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
