the event, was encountered by no one other than Maximilian himself, who was engaged in a preliminary attempt at paper aeroplane making and throwing, and was in fact disappointed by the results of his efforts.
16 Blackhorse Lane, E17
Site of a café where Maximilian would occasionally dine, amongst clattering chairs, steam risings, stained mirrors, tables which each held a single occupant. He would gape at the void of his reflection, sitting through many dead idle hours.
8 Ballast Quay, SE10
Approximate source of an extended chain of considerations arising from the glimpsing of a turtle-shaped ocarina, which Maximilian had seen displayed in the front window of this property.
43 Roman Road, E2
Premises to which Maximilian would travel especially in order to communicate with a pair of blue-throated macaws, creatures with whom he felt he had begun to develop an affinity.
83 Blomfield Road, W2
Address to which Maximilian sent a mysterious chain of correspondence to an unseen recipient bearing the alias of “Jonah Plinkerton,” an individual who claimed to have once been involved in the manufacturing of fondue-sets. After a prolonged dialogue about eighteenth-century fountain design, their letters eventually turned to detailed considerations of the representation of snails throughout the history of painting.
Camberwell Baths, SE5
On the 19th of November that year, a phial of green ink was opened in the swimming pool at this location, an act performed purely to facilitate aesthetic contemplation. Afterwards, a large compensatory cash donation was sent to the council anonymously, with an accompanying letter of apology and explanation, but the ideas and terminologies employed in the text were found lamentably impenetrable by the relevant authorities.
(1954–1976)
One of Maximilian’s first major acquisitions was an abandoned warehouse, located on the fringes of the city, in Edgware. At first he had not been entirely certain of the use to which he intended to put it, but a number of ideas occurred to him, and he enjoyed visiting the building regularly and dreaming of its potential.
Empty for many years now, the space had gradually fallen into a state of dereliction. It had once been a paint factory, but all of the machinery had long since been sold, and the only trace of its previous use at the time of purchase was a vague lingering odour of paint, somehow still embedded in certain pockets of air, from which it never seemed to leave, being clearly detectable for many years to come.
Maximilian enjoyed observing the forms of decay present in the property, and he spent many afternoons pacing back and forth through the space, often with no definite intentions in mind, sometimes even sitting at a single fixed point for many hours at a time, so that he became intimately acquainted with the building’s atmosphere and dimensions, its many interior vantage points, the uses it presented to him.
During the daylight hours, cold light would stream down into the expanses of the building through the enormous dirt-spattered slates of frosted glass that were fixed into its high, vaulted ceilings. Black weeds poked through the thick cracks that had formed in the walls, withering and drooping amongst a canvas of scratches and stains. Certain windows had been broken, leaving glass fangs protruding, as well as gouges that invited the entrance of cold drifts of air. Pipes emerged from the walls tentatively, decided on a definite course, curved for some distance in a new direction, and finally disappeared into other walls. Oily-feathered pigeons nested at the top of flaking iron columns, spraying down patterns of white shit that accrued and hardened over time. In one room the floors were coated with a thin layer of orange dust. Traces of the old factory workers were present in the form of short trails of footprints, mysterious tracks which faded away almost as soon as they commenced.
Finally Maximilian decided that he would dedicate these new premises to sculpture. To a single, giant sculpture, in fact. Commencing at floor-level, he would work on the project for many years, gradually building layer after layer, working his way up in a growing sprawl of forms, multiplying and sprouting strange protrusions, utilizing a vast array of different materials, until he had finally reached the ceiling. Each layer would be roughly the same height, representing the duration of a given year, with materials and objects discovered and purchased only during that period. Ladders would extend far into the air, reaching into the midst of the sculpture, leading towards a number of walking platforms that any potential visitors would be able to use. By the time that the sculpture was completed, the earliest parts would look worn and frayed, would be relics from the past already capable of provoking forgotten memories, vanished moments of life. It would not be long before the piece became an exercise in belaboured nostalgia.
Tending to be a slow worker, he spent many months away from the warehouse whenever he lost interest in the project, before returning to it with great energy. Once he had again become absorbed in the process, he would spend up to ten hours a day working on tiny details, attempting strange new juxtapositions, tinkering with small matters of form, attaching a miscellany of random objects to the central frame. In winter he could often see his breath appearing and dissolving in front of him as he worked. Shivering, he would rub his hands together or jump up and down on the spot until he felt certain of a vague modicum of warmth returning to his extremities. Despite the many difficulties involved, he came to feel a strange joy in the hard labour that such conditions required from him. Lost in the rhythms of his work, he would frequently return home late at night with weary limbs and a genuine sense of achievement, having forgotten all his other ambitions in the meantime.
He’d soon gathered together a vast collection of tools for this project. They were laid out on a large cotton sheet in a series of carefully ordered rows. Every imaginable object that he could potentially need lay there waiting for its moment of use. Saws, chisels, drills, mallets, brushes, clamps, ladders, boxes of nails, scaffolding poles, pairs of overalls, as well as hundreds of tins and bottles filled with every imaginable liquid, gel, powder. As time went on he became eager to add to his supplies at any given opportunity, purchasing any likely objects with the enthusiasm of a child collecting toys. There was a particular pleasure to be felt at reaching for the correct tool at a given moment out of instinct alone, and Maximilian often found himself grasping it in his hands before he had even decided what its precise purpose would be.
At first the sculpture seemed very small and insubstantial to him. For a number of years it had hardly gained any altitude whatever, seeming almost pathetic, a grand folly, waiting to collapse on him at any given moment. On many occasions he wondered if he was actually capable of achieving what he had set out to accomplish here, becoming frustrated by his lack of technical skill, and by the enormous lengths of time it took him to complete anything of even the slightest complexity. However, when he found himself assailed with doubts he would somehow still discover the strength necessary to continue his work, and finally, whenever he reasoned with himself, he could find no other purpose for continuing to live his life other than to proceed with his acts of creation. So he persevered.
Whilst he was working he would always leave a gramophone playing in a corner of the room. For many years he favoured selections of jazz whilst sculpting, a form of music new enough to him that it caused a riot of different sensations, even desires, to rear up inside, until, running out of space, they fought with each other in the pit of his stomach, as Maximilian followed the jagged rhythms with the movements of his hands, often stopping altogether and getting down from his ladder before a song had ended, so that he wouldn’t have to face even a moment of silence. It was always of great importance to maintain the momentum that he had established. As the work progressed, he would look back at what he had completed from time to time and find that certain fragments of melody, nearly forgotten, would return to him with extraordinary force, along with other memories of the period when the music had first struck him.
After many years, he began to detect patterns in his thinking, objects and symbols that repeated. He eventually realized that he had a predilection for circles, spirals, vertical lines, particular shades of blue, and objects that were in some way related to the sky. He began to place his symbols more consciously and commenced composition of a voluminous series of notes, describing in great detail his own interpretations of the sculpture, recording where each separate component had been obtained, what he knew of its origins and why he felt he had chosen it. All of these notes were kept in a single heavy ledger bound in red leather. Adding to its pages on a regular basis, it soon became an obsession for Maximilian to give his entries as much detail as possible, so that if the piece should ever have an audience they would be able to have access to some of its possible meanings, as well as what the sculptor had felt to be his essential motivations. Despite this general attention to specifics, the piece never did acquire a name. Maximilian felt that a title might limit the scope of what it could potentially say.
Once he had reached the end of each day’s work he would usually sit slumped against the wall at the far end of the warehouse, listening to a record, a bottle of water in his hand, staring at the sculpture and trying to gauge the progress he had made. When he was in one of his productive periods, he was eager each morning to return to the warehouse and look over how much he had managed to accumulate, to guess where the work would be leading him in the future. Once engaged with the work, he never allowed himself to stop until nightfall; then he would watch as the sculpture threw shadows across the floor at odd angles, a dark maze of contortions, alien shapes of irregular size, jarring lines liable to extend or break in any given direction.
Tall, snaking tubes writhed upwards, tangling with each other, stretching to infinity; a trellis of steel antennae threw dark scratchy webs across the vast concrete floors; the rotting husks of several cars were piled on top of each other, rust-brown and flaking; clay sculptures of white tortoises ascended for many metres before gradually diminishing into air; broken leather bus seats were pocked with holes that revealed the coils of horsehair within; aeroplane propellers were fixed to gargantuan machines of purely ornamental value, formed from random fragments of scrap metal; hundreds of glass pipes channelled a continuous stream of water from the warehouse’s mains, collecting it into a series of porcelain receptacles arrayed across the floor; directionless staircases hurried towards the horizon with no sense of decorum; pairs of giant, tattered wings were attached to the grotesque forms of unknown creatures; straggling tubular foam tentacles grasped for invisible treasures; orifices gaped at random intervals, inspiring hopes of never emergent eggs; a leather aviator’s helmet was placed upon the head of a naked mannequin wearing a blonde wig, its lips red with lipstick; looping pathways led towards pinnacles of spiky protrusions; paraphernalia associated with a variety of airlines had been strewn across the entirety of the piece, hanging precariously from one or another pole or hook; numbers were inscribed in blue chalk on a wooden doorway that was dangling from a length of rope; small birds of many varieties, carefully worked upon by taxidermists, were mounted on a series of plinths; antique telephones bore intimations of forgotten conversations; price tags were attached to wisps of air; monocles, ear trumpets, and gloves made fleeting appearances; toothbrushes once belonging to sailors were glued to a variety of surfaces; reels of celluloid stored in a series of canisters could be taken down and projected; crinkly bunches of blue cellophane gleamed with fluorescent light; kites bearing proverbs and inscriptions flew upwards, caught in their flight by the debris surrounding them; a broken piano was covered in plastic spiders; typewriters held sheets of paper that were almost blank; it felt, in brief, as if very little of interest had been omitted.
When he examined the sculpture Maximilian would often discover patterns created entirely by chance, by the whims of his mind, finding meanings that he felt he had not previously understood, hidden forms that lay within forms, entities he had not realised the existence of. Faces could be discovered in the fissures and gouges: soft masses of hair, weird hypnotic eyes, cruel jutting mouths. On one forehead he could detect a single tiny, bulbous wart. If he stared even more intently, he could see sweeping black jagged mountain ranges like rows of dislocated giant’s teeth, and swarming galaxies burning and sparkling in vivid hues and colours.
Many of the objects were attached to the whole only precariously, swinging on hooks, balanced on top of one another, hanging in place by the grace of thin lengths of blue string. A number of the sculpture’s components would creak and rattle as billows of wind drifted through the broken windows and the enormous openings that stood like solemn sentinels at either end of the building.
In one sense, Maximilian felt that the piece could never really be completed. As long as he was alive, it would always be possible for him to return to the warehouse, to add further layers, to let its forms expand outwards. There was enough space in the warehouse for the sculpture to grow to at least five times its current size. But he sensed he had to reach some point of termination in order to feel that his efforts had led somewhere in particular.
After finally reaching the ceiling in 1973, it seemed clear that he should soon declare the project finished, but some manic inner urge kept him working for another three years, until one morning in August, 1976, he finally became bored whilst nailing some planks of wood together. Stopping his work for a moment, he turned around and looked out at the world outside, seeing the morning sunlight drift and scatter through the rustling leaves of a beech tree in the back garden of a house that bordered his property. Descending from his ladder, he carefully placed his hammer and nails with the other tools on the dirty cotton sheet that lay on the floor, and then walked all the way to Hyde Park, where in the late afternoon he hired a rowing boat and paddled himself in long languid circles around the Serpentine, smiling benevolently at families as they passed him in pedalos, dimly aware of the distant roaring of the city as prickly droplets of sweat broke out across his forehead and under his armpits, allowing himself to bathe within the generous enveloping heat that had fallen upon everyone without warning that day, all the while gradually becoming aware that such occasions can never be repeated, because they occur almost as rarely as events which are not possible at all. And after that, he never returned to the paint factory again.
Aspirations to a Complete Inventory
(1955)
Amongst other things, Maximilian experienced the following that year:
3 badminton tournaments attended with mild curiosity;
5 buttons lost from shirts;
9 rides undertaken on Ferris wheels;
12 vivid colour photographs observed in the throes of fever;
17 circles drawn around particular dates on a wall calendar purchased for a discounted sum in early February;
23 ships in bottles;
78 potentially supernatural occurrences causing shivering motions to pass through his limbs and bones;
116 dreams featuring a peacock feather placed upon a red velvet chaise longue;
211 mathematical sums completed with relative accuracy;
328 park benches sat upon briefly whilst experiencing states of serious contemplation;
692 creases formed within the leather stretched across a pair of black boots;
937 moments of slight regret;
1,023 bus journeys to a variety of locations;
2,341 numbers heard called out in desolate bingo halls;
3,297 separate occasions on which he considered growing a beard, but thought better of it;
4,684 instances of wriggling his toes with pleasure;
23,497 minutes spent gazing listlessly at walls holding no particular interest for anyone;
46,319 steps belonging to staircases ascended;
81,682 flurries of steam emerging from his bathtub;
278,341 moments of finding things more or less unendurable; 356,986 blades of grass trodden upon with firm feet;
541,095 vertical lines observed forming deliberate patterns;
672,984 glances thrown at the face of his wristwatch in order to obtain knowledge of the positions of its hands relative to the circumference of the dial;
985,431 approximations of entities discerned on overcast Mondays;
1,762,298 repetitions of events that he found familiar, warming and comfortable;
3,173,902 doubts that his life had yet obtained a meaningful purpose or direction;
4,876,325 streams of bubbles encountered in mid-ascent through tall glasses filled with liquid intended for his refreshment, and for which purpose were being held in his right hand;
5,287,781 things impossible to analyse with absolute precision.
Writings in the Mode of Realism
(1956–1989)
During the course of his life Maximilian completed only one book. This came to be the project that he laboured on more intensively than any other, as he obsessively undertook library researches for each subject that he wrote about. From early on in the life of its composition he decided to call it simply The Book of Essays. Once finished it would be exactly one thousand pages long and would contain precisely one hundred essays, each consisting of exactly ten pages. They were essays about mirrors, pencils, magnets, centipedes, electricity, poker, banjos, silk, eels, make-up, cigars, ears, phenomenology, spaghetti, gin, astrology, string, cacti, karate, ophthalmology, semaphore, cinnamon, tattoos, hoaxes, planetariums, bones, surfing, earrings, ventriloquism, martyrs, whistling, curtains, justice, trombones, gunpowder, hats, swamps, Andorra, vases, adolescence, railways, nylon, shelves, bowling, doubt, glaciers, jumping, triangles, chance, steam, brass, sandals, go-karts, denial, superstition, gas, basements, advertising, truth, trout, bubbles, shadows, typography, lightbulbs, melancholia, plastic, acrobats, assonance, dots, houses, clay, benevolence, canoes, buttons, locusts, bells, apples, synthesizers, backgammon, saliva, bureaucracy, algae, aspirins, cuneiform, paint, magicians, noses, ponds, helicopters, melodrama, yachts, arrows, unicycles, radars, classification, singing, lampshades, serenity, riddles, and essays.
The style of the essays varied greatly. On occasion he would reveal little-known facts about the subject under discussion, assembling concise, truncated histories occasionally spanning several millennia in the course of a paragraph or two. Other attempts at the form would see him forming philosophical interpretations of the “meaning” of a given subject, rather than its material circumstances, employing examples from his own biography and mingling them with arguments that frequently involved a series of wild speculations and abstractions in an attempt to bring common assumptions into doubt. Equally, an essay might focus on a single instance of an object’s manifestation in the world, building a tower of anecdotal surmises from nothing more than the way in which a vase was placed upon a table, or the manner in which a wall had been daubed with its particular shade of paint. Indeed, a few of his essays mentioned their “subjects” only in passing, hiding them within sentences focused on other matters, so that the often ambivalent relationships existing between one thing and another were opened up to potential scrutiny and wonderment. Any possible interpretation of a subject could be included, if only in a brief aside, existing as a stray fact standing at a moderate distance from the central narrative. In the end, Maximilian used so many different approaches to writing that his repertoire began to feel inexhaustible.
He soon became lost in trails of facts, in pages of library volumes teeming with unknown stories of individuals who had managed to instate themselves at the fringes of significance. Etymologies, distant years, Greek myths, quotations attributed to celebrated figures—there was no end to such trivia. A single bibliography could lead to hundreds if not thousands of new texts, which could in turn lead to thousands more. Maximilian would read through these books in perfect happiness for some months, gradually acquiring a mass of material before he was finally ready to commit himself to paper and declare his thoughts on a subject for posterity.
Once such a point had been reached he would seat himself with straight-backed solemnity, at the centre of the British Museum Reading Room, staring at the blank sheets lying before him, attempting to gather his forces and invoke the muses, until he felt that the optimum moment had arrived for unleashing a torrent of words. He would then generally spend the next ten hours writing, barely stopping to rest. After working in this manner for a few days he would scrutinize every word he had written and then destroy nearly all of them. Twenty or even thirty drafts of each essay seemed necessary in order to reach the pitch of perfection that he believed was required; but once a point of termination had been attained, there was no turning back. Every year he wrote three new essays. All of the completed works were stored inside a rectangular rosewood box that he kept at the foot of his bed. Once in the box, he would never again return to the subject of a particular essay, neither in thought nor on paper.
Each essay was a feat that did not have to take place, that might never have come into being were it not for the chance conglomeration of a strange series of events and persons. He always chose his subjects at the beginning of the year, at first relying on one of a number of different methods of selection by chance. It pleased him, at first, for his subjects to be chosen in this way, so that each essay would stand as evidence of the whims of fate dictated to him in a given period. Some years saw him opening obscure manuals at random simply in order to seize upon a particular noun. Other years saw him utilizing a pack of playing cards and a series of dice rolls. On one occasion he asked a bemused pedestrian to name the first three household objects that came to mind. A coincidence, a moment’s flippant thought, could mushroom into hundreds of hours of diligent writing and research, until Maximilian possessed so great an overabundance of knowledge on certain subjects that it came close to being entirely useless. After a few years he was to learn that these aleatoric methods of selecting subjects were not enough to engage him, that he would need to discover suitably inspiring subjects in order to find the will to continue his efforts, as the energy and devotion that were needed to complete an entire essay were always considerable.
With the first essay he wrote, on mirrors, he found himself plunged into a proliferating universe of reflections and doublings, soon realising that he was studying a subject that involved every last single entity that was visible, including the infinity of things only barely perceptible to the human eye. He learnt of many facts; that “catoptromancy” was the name given to acts of divining performed by staring into a mirror; that Pythagoras was a devotee of this art, said to possess a mirror that he held up to the moon before reading the future in it; that the Aztecs had performed human sacrifices to a god named Tezcatlipoca, who had a mirror in place of a right foot and wore a mask containing eyes of reflective pyrite; that the ancient Chinese believed mirrors could be used as a charm to ward off evil spirits; that Louis XIV had owned 563 mirrors; that Asian elephants are capable of recognizing their own features in mirrors but that African elephants are not; that in 1781 the planet Uranus had been discovered by Sir William Herschel after he had built a telescope containing a parabolic mirror measuring six and a half inches in diameter. Ignoring all mention of psychology, his essay gravitated instead toward mysticism, exploring the fantastical realms supposedly contained within the frenzy of reflection. He concluded his essay with a number of bold statements about the “transcendental leaps of perception” possible for the individual who truly apprehends and understands the meaning of mirrors.
Naturally, he next turned his attentions towards the subject of pencils. He focused on the fragile and ephemeral nature of the object, expressing his anger at the common assertion that graphite should be considered inferior to ink because it is usually used to leave mere temporary traces and footnotes rather than indelible markings and incisions. Subsequently, he argued, pencils had been overlooked and taken for granted by society, which only rarely gave them the credit they undoubtedly deserved. He was at pains to point out how complicated the act of making a pencil was, citing the fact that a single modern pencil goes through about one hundred and twenty-five separate manufacturing processes before being put onto the market. Discussing the early history of the pencil, he told his prospective readers that for hundreds of years there had only been a single mine in all of Europe where graphite of a suitable quality for making pencils could be found. This was at the Borrowdale estate, in Cumber-land, a resource that had been so precious it was frequently subject to thievery and was for many years protected at all times by a steward armed with two blunderbusses.
In the autumn he undertook a sustained consideration of magnets. Firstly, he discussed the origins of the word “magnet,” its probable emergence from Greco-Roman antiquity, specifically from a town in what was then known as “Asia Minor,” named “Magnesia ad Sipylum,” standing adjacent to Mount Sipylus, the source of the ores which were used to create the first magnets, objects that originally bore the name magnetes, later evolving into magnitis. Next, he discussed individuals of the Victorian period who had claimed to live within bodies that possessed magnetic properties, so that they could make spoons, irons, and kettles stick to their outstretched limbs. Additionally, he outlined the theories of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, later known as Paracelsus (although both names were pseudonyms) a man who was a physician, botanist, alchemist, and astrologer who wandered relentlessly throughout Europe in the early sixteenth century. He had proposed the theory that magnets possessed magical healing properties, believing that magnetic forces could “draw out” diseases from the body. Maximilian’s essay was founded on a great deal of conjecture.
In writing the essays, he wished to be continuously uncovering new layers of reality so that he might always have new ways in which to experience his everyday life. Each topic he took up hid a multitude of stories, and in the course of his research he would discover some of them, rooting them out from the murk of obscurity before depositing them into the deeper obscurity of his unknown manuscript, where they were destined to reside, neglected, for many years to come. Working on the essays fed his limitless curiosity for facts, and for encyclopaedic classifications of the world.
He believed that it was sufficient to produce a single book during the course of a lifetime. If anyone managed to write a single work of any lasting interest they would have succeeded in embellishing their existence with a little meaning, even if the work were to remain relatively obscure. In some ways he supposed that it might be preferable for every author to be restricted to the writing of a single book, as this would perhaps focus each author’s mind upon the importance of the task being undertaken. Surely far fewer minor works would be written under such conditions, and there might be far greater variety, with less insistence upon the dictates of genre. Perhaps every book would then become interesting simply because it was a document of how a given individual had chosen to express his or her lifetime within lines of print. Maximilian thought that if this had been instated as one of the cardinal rules of literature many centuries previously, then perhaps the entire course of the development of civilisation might have been different. Egotism, competition, and hierarchy might have been replaced with a sense of sharing and equality, at least within the confines of the literary realm.
He learnt so many things. He learnt that the first go-kart was invented by Art Ingels, in California, in 1956; that the tallest species of cactus is Pachycereus pringlei, which has been known to grow up to 19.2 metres tall; that the oldest known canoe is from the village of Pesse in the Netherlands and was constructed at some point between 8200 and 7600 BC; that the word “telephone” is derived from the Greek tele (far) and phone (voice); that in 1874 the daily newspaper the New York Herald had published a front-page article claiming that animals had escaped from their cages in the Central Park Zoo; that the source of cinnamon (Ceylon) had been kept secret by spice traders in the Mediterranean for centuries in order to protect their monopoly on the substance; that radars were first patented in France, in 1934, by Émile Girardeau, receiving French patent no. 788795; that there are approximately eight hundred different species of eel; that since 1979 the World Backgammon Championship has taken place every year in the Monte Carlo Grand Hotel in Monaco; that the first plants on earth evolved from shallow freshwater algae in the region of four hundred million years ago.
General Advertisement to the Locality
(1957)
Maximilian stuck the following notice to the centre of an unlocked door that led from the street into a property that he owned in Islington:
PREPARATORY NOTES TOWARDS A GENERAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE SITUATION WHICH YOU FIND YOURSELF IN
initially it is probably worth remarking that you may well have been followed today. it frequently happens to people who end up reading this notice. if it didn’t happen today, then most likely it did the day before, or perhaps it will happen tomorrow. the sole inhabitant of this household delights in following others through the streets and observing their habits and rituals. he studies mannerisms, listens to conversations, observes the goods and services which individuals choose to purchase.
all newcomers are advised that any cheering messages, cryptic intimations, secret bulletins and genuine grievances may be placed in the letterbox below. you can live secure in the knowledge that they will be received kindly and attended to with heartfelt thought and ceremony. written communications are treated with utmost respect in the place before which you are currently standing.
it is true to say that if you stare at a thing hard enough, paying very careful attention to what lies before you, that thing (anything) can become transformed into another entity altogether. a similar thing occurs when you repeat a word to yourself aloud enough times. the concrete meaning of the word blurs and eventually disappears. the sound becomes mere babble, a series of rhythmical noises. somehow this sound has taken possession of a thing we have mutually agreed is knowable, tangible and commonly understood. this moment of your reading of these words on this door might be the time to commence an experiment related to this phenomenon.
after reading this notice, perhaps fifty times, you may find that many of your ideas about what a door is will have shifted inalterably. this might be an experience that you would find rewarding.
A CONCISE EXPLORATION OF WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU WALK THROUGH A DOOR
we open doors and walk through them. we move from one place to another. when we open a door we expect to find certain things there. for most people it is a rare thing to walk through unknown doors. perhaps, when we do walk through a door for the first time, it should be regarded as a privilege. in doing so, in taking these steps, we have obtained access to another room, another fragment of the world.
rooms are often very similar to each other, but it is impossible for rooms to be identical to one another. at the very least they can never occupy the same positions in space. when walking through doors we should attend to the differences we can see in the space beyond them, however small these differences may be. we should always try to enjoy things that are unfamiliar to us. life should contain, amongst other things, a long series of adventures in which our ideas about ourselves and the nature of the world evolve continuously. this can begin to happen whenever we open a door, if we walk through a door in possession of the knowledge that we are walking through a door. we will only discover ourselves in our encountering the unknown. every door we arrive at offers this possibility.
doors are usually viewed from the outside. in this role, as an object-to-be-viewed-from-the-outside, for a moment or so, they are neutral objects, hiding nothing remarkable. consequently, doors frequently find themselves engaged in the act of looking as ordinary and respectable as possible. but let us not forget that doors are more significant entities than is commonly accepted.
AN OUTLINE OF WHAT YOU MIGHT EXPECT TO FIND ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS PARTICULAR DOOR
unusual things lie behind this door. amongst them are articles which possess the ability to shock, jolt, quicken, abstract. you may wish to encounter them. in particular, those of you who enjoy collecting cigarette cards will find a great deal to enjoy.
at least accept that in choosing to NOT open this door you are enacting a protest against curiosity. you will remain forever bereft of this particular form of knowledge.
nevertheless, it may be worth remembering that almost every door we encounter in our lives will remain closed to us. there are reasons for this, although it is not always clear what they are. but we should be mindful nonetheless that there are a great many consequences arising from this fact.
A CERTAIN FEELING OF CAUTION IT MIGHT BE WISE TO ADOPT BEFORE PROCEEDING ANY FURTHER
it would be wise for readers of this notice to consider the many possibilities present when one is still at the stage of anticipation. it is not always better to rush ahead, to be in a hurry to begin.
if you decided to walk away from this notice and only return once your anticipation had peaked, when it became impossible to stand the tension any longer, perhaps your enjoyment would also be increased. using this technique it would then become possible to imagine what lies beyond this notice and so invent your own room, which in your imagination may well seem a more perfect room than the one which you might actually encounter. this perfection can linger as long as you will allow it to and need never be shattered. to walk through the door now will only result in the disappointment of it being different from the ideal room that you will have fashioned in your mind.
still, a confrontation with the actual, tangible truth is surely preferable to fanciful flights of the imagination. perhaps you should simply discover what lies beyond the door and accept it for what it is.
THE ACCURACY OF PREDICTIONS BASED ON ACTS OF INTUITION
it might be possible for you to guess what lies beyond this door. or perhaps ’deduce’ is the more appropriate term. you would be working from nothing more than various clues left in this notice. you would have become a sort of detective. not that there is anything deliberately hidden in these words. there is certainly no elaborate system of hints for you to follow in order to guess what lies beyond the door. i am only suggesting that it may be, in theory, possible for you to anticipate with some degree of accuracy what you will find on the other side.
if you do successfully manage to intuit what lies beyond the door i hope you will be made happy by finding your suspicions verified. considering the vast unlikelihood of this happening, i hope you might, in that instance, venture to take it as a particularly positive omen.
it is difficult to gauge precisely from where our intuition arises. perhaps what we refer to as intuition is in part an entirely rational process involving the ordering of facts of which we are already in possession. using these facts we grasp at the most likely possibilities through processes that are concealed from our conscious minds, employing a series of no-less-analytical and precise methodologies and forms of reasoning that we have however long since interiorised and forgotten.
this couldn’t of course account for those things that are wholly unknown to us but of which we still manage somehow to grasp the truth. even if it is only a truth perceived vaguely, opaquely, seemingly untrustworthy. somehow, within this fog, we nonetheless arrive, sometimes, at the facts.
A COMPARISON OF THIS DOOR WITH EVERY OTHER DOOR IN THE WORLD
perhaps every door in the world has its own piece of writing, of a more or less similar length to the one you are now reading, scrawled in invisible letters across its surface. each such notice is doubtless different from every other, just as no two snowflakes are the same and no two people, etc. each notice presumably corresponds to the people who live behind each door, or the people who have lived there in times past, to the things that have been done there and the words which have been spoken inside.
perhaps, in each case, the words are waiting to be written, already existing, tentatively, in an indefinite future. these words are waiting to be caught and pulled from the air and brought to rest upon a series of notices like the one you are now reading.
in many cases this writing should probably remain invisible. imagine if words suddenly appeared upon the surface of every door in the world. the weight of the world would increase to an enormous extent!
so many subsequent actions would be affected. the continual temptation to ”read” every doorway might cause an epidemic of indecision and doubt. it would take some time for humanity to adjust and feel comfortable in such an environment.
gauging the relative importance of each notice would be a difficult enterprise. going about from day to day, completing one’s chores and necessities, as one did previously, might suddenly seem an insurmountable task.
it feels almost immoral to go about encouraging such forms of behaviour.
feel content in the knowledge that writing will only appear on doors as and when it will. this will happen from time to time. that is the way of these things.
(1958–1959)
For a relatively short period of time, Maximilian became addicted to a strange practice for which he never coined a name. He wondered if, in fact, he was the first human being to engage in this activity, whatever it happened to be.
Riding underground trains during the afternoon rush hour periods, he would, for short durations of time, become the opposite of a pickpocket. With enormous care he would slip tiny objects into the pockets and bags of unsuspecting commuters. Sometimes these were merely slips of paper bearing quotations or messages that he had screwed up into tiny balls, often liable to be mistaken for pieces of litter. On other occasions he deposited small enamel lockets that opened to reveal picture puzzles cut out from the backs of matchboxes, or pieces of card upon which he had written lurid predictions of the distant future, or else discs the size of a fingernail emblazoned with barely perceptible swirling patterns and shiny-bright colours.
He would prepare these objects late at night, drawing the shadows and the hush of evening close around him before retiring to bed. Seated in an armchair, drowsy with the pull of dreams and oncoming sleep, he would find himself in a very particular mood, one in which his imagination felt free to wander far afield and grasp hold of new ideas. In some cases he would spend weeks preparing a single object, chipping away at its edges, licking it gently with a tiny paintbrush, holding it up to scrutiny through the lens of a magnifying glass. Whenever he had produced something that he felt especially proud of, he was very careful to reserve it for the “right” person, the individual for whom it would be most suitable, and who would, in turn, most deserve it.
Any object would do, so long as it was interesting enough, and then small enough not to be detected. This came to include examples of many tiny knick-knacks, odds and ends discovered in junk shops, in forgotten old shoeboxes, or lying discarded in heaps upon suburban street corners. It never ceased to bemuse Maximilian, the range of objects that he could find belonging to no one.
On the first occasions of his depositing these objects with strangers, he’d experienced exquisite feelings of fear. Nervous energy was generated by his constant thoughts of discovery. Specific scenes would play themselves over and over again in his mind. He could already hear the piercing shriek of a hysterical woman feeling him brush up against her. Suspicious eyes would fall upon him, to be followed by the indignity of being led away by policemen, who would proceed to interrogate him inside a small room without windows, where perhaps his counterfeiting activities would also be discovered. Nevertheless, nothing ever happened. Perhaps commuters were too preoccupied with thoughts of how they would spend their evenings to notice the subtle movements of his fingers.
For a brief period of time he attained a certain level of confidence and no longer worried about the possibility of being caught. However, it was an act that required a great degree of care and had to be performed at a tempo which would render his movements almost invisible, so that it seemed as if he had only given rise to a vague moment of shuffling or writhing that was indistinguishable from the many other anonymous movements of the crowd. He felt it was akin to a theatrical performance, one that had to be hidden from view, but which had originally needed as much practice and effort as that required by a stage actor. At first he would spend hours staring at himself in a tall mirror, mimicking his actions many times, until he became conscious of every last movement that he made, and was capable of manipulating his body into all manner of postures and poses.
Before depositing an object, it was of paramount importance that he first observe the crowd and decide which individuals were suitable candidates. He could always tell which commuter might be too sensitive or anxious for him to work on with impunity. There were always those passengers whose distraction or exhaustion or anomie left them seemingly oblivious to the fact that there was anyone else surrounding them at all. After rapidly assessing each candidate’s particulars, and ruling out the obvious dangers, Maximilian would select his targets on the basis of their appearance: the way their faces spoke to him, attracting or repelling him, suggesting particular professions or ways of living. For the most part, he chose whoever appeared to be most empty, inert, and lacking in feeling. He found that he could not help but want to jolt such people into some more “genuine” state of being, even if only for a moment or two.
He was never caught, though there were a few close calls. Certain individuals could always sense when their personal space had been trespassed, no matter what their faces communicated. A vague twitch, dimly felt, at the top of a thigh, was more than enough to arouse suspicions. Then one of the throng of commuters might suddenly come to life, startled for reasons that he or she couldn’t quite articulate, moving their heads to and fro to survey their fellow passengers and find someone to blame for their peculiar feelings of unrest. Undoubtedly it helped that Maximilian was only 5’ 2” tall. At that size he was more easily dismissed by taller people, who tend to discount shorter people when it comes to assessing threats. Maximilian often thought that the ideal agent for this particular project would be a child or a dwarf.
The best moment to act was when a train pulled into a station. Amidst the confusion of jostling limbs attempting to evade each other, it was reasonably straightforward to slip one of his objects into a pocket or a bag. Whenever he noticed a particularly large or loose pair of trousers with pockets that were easy to access, or a bag gaping open at one corner, he found it very difficult to resist the temptation to quietly drop one of his mementoes into the space provided.
After he had disembarked, Maximilian could not help but continue to meditate upon his “victims.” He would imagine their journeys home, the tiredness in the muscles of their feet, the look and feel of the properties to which they would return; the fact that in a few cases his actions might cause a quiet moment of rupture or revelation in the steady continuity of existence that most people were accustomed to inhabiting. He hoped that his creations would instigate worthwhile confusions: perhaps his recipients would ask “How did that get there?” “Who gave this to me?” “What is that?” . . . He saw their faces making their way out of crowded trains, ascending the escalators, passing through the station doors, and walking into the familiar and comforting tedium of the street, where the same newspaper vendor and flower seller sat metres apart, day after day, barely exchanging a word or a glance in the other’s direction. He imagined their walk across the rain-slicked streets, the same route every day, passing landmarks reassuring in their banality. The public house, the fish and chip shop, the bookies, the newsagent, the shops that were closed but didn’t bother to shutter their window displays. Journeying across the slabs of paving stone, a walk that added to the silent residue of other old, exhausted footsteps. And beyond each High Street the endless rows of identical houses with their creaking waist-high gates leading onto well-tended lawns and beds of flowers, before the advent at last of the long-awaited atmosphere of comfort circulating just beyond the front door, the reassurance that had settled over so many years into the odours in the kitchen, the grains in the wallpaper, the sounds of the children.
Maximilian wanted to interrupt this all-too-logical flow of events. Intruding—in a mild-mannered way, of course—he hoped to disrupt the sense of inevitability that pervaded such a scene. He imagined the few amongst the millions of men in black hats and suits who would rummage in their pockets and look for their keys, in the process discovering the unfamiliar outlines of an object that they would proceed to hold up to the diminishing light still trickling from the sky: an object that would reveal itself as a strange intruder, perhaps causing a faint wrinkle to impress itself upon their brows.
Most of his recipients would merely shrug their shoulders, he knew, whatever the nature of his gift, however extraordinary its qualities; then again, many would never even find them, or perhaps would assume that the objects were in fact their own possessions. But even if this were the case, Maximilian delighted in the fact that he had discovered another way to quietly alter the prevailing formations of social reality. To shift matter from one location to another, causing tiny disruptions in the accepted patterns of the city: this was his modest aim.
After a day spent in his habitual solitude, Maximilian sometimes found it a perverse sort of thrill to join the stream of humanity from 4:30 to 6:00 P.M., to steep himself in the tension generated by this manic convergence of workers joined together each day in order to ensure their collective survival. Even without distributing any of his objects, he felt as if he were engaged in silent communion with the populace simply by having placed his body amongst them, a location in which he could listen and observe. Surveying their faces for signs of familiarity became his own sort of comforting ritual. He liked to be part of the crowd, keeping his secrets to himself, lurking at the periphery, undetected. It soon reached the point where these expeditions were the high point of his day. He would wait the length of an afternoon in eager anticipation, unoccupied, anticipating the moment when all the offices would close and empty of their workers.
He chose to end this particular phase of his life’s work when his eagerness began to be disrupted by bouts of paranoia. Nothing had actually changed, indeed he had met with nothing but success, but the early panic he had found the confidence to ignore now began to eat away at his own comfort, and he started to feel genuinely at risk whenever he boarded a train. Many times he would tell himself that this was absurd, especially considering the far greater dangers posed by his counterfeiting activities, but to no avail. His rush-hour activity had something of the sense of a physical violation about it, however minor. It was to this that he attributed his growing anxiety. And so he turned to other pursuits.
Occurrences of an Afternoon of Leisure
(1959)
(a series of thoughts, observations, queries, possibilities, and events encountered on the twenty-ninth of october)
12.00 P.M.
Maximilian sat in his armchair at home, legs crossed, pipe smoking, pondering.
12.01
He considered the many kinds of chairs in the world and their vastly different arrangements. This led to thoughts regarding the extent to which the style of chair sat in, and its precise spatial attributes, might determine the nature of the thoughts produced when seated in those particular conditions.
12.16
Flicking through a full-colour magazine feature on life in the Riviera, he found that these gaudy images appealed to him far more than the accompanying text, and it was to these that he directed his full attention, after reaching the middle of the second paragraph.
12.18
A soft, almost intangible belch escaped from within.
12.24
Imagining the commencement of a new life in a crofter’s cottage, three miles away from the nearest human being.
12.27
Lying on his belly, he bent both legs and raised them into the air, holding on to his feet with both arms outstretched behind. He kept this position for a full two minutes, a rough approximation of the yoga posture Dhanurasana.
12.34
Closing his front door behind him he began to whistle a cheerful tune entirely of his own invention as he commenced an unhurried stroll towards the West End.
12.37
Observations of a shadow thrown from a bench in the shape of a rhomboid.
12.41
Encounter with a film poster blazoned with gigantic red letters, a screaming woman wearing a yellow dress, rushing waters, aeroplanes, tanks, ranks of buildings tumbling into rubble or being consumed by fire.
12.44
He bent down to tie up his left shoelace (in order to match the strength of the knot with that of his right shoe).
12.53
He wondered if it was possible to re-establish naïveté after a certain level of self-consciousness had already been attained, or would this always then be a false naïveté, an impossible attempt at reversing what had been indelibly fixed?
1.17
Officious air of typists eating sandwiches during their lunch hour.
1.22
Screwing up a waxy ball of paper, Maximilian aimed it at the mouth of a rubbish bin and launched it into the air.
1.24
The irritating way in which toothpicks become soft and useless almost immediately upon contact with the teeth.
1.26
Impertinent faces of the riders of horses featured in equestrian statues. The lack of imagination in all public sculpture.
1.32
A cold glass of pineapple juice placed to his lips.
1.41
Concerns about his shaving technique after detecting hairs sprouting from the skin covering his lower jaw.
1.52
Halting momentarily, he considered the commotion at a building site, a frenzy of hammer blows. An enjoyable sense of witnessing minor yet historical changes in one’s environment.
1.58
An old man, with prominent boils and flaring eyes, seen pacing up and down the street and muttering quite audibly to himself about partridges.
2.04
Maximilian turned right off of Tottenham Court Road and onto Oxford Street.
2.06
Aeroplane glimpsed in the sky. Aviation daydream interlude.
2.08
A little girl beaming and holding a green balloon attached to a length of string.
2.15
Italian Gents Hairdressers—a giant comb and pair of scissors, crossed over each other, filling the entire window. Barbers within producing monologues about mortality and horseraces. Swirling red-and-white striped pole jutting out from shop sign.
2.17
Obnoxious displays of the accoutrements required for contemporary existence. Nothing more inspirational or remarkable on offer than that.
2.18
Everywhere the constant streaming of bodies, all neatly buttoned up, choking out each inner fire.
2.23
Shopping expeditions being undertaken for who-knows-what nefarious purposes.
2.27
Overcast skies casting a pallid gloom on all lying underneath them. At least rain would be decisive.
2.34
The possibility of inventing entirely new ways of spending afternoons. To become a seer of the leisure classes.
2.41
Considerations of what the maximum possible human achievement within the space of a five minute interval could be.
2.46
Passing resolve to risk involvement of paprika in tonight’s dinner.
2.48
Maximilian’s gaze fell upon an eighteenth-century paper fan depicting a couple seated in a garden beside an overflowing basket of fruit, a dog attendant at their feet, a gushing river in the foreground.
3.06
The way in which most objects seem improved when placed upon a boat.
3.19
A broken glass bottle seen in the gutter amidst dead leaves, scraps of newspaper.
3.21
Sudden apprehension of the face of a young woman staring at him from a fifth-floor window. Curious eyes, not hostile.
3.29
It struck Maximilian that experts on the subject of seaweed presumably reside somewhere in London. Where do they live? What do the rooms of their houses look like? Are they eaten up with melancholy?
3.45
Pigeons and their definitive place within the hierarchy.
3.48
He turned from Sackville Street onto Piccadilly.
3.51
He recalled that a number of buildings in London had beehives installed on their roofs.
4.03
Struck by the ambition to destroy a car completely, to annihilate its forms until no longer recognisable.
4.09
The garish, unreal effect of artificial lighting upon those objects which it illuminates.
4.18
The fascination of what lies behind each closed door, each shuttered window.
4.25
Memories of when he was a child and would climb trees and stay on top of them for entire afternoons, hiding from enemies, spying on mercenaries, equipped with his comic-book collection and some apples in a burlap sack.
4.32
He passed a young woman wearing a red angora wool sweater and white slacks.
4.38
Nasturtiums. Phosphorescent, encased in a rounded glass vase.
4.46
To live within his body with an aspiration to absolute knowledge of sensory awareness.
4.59
Idea: to visit ten museums during the course of an afternoon, each of them for no more than ten minutes.
(1960–1998)
Early that year, Maximilian became the owner of a bungalow in Hackney. He would live there for quite some time. It only had six rooms, but he felt that this was more than enough for him. He had vowed to keep only a minimum of clothes, bedding, cooking utensils, foodstuffs, toiletries, towels, and cleaning implements. He also allowed himself a modest collection of books and records, neither of which could exceed more than one hundred items at any time. Furniture was limited to a mattress laid out along the floor and a single threadbare armchair, in which he would sit reading or musing for many hours each evening. Other than this, he kept the rooms entirely empty.
He had developed a series of moral arguments with regard to the expenditure of his counterfeit fortune. To pay exorbitant sums for housing, furnishings, food, holidays, or any other such luxuries would constitute, in his opinion, an abuse of the privileged situation he had created for himself. Although he did purchase many commodities above and beyond his strict needs, none of these, in his view, were indulgences, and he kept them, in any case, far removed from his Spartan living quarters.
Goods took on a different character and status as soon as they became part of a work of art, of course; never once did Maximilian purchase something merely to enjoy the act of possession. All of his accumulated belongings served an active, useful purpose. To his mind, these were not extravagances but necessities. His intention had always been to make his art public only following his death, but once this happened, all the materials he had purchased in the name of art would achieve apotheosis, becoming items with a real social value, no longer mere possessions. And this would be the case, Maximilian decided, whether the public appreciated his work or not. (He couldn’t imagine that the vast majority of people could ever think well of what he had accomplished.) Naturally, then, he preferred to keep all his art materials far from the bungalow, storing them in one of his other properties, so that there could be no confusion between those things he bought in order to use—be they opulent or utilitarian—and those he bought in order, simply, to live.
Returning to his bare rooms each evening (one of which was always kept entirely empty) became an important daily ritual. The bungalow had a tranquil, calming influence on him. In truth, it was an entirely unremarkable building in which nothing very interesting ever happened, but this was precisely its charm. It provided Maximilian with a place in which every last detail was entirely predictable, a place to which he could retreat from the often chaotic states of mind to which he subjected himself, elsewhere in the city. Whenever his imagination strayed into difficult territories or he became overwhelmed by the scale of his projects, he would simply stay at home for a while, drifting through a series of empty days in which nothing much happened, during which time he might lie down or stare at the wall for many hours, until he had reached the point where he felt he could continue with his endeavours.
He never spoke to his neighbours. To avoid arousing their suspicions, naturally, but also out of inclination. His curtains were always drawn. Never once did he answer his front door. Whenever he departed from the bungalow he would immediately get into his car and drive away, not returning until dark. Of course, there was no way to avoid those liminal periods of entering and exiting during which it was possible for anyone on the street to see and hail him, despite his restricting his movements to those hours during which his neighbours were at work. Yet, Maximilian had no trouble adhering to his rule of total solitude: no one bothered to make his acquaintance. London was large enough to sustain an almost entirely anonymous existence for years on end, he found. Everyone on his street came to know him by sight, but they never asked his name.
In more than thirty years, Maximilian only had to suffer through two different occasions on which his neighbours attempted to speak to him. In 1961, Mick Prior, of Number 48, remarked that the weather was particularly nice, an observation to which Maximilian responded with his customary silence, keeping his eyes firmly focused upon the stretch of pavement lying immediately in front of his feet as he made his escape, never giving his interlocutor the slightest satisfaction as to whether this remark had indeed been overheard. In 1974, Nigel Wilkinson, of Number 56, saw Maximilian getting out of his car, and took it upon himself to mutter a “hello,” only to be greeted by eyes darting towards and then away from his own with equal rapidity. After that, there was to be no more verbal contact with any of Maximilian’s neighbours. Either they didn’t notice him at all, or they were perturbed enough by his manner to think better of it.
Which is not to say that a number of people didn’t wonder who he was, what he did, why he did it and so on. But these persons were never to uncover a single definitive fact about him beyond those that were already obvious, such as the numbers of his address or the placement of his nose relative to his eyes. Rumours circulated, but were no more than speculative fictions. Everyone was far too busy pursuing their own life to be bothered with Maximilian’s wraithlike form traipsing through the neighbourhood at odd hours.
It was only during those lost moments of life, those pale and lethargic hours when people find themselves attempting to kill flies with glowing cigarette ends, or idly leafing through the pages of magazines, that Maximilian’s neighbours pondered again the mystery of who he might be, sometimes even turning their heads to stare at the exterior of his bungalow, as if doing so might enable them to tear away the outward layers of his domain and reveal whatever lay within. But such speculations were short-lived.
In the period following his first moving into the bungalow, almost every single weekday came to follow the same pattern for Maximilian. He would wake up at 5 A.M. and consume a breakfast consisting solely of soybeans, perform his ablutions, and then leave the bungalow to pursue one or another of his projects. Lunch and dinner would usually be eaten in restaurants, but always in modest or lowly establishments, and then late in the evening Maximilian would return home and practice zazen for an hour inside his one entirely empty room, sitting cross-legged on the floor and staring at a blank white wall for an hour whilst attending closely to both his posture and breathing. Afterwards, he would read for a while, and then go to sleep. Nothing other than a terrible emergency could break this routine. He would feel lost, even nauseated, at the prospect of making do without it—consumed by an overriding sense of displacement and confusion.
Saturdays would see him dealing with all purely utilitarian chores and administrative activities. Cleaning, shopping, and exercising took most of the day. Afterwards, once evening had descended, he would avoid all revellers and go for long walks along the city’s back streets, solemn undertakings that might last until dawn, during which time Maximilian would contemplate the previous week’s labours, considering how they might be improved, made more efficient, more productive. Staring into the shadows and illuminated windows he came upon, he would seek solutions to his various predicaments.
Sundays were reserved for reading. He experimented with many different reading venues and positions: cafés, trains, bathtubs, rooftops, and cemeteries; sitting, standing, leaning, suspended in a hammock, balanced against a wall on his head, but finally he came to the conclusion that he was happiest at home, lying on his back on the floor. Maximilian would stare at page after page for ten hours at a stretch, finding that this method allowed him to finish a threehundred-page book in a single day. Consequently, three-hundredpage books tended to become his favourites, and he found himself accumulating quite a few.
From time to time, Maximilian wondered whether there was something wrong, even perverse, perhaps hypocritical about his reliance on routine. Yes, he did like to control every element of his domestic life, for every last detail to be planned, for every inch of his living quarters to be entirely under his control; and certainly many people would have criticised his lifestyle as being unhealthy, a subject worthy of mockery. But these doubts never lasted very long. Maximilian was content. This was how he wanted to live. The hypocrites were the ones who believed they were any different. (Not, of course, that he had ever actually conversed with any such people, nor been subject to their criticisms.) Most people’s lives were ordered to precisely the same degree. The difference was that he chose to order his life, quite consciously, and in a form that might be termed “idiosyncratic,” not at all on the model of “ordinary” life and its concerns.
He never really asked himself why he had such a great need for solitude, feeling that there was no other way in which he could comfortably live. Social niceties would steal precious hours away from his work, leaving his creations neglected. A single sentence addressed to Maximilian—even those routinely fired in his direction by shop assistants—could throw him off balance and upset the rhythm of his work for the rest of the day. When he thought about the way in which most people lived, he could not help but recoil. The quotidian world sprawling about him in all directions was enormously depressing, if not terrifying. For him it was a place in which the imagination had been destroyed in favour of empty ritual; his rituals, by contrast, being heavy with purpose. He could not bear to open his mouth there, in that larger world. On some days even to walk down a perfectly ordinary street, populated with shops and traffic and pedestrians, would be enough to topple him into despair. After weeks of forgetting that the quotidian existed, he would come across a certain face or street corner and this would return him forcefully to the lives of others. So often he could separate himself from these lives, holding them at arm’s length, but when he could not continue to do so, however transient his lapse, it often felt as though the ugliness of everyone else’s realities had fallen upon him in some horrible, tumbling profusion, and he would retreat into himself once more.
(1961)
