Daniel James
The past is altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past354
The light flickered, the projector whirred, and the image flooded the room. The work of Ezra Maas, from floor to ceiling, colouring everything, the four walls that had become my world. The film that Wallas had intercepted355 left me changed. Even when the projector had powered down, and the yellow light had dimmed, the images kept playing in my mind, over and over again. I felt like I was undergoing a transfusion. Another life was flowing into my veins; opening my eyes to a new way of seeing the world. It was only after I had watched the footage a dozen times that I saw the code and uncovered the hidden message that would lead me to the oldest bank in London.356 I didn’t know what to expect as I turned the safety deposit box over in my hands. The smooth, brushed steel was cold beneath my palms, but as I reached for the lid I felt an overwhelming sense of unease. I almost set it back down without opening it, but I hadn’t come this far to turn back now.
For a second it looked empty but thankfully it wasn’t. Inside was a deed of warranty, apparently signed by Maas himself, which gave the bearer access to a property in Soho. There was also a letter handwritten in spidery ink and a set of keys that slid along the smooth steel and into my hand. I couldn’t remember leaving the bank. The journey to Soho was a blur. My next memory was simply standing outside the building in the dark, the rain soaking me through. I looked down at the handwritten address. The words seemed to be alive. It took me a second to realise it was the rain. I watched as the ink ran like tears, spilling off the edges of the paper as if it were trying to escape the words it had once formed, until the address was illegible and the note fell apart in my hands, until the tips of my fingers were stained black.
I climbed the steps and heard the door unlock automatically as I approached. Someone was obviously watching. Inside the dimly lit foyer a security guard357 sat expressionless at a desk. I looked around. There was a lift behind him and a doorway leading to a stairwell. The guard glanced up, as if he had been expecting me, and asked to see my identification. When I showed him the letter signed by Maas he told me to take the elevator to the sixth floor. I stepped inside the mirrored compartment, surrounded by my own reflections, and pressed the button to go up. The doors opened to darkness, and for a second I wondered if I was on the wrong floor, but as I stepped out into the hallway a light flickered on then off again, revealing a gold number six on the wall. I looked around as the lift doors closed behind me.
The sixth floor was expensively decorated, with crimson wallpaper, ebony furniture, and modern art on the walls, but it looked like no one had been up here for a long time. The air was stale, heavy black curtains were drawn across the only window, and there was a layer of dust over everything. I walked towards a solitary door at the far end of the hall, the lamps overhead continuing to flicker, alternating between stark, merciless, light and deepest black. There was a steady drone coming through the walls, like the rumble of a train or a ship’s engine deep within the foundations of the building. I knocked on the door, but I didn’t expect anyone to answer. Judging from the solitary footprints I had tracked in the dust, as I walked from the elevator to the apartment, it had been some time since anyone had visited apartment 601. After a moment of silence, I slipped the key from the safety deposit box into the lock and opened the door.
TRANSCRIPT /001358
DJ: I feel like an idiot talking into my phone, but I need to document this, just in case anything happens. I’m going to pretend you’re a person, okay? Would Diane be too obvious?359 How about Bob, instead?360 Okay Bob, I’ve found something extraordinary…an apartment in Soho361 owned by Maas… but it’s much more than that. I think this is where he’s been coming all these years. While the eyes of the world were watching his mansion and studios, his galleries, his homes around the world, all those remote, isolated locations he had supposedly retreated to, all that time, he had been coming here, to an apartment in one of the biggest cities in the world, the streets outside teeming with life, people living either side of him, above him, and below. Here he was, hiding in plain sight. This was his real workspace. No phone, no TV, no distractions. Just a cavernous apartment, filled with barely furnished rooms, curtains drawn, bookshelves from floor to ceiling, hardly any light…dirt and dust on everything…there are hundreds of notepads and sheets of paper, canvasses, a typewriter, old computer equipment, and a bed. I’ve been here for five or six hours and I’ve barely scratched the surface. None of the light bulbs seem to be working and it’s been difficult to explore in the dark. I’m going to sleep here tonight and spend all day tomorrow going through his books and belongings. I have to take this opportunity while I have the chance. There’s no telling when The Maas Foundation or someone else might turn up.
In the end I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t. Not after everything I had found. It was like finding the keys to Da Vinci’s hidden studio,362 or Dylan’s long-rumoured archives.363 Every inch of this place was filled with secrets. Even the walls themselves were covered in handwritten notes, sketches, and complex mathematical equations. Others had been transformed into large scale artworks. The figure of a man had been drawn across one wall, so large that it continued onto the ceiling and hung over the room like the outline of an enormous shadow. The man was illustrated in the style of a Victorian medical textbook, its graphic detail both horrifying and beautiful, clinical in its precision, but Maas had also introduced a surreal poetry to the visual, the veins and tributaries bursting forth, extending beyond the outline of the body, branching out into the space of the room like flowering vines. There was mould growing up the wall over the sketch, merging with the brickwork and threading itself around the leg of the man. Intentional or not, it had become a living artwork.
Beneath the furniture covered in sheets there were hundreds of books and manuscripts, many with important passages underlined, thousands of pages of notes about his most famous artworks, dozens of unpublished notepads and sketches, old desktop computers, unfinished sculptures and paintings, literary papers, reviews and correspondence he had written, film reels and audio recordings, and more. It was a unique, unprecedented insight into his methods, his genius, his life and work.
Filled with a renewed energy, I began the process of cataloguing everything I came across, dividing my discoveries into different mediums and genres, published and unpublished. Maas seemed to have had his own colour-coded system perhaps denoting which works were suitable to be published, if he died before they were complete, and which were private. I’d heard of other artists364doing the same, but without a code key there was no way of knowing his intentions. For better or worse I had to create my own categories now. It somehow seemed better this way. Instead of relying on his definitions I was taking control and deciding where everything fitted. I read until dawn, fascinated by his handwriting, by the passages he had underlined and their significance, obsessed with memorising as much as I could, appropriating his words, his thoughts, his knowledge, his memories, absorbing some sense of his self into my own.
TRANSCRIPT /002
DJ: Maas’s notes cover a frightening range of topics, but his thoughts repeatedly gravitate to strands of Western philosophy and Eastern religion, and so much more – science and psychoanalysis, mathematics, literature, language and art. The way he connects these disparate topics is incredible, from exploring Lacan’s triptych order of the unconscious365 to a meditation on the Tetragrammaton366 and the Shemhamphorasch,367 the hidden name of God, to the Sephirot,368 the ten different aspects of God’s Will. This must be linked to his final work. I just don’t know how, yet. His notes document his research and interest in these concepts, how he engaged with each of them artistically, and his unrealised plans to incorporate these ideas into his later work. Maas wasn’t religious as far as I can tell, but he seemed to be attracted to the iconography of apocryphal texts and images, and the sense of hidden mysteries they symbolised.369
He shows a similar interest in representing scientific concepts through his art and appears to have had a particular fascination with quantum mechanics. I’ve found several ambitious essays on the subject from his teens, which were never published, and he seems to have returned to the subject shortly before his disappearance. There is even evidence here to suggest he travelled to High Island, Maine, to talk theory with John Wheeler370 a few years before the physicist’s death in 2008. If this meeting did take place the timing is especially interesting, as this was around the period when Maas announced his intention to disappear from public life and concentrate on his final artwork. Based on what I’ve found, here, I think any discussion of Maas’s final project must take quantum mechanics into account. It definitely appears to have been one of his central obsessions in later life. Or could language have been his renewed focus in those last years before his disappearance? His writings continually circle back to a desire to use art as a means to reconnect with a pre-linguistic stage. Perhaps that was the final work he returned to at the end? You could arguably say the same for any of these topics, however. His explorations of art, psychoanalysis, religion, mathematics, and dozens of other topics are all equally ground-breaking. Any one of the proposed projects linked to these fields could be his masterpiece, each could potentially change the world, but I can’t help but feel there is more to discover. Even now, after everything, I still don’t fully understand the connections I’m seeing here. Like the man himself, whatever he was working on at the very end is still out there, invisible and beyond my reach, at least for now.
When morning came I decided to throw open the curtains. Who knew what else could be here? It was only then, as beams of light arced into the room, that I realised there was a door I hadn’t noticed, partially hidden by storage boxes, sheets dappled with paint, and unfinished canvasses.
The canvasses were stacked up by the dozen, some mounted, other rolled up and bound by string, some seemingly finished, others incomplete. I recalled the old saying that ‘art is never finished, only abandoned’.371 These lost and discarded pieces would be worth millions in the right hands. Some of the paint was layered on so thickly I wondered if Maas had painted over previous artworks. I had read about this practice, in other famous artists,372 but there was no way of knowing, without an X-Ray or other technology. I examined as many artworks as I could, both to catalogue their existence and in the hope of finding more hidden messages. There was a dark substance on some of the canvasses that left a green stain on my hands; it had a sickly sweet, decaying smell, like rotten fruit. I looked it up and discovered a pigment called Paris Green,373 once used by the Impressionists Monet and Renoir, and the Post-Impressionists Cezanne and Van Gogh, as well as many others, in 19th and early 20th century Paris. It contained arsenic and could be lethal. Maas would have known this of course. The canvasses might have been worth millions, but they were also a poisoned chalice in more ways than one. I set the paintings aside for now and decided to see where the door led. It was locked from the inside. My heart pounded in my chest. For an electrifying moment, I wondered if I had reached the end of the story. Was this the locked room? Would I find Maas inside this secret chamber, sat working at his desk, with a pencil held between finger and thumb, poised above the page? I put my ear to the door and listened, imagining the click, click, click of a typewriter at work. I took a step back and threw my weight against the door.
TRANSCRIPT /003
DJ: I was able to get inside, but it wasn’t what I was expecting. The room is some sort of surveillance suite, filled with monitors and recording equipment. The technology is old, but most of it is still working, and there’s one screen that’s still turned on, showing footage from the hall. There must be a camera watching the door, so Maas could see who was outside. I’ve found tapes going back years but, get this, Maas has edited himself out. He’s not in any of the footage. There’s something else interesting, too. All of the people who visited Maas here were women. END
Hours turned into days. I was pale and unshaven, weak from a lack of food, but I was scared to leave now. I was convinced that, if I did, I wouldn’t be able to return; that everything I had found would be lost, and it would all disappear. But if I didn’t leave I would eventually die. Maybe this was meant to kill me after all? Maas must have known I would keep reading, searching for answers, refusing to give up, even if it meant my own death. Were the bodies of the others who had come before me here within these walls, rotted away to dust?
TRANSCRIPT /004
DJ: I know what the tapes are now. They’re not a record or surveillance. They’re art. Maas turned every relationship he’s had for the last twenty-five years into a piece of conceptual art. I found the notes in one of his journals. He called this The Hallway. Every woman who has come to his door has been filmed, every conversation recorded. He’s edited himself out, so we have to reconstruct the relationships through their words, their images, their presence juxtaposed against his absence. I had heard rumours of his affairs, everyone had, but this is something else. We’re talking hundreds of women here. It’s incredible. The tapes start in the 1980s and the last one is dated 2005. The women visited him one at a time, but he’s edited the film in such a way that they all appear at once, filling up the hallway with the ghosts of different women, displaced from time and space. I can almost imagine them all lined up in the hallway outside right now, waiting to see him.
As I wondered how long I could go without food, I began to realise this was more than just an intellectual challenge; it was about endurance. How would I operate under stress, deprived of food, water, sleep? I found a half bottle of Bushmills374 under a pile of manuscripts. It wasn’t bourbon, but for the moment it was all I had to satiate my thirst – for sustenance, for the truth, for an end to the madness – as I watched the surveillance tapes back and attempted to understand them.
TRANSCRIPT /005
DJ: Ever since the discovery of the encoded message, that led me to the safety deposit box and eventually to this apartment, my eyes have been opened to the presence of other codes in Maas’s work, visual or otherwise. Well, I’ve just found one more, and it might be the most important yet. I just don’t know what it means though. Maas’s cult followers in the ’60s and ’70s always spoke of the hidden messages in his work. It was pretty much dismissed as the ravings of obsessive fans, like ‘Paul is Dead’,375 but I’m starting to think they might have been onto something.
It seems impossible, but the same group of numbers – three, six and seventeen – seem to recur throughout his work, from the novella he wrote as a teenager,376 to his poems, paintings, sculptures, conceptual art, books, films, everything. They’re ingeniously hidden and never concealed in the same way twice. Some are easier to find than others. In one painting he depicts three children in a field with six trees and uses seventeen different colours. Others are harder to find, such as the amount of grammar he uses and on what pages, or the repetition of words with those number of letters. In his sculptures it could be the number of points or edges, or the physical distance between them when measured. In his films it seems to be a combination of audio-visual cues. Sometimes it’s all of these things combined. Like I said, it’s incredible…impossible, insane…but the numbers are there and now that I’ve noticed them I can’t stop finding them. I see the numbers everywhere.377 17-6-3-17-6-3-17-6-3-17-6-3-17-6-3-17-6-3-17-6-3-17-6-3-17-6-3-17-6-3-17-6-3-17-6-3…I get the impression you could dedicate an entire academic career to hunting out Maas’s messages and codes, never mind interpreting his art, but I don’t have that kind of time and I’m no mathematician or number theorist. I’ve managed to get this far through intuition alone. None of it will matter though if I can’t answer the question that remains. What do the numbers mean?
Maas’s video suite was filled with outdated technology gathering dust. It was a strangely beautiful, mechanical graveyard. A Macintosh 128k, a Tri-X camera, an Altair 8800, an Apple II, a Rolleiflex 3.5f with a Schneider Xenotar lens, a Motorola DynaTAC phone, a Pulsar P1 watch, a TRS-80 Model 100, an Epson MX-80 printer, a decommissioned microfilm reader. Everywhere I looked there was another computer, camera, or miscellaneous device. He seemed to have hoarded anything analogue. The microfilm reader was huge and unwieldy, too heavy for me to move, but I was intrigued what Maas might have used it for. Traditionally, microfilm was used to preserve publications, newspaper clippings, and archival records. It was also used during WW2 for espionage and to secure military correspondence. The only one I had ever come across previously was in the archives at the newspaper but that was fifteen years ago now. Since then everything had migrated to digital. I remembered something one of Maas’s former collaborators had told me during an interview. He said Maas loved the tactile, physical, nature of analogue technology, but I suspected it was more than just a personal preference. Unlike digital, analogue technology such as a microfilm reader was not connected to the internet or any other network. Therefore it was not subject to the same invasive and insidious surveillance that we experience while using computers and smart devices. There is no big brother inside the microfilm reader and no algorithms mapping our search patterns to provide personalised advertising. I could imagine Maas preferring the isolation and privacy of old technology.
There was a stack of Kodak Eastman film canisters in the corner of the suite, containing reels of 35mm stock, the same as the original film that led me here to the apartment. When I opened one of the canisters a glossy 8 x 10 headshot fell out onto the floor. I recognised the man’s face from somewhere. On the back of the photo were the initials M.M and a stamped business address, ‘Warren Wagner and Associates, Theatrical Agency, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7FH’. I examined each reel, one by one, holding the film up to the light carefully, tracing the perforations along each side as if they were braille. Most of the stock was degraded, and damaged, but I decided to watch what I could. When the first film flickered into life I saw a man dressed in black walking towards to the camera. He was speaking but there was no sound. The image was crisscrossed with white lines. One of them ran right through the man’s face, but I was sure it was the same man from the photograph. I realised now where I knew the face from. It was the photograph of Maas and his entourage having dinner at the Golden Fleece. Could I be looking at Ezra Maas? I packed the film and the photograph into my bag.
I realised it could take me years to uncover all the mysteries hidden within those walls in Soho, but from a biographer’s perspective the greatest discovery was still to come. The books I would later refer to as ‘The Maas Journals’ were locked away in a trunk in the surveillance suite. I prized it open and found the journals inside, tied together with string. There were several dozen and, at first glance, it was hard to appreciate the importance of these coloured exercise books, with their pages filled with handwritten text. However, as I began to read, I quickly realised what I held in my hands. It was Ezra Maas’s life story written in pencil on sheets of quadrille paper. This was the truth I was here to find.
Notes
354. T.S Eliot.
355. Daniel does not provide any further information about how he got the film from Wallas for reasons that become apparent later in the text – Anonymous.
356. C. Hoare & Co, founded in 1672 by Sir Richard Hoare, is the oldest owned privately-owned banking house in England. Maas kept a safety deposit box here.
357. Daniel’s handwritten notes provided an expanded version of his conversation with the security guard. Removing the dialogue from this scene appears to have been a conscious decision by Daniel to reflect the dreamlike nature of his discovery of the apartment. Daniel wrote: “The guard had no idea who owned the building. He simply had instructions to prevent anyone from entering unless they were carrying a signed deed of warranty. The guard had worked here for two years and rotated his shift with two others. They had often speculated who owned the building and thought it might have been a Hollywood actor or a famous musician, after all Paul McCartney had an office just around the corner, but none of them had ever seen anyone and no one had ever tried to get into the building in the years they had worked there as security. This was as far as their curiosity extended. They were paid not to ask questions. As I left him he called after me, his face uncertain, and said “Was this a test?”. I nodded, the only thing I could think to do, and stepped into the lift.”
358. These recordings were made on Daniel’s phone and later transcribed. I initially believed he had used a Dictaphone, but it may have been using the voice memo function on his mobile phone.
359. I presume this is a reference to Twin Peaks, and the Diane that Special Agent Dale Cooper dictates his FBI reports to, during the show.
360. See above. Bob was one of the show’s primary antagonists.
361. Although no one would have guessed Maas had been working in secret in the centre of London, the choice of Soho as the location of his studio is perhaps not surprising when you consider the area’s cultural history. Of all the stories surrounding it, the one I like to think influenced Maas the most is Dr Jekyll setting up a home for his alter-ago Edward Hyde in Soho, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic book. There are lots of other interesting stories from Soho’s history, too. Its former residents include Mozart, Karl Marx (the Communist Manifesto was actually written in Great Windmill Street, Soho), Eric Clapton, and The Sex Pistols. Soho has strong links to the music scene. In the 1940s Soho’s Club Eleven was the heart of the UK jazz scene, the 1950s saw Europe’s first rock club open on Old Compton Street, in 1962 The Rolling Stones played their first gig at the Marquee Club on Wardour Street, and Elton John wrote Your Song in Denmark Street. While Soho may be famous for its notorious red-light district, it is also well known for its late-night coffee shops and cafes and today is one of the key locations for the entertainment industry, with both Paul McCartney and the British Board of Film Classification having premises there. Whether by chance or design, Maas’s decision to place himself here, in the centre of all this cultural history, hiding in plain sight, is an interesting one – Anonymous.
362. Or the Unabomber’s cabin? When I first read Daniel’s description of Maas’s apartment, I was reminded of news reports about the discovery of Ted Kaczynski’s cabin in the woods near Lincoln, Montana, after his arrest by the FBI following his twenty year bombing campaign. Kaczynski, a former mathematics prodigy, had turned his back on academia and disappeared, in 1969. He spent the next two decades living in his cabin, writing his manifesto and planning his bombing campaign which would kill three and injure more than twenty. Inside his cabin FBI officers found highly descriptive journals detailing all of his crimes, as well as bomb parts and other paraphernalia. Bizarrely, the cabin is now preserved in its entirety as a museum piece (on loan from the FBI) in the Newseum, Washington DC. Only in America, as they say – Anonymous.
363. In 2016, The New York Times reported the story that Bob Dylan’s long rumoured secret archives of notebooks, lyrics, correspondence, films, photographs, and other material, had been privately bought by a consortium of US institutions for $15 – $20m. This collection of 6,000 pieces included a trinity of notebooks, which had been kept in climate-controlled storage and whose existence had previously been known only to Dylan’s closest friends and family. One of these notebooks has been referred to as the ‘Maltese Falcon of Dylanology’ for its promise as an ‘interpretative key’ to decoding his masterworks.
364. J.D Salinger used a similar system according to his daughter Margaret, as recollected in her book Dream Catcher: A Memoir, (2001).
365. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, outlined a three-part structure to the unconscious, The Imaginary, The Symbolic, and The Real. The Imaginary is the pre-linguistic world of the image and is rooted in the subject’s relationship with his own body. The Symbolic is the linguistic dimension, our perception of the world defined by language. The Real is outside of language and resists symbolisation absolutely.
366. The Tetragrammaton, meaning ‘to have four letters’, allegedly refers to the true name of God in the Hebrew bible, which ‘should not be spoken’. In the short story, Death and the Compass, by Jorge Luis Borges, a detective is lured to his death by his nemesis after becoming obsessed with solving a mysterious set of murders he connects to the Tetragrammaton, the hidden name of God.
367. Shemhamphorasch, meaning ‘the explicit or interpreted name’, is linked to the Tetragrammaton. In Kabbalah, the term was used to designate a 72-letter name for God, other times a 42-letter name. A 216-letter name for God is found in Jewish Kabbalistic sources (mentioned by Tosafot as well as by the Kabbalists) as well as in Christian Kabbalah and in Hermetic Qabalah, derived from the 72 groups of three letters, each of these triplets being the name of an angel or intelligence. The word, Shemhamphorasch has also been used by the Church of Satan and has been associated with everything from tarot cards and magical grimoires to occult rituals and summoning demons.
368. Sephirot, meaning ‘enumerations’, are the ten attributes/emanations in Kabbalah, through which Ein Sof (The Infinite) reveals himself and continuously creates both the physical realm and the chain of higher metaphysical realms (Seder hishtalshelus). Number theorists have speculated on a ‘mysterious power’ locked within the numbers and letters, the hidden messages, in the Tetragrammaton, Shemhamphorasch, and Sephirot.
369. Interestingly, this was also a central preoccupation in the work of Maas’s friend RB Kitaj. The painter strongly identified with the writer Franz Kafka’s sense of estrangement and his fascination with hidden mysteries. In the catalogue for Kitaj’s Little Pictures exhibition, these were said to include representations of the Judao-Christian mysteries of the hidden face of God and the artist’s meditation on the Jewish Christ.
370. John Archibald Wheeler (1911 – 2008), a professor at Princeton and a world authority on quantum mechanics, was considered to be one of the ‘monster minds’ of theoretical physics. He was a colleague of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr and coined the terms ‘black hole’ and ‘wormhole’ during his career. Toward the end of his life he developed a particular fascination with the relationship between consciousness and existence.
371. A much-used quote that has been erroneously attributed to everyone from Leonardo Da Vinci, to Paul Valery, to Cezanne – Anonymous.
372. Using technological advances such as X-ray, and other non-invasive techniques, it has been revealed that many famous artists, including Picasso, Van Gogh, Goya, Degas, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and others, painted over previous works to create new masterpieces. Thanks to technological advances, art historians and conservation experts have been able to discover what lies beneath a number of famous paintings without disturbing the original. Techniques include using macro X-ray fluorescence analysis, terahertz radiation, infrared technology, and fluorescence spectroscopy. Famous example of artworks which have been revealed to have other artworks hidden beneath them include Picasso’s Blue Room, and The Old Guitarist, Van Gogh’s Patch of Grass, and Rembrandt’s An Old Man in Military Costume – Anonymous.
373. Paris green consists of copper(II) acetate triarsenite or copper(II) acetoarsenite Cu(C₂H₃O₂)₂·3Cu(AsO₂)₂. Arsenic is among the most toxic substances in the world and, depending on the level of exposure, can cause cancer and death.
374. Bushmills Triple Distilled Irish Whiskey was also the brand of whiskey preferred by the playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, according to sources.
375. The urban legend of Paul McCartney’s death allegedly started at an American University in 1969 and followed a minor car accident McCartney had been involved with in 1966. Supporters of this theory suggested that playing the song Revolution 9 from The Beatles’ White Album backwards revealed the words “Turn me on, dead man”. This was taken as a clue to McCartney’s alleged death and replacement by a lookalike in 1966. Additional ‘clues’ were John Lennon supposedly saying “I buried Paul” at the end of Strawberry Fields and the symbolism of the cover to the Abbey Road album. Eventually the Beatles press officer and McCartney himself (who had been away from the public eye at the time, living at a Scottish retreat) were forced to deny the rumours, which had quickly grown into an international cult.
376. It may also have been concealed within the work he produced as a child and young adult, but Daniel did not have access to this at the time.
377. Apophenia is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”, but it has come to represent the human tendency to seek patterns in random nature in general, as with gambling, paranormal phenomena, religion, and even attempts at scientific observation. It was originally used in relation to the distortion of reality present in psychosis, but it has become more widely used to describe this tendency, without necessarily implying the presence of neurological differences or mental illness.