by Alex Kovacs
For his part, Trevor soon put the conversation with Maximilian out of his mind. Now and then, for a few weeks after their meeting, he would consider Maximilian for a brief instant before immediately putting the experience of their dialogue behind him, shrugging it off as a strange and ultimately minor occasion, the likes of which he would most probably never see again. A few months after their meeting he met his future wife, Jill, and settled down to a life of servitude and domesticity. They had two children (Nick and Tracy) one cat (Ginger) and one dog (Bruce). Every now and then he would feel a sense of contentment with his life.
To Be Accepted As Truths
(1967–1968)
(The following aphorisms were composed by Maximilian one winter during a brief period of philosophical reflection. Originally he had intended this to be a project on a much larger scale, but he became distracted by other concerns, irrelevant to the following account. He recorded these thoughts in a 5½-by-7½-inch hardbound notebook containing ninety-four pages, with a pale green linen cover and dark brown leather elbows supporting the corners. Various pages were adorned by a number of stains believed to be spilt coffee. Each of the entries below was copied onto the notebook’s pages in a precise hand and executed with green ink.)
Human society exists only as a consequence of happenstance, and so therefore there is nothing particularly noble or dignified about its social conventions.
Genuine states of liberty are always founded upon acts of destruction.
Our aesthetic configurations are so often a consequence of limited ideologies.
Words used in conversation often stray closer to a state of nakedness, and are more powerful in their blunt and awkward connotations, than they are when presented on the page.
There will always be tensions between the desire for individual freedom and the need for social organization.
The proper state of mind for any freethinking individual is one of frequent and delighted bewilderment.
Most of the standard measurements of human achievement indicate only the whims of a certain historical moment.
Our notions of justice should be flexible enough to allow for certain immoral practices.
When larger and larger numbers of possible forms of appropriation and consumption are available to us, our judgements can become so refined and individualised that they end up becoming minor tyrannies.
In future societies, a parade of abstractions will present themselves, accumulating in intensity over time, forcing everyone to merge with them.
Traditions maintained purely for their own sake can become the most sophisticated forms of decadence.
The creation of Utopias involves the stalling of all essential progress.
The denaturing processes of society which we encounter everyday can be appropriated as tools to fight innocence.
Every form of writing is interchangeable with every other one.
The widespread dissemination of photography causes the intricacies of physiology and anatomy to be forgotten altogether.
Nothing significant can be achieved without the presence of humour.
Sound is the most easily deceived of the senses because it is the subtlest.
A place is not a singular entity but a conglomeration of energies, histories and mental formulations.
When the imagination is exercised to its greatest extent, new possibilities for praxis will always emerge.
Playfulness is a more important and potentially dangerous quality than it is generally considered to be.
Mobilizing the Labour Force
(1968–1993)
One day Maximilian decided to set up his own employment agency. The only jobs on offer would be creative and intellectual ones, positions that hopefully stood a chance of being beneficial and enjoyable to the individuals who filled them. As it seemed obvious to him that the prevalent economic system would not be radically altered in the near future, he thought that he ought to at least attempt to help those who wanted to change society.
By the end of 1968, having followed the newspaper accounts of radical unrest during the period with great fascination, Maximilian came to believe wholeheartedly that the opening of an employment agency was a far more constructive form of political behaviour than rioting and protesting. Whilst he had enormous sympathy for the generation of students and young people who were engaging in demonstrations, he felt that, ultimately, they had no real plan in place for instigating real progress. Few of the young people of the day seemed ready to accept that it would always be necessary for humans to perform certain acts of labour. The problem, as he saw it, lay in the fact that the available forms of employment were with few exceptions unsatisfactory to anyone in possession of a properly functioning intellect.
Paying considerably more than most employers of the day, Maximilian invented a range of temporary positions whose duties included library research, the preparation of exhibitions, visits to museums, scouting expeditions across the city, the formation of political debating groups, as well as anything else that happened to pass through his head.
The day-to-day operations of the agency were overseen by two undergraduates recruited from Hornsey Art College—Chris Jenkins and John Groves. That autumn, Chris had come across a tiny note handwritten in purple ink and pinned to a neglected corner of a college notice board. As the two young men were the only respondents to this notice—one of a number left in a variety of locations—Maximilian had already decided to give them the job prior to their interview, without a thought as to their actual qualifications. However, he had stressed on his notice that those candidates selected for the positions would have to abandon their studies immediately. Chris and John were quite ready to make such a move.
Their interview was conducted in a café on the Kingsland Road and lasted for just under a quarter of an hour. No specific “skills” or forms of “relevant experience” were required for the positions. Maximilian told his applicants that he merely expected to see a reasonable display of enthusiasm and gentility, combined with a genuine interest in both radical politics and the avant-garde. During the course of their meeting (the only one that they would ever have with their employer), Maximilian had asked the young men a few brief questions about their artistic preferences, their general aspirations for the future and the political stances that they would take in a series of hypothetical situations. After this he handed them two large brown paper envelopes, each of which contained an eighty-three page document prepared especially for the occasion. Grinning, he told them that both of their interviews had been successful. Muttering, almost to himself, that he had some business to be attending to elsewhere, he then rose from the table, shook both of their hands at length and told them that he would soon be in touch. All of their subsequent dealings with him would be conducted either over the telephone or via the postal service.
Inside the eighty-three page “briefings” Chris and John were to discover some imposingly detailed directions for commencing their work. The following Monday they were to move into an office in Mayfair, and there they would begin to promote the agency and process applications. Not a single CV would pass through their hands without being given serious consideration, and, likewise, all materials would be forwarded to a P.O. box belonging to Maximilian. Chris and John might make recommendations, but ultimately the decisions as to who would be employed and in what capacity were to be made by Maximilian alone.
Outwardly, the office looked like any other. Many individuals arrived and departed under the impression that they had entered an altogether ordinary and legitimate business in which people were being quietly exploited, just as they were anywhere else. No pictures or ornaments decorated the walls. At all times the desks were cluttered with tall piles of paper. At first, in order to please their employer, Chris and John always wore suits and were at pains to appear fastidiously professional. Yet office hours were only to be from 10:30 A.M. to 3:30 P.M. Monday to Wednesday, with an hour reserved for lunch in the middle of the day.
From t
heir first meeting on, both young men were convinced that Maximilian was clinically insane. Never once did it occur to them that there might have been a philanthropic basis for his peculiar behaviour. They thought that he was simply amusing himself. Not that they minded, especially, seeing as their salaries were generous enough to ensure their complicity for some time. There was no question whatsoever of their acting contrary to his wishes. In any case, he didn’t really expect all that much from them.
After a while, they took to ignoring any part of their job unrelated to Maximilian himself—keeping him happy, as it were, for the brief periods they were actually in direct communication. Everything else was considered a waste of time. For example, they soon discovered that they could not afford to stay home during office hours, because Maximilian would phone them almost every day at random intervals merely in order to check that they were present, even cheerfully informing them on occasion that he was studying their actions through a pair of binoculars. Having finished all of their work for the week, come Wednesday they would put their feet up on their desks and smoke a little hashish, whilst waiting for the familiar voice of Maximilian to arise at the other end of the telephone line.
One of the first things they did, as managers of the agency, was to ensure that all of their friends were employed. These friends in turn brought their own friends to the office, who in turn brought their own, and so on. This cycle continued for a few weeks until precisely one thousand people had been placed on the agency’s books. At this point Maximilian decreed that it was necessary to stop collecting names, as the number already amassed was as much as he could comfortably administrate. He would have liked to employ many more people than this, of course, but that seemed to be too perilous an exercise for him to seriously consider: it would take so little for the enterprise to dissolve into chaos.
With a sense of humour that he hoped was not lost on his employees, Maximilian ensured that they were kept busy with a series of tasks that were frequently absurd in character. An employee might spend the day investigating the physical properties of plastic geese, or have to consider the scale of chewing gum use in particular train stations in the north-west of the city. Still, Maximilian was careful to be sure that, however ridiculous, his invented assignments usually had an intellectual component. Hundreds of people were sent to libraries to do research into inexplicable but precisely delineated topics, generally in aid of one of Maximilian’s other on-going projects. And then, other groups would be tasked with investigating certain sites in the city, their purviews often restricted to a single street or building, on which Maximilian would demand a detailed “report.” This meant a combination of photographs, a dossier of facts (contemporary geography, historical notes) and prosaic description. These reports became Maximilian’s bedtime reading. Flipping through them, he would start with the photographs, giving them not much more than a glance, mainly in order to see if they depicted anywhere that seemed especially attractive to him, or else anywhere he could not recognise. If he happened to pick out a report that he felt had not been researched properly, or else didn’t make any real sense, according to his own standard, then its author would be reprimanded with a stern written warning, stating that they would only be given one more chance, and if their next report contained the same mistakes, they were to be struck off the list immediately.
As a consequence of their newfound economic status, Chris and John came to enjoy highly privileged social lives of a most unusual kind. Without exception they were adored by those they helped to employ. Their inner circle became extremely tight-knit, meeting regularly to throw parties and generally cause mayhem. But as the years wore on and everyone became more or less dependant on the income provided by Maximilian, certain members of the circle developed a tendency toward paranoia. In many cases it was now necessary for them to provide for children and make payments on mortgages. It was hard for them not to wonder who their anonymous benefactor was and how long he intended to continue to ensure their survival. Nevertheless, the payments went on—for a time. And if anyone needed a reference to show to any sort of real employer then Chris and John would supply it, though lying about the nature of the work they’d done.
After a few years of this, Maximilian decided to let his employees request particular jobs. Once a month he would receive a flurry of forms on which outlines of these were written, with suggestions of possible wages placed in brackets. Any ideas that struck Maximilian as being excessively flippant in character were responded to with a flippant note of his own. But requests deemed “sensible” by him were often granted for short periods before he reassigned those individuals back to his own projects. In general he would only allow a request to be granted if he believed that it would be of sufficient value to the “growth” of the person who had suggested it. All requests of a lewd nature were discarded immediately.
Maximilian often considered the agency to be his most significant achievement. It was the epitome of effecting direct and positive change in the lives of others. While this endeavour was unlikely to have any lasting importance—unlike, for instance, a work of art—he felt proud that he had given a handful of individuals a taste of something very like freedom. He believed this was about as much as anyone could hope to accomplish for another human being.
One day, early in 1993, Maximilian’s telephone calls to the office ceased without warning. At first Chris and John hardly noticed. Soon enough it occurred to them that they hadn’t heard the boss’s voice for a fortnight. As it turned out, they were never to hear from Maximilian again. Their aloof employer had now vanished entirely.
Many times over the years, Chris and John had attempted to engage Maximilian in a proper conversation, but they found it was impossible for them to lead him onto any subject that did not in some way involve their “business” together. At first they had felt some bitterness about this, but they had later come to accept it as one of their employer’s many eccentricities. After his disappearance, however, that bitterness revived and became rage. Maximilian had provided routine and sustenance for so long, and for so many people, and now all of them had been cast into the void.
Abandoned Projects of Minor Significance
(1969–1983)
Amongst the more important of Maximilian’s abandoned projects during this period we can include the following:
– For three months he took up playing Bar Billiards with the intention of entering a national competition, but he found himself giving up hope that he would ever achieve a high enough standard to make his efforts worthwhile.
– After spending a number of years practising the art of walking on his hands he considered the possibility of embarking upon a long voyage undertaken in this manner, but he suspected he was at risk of becoming famous.
– He collected examples of mammals that the General Public of the British Isles was extremely unfamiliar with. These included quolls, tarsiers, solenodons, bandicoots, and lorids. He had hoped that he might open a small zoo dedicated to these little known species, but he found the experience of having the animals in his home too disturbing to endure for long and so abandoned the project altogether.
– For a while he attempted to form a system which would ensure continuous success whenever he played bingo. Merging together strands of research he had undertaken in the fields of statistics, anthropology, and telepathy he believed that he was beginning to discern a variety of patterns which might eventually enable him to make considerable financial gains, but his researches never progressed beyond the preliminary stages.
– Occasionally he would return to the project of inventing his own ice cream flavours. Gastronomy was generally of very little interest to him, but ice cream was an unusual exception. His flavours included quince, zabaglione, sherbet, and brown bread. Whilst the results were very interesting, they were rarely exceptional.
– In 1973 he studied for a degree in Philosophy at the University of London without being enrolled on any of the courses. After diligently attending every lectur
e for many months the common assumption was that he was evidently a legitimate student, even if a slightly old-looking one. But as it would not be possible for him to obtain the degree, he gave up his studies after two terms.
– He left tiny slips of paper all over his bedroom. On each of them he had written messages in scrawly lines of black ink to potential future versions of himself. There were so many slips of paper that it would be impossible for him to remember the precise contents of all of them. Bewilderment and surprise would surely be inevitable. Despite intending to write 1,000 of them he stopped at 587.
– Reading through nearly every book available on the subject of levitation he discovered to his disappointment that none of them seemed to lead towards any real methods of flight.
– He took to making his way onto the roofs of public buildings, visiting locations that often possessed superb visual panoramas. In the aftermath of every successful ascension he would feel victorious and elated, usually feeding off this energy for some days. He successfully reached the roofs of Somerset House, the Criterion Theatre, Alexandra Palace, and the Brent Cross Shopping Centre, but he gave up this pursuit after being forced to flee security guards on a number of occasions.