Pierścienie Saturna
The Rings of Saturn

Summary/Abstract: Max’s enemy everywhere is the totalising overview. His art is designed to correct or subvert this kind of cognitive aberration which can be so misleading and dangerous. His narratives of East Anglia offer melancholy fragments with a wide historical and cultural range of possibilities. I begin this essay with an example of my own from a masterpiece of German culture in order to frame my account suggestively in relation to Max’s own lifelong struggle with the land that bore him and which he felt impelled to reject, while acknowledging its colossal contribution to human knowledge and experience. Like Walter Benjamin Max values most the kind of quincunx-links that arise intuitively and spontaneously (as in the work of Sir Thomas Browne, the great Norwich writer and thinker) between domains of experience that cannot be connected by a totalising overview. The vivid images that his works embody are similarly at odds with the ever-sharper digitised perceptions that we now experience on a daily basis but which lack any kind of depth of field and so have no experienced life in them. My only quarrel with Max’s way of working is that in his pursuit of his “illuminations” he is inclined to set aside what may already have been thought and said by other writers. The effect of this is a foreshortening that may be a kind of distortion. A historian once said to me that despite his fascination with history Max was not a historian. For me this does not constitute a weakness, but I think it is a fact.

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