Daniel James
Nothing ever becomes real ‘till it is experienced394
The Maas Journals were everything I had been searching for. I had found the truth. Only it wasn’t as simple as that. It never is. On the surface, the journals appeared to provide a highly detailed account of Maas’s life from childhood up to his disappearance.395 Each journal covered several months, sometimes years, of his life. The first was marked 1950 – ’55, containing childhood memories and recollections of his parents, the second 1956 – 1960, his school years, and so on. When combined they essentially told Maas’s life story decade by decade from the 1950s to his disappearance almost sixty years later.
It seemed too good to be true, and of course it was. After I found the first journal, marked 1950 – ’55, I found another with the same date, and another; three different journals with three very different stories about his childhood. It was not simply that they were contradictory. It was so much more than that. They presented completely alternate versions of his life, each one making the other impossible.
This was the case with all of the journals, right up to the most recent dated over seven years ago. There were dozens of variations of Maas’s life, through the decades, and no way of knowing which one of them was real. If his reclusive existence in life had refuted interpretation through an absence, these journals overwhelmed the possibility of a single, definitive, truth by drowning it in alternatives. I was faced with a proliferation of answers and no hope of separating truth from fiction.
I remembered an unpublished essay Maas had written as a teenager that I had read a couple of days ago, which explored similar ideas. It was an audacious piece of work linking post-structuralism and quantum mechanics, from the Copenhagen Interpretation and Many-Worlds theory to Wheeler’s participatory universe,396 and proposed a correspondence with “the fluid nature of language as a representation of reality and its infinite play of signifiers”.397 Looking through Maas’s journals, I couldn’t help but feel they were an extension of these ideas about the certainty of knowledge. Multiple realities perceived simultaneously. All equally valid. I recalled a quote from the German physicist Werner Heisenberg that Maas had underlined in his own paper: Reality is in the observations, not in the electron.398
Was Maas giving me the power to observe and decide the outcome? Or was this another game, another trap, a maze where I would become hopelessly lost? Scientific truth was always provisional. Quantum mechanics had changed everything by revealing the central role of the observer to scientific knowledge.399 This had been confirmed by experiments on the quantum level, where the results appeared to be directly affected by the presence of the person making the observation. It had been successfully demonstrated in lab conditions hundreds of times. Incredibly, particles of matter seemed to respond to consciousness on the smallest, most fundamental, level, existing in a fluid, ever-changing state of pure potential while unseen, and only becoming a fixed, definite, ‘thing’ when observed. After discovering Maas’s extensive notes on quantum theory,400 I had given myself a crash course in the subject. Luckily I was always a fast learner, especially when it came to complex ideas that challenged you to think in new ways. In that sense, Maas and I were alike; two sides of the same coin. On the quantum level, matter seemed to exist in all possible forms until it was observed, but the classical world that we lived in, and experienced, did not fluctuate in this way. It seemed stable, at least on the surface.
Maas’s journals presented a multitude of different lives. I had to believe they had been left here for a reason. Were they waiting for a conscious observer? Would my decision determine which of the journals was true? In physics, it was referred to as ‘the collapse of the wave function’, when the potential states of a particle took on a single form. The big question in science was, what caused this? Who or what decides the final state of these electrons and particles, which are essentially the building blocks of the reality we experience?
The source of this collapse was the subject of intense speculation with many believing the cause to be consciousness,401 because it was only when an observation was made that ‘potential’ became ‘actual’ reality. Others believed it was a matter of chance.402 Some even believed it was God. The debate wasn’t new. In the 18th century, philosophers such as Bishop Berkeley had speculated that objects only existed because humans were there to observe them and that solipsism,403 the belief that only the mind exists, had been around for centuries.
The revelations of quantum mechanics reignited the debate into questions of free will and predestination, which had philosophical and theological implications, and called for a reinterpretation of these ideas, with thought experiments, such as Schrodinger’s Cat,404 created to express what the quantum world meant for our understanding of reality and the potentially crucial role of an observer in defining it.
Were Maas’s journals the equivalent of a thought experiment presented as a conceptual art installation? Or were they a reflection of the world as it was, our sense of self fractured between different possible identities; a schizophrenic existence? If I chose one version of his life, and published it, would the other possibilities ‘decohere’ and cease to exist? Would my choice become the truth? It felt like a gift in some ways, being given this power to decide reality, but I couldn’t help but wonder, what was the price?
TRANSCRIPT /007
DJ: I keep coming back to Maas’s final project. The journals may be the turning point for my book, but I’m convinced this place, and the notes he left behind, hold the key to the final piece of art he disappeared to create. The pieces are all here, life, art, language, quantum mechanics, religion, psychoanalysis, his secret codes and hidden messages, the numbers seventeen, six, and three, the hidden name of God, it’s all here, all connected by him, but to what end? END
There was a knock at the door. I went into the surveillance suite and looked at the monitor. There was a man standing at the door. He knocked again. As he reached into his jacket he turned to the camera slightly and I realised the man was me. I was looking at myself…but from a week ago. What I was seeing wasn’t possible. Either I was hallucinating or it was a glitch in the system, an eerie coincidence. Nevertheless, the sight of my own face looking back at me, and the sound of the knocking, made me feel uneasy. My hands were shaking as I gripped the table to steady myself, my legs like water. There was another knock at the door. It couldn’t be me at the door. It was impossible. I staggered across the apartment and pressed my eye to the glass peephole. A young woman’s face looked back at me in the fisheye lens. She was tall and elegant, with thick dark hair and large brown eyes. I opened the door.
‘Can I come in?’ she said.
‘Who are you?’
‘A friend.’
‘What if I say no?’
‘I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say.’
The Maas Foundation had caught up with me. It had just been a matter of time. I decided not to fight it and held the door open as she walked past me into the living room.
‘It’s amazing,’ she said, her eyes wide as she looked around.
‘You didn’t know about this place?’
‘We knew of its existence, but not its location…’ she replied.
‘Until I led you here…’ I realised. ‘But if you knew I was here all this time, why didn’t you come in earlier? Why wait?’
‘The people who followed you here did not have the authority to make that decision. Paid to watch, yes, but not to act. Their instructions were to wait for you to come out, but when you didn’t…’
‘They had to call their superiors? I guess that makes you upper management. Who is calling the shots at The Maas Foundation these days? Helena? You? I didn’t get your name.’
‘My name is Ophelia, and I don’t work for The Maas Foundation.’
‘Sure you don’t. Not that it matters. I knew I’d have company sooner or later. The guard on the door must have tipped you off days ago.’
‘We have nothing to do with the security downstairs. It’s possible Ezra, or someone else, hired them privately. If they were our people, we would have known about this place long ago.’
‘So what now? Do I get the same treatment as Wallas?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re free to leave, Mr James. We have no desire to harm you, but you must leave everything behind. All of this belongs to us.’
‘I’m not just going to walk away.’
She sighed. ‘I was afraid you’d say that.’
‘Is this where you call in the heavy hitters?’
Ophelia approached me slowly until our faces were inches apart. Her gaze drifted up over my pale, unshaven, face, until she was looking directly into my eyes. She ran her fingers through my hair and used it to pull me close, as if to kiss me.
‘I am the heavy hitter, you fool.’
By the time I felt the needle enter my neck, it was too late. I was already falling.
When I opened my eyes, I was lying on a bare living room floor. The apartment had been stripped. All the books, notes, sketches and paintings, all of the unfinished sculptures and artworks, the old computers, the surveillance equipment, the recordings, all of his plans and secrets, even the furniture…it was all gone. They had taken everything, wiped it clean. All that remained were the fixtures and fittings…and me. At least, that’s what they thought. I rose unsteadily and dragged myself into the bedroom.
A day earlier, I had prized one of the floorboards up and buried whatever I could in the dark and dusty space underneath. I had clearly done a good job of putting everything back as it was because they hadn’t discovered my hiding place. I pulled the floorboard free and reached inside. There hadn’t been much space, so I had had to choose carefully what to save. Inside, one complete set of The Maas Journals was safe and sound, along with the notes that I believed referred to his final work.405 Last was a canister of 35mm film and the headshot of the man who may or may not have been Ezra Maas.
I began to laugh, my voice echoing in the emptiness. For the first time I felt like I was winning. I picked up the journals and lifted the window open, stepping out onto a wrought iron fire escape, the city’s rooftops and chimneys stretching out before me, the sound of traffic far below. It was like another world up here, a dark, rain-soaked alternate city that existed in secret, high above street level. I climbed the ladder towards the roof and disappeared into the night.
END
Notes
394. John Keats (1795 – 1821)
395. Again, there are echoes of the Unabomber’s journals here.
396. Wheeler calls this: ‘Genesis by observership’. Our observations, he suggests, might actually contribute to the creation of physical reality. To Wheeler we are not simply bystanders on a cosmic stage; we are shapers and creators living in a participatory universe…“Wheeler conjectures we are part of a universe that is a work in progress; we are tiny patches of the universe looking at itself – and building itself. It’s not only the future that is still undetermined but the past as well.” From an interview with John Wheeler by Tim Folger published in Discover magazine (2002).
397. This essay was originally included as an appendix to this chapter, but was lost, and presumably destroyed, along with many other chapters before the manuscript was given to me – Anonymous.
398. Werner Heisenberg (1901 – 1976). As quoted in Kaku, Michio, Parallel Worlds, Penguin Books, 2005.
399. And this was equally true whether you adhered to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Bohr’s Quantum Mechanics, or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
400. “Some of the complex concepts discussed here can be summarised as follows: Matter is represented by particles; and the probability of finding the particle is given by a wave. This wave, in turns, obeys an equation. Before an observation is made, an object exists in all possible states simultaneously. To determine which state, we have to make an observation which collapses the wave function and the object goes into a definite state. The act of observation destroys the wave function and the object now assumes a definite reality.” Kaku, Michio, Parallel Worlds, Penguin Books, 2005.
401. Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner said: “…it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness [of the observer]…the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of the consciousness is the ultimate reality.”
402. Einstein did not like this suggestion and famously said “God does not play dice with the world.” However, his great rival and colleague Niels Bohr reportedly replied “Stop telling God what to do.”
403. Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. The term comes from the Latin solus (alone) and ipse (self). Solipsism as an epistemological position holds that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure. The external world and other minds cannot be known, and might not exist, outside the individual’s mind. As a metaphysical position, solipsism goes further to the conclusion that the world and other minds do not exist. As such it is the only epistemological position that, by its own postulate, is both irrefutable and yet indefensible in the same manner.
404. In this classic thought experiment, a cat is placed in a box with a radioactive element which may or may not break a vial of poison gas. By the rules of quantum mechanics, the cat is both alive and dead until the moment an observation is made i.e. until someone opens the box. Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde adds: “You may ask whether the universe really existed before you start looking at it. That’s the same Schrodinger cat question.”
405. From Daniel’s handwritten notes: “I tore pages out of a dozen separate notebooks that I believed contained plans for Maas’s final project. I brought all these pages together to form a new creation, a new book, my very own Frankenstein’s monster, a bible of Maas’s final ideas and the story of his life, in a single text.”