The Currency of Paper

by Alex Kovacs

  Every night this process would be followed by Maximilian’s listening to the same record in order to encourage sleep. “Raga Mishra Piloo” (“An Evening Raga”) was a long, sprawling piece by Ravi Shankar considered by Maximilian to possess a rare and tranquil beauty. The music induced a pleasant numbness; he welcomed it into every fold of his body, which let its stresses dissolve away one by one. After months of listening to it every evening, Maximilian found that from the first few moments of the needle touching the rim of the record, he would begin to drift towards sleep, succumbing soon after. This was repeated with such reliability every evening that Maximilian had no idea what the last ten minutes of the piece were like.

  He kept the volume knob fixed in the position that he considered to be optimum, producing at most a distant hum, but this was enough to induce the trance state required. The music lulled Maximilian into a womb-like serenity in which his mind was cleared of all confusion, to the extent that it became absolutely devoid of both pleasure and suffering. It was under these conditions that he never remembered his dreams.

  Notes on Inconsequential Occasions

  (1977)

  July 1st

  To commence a diary, record of a brief period of time, one particular summer, a collection of hours.

  July 2nd

  I have few urgent preoccupations for the time being and feel content to see what happens when these entries become my sole creative activity.

  July 3rd

  Wandered over to Islington from Hackney Marshes, eventually coming upon a television crew in Wilmingston Square. Sat watching them for half an hour. Leafed through newspapers in the Westminster Reference Library. Drifted towards the river and ambled all the way to Chelsea Embankment before returning home.

  July 4th

  Visited the Sir John Soane’s Museum. It remains my favourite place in London after all these years. Coffee and newspapers in Holborn. A stroll in Green Park. Various drinking establishments in Marylebone.

  July 8th

  Riding a merry-go-round in the afternoon rain. Only a handful of children joining me. Pleasant sense of peace amid such melancholy, although all of the parents looked at me a little suspiciously. By this time I’m so used to feeling that I’ve been painted as a dubious character in other peoples’ eyes that I think very little of it. What exactly is wrong with a grown man earnestly riding a pink-and-gold horse?

  July 9th

  And so it seems that most of my activities have ground to a halt. This has happened before, indeed seems to happen from time to time, so I can’t say I feel enormously worried, but nevertheless there is always the fear that during one of these periods I might become overly complacent and drift into lassitude permanently. On some recent days the lethargy has been so overpowering that I wonder if I am about to fall into some sort of permanent state of inaction.

  July 11th

  Boredom. Hours in a cafe watching the customers and staff, all of whom seem considerably more cheerful than me. No real interest in anything much. Fiddled with the salt and pepper shakers for a while. Tried to spur myself on and generate some enthusiasm for something or other, but nothing doing. How long can this go on?

  July 12th

  Only aardvarks and peppermints seem to interest me today.

  July 14th

  Have found temporary solace in crosswords. Began in the morning with a couple discovered in tabloids lying around in the cafe. After finishing those fairly quickly I then progressed to a more serious crossword in The Times. Not being used to the form at all it proved to be a real challenge. Confidence increased after a couple of successes, and by the onset of evening I felt certain I had successfully completed about two thirds of the puzzle. A feeling of minor triumph.

  July 15th

  Sitting on a bus approaching Trafalgar Square, I felt the need for company, strangely—at least for a short time. Just to begin a conversation with the old man who sat next to me. I know this is impossible, that I’ve invested too much of myself in my many forms of solitude, that to enter into any sort of relationship right now would destroy me. And yet . . . this fantasy of easy camaraderie lingers. Find myself amazed at this.

  July 19th

  Walked through Selfridges for the first time in many years, marvelling at the great ridiculous display of products and the monumental appearance of the building and its spaces. Found the grandeur to be quite seductive, not that I bought anything. It made for a good stroll, if nothing else.

  July 21st

  The mysterious clustering in cities, whereby human beings pack themselves together into such limited spaces, leaving enormous stretches of the surface of the planet unoccupied. What perversity.

  July 22nd

  A day-trip to Brighton. Walked along the beach. Played the slot machines. Passed through antique shops in the Lanes. Sat in the gardens of the Pavilion listening to a Salvation Army Band.

  July 23rd

  Visit to the Westminster Reference Library. Sat next to a man who fell asleep repeatedly and who was told off for doing so by the librarians. An air of desperation pervades the place. Old men who have nowhere else to be gather there in weather-beaten clothes and sit for hours with few thoughts of the future in mind. Whenever I stop working I find myself coming here often. Sad and slightly ashamed that I fit into this company so easily.

  July 25th

  Spent the night camping in Epping Forest. Reading under torchlight undoubtedly has a quality of its own, being a state of artificially induced unreality intimately related to memories of childhood. Enjoyed the darkness and emptiness, the sense of removing myself from the city and hovering above it—a place I could return to whenever I wanted, but which I was choosing to keep at arm’s length.

  July 26th

  Time is always disappearing, but it’s impossible to always worry about this.

  July 29th

  Fantasy of living on one of the islands in the midst of the Thames. In particular Eel Pie Island at Twickenham or Oliver’s Island at Strand-on-the-Green.

  August 1st

  I think there is pleasure in the abruptness, the superficiality of these entries. Reading back I feel they evoke the previous month quite well. Fragments are of more interest to me these days than entire stories or epics. Contemporary life seems to demand concise statements, a certain brevity.

  August 4th

  Whenever I pass a hospital, lately, I find myself filled with an unbearable dread. I project myself into the future in which I will be a patient.

  August 6th

  Riding buses most of the day. Seeing the entire length of a given route, the landmarks that one comes across, a sense of the city shifting as you move from east to west or north to south. Surprises in the form of unknown places that I find intriguing—at which point I either disembark for a few minutes to investigate or jot the street name down in my notebook. A perfectly pleasant way to spend the day.

  August 10th

  Looking forward to autumn. It suits the country so much better than summer, a season that occasionally promises to arrive but rarely does with any substance. In contrast, autumn never fails to provide the melancholy of brown leaves, overcast skies, and overdue library books.

  August 12th

  Followed the Regent’s Canal all the way from Camden Lock to Victoria Park. Hard to avoid the enjoyable fantasy of living on the houseboats that you pass. The snug cosiness of the cramped quarters within each. Equally, the fantasy of drifting down canals for months on end.

  August 13th

  Have developed a fascination with horoscopes. Enjoy the idea of a project that would involve assembling all of the thousands of horoscopes printed for one star sign on a given day. This would include newspapers and magazines from all over the world. What a beautiful array of clashing sentiments would arise!

  August 15th

  Purple and scarlet streaks flaring above the dome of St. Paul’s as dusk was descending this evening.

  August 16th

  Took a tour of Highgate Ceme
tery, where a guide showed a small group of us the grave of the man who invented the dog biscuit. Crumbling mock-Egyptian tombs. Dilapidated stonework. Beautiful sense of unkempt profusion, forgotten desolation.

  August 17th

  A day spent in a few of the most dismal areas of the city: Tottenham, Redbridge, Barking. Wandered through the streets for many hours merely to try and discover a single redeeming feature. I feel that there must be something of interest in these places, but so far I have failed to find it.

  August 21st

  Visited the Windmill Museum in the middle of Wimbledon Common. The museum is housed inside a windmill that was built in 1817. Lord Baden Powell wrote parts of his book Scouting for Boys when he was staying there in 1902. A fine eccentric monument.

  August 24th

  I can no longer imagine any kind of ordinary life for myself. If I had given in to the demands of the workplace then my life would have been one of slavery and emptiness. Such a fate seems both impossible and odious to me now.

  August 26th

  Followed the river between Brentford and Kew Bridge. This stretch is one of the most beautiful parts of the city and feels all the more appealing for being largely hidden and unknown. Large houseboats moored permanently have their own gardens along the footpath.

  August 29th

  Not for the first time, the idea of leaving London. To depart from the country altogether, perhaps, in order to take up a new life elsewhere, one of an entirely different character. I love the idea of selecting my new homeland when browsing through travel guides in a bookshop. To see a single photograph of a distant city and then proceed to make arrangements to live there for the rest of one’s life—that would be a terrific way to leave. Actually going through with the scheme is another matter however . . .

  Broadcasts Received in the Outer Regions

  (1978–1991)

  From that year onwards, every Sunday evening, as dusk began to fall, Maximilian would make his way to his garden shed in order to broadcast a radio programme. This was the one place within his abode in which he always allowed himself a moderate amount of disorder. Amidst shelves crowded with oily work tools, boxes of various mementoes, and files crammed full of disordered papers, lay his hidden radio equipment: turntables and tape machines, large boards covered in buttons and dials, enormous black speaker cabinets, a spider-like mass of black-coated wires spilling out from a profusion of sockets. It was in this place that Maximilian felt most comfortable, relaxing into a blue-and-white striped canvas deckchair, a bottle of ale by his side, listening intently to a great variety of recordings as he broadcast them to a tiny minority of obsessives and misfits.

  His programmes consisted of carefully chosen selections of natural sound, mixing recordings he had made himself with those discovered in record shops and lending libraries. Focusing entirely on examples of what has been called musique concrète, he played a series of sounds formed spontaneously in a great variety of environments, with occasional interjections of speech included in its many myriad forms, whilst only rarely straying into the domain of traditional musical composition. In his opinion, the ordering of sounds permitted by the government on its radio waves restricted the range of recorded sounds heard by the population to a staggering degree. There was barely any place within this scheme of things for radio shows that were not venues for either speech or music, that is to say for programmes taking into account the majority of naturally occurring sounds in the world. Maximilian was at pains to change this tendency.

  Long ago he had made the startling discovery that sounds, divorced from their immediate contexts, were transformed, became clearer and more definite, much in the way that photography transforms the visual environment, whilst also taking on more abstract qualities, to the extent that they could become impossible to identify. Maximilian wanted his broadcasts to be difficult to listen to, at least on occasion, just as they were nearly impossible to locate on a radio dial, so that only the genuinely dedicated would continue to listen and be forced to think about what they were hearing, a rare agenda for any radio programme.

  After years of secret broadcasts, he discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that he did have listeners. He learnt of their existence after setting up a P. O. box which he read out over the airwaves one evening, inviting anyone listening to contribute “suggestions” or to simply get in touch for any reason that they wished. Repeating this invitation a number of times resulted in a small trickle of mail, ranging in substance from the extraordinarily banal and literal (“I am writing to tell you that I enjoy your programmes very much . . .”) to what could only be described as rare and inexplicable (“Considerations of goats are rarely far from my cerebellum . . .”), but Maximilian felt tenderly towards everyone who wrote to him and would often keep certain individuals in mind when preparing his broadcasts. At first he did not feel inclined to respond to these letters in written form, partly because he felt that he was far too busy with his other activities, but eventually he could not resist the temptation to enter into correspondence with the few listeners he found to be particularly interesting.

  Over time, he began to receive many hundreds of cassettes, all from just a handful of sources, containing field recordings from over the world. He placed a world map above his transmitter, marking the locations of his “sources” with coloured pins, each colour representing a different mood or theme. Before long he got into the habit of requesting sounds from listeners who lived in places that he happened to find intriguing. Constructing running orders around particular locations became another fixation. Following a series of precise spatial patterns, he would create playlists that moved across the surface of the globe, covering many kilometres in lines or circles, or else focusing exclusively on the sounds of a single village, street or field.

  Many of his programmes took months and even years of slow and meticulous preparation to reach the stage at which Maximilian was comfortable transmitting them: he gathered together the necessary materials and experimented with different timings and juxtapositions between clips. On pale afternoons in winter he would play a number of tapes in the various rooms of the bungalow whilst he wandered from one to another, bathing in the different palettes of sound, forming close acquaintances with certain pieces, so that he could best decide upon the position that they would take within a certain programme, jotting down his observations, notes that would often develop into monologues which he would deliver on the airwaves.

  Years of solitude had sharpened his senses; whilst the majority of the city’s populace hurried to workplaces before hurrying home as soon as it became possible, frequently quite oblivious to what was occurring around them, Maximilian had given himself the opportunity to meditate, more or less endlessly, on his environment and all that it contained. Entire weeks might be devoted to wandering through London in order to attend to the panoply of sounds he would encounter. Sound became, for a time, the principal way in which Maximilian related to his surroundings; he would hear an object or space before seeing it.

  Monday mornings might find him dressed in a suit, eyes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses, intently holding a microphone up to air-conditioning systems and radiators; or else attempting to capture the “flow” of a particular street with a series of different tape recorders, shifting his position frequently, the better to take in every nuance. Such practices even saw him leave the city, unusually; he would travel the length and breadth of the country picking through the sounds he collected along the way. He would spend five or six hours at a time recording the sound of rain falling on a fallow field, or the clatter of feet as they progressed up the steps of a cathedral.

  Before going on air, Maximilian always took a good while to prepare himself. He would rehearse, strolling around the bungalow, going through a series of voice exercises, producing a selection of incomprehensible nonsense, bursts of babble incorporating the entire phonetic range of vocal gibberish. These exercises would take about an hour. Once they were finished, he would strut before a tall
mirror, adjusting his clothes, taking in his features, attempting to project onto them the persona that he wished to assume. He suspected that, when speaking on the radio, he became a different person entirely, a less inhibited one who didn’t mind talking at length about his beliefs and activities, who didn’t shy away from employing esoteric words and phrases, breaking off into strange digressions, and revealing a substantial amount about himself in the process.

  Anticipation of his broadcasts brought out a nervous excitement. It was often his favourite moment of the week. Once a programme began, he would imagine his broadcasts spreading out beyond his house, a vast net sinking into a darkened sea, reaching the ears of who knew what stray individuals, most of whom would be residing in solitude not unlike his own, sitting in armchairs, or else underneath heaps of blankets in their beds, or else driving in cars along motorways.

  They might be listening to the insides of a hole cut into the ice of the Arctic Ocean, as drippings and splashes of water fell amongst glittering specks of snow. Winds surging across the empty roaring bitterness of the plains. Slow movements of light melting the cold wastes, vague stirrings of summer.

  The growing swollen oceans, teeming with innumerable tiny bodies, including many that have never received human names. Enormous landscapes of rock, grass, and sand. Clusters of buildings. Webs of roads. White frothing rivers. Craters of dormant volcanoes. Cool shady clearings in forests. Hoarse voices calling in teeming marketplaces. Old men mumbling in ancient temples. Yellow lizards scuttling across the dirt-stained walls of ragged rooms, darting into crevices.

  Trains clattering towards forgotten destinations. The steady rhythm of their wheels revolving. Glimpses of fields and houses far in the distance, cliffs falling and crumbling into the sea, villages gathered on lofty hilltops. Long idle conversations drifting through afternoons, the meetings of strangers. Journeys through obscure provincial cities, each containing an old woman on a bench in a train station with her dog sitting attentively beside her.