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.