General Advertisement to the Locality
(1957)
Maximilian stuck the following notice to the centre of an unlocked door that led from the street into a property that he owned in Islington:
PREPARATORY NOTES TOWARDS A GENERAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE SITUATION WHICH YOU FIND YOURSELF IN
initially it is probably worth remarking that you may well have been followed today. it frequently happens to people who end up reading this notice. if it didn’t happen today, then most likely it did the day before, or perhaps it will happen tomorrow. the sole inhabitant of this household delights in following others through the streets and observing their habits and rituals. he studies mannerisms, listens to conversations, observes the goods and services which individuals choose to purchase.
all newcomers are advised that any cheering messages, cryptic intimations, secret bulletins and genuine grievances may be placed in the letterbox below. you can live secure in the knowledge that they will be received kindly and attended to with heartfelt thought and ceremony. written communications are treated with utmost respect in the place before which you are currently standing.
it is true to say that if you stare at a thing hard enough, paying very careful attention to what lies before you, that thing (anything) can become transformed into another entity altogether. a similar thing occurs when you repeat a word to yourself aloud enough times. the concrete meaning of the word blurs and eventually disappears. the sound becomes mere babble, a series of rhythmical noises. somehow this sound has taken possession of a thing we have mutually agreed is knowable, tangible and commonly understood. this moment of your reading of these words on this door might be the time to commence an experiment related to this phenomenon.
after reading this notice, perhaps fifty times, you may find that many of your ideas about what a door is will have shifted inalterably. this might be an experience that you would find rewarding.
A CONCISE EXPLORATION OF WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU WALK THROUGH A DOOR
we open doors and walk through them. we move from one place to another. when we open a door we expect to find certain things there. for most people it is a rare thing to walk through unknown doors. perhaps, when we do walk through a door for the first time, it should be regarded as a privilege. in doing so, in taking these steps, we have obtained access to another room, another fragment of the world.
rooms are often very similar to each other, but it is impossible for rooms to be identical to one another. at the very least they can never occupy the same positions in space. when walking through doors we should attend to the differences we can see in the space beyond them, however small these differences may be. we should always try to enjoy things that are unfamiliar to us. life should contain, amongst other things, a long series of adventures in which our ideas about ourselves and the nature of the world evolve continuously. this can begin to happen whenever we open a door, if we walk through a door in possession of the knowledge that we are walking through a door. we will only discover ourselves in our encountering the unknown. every door we arrive at offers this possibility.
doors are usually viewed from the outside. in this role, as an object-to-be-viewed-from-the-outside, for a moment or so, they are neutral objects, hiding nothing remarkable. consequently, doors frequently find themselves engaged in the act of looking as ordinary and respectable as possible. but let us not forget that doors are more significant entities than is commonly accepted.
AN OUTLINE OF WHAT YOU MIGHT EXPECT TO FIND ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS PARTICULAR DOOR
unusual things lie behind this door. amongst them are articles which possess the ability to shock, jolt, quicken, abstract. you may wish to encounter them. in particular, those of you who enjoy collecting cigarette cards will find a great deal to enjoy.
at least accept that in choosing to NOT open this door you are enacting a protest against curiosity. you will remain forever bereft of this particular form of knowledge.
nevertheless, it may be worth remembering that almost every door we encounter in our lives will remain closed to us. there are reasons for this, although it is not always clear what they are. but we should be mindful nonetheless that there are a great many consequences arising from this fact.
A CERTAIN FEELING OF CAUTION IT MIGHT BE WISE TO ADOPT BEFORE PROCEEDING ANY FURTHER
it would be wise for readers of this notice to consider the many possibilities present when one is still at the stage of anticipation. it is not always better to rush ahead, to be in a hurry to begin.
if you decided to walk away from this notice and only return once your anticipation had peaked, when it became impossible to stand the tension any longer, perhaps your enjoyment would also be increased. using this technique it would then become possible to imagine what lies beyond this notice and so invent your own room, which in your imagination may well seem a more perfect room than the one which you might actually encounter. this perfection can linger as long as you will allow it to and need never be shattered. to walk through the door now will only result in the disappointment of it being different from the ideal room that you will have fashioned in your mind.
still, a confrontation with the actual, tangible truth is surely preferable to fanciful flights of the imagination. perhaps you should simply discover what lies beyond the door and accept it for what it is.
THE ACCURACY OF PREDICTIONS BASED ON ACTS OF INTUITION
it might be possible for you to guess what lies beyond this door. or perhaps ’deduce’ is the more appropriate term. you would be working from nothing more than various clues left in this notice. you would have become a sort of detective. not that there is anything deliberately hidden in these words. there is certainly no elaborate system of hints for you to follow in order to guess what lies beyond the door. i am only suggesting that it may be, in theory, possible for you to anticipate with some degree of accuracy what you will find on the other side.
if you do successfully manage to intuit what lies beyond the door i hope you will be made happy by finding your suspicions verified. considering the vast unlikelihood of this happening, i hope you might, in that instance, venture to take it as a particularly positive omen.
it is difficult to gauge precisely from where our intuition arises. perhaps what we refer to as intuition is in part an entirely rational process involving the ordering of facts of which we are already in possession. using these facts we grasp at the most likely possibilities through processes that are concealed from our conscious minds, employing a series of no-less-analytical and precise methodologies and forms of reasoning that we have however long since interiorised and forgotten.
this couldn’t of course account for those things that are wholly unknown to us but of which we still manage somehow to grasp the truth. even if it is only a truth perceived vaguely, opaquely, seemingly untrustworthy. somehow, within this fog, we nonetheless arrive, sometimes, at the facts.
A COMPARISON OF THIS DOOR WITH EVERY OTHER DOOR IN THE WORLD
perhaps every door in the world has its own piece of writing, of a more or less similar length to the one you are now reading, scrawled in invisible letters across its surface. each such notice is doubtless different from every other, just as no two snowflakes are the same and no two people, etc. each notice presumably corresponds to the people who live behind each door, or the people who have lived there in times past, to the things that have been done there and the words which