When he examined the sculpture Maximilian would often discover patterns created entirely by chance, by the whims of his mind, finding meanings that he felt he had not previously understood, hidden forms that lay within forms, entities he had not realised the existence of. Faces could be discovered in the fissures and gouges: soft masses of hair, weird hypnotic eyes, cruel jutting mouths. On one forehead he could detect a single tiny, bulbous wart. If he stared even more intently, he could see sweeping black jagged mountain ranges like rows of dislocated giant’s teeth, and swarming galaxies burning and sparkling in vivid hues and colours.
Many of the objects were attached to the whole only precariously, swinging on hooks, balanced on top of one another, hanging in place by the grace of thin lengths of blue string. A number of the sculpture’s components would creak and rattle as billows of wind drifted through the broken windows and the enormous openings that stood like solemn sentinels at either end of the building.
In one sense, Maximilian felt that the piece could never really be completed. As long as he was alive, it would always be possible for him to return to the warehouse, to add further layers, to let its forms expand outwards. There was enough space in the warehouse for the sculpture to grow to at least five times its current size. But he sensed he had to reach some point of termination in order to feel that his efforts had led somewhere in particular.
After finally reaching the ceiling in 1973, it seemed clear that he should soon declare the project finished, but some manic inner urge kept him working for another three years, until one morning in August, 1976, he finally became bored whilst nailing some planks of wood together. Stopping his work for a moment, he turned around and looked out at the world outside, seeing the morning sunlight drift and scatter through the rustling leaves of a beech tree in the back garden of a house that bordered his property. Descending from his ladder, he carefully placed his hammer and nails with the other tools on the dirty cotton sheet that lay on the floor, and then walked all the way to Hyde Park, where in the late afternoon he hired a rowing boat and paddled himself in long languid circles around the Serpentine, smiling benevolently at families as they passed him in pedalos, dimly aware of the distant roaring of the city as prickly droplets of sweat broke out across his forehead and under his armpits, allowing himself to bathe within the generous enveloping heat that had fallen upon everyone without warning that day, all the while gradually becoming aware that such occasions can never be repeated, because they occur almost as rarely as events which are not possible at all. And after that, he never returned to the paint factory again.
Aspirations to a Complete Inventory
(1955)
Amongst other things, Maximilian experienced the following that year:
3 badminton tournaments attended with mild curiosity;
5 buttons lost from shirts;
9 rides undertaken on Ferris wheels;
12 vivid colour photographs observed in the throes of fever;
17 circles drawn around particular dates on a wall calendar purchased for a discounted sum in early February;
23 ships in bottles;
78 potentially supernatural occurrences causing shivering motions to pass through his limbs and bones;
116 dreams featuring a peacock feather placed upon a red velvet chaise longue;
211 mathematical sums completed with relative accuracy;
328 park benches sat upon briefly whilst experiencing states of serious contemplation;
692 creases formed within the leather stretched across a pair of black boots;
937 moments of slight regret;
1,023 bus journeys to a variety of locations;
2,341 numbers heard called out in desolate bingo halls;
3,297 separate occasions on which he considered growing a beard, but thought better of it;
4,684 instances of wriggling his toes with pleasure;
23,497 minutes spent gazing listlessly at walls holding no particular interest for anyone;
46,319 steps belonging to staircases ascended;
81,682 flurries of steam emerging from his bathtub;
278,341 moments of finding things more or less unendurable; 356,986 blades of grass trodden upon with firm feet;
541,095 vertical lines observed forming deliberate patterns;
672,984 glances thrown at the face of his wristwatch in order to obtain knowledge of the positions of its hands relative to the circumference of the dial;
985,431 approximations of entities discerned on overcast Mondays;
1,762,298 repetitions of events that he found familiar, warming and comfortable;
3,173,902 doubts that his life had yet obtained a meaningful purpose or direction;
4,876,325 streams of bubbles encountered in mid-ascent through tall glasses filled with liquid intended for his refreshment, and for which purpose were being held in his right hand;
5,287,781 things impossible to analyse with absolute precision.
Writings in the Mode of Realism
(1956–1989)
During the course of his life Maximilian completed only one book. This came to be the project that he laboured on more intensively than any other, as he obsessively undertook library researches for each subject that he wrote about. From early on in the life of its composition he decided to call it simply The Book of Essays. Once finished it would be exactly one thousand pages long and would contain precisely one hundred essays, each consisting of exactly ten pages. They were essays about mirrors, pencils, magnets, centipedes, electricity, poker, banjos, silk, eels, make-up, cigars, ears, phenomenology, spaghetti, gin, astrology, string, cacti, karate, ophthalmology, semaphore, cinnamon, tattoos, hoaxes, planetariums, bones, surfing, earrings, ventriloquism, martyrs, whistling, curtains, justice, trombones, gunpowder, hats, swamps, Andorra, vases, adolescence, railways, nylon, shelves, bowling, doubt, glaciers, jumping, triangles, chance, steam, brass, sandals, go-karts, denial, superstition, gas, basements, advertising, truth, trout, bubbles, shadows, typography, lightbulbs, melancholia, plastic, acrobats, assonance, dots, houses, clay, benevolence, canoes, buttons, locusts, bells, apples, synthesizers, backgammon, saliva, bureaucracy, algae, aspirins, cuneiform, paint, magicians, noses, ponds, helicopters, melodrama, yachts, arrows, unicycles, radars, classification, singing, lampshades, serenity, riddles, and essays.
The style of the essays varied greatly. On occasion he would reveal little-known facts about the subject under discussion, assembling concise, truncated histories occasionally spanning several millennia in the course of a paragraph or two. Other attempts at the form would see him forming philosophical interpretations of the “meaning” of a given subject, rather than its material circumstances, employing examples from his own biography and mingling them with arguments that frequently involved a series of wild speculations and abstractions in an attempt to bring common assumptions into doubt. Equally, an essay might focus on a single instance of an object’s manifestation in the world, building a tower of anecdotal surmises from nothing more than the way in which a vase was placed upon a table, or the manner in which a wall had been daubed with its particular shade of paint. Indeed, a few of his essays mentioned their “subjects” only in passing, hiding them within sentences focused on other matters, so that the often ambivalent relationships existing between