by Alex Kovacs
With some tenacity Maximilian was eventually to find drafts of poems, song lyrics, entire paragraphs belonging to no-doubt unfinished novels, strange descriptions of states of being, lists of names of famous persons, football statistics, messages never sent to girlfriends—versions, in miniature, of just about every form of writing that had ever existed. Maximilian especially loved the absence of all metaphysical urgency pervading so many of these opuscules. Frequently too there was the profound absence of any density, importance, or talent. Occasionally he would take it upon himself to mail envelopes filled with examples of this new “genre” to the addresses of prominent writers.
Drawings were less common napkin-fodder than poetry or prose. But Maximilian felt that the general artistic standard of the drawings tended to be much higher than that of the napkin-writings, even if the vast majority of the images found were of simple matchstick men and what he could only think of as figurative fumblings. The advantage of the form, as he saw it, lay in the spontaneous nature of the drawings; by transforming the first suitable object which lay to hand into works of art, Maximilian felt that those responsible had discovered a certain freshness, often childlike, lending their creations a levity which could not always be achieved using more conventional materials.
On a café table he had once found a drawing of a tree with limbs sprouting outwards until they had invaded the entirety of the square frame that contained them. Unusual species of birds perched on particular branches, with speech bubbles containing musical notes emerging from their beaks.
A few years later he discovered a full comic strip left behind in a laundrette. Its protagonist aged drastically from one panel to the next, these making up a series of tableaux representing the essential parts of his existence: work, marriage, friends, hobbies, and retirement. Finally he was blind and bedridden at the age of 108, being refused a glass of scotch by a nurse.
Maximilian had found tentative sketches of budgerigars, policemen, offices, and disc jockeys. Little jolts of euphoria would always pass through him when he discovered another example to add to his collection. He loved to see the beautiful naïveté of the napkindrawings—their inconsequential, spontaneous nature cheered him immensely.
After some time he became equally enraptured with blank, white, unsullied napkins. These were napkins existing prior to being used for any purpose, preserved in their initial phase, as purely utilitarian objects, incapable of aspiring to any deeper significance, solely intended for wiping mouths and other surfaces. Maximilian was increasingly amused by people who saw napkins as “simple” objects. He believed that their inability to form an adequate conception of the possibilities that lay suspended within a single white square was a symptom of terrible ignorance.
It wasn’t long before his collection came to be dominated by these “empty” napkins, obtained at many different sites, and indexed in the alphabetical order of the locations where he’d found them. These included every part of London in which he had once stopped to drink a cup of coffee or eat a meal. Many of the napkins came to be imbued with memories of wasted time, and so to seem emblematic of the tragedy of all squandered potential: frames in which so much might have happened, but did not, their white forms lingering, unused, perhaps forever. He marvelled at how many things in this world were wasted, how much was destroyed.
There was also the question of napkins bearing decorative designs, of which there were many and varied examples. Maximilian felt it was his duty to collect samples of these, given the extent of his other work in this field. And so he seized upon napkins bearing tasteful floral borders, as well as those emblazoned with robots, those commemorating historical events, those that bore outlines of reindeers and snowflakes. These were not Maximilian’s favourite napkins, but he supposed that they were representative of certain tendencies in the history of graphic design, and that they would preserve the traces of their particular era. He felt that there was a good chance this portion of his collection would prove to be of great significance to someone else, one day.
His napkin collection was stored in the same room as his newspaper collection, in his warehouse overlooking Hackney Marshes. Often he wondered which of these collections would ultimately be of more significance. Many heavy volumes served as napkin albums, with transparent plastic pockets inside them holding one exhibit per page. Each was accompanied by a typewritten text, although in no case were these more than a paragraph in length.
His preference for paper over cloth napkins could be attributed to the fact that the disposable napkin was a quintessentially modern object, inexorably bound up in his imagination with the onset of mechanization, the growth of cities, the generalized fragmentation of modern experience. In contrast, cloth napkins belonged to the realm of the antique, feeling heavy with dubious “significance,” with the cleanliness and decorum beloved of a vanished social order—a state of affairs that he had no wish to preserve or uphold; only to extinguish.
Furthermore, Maximilian was taken with the fragility of the paper napkin, its flimsy body, liable to be torn or crumpled, to dissolve or become irreparably stained. They seemed to him such tentative objects, always on the brink of extinction. Reproduced infinitely, identically, they were taken for granted by virtually everyone living within advanced industrial economies. Their presence was thought to be as natural and inevitable as that of water or air, but this was of course an illusion: they were made, and many resources were taken up with their manufacture, only for them to be disposed of without a second thought. Maximilian also loved that paper napkins had become kitsch objects on a par with bubble-gum. They were widely considered to be ugly, when they were considered at all. Maximilian was haunted by the millions of neat stacks of napkins lining the insides of mechanical dispensers—objects so easily reached for and relied upon without their origin, meaning, or potential being considered. First brought to the mass market in America in the 1930s, the paper napkin was in fact a cultural artefact existing at the margins of Modernism. Silently it would come to lurk in the corners of films and modern novels. Maximilian felt it was a more elegant entity than certain other forms of tissue paper, perhaps because each napkin was always separated and removed from other, identical examples of the form, making each square a clearly delineated frame, an individual object that in every instance possessed the potential to be of great individual significance if transformed by social forces. He also liked the way that it mimicked what could be seen as an obsolete form—the cloth napkin—and could therefore be understood as a pretence, garish and yet somehow delightful to him for precisely this reason.
Maximilian loved the transformative possibilities of the medium of paper, its eternal invitation to make marks and leave inscriptions, to communicate with strangers, to add to the great swollen ocean of print. Paper was the medium in which nothingness was forever conquered by new statements and representations, lines representing new regions and fiefdoms.
He would never entirely recover from the hope that he had felt, the hope that he had come upon some marvellous and inexplicable message when he set his eyes upon the first napkin of his collection. But, its pleasures aside, his quest to find a napkin, the napkin, at last providing the consummation he had initially envisioned, was to yield no results. He would need to look elsewhere for his ecstasies.
Time Signatures Affect Desires
(1965)
Outside it was snowing.
He softly played a sheet of glass with a violin bow.
An Unexpected Encounter with Trevor
(1966)
That year, Maximilian was to have his first conversation of any substantial length in fifteen years. In that time, he had frequently needed to put himself through the paces of the usual pleasantries required of him by shop assistants and waiters, but he had never once engaged in a real conversation, that is to say any sort of dialogue involving a legitimate exchange of ideas, however rudimentary the thoughts expressed. This might be considered an unusual state of affairs, but it was only rarely that Maxim
ilian was reminded that he no longer spoke to anyone; for the most part he was too preoccupied with other things to notice.
Whenever it had seemed to him that certain situations might threaten to develop into a conversation, he would sidle away without a word, without a thought for how rude or strange such an action might seem to whoever had tried to engage him. Eventually he reached the point of feeling that he needed to maintain his silence at all costs, or else face unbearable consequences. What would happen to him, he didn’t know; but neither did he want to find out.
Relationships were replaced in his life with solitary actions and abstract ideals. Continuous immersion in his art was necessary; to slow or stop would expose himself to possible attack by such feelings as loneliness and anxiety; thus, he would work for twelve hours a day, only breaking off to eat, wash, and sleep before getting up for another day’s work. The trick behind this unceasing diligence was to engage only in those activities that were, for Maximilian, purely pleasurable. As soon as a project became tiresome, he would abandon it for an indefinite period until the idea of it became interesting to him once more (if ever). Following this plan largely ensured the eradication of boredom from his repertoire of sensations and emotions. Solitude was his natural state, consuming him entirely. He couldn’t imagine any other way of living.
So it came as quite a shock when, one evening, he found himself drawn into a conversation with a young man named Trevor. They were both sitting alone, drinking pints of ale at adjacent tables in the Widow’s Son, at Bromley-by-Bow, during a tawdry Thursday evening of heavy and relentless rain. Much to his surprise, Maximilian found that after a few awkward stumbling moments, he was after all perfectly capable of engaging another person in conversation.
At first they talked about the difficulties of employment; the dreariness of waking up and forcing yourself into the workplace each morning, the tense exchanges with colleagues, the feeling of one’s life gradually disappearing into a mass of tedious repetitive activity until your life was wrung of all value and seemed to recede into the far distance, like the shoreline of a country observed from a boat moving out into the sea.
Trevor, at that time, was working as an estate agent. He’d long since come to wish that he had chosen another career path, one that involved more creativity and freedom. Frequently, indeed, he would long for freedom, but he did not know how to go about finding it. Maximilian claimed to understand this predicament very well, and related some of his own experiences from his own brief period of employment (which had at this time concluded thirteen years previously). He applauded Trevor’s attitude and stated that he hoped his situation might change for the better in the near future.
Maximilian went on to ask what forms of freedom Trevor would most like to engage in, if he could. At first this caused Trevor to stare into the middle distance and hold his head between his hands, giving out a series of ummms and ahhhhs that successfully communicated a sense of confusion and indecision about how best to answer this question. Finally he responded that he really did not know, that he just felt that he would somehow like to be doing something else, whatever it happened to be.
Hoping to develop things a little further, Maximilian asked Trevor what made him happy. He responded that football made him happy and that whenever West Ham, his team, won a match, that was enough to make his day seem worthwhile. He went on to say that the most important thing to consider in terms of his happiness, however, was women. On the few occasions that he had been fortunate enough to take a girl out on a date, he had found himself to be very happy indeed. Maximilian, having had extremely limited experience of this particular subject, remained silent, whilst Trevor was busy discussing the wonders of holding hands with women and even kissing them.
This being one of Maximilian’s least favourite subjects, he was at pains to alter the course of the conversation as swiftly as he could, and he did so by taking advantage of the fact that they had both nearly finished drinking their respective pints of bitter ale. He offered to buy Trevor another one; Trevor having agreed, Maximilian moved temporarily to the vicinity of the bar to make the order, and, upon returning, launched into a lengthy disquisition on the subject of insects. Maximilian related the joy that he felt at contemplating the size of those creatures, the fact that they lived a nearly secret existence almost entirely neglected by human beings; that they were present everywhere, invisibly crawling and flying and scuttling, in immense profusion, although only rarely noted. Furthermore, he went on, was it not worth considering the difference in size between a human being and an ant? He began to expound in great detail on his sense of joy at being so much larger and more complicated than an ant. Apprehension of this fact, he felt, could make even the simplest attributes of the human being seem endlessly complex and fascinating.
Once Maximilian had finished his monologue on the subject, there was a moderate pause, followed by Trevor’s beginning, with startling rapidity, to lament that his existence was worthless, that it would lead him nowhere, and wasn’t life unbearably depressing? Why, in fact, should he go on? This went on for some time and elicited a certain amount of disgust on Maximilian’s part. He seriously considered, and repeatedly, simply getting to his feet and walking wordlessly out of the premises. Why, after all, should he now be punished for his friendliness by being made to suffer through these impractical thoughts and observations? He came to the conclusion, however, that to abandon Trevor at such a juncture would be hypocritical, considering that Maximilian had nursed similarly negative sentiments himself, in the past. And yet, he reasoned, he had worked himself out of such thinking, albeit with a great effort of the will—Trevor would just have to do the same. He would have said as much, as soon as Trevor stopped talking, but Trevor did not stop talking, and so Maximilian remained there, listening, feeling that it would be impolite to do otherwise.
As soon as he saw an opening, Maximilian was immediately at pains to communicate certain things that he had learnt to this young man. He exhorted Trevor to be creative, to find any way of exploring the world, the human imagination. To find any way of escaping his sadness. He told Trevor of the excitement there was to be found in the process of accessing the vast body of knowledge which was available, for example, in his local library, and stressed the fact that this privilege was open to anyone. After this, he turned to his strongly held belief in the mystical properties of art. In creating artworks, he claimed, it was possible to have transcendent experiences, occasions that could prove entirely transformative for any individual, as long as they were prepared to devote themselves wholly to their work and the medium which it formed a part of, enduring great confusions and uncertainties, until finally, with patience and time, a sense of understanding might be reached, and the world might appear freshly, taking on a different character altogether.
Trevor responded with more than a little indifference to this advice, as if, Maximilian thought, he could not even muster the will to be excited, or to attempt to change his circumstances. By this time, he wasn’t really listening to Maximilian. This was because he had become extremely drunk. He complained that he couldn’t find the time to read, and that art didn’t generally interest him very much. But he did say, mostly out of politeness, that he would try to have a look at some of the things that Maximilian was telling him about.
Oblivious to the sheepishness of this response, Maximilian felt encouraged to continue advising Trevor, in grandiloquent tones, recommending he engage, for another thing, in contemplating the infinite. He suggested that when one sat at a table it was possible to consider every table in the world, as well as every person who sat at every table, their vast variety of appearances and mannerisms, all engaged in a series of conversations or silences, which would inevitably range across most of the possible subjects addressed by human beings on this planet. He urged Trevor to consider that each table would necessarily be found in different surroundings and would have different objects placed upon it, would initially have been crafted from specific, individual pieces
of wood or metal or stone, before becoming someone’s property, and taking on its own distinctive history as certain people, and not others, sat around it, placed things upon it, spoke to one another in its vicinity, and perhaps even wrote or drew things directly onto its surface. When a table was considered in this way, said Maximilian, it became another entity altogether, and indeed a much more interesting one.
It was then that Trevor decided, for whatever reason, that he could not remain seated for a moment longer, and so said hurriedly to Maximilian that he was really sorry, but he was afraid that he had to be leaving, that he had work in the morning and that he needed to get some sleep, but it had been a pleasure to meet him and he hoped that perhaps they would run into each other again some time. And with that he swiftly shook Maximilian’s hand, got up, and left.
Overall, Maximilian found their conversation underwhelming. He was reminded of his reasons for giving up conversation in the first place. At the same time, Trevor had sparked a desire to enter into the company of others once more, even if only in a limited capacity. In the nights to come, and even though he hadn’t enjoyed the experience very much, Maximilian went over his talk with Trevor again and again, remembering certain things he had said, marvelling at the fact that he had managed to say them, feeling pleased with certain word choices and turns of phrase, still smiling at the thought of them many weeks later, even repeating them to himself in a low murmur as he took strolls around the city in the fading evening light.