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J.G. Ballard

The Atrocity Exhibition with an Preface by William Burroughs

This revised, expanded, annotated edition of The Atrocity Exhibition first published in a large format in Great Britain by Flamingo, 1993

The original edition first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1970, and first published in paperback by Panther Books, 1972

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Preface by William S. Burroughs

1 The Atrocity Exhibition

2 The University of Death

3 The Assassination Weapon

4 You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe

5 Notes towards a Mental Breakdown

6 The Great American Nude

7 The Summer Cannibals

8 Tolerances of the Human Face

9 You and Me and the Continuum

10 Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy

11 Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.

12 Crash!

13 The Generations of America

14 Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan

15 The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race

APPENDIX:

Princess Margaret’s Face Lift

Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty

About the Author

From the reviews of The Atrocity Exhibition: Also by J.G. Ballard

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Most of the film stars and political figures who appear in The Atrocity Exhibition are still with us, in memory if not in person - John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Together they helped to form the culture of celebrity that played such a large role in the 1960s, when I wrote The Atrocity Exhibition.

Other figures, though crucially important to the decades that followed, have begun to sink below the horizon. How many of us remember Abraham Zapruder, who filmed the Kennedy assassination in Dallas? Or Sirhan Sirhan, who murdered Robert Kennedy? At the end of each chapter I have provided a few notes that identify these lesser characters and set out the general background to the book.

Readers who find themselves daunted by the unfamiliar narrative structure of The Atrocity Exhibition - far simpler than it seems at first glance - might try a different approach. Rather than start at the beginning of each chapter, as in a conventional novel, simply turn the pages until a paragraph catches your eye. If the ideas or images seem interesting, scan the nearby paragraphs for anything that resonates in an intriguing way. Fairly soon, I hope, the fog will clear, and the underlying narrative will reveal itself. In effect, you will be reading the book in the way it was written.

J.G. Ballard, 2001

PREFACE BY WILLIAM BURROUGHS

The Atrocity Exhibition is a profound and disquieting book. The nonsexual roots of sexuality are explored with a surgeon’s precision. An auto-crash can be more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture. (Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual content in many cases do not result in orgasm.) The book opens: ‘A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition . . . was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.’

The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments: ‘In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac, the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, Eichmann in drag, a dead child . . . ’ The human body becomes landscape: ‘A hundred-foot-long panel that seemed to represent a section of sand dune . . . Looking at it more closely Doctor Nathan realized that it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest . . . ’ This magnification of image to the point where it becomes unrecognizable is a keynote of The Atrocity Exhibition. This is what Bob Rauschenberg is doing in art - literally blowing up the image. Since people are made of image, this is literally an explosive book. The human image explodes into rocks and stones and trees: ‘The porous rock towers of Tenerife exposed the first spinal landscape . . . clinker-like rock towers suspended above the silent swamp. In the mirror of this swamp there are no reflections. Time makes no concessions.’

Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image: ‘Each afternoon in the deserted cinema: the latent sexual content of automobile crashes . . . James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Albert Camus . . . Many volunteers became convinced that the fatalities were still living and later used one or the other of the crash victims as a private focus of arousal during intercourse with the domestic partner.’

James Dean kept a hangman’s noose dangling in his living room and put it around his neck to pose for news pictures. A painter named Milton, who painted a sexy picture entitled ‘The Death of James Dean,’ subsequently committed suicide. This book stirs sexual depths untouched by the hardest-core illustrated porn. ‘What will follow is the psychopathology of sex relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations. This will allow the exploration without any trace of guilt of every aspect of sexual psychopathology.’

Immensely magnified portion of James Dean subsequently committed suicide. Conception content relates to sexual depths of the hardest minds. Eichmann in drag in a waste lot of wrecked porous rock.

CHAPTER ONE

THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION

Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition - to which the patients themselves were not invited - was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses. As Catherine Austin walked around the converted gymnasium these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor, reminded her of the slides of exposed spinal levels in Travis’s office. They hung on the enamelled walls like the codes of insoluble dreams, the keys to a nightmare in which she had begun to play a more willing and calculated role. Primly she buttoned her white coat as Dr Nathan approached, holding his gold-tipped cigarette to one nostril. ‘Ah, Dr Austin . . . What do you think of them? I see there’s War in Hell.’

Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown. The noise from the cine-films of induced psychoses rose from the lecture theatre below Travis’s office. Keeping his back to the window behind his desk, he assembled the terminal documents he had collected with so much effort during the previous months: (1) Spectro-heliogram of the sun; (2) Front elevation of balcony units, Hilton Hotel, London; (3) Transverse section through a pre-Cambrian trilobite; (4) ‘Chronograms,’ by E. J. Marey; (5) Photograph taken at noon, August 7th, 1945, of the sand-sea, Qattara Depression, Egypt; (6) Reproduction of Max Ernst’s ‘Garden Airplane Traps’; (7) Fusing sequences for ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Boy’, Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-Bombs. When he had finished Travis turned to the window. As usual, the white Pontiac had found a place in the crowded parking lot directly below him. The two occupants watched him through the tinted windshield.

Internal Landscapes. Controlling the tremor in his left hand, Travis studied the thin-shouldered man sitting opposite him. Through the transom the light from the empty corridor shone into the darkened office. His face was partly hidden by the peak of his flying cap, but Travis recognized the bruised features of the bomber pilot whose photographs, torn from the pages of Newsweek and Paris-Match, had been strewn around the bedroom of the shabby hotel in Earls Court. His eyes stared at Travis, their focus sustained only by a continuous effort. For some reason the planes of his face failed to intersect, as if their true resolution took place in some as yet invisible dimension, or required elements other than those provided by his own character and musculature. Why had he come to the hospital, seeking out Travis among the thirty physicians? Travis had tried to speak to him, but the tall man made no reply, standing by the instrument cabinet like a tattered mannequin. His immature but at the same time aged face seemed as rigid as a plaster mask. For months Travis had seen his solitary figure, shoulders hunched inside the flying jacket, in more and more newsreels, as an extra in war films, and then as a patient in an elegant ophthalmic film on nystagmus - the series of giant geometric models, like sections of abstract landscapes, had made him uneasily aware that their long-delayed confrontation would soon take place.

The Weapons Range. Travis stopped the car at the end of the lane. In the sunlight he could see the remains of the outer perimeter fence, and beyond this a rusting quonset and the iron-stained roofs of the bunkers. He crossed the ditch and walked towards the fence, within five minutes found an opening. A disused runway moved through the grass. Partly concealed by the sunlight, the camouflage patterns across the complex of towers and bunkers four hundred yards away

revealed half-familiar contours - the model of a face, a posture, a neural interval. A unique event would take place here. Without thinking, Travis murmured, ‘Elizabeth Taylor.’ Abruptly there was a blare of sound above the trees.

Dissociation: Who Laughed at Nagasaki? Travis ran across the broken concrete to the perimeter fence. The helicopter plunged towards him, engine roaring through the trees, its fans churning up a storm of leaves and paper. Twenty yards from the fence Travis stumbled among the coils of barbed wire. The helicopter was banking sharply, the pilot crouched over the controls. As Travis ran forward the shadows of the diving machine flickered around him like cryptic ideograms. Then the craft pulled away and flew off across the bunkers. When Travis reached the car, holding the torn knee of his trousers, he saw the young woman in the white dress walking down the lane. Her disfigured face looked back at him with indulgent eyes. Travis started to call to her, but stopped himself. Exhausted, he vomited across the roof of the car.

Serial Deaths. During this period, as he sat in the rear seat of the Pontiac, Travis was preoccupied by his separation from the normal tokens of life he had accepted for so long. His wife, the patients at the hospital (resistance agents in the ‘world war’ he hoped to launch), his undecided affair with Catherine Austin - these became as fragmentary as the faces of Elizabeth Taylor and Sigmund Freud on the advertising billboards, as unreal as the war the film companies had restarted in Vietnam. As he moved deeper into his own psychosis, whose onset he had recognized during his year at the hospital, he welcomed this journey into a familiar land, zones of twilight. At dawn, after driving all night, they reached the suburbs of Hell. The pale flares from the petrochemical plants illuminated the wet cobbles. No one would meet them there. His two companions, the bomber pilot at the wheel in the faded flying suit and the beautiful young woman with radiation burns, never spoke to him. Now and then the young woman would look at him with a faint smile on her deformed mouth. Deliberately, Travis made no response, hesitant to commit himself into her hands. Who were they, these strange twins - couriers from his own unconscious? For hours they drove through the endless suburbs of the city. The billboards multiplied around them, walling the streets with giant replicas of napalm bombings in Vietnam, the serial deaths of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe terraced in the landscapes of Dien Bien Phu and the Mekong Delta.

Casualties Union. At the young woman’s suggestion, Travis joined the C. U., and with a group of thirty housewives practised the simulation of wounds. Later they would tour with Red Cross demonstration teams. Massive cerebral damage and abdominal bleeding in automobile accidents could be imitated within half an hour, aided by the application of suitable coloured resins. Convincing radiation burns required careful preparation, and might involve some three to four hours of makeup. Death, by contrast, was a matter of lying prone. Later, in the apartment they had taken overlooking the zoo, Travis washed the wounds from his hands and face. This curious pantomime, overlaid by the summer evening stench of the animals, seemed performed solely to pacify his two companions. In the bathroom mirror he could see the tall figure of the pilot, his slim face with its lost eyes hidden below the peaked cap, and the young woman in the white dress watching him from the lounge. Her intelligent face, like that of a student, occasionally showed a nervous reflex of hostility. Already Travis found it difficult not to think of her continuously. When would she speak to him? Perhaps, like himself, she realized that his instructions would come from other levels?

Pirate Radio. There were a number of secret transmissions to which Travis listened: (1) medullary: images of dunes and craters, pools of ash that contained the terraced faces of Freud,

Eatherly, and Garbo; (2) thoracic: the rusting shells of U-boats beached in the cove at Tsingtao, near the ruined German forts where the Chinese guides smeared bloody handprints on the caisson walls; (3) sacral: V.J.-Day, the bodies of Japanese troops in the paddy fields at night. The next day, as he walked back to Shanghai, the peasants were planting rice among the swaying legs. Memories of others than himself, together these messages moved to some kind of focus. The dead face of the bomber pilot hovered by the door, the projection of World War III’s unknown soldier. His presence exhausted Travis.

Marey’s Chronograms. Dr Nathan passed the illustration across his desk to Margaret Travis. ‘Marey’s Chronograms are multiple-exposure photographs in which the element of time is visible - the walking human figure, for example, is represented as a series of dune-like lumps.’ Dr Nathan accepted a cigarette from Catherine Austin, who had sauntered forward from the incubator at the rear of the office. Ignoring her quizzical eye, he continued, ‘Your husband’s brilliant feat was to reverse the process. Using a series of photographs of the most commonplace objects - this office, let us say, a panorama of New York skyscrapers, the naked body of a woman, the face of a catatonic patient - he treated them as if they already were chronograms and extracted the element of time.’ Dr Nathan lit his cigarette with care. ‘The results were extraordinary. A very different world was revealed. The familiar surroundings of our lives, even our smallest gestures, were seen to have totally altered meanings. As for the reclining figure of a film star, or this hospital . . . ’

‘Was my husband a doctor, or a patient?’ Dr Nathan nodded sagely, glancing over his fingertips at Catherine Austin. What had Travis seen in those time-filled eyes? ‘Mrs Travis, I’m not sure the question is valid any longer. These matters involve a relativity of a very different kind. What we are concerned with now are the implications - in particular, the complex of ideas and events represented by World War III. Not the political and military possibility, but the inner identity of such a notion. For us, perhaps, World War III is now little more than a sinister pop art display, but for your husband it has become an expression of the failure of his psyche to accept the fact of its own consciousness, and of his revolt against the present continuum of time and space. Dr Austin may disagree, but it seems to me that his intention is to start World War III, though not, of course, in the usual sense of the term. The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.’

Zoom Lens. Dr Nathan stopped. Reluctantly, his eyes turned across the room to the portrait camera mounted on its tripod by the consulting couch. How could he explain to this sensitive and elusive woman that her own body, with its endlessly familiar geometry, its landscapes of touch and feeling, was their only defence against her husband’s all-too-plain intentions? Above all, how could he invite her to pose for what she would no doubt regard as a set of obscene photographs?

The Skin Area. After their meeting, at the exhibition of war wounds at the Royal Society of Medicine’s conference hall, Travis and Catherine Austin returned to the apartment overlooking the zoo. In the lift Travis avoided her hands as she tried to embrace him. He led her into the bedroom. Mouth pursed, she watched as he showed her the set of Enneper’s models. ‘What are they?’ She touched the interlocking cubes and cones, mathematical models of pseudo-space. ‘Fusing sequences, Catherine - for a doomsday weapon.’ In the postures they assumed, in the contours of thigh and thorax, Travis explored the geometry and volumetric time of the bedroom, and later of the curvilinear roof of the Festival Hall, the jutting balconies of the London Hilton, and lastly of the abandoned weapons range. Here the circular target areas became identified in

Travis’s mind with the concealed breasts of the young woman with radiation burns. Searching for her, he and Catherine Austin drove around the darkening countryside, lost among the labyrinth of billboards. The faces of Sigmund Freud and Jeanne Moreau presided over their last bitter hours.

Neoplasm. Later, escaping from Catherine Austin, and from the forbidding figure of the bomber pilot, who now watched him from the roof of the lion house, Travis took refuge in a small suburban house among the reservoirs of Staines and Shepperton. He sat in the empty sitting-room overlooking the shabby garden. From the white bungalow beyond the clapboard fence his middle-aged neighbour dying of cancer watched him through the long afternoons. Her handsome face, veiled by the laced curtains, resembled that of a skull. All day she would pace around the small bedroom. At the end of the second month, when the doctor’s visits became more frequent, she undressed by the window, exposing her emaciated body through the veiled curtains. Each day, as he watched from the cubular room, he saw different aspects of her eroded body, the black breasts reminding him of the eyes of the bomber pilot, the abdominal scars like the radiation burns of the young woman. After her death he followed the funeral cars among the reservoirs in the white Pontiac.

The Lost Symmetry of the Blastosphere.‘This reluctance to accept the fact of his own consciousness,’ Dr Nathan wrote, ‘may reflect certain positional difficulties in the immediate context of time and space. The right-angle spiral of a stairwell may remind him of similar biases within the chemistry of the biological kingdom. This can be carried to remarkable lengths - for example, the jutting balconies of the Hilton Hotel have become identified with the lost gill-slits of the dying film actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Much of Travis’s thought concerns what he terms “the lost symmetry of the blastosphere” - the primitive precursor of the embryo that is the last structure to preserve perfect symmetry in all planes. It occurred to Travis that our own bodies may conceal the rudiments of a symmetry not only about the vertical axis but also the horizontal. One recalls Goethe’s notion that the skull is formed of modified vertebrae - similarly, the bones of the pelvis may constitute the remains of a lost sacral skull. The resemblance between histologies of lung and kidney has long been noted. Other correspondences of respiratory and urino-genital function come to mind, enshrined both in popular mythology (the supposed equivalence in size of nose and penis) and psychoanalytic symbolism (the “eyes” are a common code for the testicles). In conclusion, it seems that Travis’s extreme sensitivity to the volumes and geometry of the world around him, and their immediate translation into psychological terms, may reflect a belated attempt to return to a symmetrical world, one that will recapture the perfect symmetry of the blastosphere, and the acceptance of the “Mythology of the Amniotic Return”. In his mind World War III represents the final self-destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world. The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator . . . ’

Eurydice in a Used Car Lot. Margaret Travis paused in the empty foyer of the cinema, looking at the photographs in the display frames. In the dim light beyond the curtains she saw the dark- suited figure of Captain Webster, the muffled velvet veiling his handsome eyes. The last few weeks had been a nightmare - Webster with his long-range camera and obscene questions. He seemed to take a certain sardonic pleasure in compiling this one-man Kinsey Report on her . . . positions, planes, where and when Travis placed his hands on her body - why didn’t he ask Catherine Austin? As for wanting to magnify the photographs and paste them up on enormous billboards, ostensibly to save her from Travis . . . She glanced at the stills in the display frames, of this elegant and poetic film in which Cocteau had brought together all the myths of his own journey of return. On an impulse, to annoy Webster, she stepped through the side exit and walked

past a small yard of cars with numbered windshields. Perhaps she would make her descent here. Eurydice in a used car lot?

The Concentration City. In the night air they passed the shells of concrete towers, blockhouses half buried in rubble, giant conduits filled with tyres, overhead causeways crossing broken roads. Travis followed the bomber pilot and the young woman along the faded gravel. They walked across the foundation of a guard-house into the weapons range. The concrete aisles stretched into the darkness across the airfield. In the suburbs of Hell Travis walked in the flaring light of the petrochemical plants. The ruins of abandoned cinemas stood at the street corners, faded billboards facing them across the empty streets. In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac. He wandered through the deserted suburbs. The crashed bombers lay under the trees, grass growing through their wings. The bomber pilot helped the young woman into one of the cockpits. Travis began to mark out a circle on the concrete target area.

How Garbo Died.‘The film is a unique document,’ Webster explained, as he led Catherine Austin into the basement cinema. ‘At first sight it seems to be a strange newsreel about the latest tableau sculptures - there are a series of plaster casts of film stars and politicians in bizarre poses - how they were made we can’t find out, they seem to have been cast from the living models, LBJ and Mrs Johnson, Burton and the Taylor actress, there’s even one of Garbo dying. We were called in when the film was found.’ He signalled to the projectionist. ‘One of the casts is of Margaret Travis - I won’t describe it, but you’ll see why we’re worried. Incidentally, a touring version of Kienholz’s “Dodge 38” was seen travelling at speed on a motorway yesterday, a wrecked white car with the plastic dummies of a World War III pilot and a girl with facial burns making love among a refuse of bubblegum war cards and oral contraceptive wallets.’

War-Zone D. On his way across the car park Dr Nathan stopped and shielded his eyes from the sun. During the past week a series of enormous signs had been built along the roads surrounding the hospital, almost walling it in from the rest of the world. A group of workmen on a scaffolding truck were pasting up the last of the displays, a hundred-foot-long panel that appeared to represent a section of a sand-dune. Looking at it more closely, Dr Nathan realized that in fact it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest. Glancing at the billboards, Dr Nathan recognized other magnified fragments: a segment of lower lip, a right nostril, a portion of female perineum. Only an anatomist would have identified these fragments, each represented as a formal geometric pattern. At least five hundred of the signs would be needed to contain the whole of this gargantuan woman, terraced here into a quantified sand-sea. A helicopter soared overhead, its pilot supervising the work of the men on the track. Its down-draught ripped away some of the paper panels. They floated across the road, an eddying smile plastered against the radiator grille of a parked car.

The Atrocity Exhibition. Entering the exhibition, Travis sees the atrocities of Vietnam and the Congo mimetized in the ‘alternate’ death of Elizabeth Taylor; he tends the dying film star, eroticizing her punctured bronchus in the over-ventilated verandas of the London Hilton; he dreams of Max Ernst, superior of the birds; ‘Europe after the Rain’; the human race - Caliban asleep across a mirror smeared with vomit.

The Danger Area. Webster ran through the dim light after Margaret Travis. He caught her by the entrance to the main camera bunker, where the cheekbones of an enormous face had been painted in faded Technicolor across the rust-stained concrete. ‘For God’s sake - ’ She looked down at his strong wrist against her breast, then wrenched herself away. ‘Mrs Travis! Why do you think

we’ve taken all these photographs?’ Webster held the torn lapel of his suit, then pointed to a tableau figure in the uniform of a Chinese infantryman standing at the end of the conduit. ‘The place is crawling with the things - you’ll never find him.’ As he spoke a searchlight in the centre of the airfield lit up the target areas, outlining the rigid figures of the mannequins.

The Enormous Face. Dr Nathan limped along the drainage culvert, peering at the huge figure of a dark-haired woman painted on the sloping walls of the blockhouse. The magnification was enormous. The wall on his right, the size of a tennis court, contained little more than the right eye and cheekbone. He recognized the woman from the billboards he had seen near the hospital - the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness. Yet Margaret Travis’s role was ambiguous. In some way Travis would attempt to relate his wife’s body, with its familiar geometry, to that of the film actress, quantifying their identities to the point where they became fused with the elements of time and landscape. Dr Nathan crossed an exposed causeway to the next bunker. He leaned against the dark décolleté. When the searchlight flared between the blockhouses he put on his shoe. ‘No . . . ’ He was hobbling towards the airfield when the explosion lit up the evening air.

The Exploding Madonna. For Travis, the ascension of his wife’s body above the target area, exploding madonna of the weapons range, was a celebration of the intervals through which he perceived the surrounding continuum of time and space. Here she became one with the madonnas of the billboards and the ophthalmic films, the Venus of the magazine cuttings whose postures celebrated his own search through the suburbs of Hell.

Departure. The next morning, Travis wandered along the gunnery aisles. On the bunkers the painted figure of the screen actress mediated all time and space to him through her body. As he searched among the tyres and coils of barbed wire he saw the helicopter rising into the sky, the bomber pilot at the controls. It made a leftward turn and flew off towards the horizon. Half an hour later the young woman drove away in the white Pontiac. Travis watched them leave without regret. When they had gone the corpses of Dr Nathan, Webster, and Catherine Austin formed a small tableau by the bunkers.

A Terminal Posture. Lying on the worn concrete of the gunnery aisles, he assumed the postures of the film actress, assuaging his past dreams and anxieties in the dune-like fragments of her body.

Apocalypse.

‘Eniwetok and Luna Park’ may seem a strange pairing, the H-bomb test site in the Marshall Islands with the Paris fun-fair loved by the surrealists. But the endless newsreel clips of nuclear explosions that we saw on TV in the 1960s (a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning everything) did have a carnival air, a media phenomenon which Stanley Kubrick caught perfectly at the end of Dr Strangelove. I imagine my mental patients conflating Freud and Liz Taylor in their Warhol-like efforts, unerringly homing in on the first signs of their doctor’s nervous breakdown. The Atrocity Exhibition’s original dedication should have been ‘To the Insane’. I owe them everything.

Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown.

The many lists in The Atrocity Exhibition were produced by free association, which accounts for the repetition but, I hope, makes more sense of them.

‘Garden Airplane Traps.’ ‘Voracious gardens in turn devoured by a vegetation that springs from the debris of trapped airplanes.’ Max Ernst, Informal Life. The nightmare of a grounded pilot.

Why a white Pontiac? A British pop-star of the 1960s, Dickie Valentine, drove his daughter in a white Pontiac to the same school that my own children attended near the film studios at Shepperton. The car had a powerful iconic presence, emerging from all those American movies into the tranquil TV suburbs. Soon after, Valentine died in a car accident. By chance a telescoped Pontiac starred in my 1969 exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory in London.

The Weapons Range.

Weapons ranges have a special magic, all that destructive technology concentrated on the production of nothing, the closest we can get to certain obsessional states of mind. Even more strange are the bunkers of the Nazi Atlantic Wall, most of which are still standing, and are far larger than one expects. Space-age cathedrals, they threaten the surrounding landscape like lines of Teutonic knights, and are examples of cryptic architecture, where form no longer reveals function. They seem to contain the codes of some mysterious mental process. At Utah Beach, the most deserted stretch of the Normandy coast, they stare out over the washed sand, older than the planet. On visits with my agent and his wife, I used to photograph them compulsively.

Serial Deaths.

‘The war the film companies had restarted in Vietnam.’ Written in 1966, this was a prophetic leap in the dark. To date no Vietnam movie has been shot on the original battlegrounds, but I’m confident it will happen, and might even get out of control. Spielberg returned to Shanghai for Empire of the Sun, an eerie sensation for me - even more so were the scenes shot near Shepperton, using extras recruited from among my neighbours, many of whom have part-time jobs at the studios. I can almost believe that I came to Shepperton thirty years ago knowing unconsciously that one day I would write a novel about my wartime experiences in Shanghai, and that it might well be filmed in these studios. Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.

Casualties Union.

The so-called Casualties Union existed in London in the 1960s, probably inspired by the nuclear disarmament movement. Putting on the cosmetic wounds was a messy business, and a recruitment leaflet reassured volunteers: ‘Death is simply a matter of lying prone.’

Pirate Radio.

Tsingtao, on the north China coast near Peking, was a German naval base during World War I, and later became a popular beach resort where I spent the summers in the 1930s. As a seven-year-old I was deeply impressed by the huge blockhouses and the maze of concrete tunnels where the tourist guides pointed to the bloody handprints of (they claimed) wounded German gunners driven mad by the British naval bombardment. For some reason these were far more moving than the dead Chinese soldiers in the battlegrounds around Shanghai which I visited with my parents, though they were sad enough.

Marey’s Chronograms.

‘An individual is a four-dimensional object of greatly elongated form; in ordinary language we say that he has considerable extension in time and insignificant extension in space.’ Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation.

The Lost Symmetry of the Blastosphere.

Elizabeth Taylor was staying at the Hilton during the shooting of Cleopatra, when she contracted pneumonia and was given a tracheotomy. The Hilton’s balconies remind Travis of the actress’s lost gill-slits (which we all develop embryonically as we briefly recapitulate our biological past).

Eurydice in a Used Car Lot.

‘Where and when Travis placed his hands on her body.’ The poet Paul Eluard, describing his wife Gala, who later left him to marry Dali, said: ‘Her body is the shape of my hands.’

How Garbo Died.

The sculptor George Segal has made a number of plaster casts of prominent art patrons, mostly New York bankers and their wives. Frozen in time, these middle-aged men and women have a remarkable poignancy, figures from some future Pompeii.

The Enormous Face.

Elizabeth Taylor, the last of the old-style Hollywood actresses, has retained her hold on the popular imagination in the two decades since this piece was written, a quality she shares (no thanks to myself ) with almost all the public figures in this

book - Marilyn Monroe, Reagan, Jackie Kennedy among others. A unique collision of private and public fantasy took place in the 1960s, and may have to wait some years to be repeated, if ever. The public dream of Hollywood for the first time merged with the private imagination of the hyper-stimulated 60s TV viewer. People have sometimes asked me to do a follow-up to The Atrocity Exhibition, but our perception of the famous has changed - I can’t imagine writing about Meryl Streep or Princess Di, and Margaret Thatcher’s undoubted mystery seems to reflect design faults in her own self- constructed persona. One can mechanically spin sexual fantasies around all three, but the imagination soon flags. Unlike Taylor, they radiate no light.

A kind of banalisation of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup. Warhol’s screen-prints show the process at work. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy drain the tragedy from the lives of these desperate women, while his day-glo palette returns them to the innocent world of the child’s colouring book.

CHAPTER TWO

THE UNIVERSITY OF DEATH

The Conceptual Death. By now these seminars had become a daily inquisition into Talbot’s growing distress and uncertainty. A disturbing aspect was the conscious complicity of the class in his long anticipated breakdown. Dr Nathan paused in the doorway of the lecture theatre, debating whether to end this unique but unsavoury experiment. The students waited as Talbot stared at the photographs of himself arranged in sequence on the blackboard, his attention distracted by the elegant but severe figure of Catherine Austin watching from the empty seats beside the film projector. The simulated newsreels of auto-crashes and Vietnam atrocities (an apt commentary on her own destructive sexuality) illustrated the scenario of World War III on which the students were ostensibly engaged. However, as Dr Nathan realized, its real focus lay elsewhere. An unexpected figure now dominated the climax of the scenario. Using the identity of their own lecturer, the students had devised the first conceptual death.

Auto-erotic. As he rested in Catherine Austin’s bedroom, Talbot listened to the helicopters flying along the motorway from the airport. Symbols in a machine apocalypse, they seeded the cores of unknown memories in the furniture of the apartment, the gestures of unspoken affections. He lowered his eyes from the window. Catherine Austin sat on the bed beside him. Her naked body was held forward like a bizarre exhibit, its anatomy a junction of sterile cleft and flaccid mons. He placed his palm against the mud-coloured areola of her left nipple. The concrete landscape of underpass and overpass mediated a more real presence, the geometry of a neural interval, the identity latent within his own musculature.

Obscene Mannequin.‘Shall I lie down with you?’ Ignoring her question, Talbot studied her broad hips, with their now empty contours of touch and feeling. Already she had the texture of a rubber mannequin fitted with explicit vents, an obscene masturbatory appliance. As he stood up he saw the diaphragm in her handbag, useless cache-sexe. He listened to the helicopters. They seemed to alight on an invisible landing zone in the margins of his mind. On the garage roof stood the sculpture he had laboriously built during the past month; antennae of metal aerials holding glass faces to the sun, the slides of diseased spinal levels he had taken from the laboratory. All night he watched the sky, listening to the time-music of the quasars.

Left Orbit and Temple. Below the window a thickset young man, wearing the black military overcoat affected by the students, was loading a large display billboard into a truck outside the Neurology department, a photo reproduction of Talbot’s left orbit and temple. He stared up at the sculpture on the roof. His sallow, bearded face had pursued Talbot for the past weeks during the conception of the scenario. It was at Koester’s instigation that the class were now devising the optimum death of World War III’s first casualty, a wound profile more and more clearly revealed as Talbot’s. A marked physical hostility existed between them, a compound of sexual rivalry over Catherine Austin and homo-erotic jealousy.

A Sophisticated Entertainment. Dr Nathan gazed at the display photographs of terminal syphilitics in the cinema foyer. Already members of the public were leaving. Despite the scandal that would ensue he had deliberately authorized this ‘Festival of Atrocity Films,’ which Talbot had suggested as one of his last coherent acts. Behind their display frames the images of Nader and JFK, napalm and air crash victims revealed the considerable ingenuity of the film makers. Yet the results were disappointing; whatever Talbot had hoped for had clearly not materialized.

The violence was little more than a sophisticated entertainment. One day he would carry out a Marxist analysis of this lumpen intelligentsia. More properly, the programme should be called a festival of home movies. He lit a gold-tipped cigarette, noticing that a photograph of Talbot had been cleverly montaged over a reproduction of Dali’s ‘Hypercubic Christ.’ Even the film festival had been devised as part of the scenario’s calculated psycho-drama.

A Shabby Voyeur. As she parked the car, Karen Novotny could see the silver bowls of the three radio telescopes above the trees. The tall man in the shabby flying jacket walked towards the perimeter fence, bars of sunlight crossing his face. Why had she followed him here? She had picked him up in the empty hotel cinema after the conference on space medicine, then taken him back to her apartment. All week he had been watching the telescopes with the same fixity of expression, an optical rigor like that of a disappointed voyeur. Who was he? - some fugitive from time and space, clearly moving now into his own landscape. His room was filled with grotesque magazine photographs: the obsessive geometry of overpasses, like fragments of her own body; X-rays of unborn children; a series of genital deformations; a hundred closeups of hands. She stepped from the car, the coil hanging in her womb like a steel foetus, a stillborn star. She smoothed her white linen skirt as Talbot ran back from the fence, ripping the cassette from his camera. Between them had sprung up a relationship of intense sexuality.

The Image Maze. Talbot followed the helicopter pilot across the rain-washed concrete. For the first time, as he wandered along the embankment, one of the aircraft had landed. The slim figure of the pilot left no reflections in the silver pools. The exhibition hall was deserted. Beyond a tableau sculpture of a Saigon street execution stood a maze constructed from photographic billboards. The pilot stepped through a doorway cut into an image of Talbot’s face. He looked up at the photograph of himself, snapped with a lapel camera during his last seminar. Over the exhausted eyes presided the invisible hierarchies of the quasars. Reading the maze, Talbot made his way among the corridors. Details of his hands and mouth signposted its significant junctions.

Spinal Levels.’Sixties iconography: the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, the pudenda of Ralph Nader, Eichmann in drag, the climax of a New York happening: a dead child. In the patio at the centre of the maze a young woman in a flowered white dress sat behind a desk covered with catalogues. Her blanched skin exposed the hollow planes of her face. Like the pilot, Talbot recognized her as a student at his seminar. Her nervous smile revealed the wound that disfigured the inside of her mouth.

Towards the D.M.Z. Later, as he sat in the cabin of the helicopter, Talbot looked down at the motorway below them. The speeding cars wound through the cloverleaves. The concrete causeways formed an immense cipher, the templates of an unseen posture. The young woman in the white dress sat beside him. Her breasts and shoulders recapitulated the forgotten contours of Karen Novotny’s body, the motion-sculpture of the highways. Afraid to smile at him, she stared at his hands as if they held some invisible weapon. The flowering tissue of her mouth reminded him of the porous esplanades of Ernst’s ‘Silence,’ the pumice-like beaches of a dead sea. His committal into the authority of these two couriers had at last freed him from his memories of Koester and Catherine Austin. The erosion of that waking landscape continued. Meanwhile the quasars burned dimly from the dark peaks of the universe, sections of his brain reborn in the island galaxies.

Mimetized Disasters. The helicopter banked abruptly, pulled round in a gesture of impatience by the pilot. They plunged towards the underpass, the huge fans of the Sikorsky sliding through the

air like the wings of a crippled archangel. A multiple collision had occurred in the approach to the underpass. After the police had left they walked for an hour among the cars, staring through the steam at the bodies propped against the fractured windshields. Here he would find his alternate death, the mimetized disasters of Vietnam and the Congo recapitulated in the contours of these broken fenders and radiator assemblies. As they circled overhead the shells of the vehicles lay in the dusk like the crushed wings of an aerial armada.

No U-Turn.‘Above all, the notion of conceptual auto-disaster has preoccupied Talbot during the final stages of his breakdown,’ Dr Nathan wrote. ‘But even more disturbing is Talbot��s deliberate self-involvement in the narrative of the scenario. Far from the students making an exhibition of an overwrought instructor, transforming him into a kind of ur-Christ of the communications landscape, Talbot has in fact exploited them. This has altered the entire direction of the scenario, turning it from an exercise on the theme of “the end of the world” into a psycho-drama of increasingly tragic perspectives.’

The Persistence of Memory. An empty beach with its fused sand. Here clock time is no longer valid. Even the embryo, symbol of secret growth and possibility, is drained and limp. These images are the residues of a remembered moment of time. For Talbot the most disturbing elements are the rectilinear sections of the beach and sea. The displacement of these two images through time, and their marriage with his own continuum, has warped them into the rigid and unyielding structures of his own consciousness. Later, walking along the overpass, he realized that the rectilinear forms of his conscious reality were warped elements from some placid and harmonious future.

Arrival at the Zone. They sat in the unfading sunlight on the sloping concrete. The abandoned motorway ran off into the haze, silver firs growing through its sections. Shivering in the cold air, Talbot looked out over the landscape of broken overpasses and crushed underpasses. The pilot walked down the slope to a rusting grader surrounded by tyres and fuel drums. Beyond it a quonset tilted into a pool of mud. Talbot waited for the young woman to speak to him, but she stared at her hands, lips clenched against her teeth. Against the drab concrete the white fabric of her dress shone with an almost luminescent intensity. How long had they sat there?

The Plaza. Later, when his two couriers had moved to the ridge of the embankment, Talbot began to explore the terrain. Covered by the same even light, the landscape of derelict roadways spread to the horizon. On the ridge the pilot squatted under the tail of the helicopter, the young woman behind him. Their impassive, unlit faces seemed an extension of the landscape. Talbot followed the concrete beach. Here and there sections of the banking had fallen, revealing the steel buttresses below. An orchard of miniature fruit trees grew from the sutures between the concrete slabs. Three hundred yards from the helicopter he entered a sunken plaza where two convergent highways moved below an underpass. The shells of long-abandoned automobiles lay below the arches. Talbot brought the young woman and guided her down the embankment. For several hours they waited on the concrete slope. The geometry of the plaza exercised a unique fascination upon Talbot’s mind.

The Annunciation. Partly veiled by the afternoon clouds, the enormous image of a woman’s hands moved across the sky. Talbot stood up, for a moment losing his balance on the sloping concrete. Raised as if to form an arch over an invisible child, the hands passed through the air above the plaza. They hung in the sunlight like immense doves. Talbot climbed the slope, following this spectre along the embankment. He had witnessed the annunciation of a unique

event. Looking down at the plaza, he murmured without thinking, ‘Ralph Nader.’

The Geometry of Her Face. In the perspectives of the plaza, the junctions of the underpass and embankment, Talbot at last recognized a modulus that could be multiplied into the landscape of his consciousness. The descending triangle of the plaza was repeated in the facial geometry of the young woman. The diagram of her bones formed a key to his own postures and musculature, and to the scenario that had preoccupied him at the Institute. He began to prepare for departure. The pilot and the young woman now deferred to him. The fans of the helicopter turned in the dark air, casting elongated ciphers on the dying concrete.

Transliterated Pudenda. Dr Nathan showed his pass to the guard at the gatehouse. As they drove towards the testing area he was aware of Catherine Austin peering through the windshield, her sexuality keening now that Talbot was within range. Nathan glanced down at her broad thighs, calculating the jut and rake of her pubis. ‘Talbot’s belief - and this is confirmed by the logic of the scenario - is that automobile crashes play very different roles from the ones we assign them. Apart from its manifest function, redefining the elements of space and time in terms of our most potent consumer durable, the car crash may be perceived unconsciously as a fertilizing rather than a destructive event - a liberation of sexual energy - mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form: James Dean and Miss Mansfield, Camus and the late President. In the eucharist of the simulated auto-disaster we see the transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader, our nearest image of the blood and body of Christ.’ They stopped by the test course. A group of engineers watched a crushed Lincoln dragged away through the morning air. The hairless plastic mannequin of a woman sat propped on the grass, injury sites marked on her legs and thorax.

Journeys to an Interior. Waiting in Karen Novotny’s apartment, Talbot made certain transits: (1) Spinal: ‘The Eye of Silence’ - these porous rock towers, with the luminosity of exposed organs, contained an immense planetary silence. Moving across the iodine water of these corroded lagoons, Talbot followed the solitary nymph through the causeways of rock, the palaces of his own flesh and bone. (2) Media: montage landscapes of war - webbing heaped in pits beside the Shanghai - Nanking railway; bargirls’ cabins built out of tyres and fuel drums; dead Japanese stacked like firewood in L. C. T.s off Woosung pier. (3) Contour: the unique parameters of Karen’s body - beckoning vents of mouth and vulva, the soft hypogeum of the anus. (4) Astral: segments of his posture mimetized in the processions of space. These transits contained an image of the geometry assembling itself in the musculature of the young woman, in their postures during intercourse, in the angles between the walls of the apartment.

Stochastic Analysis. Karen Novotny paused over the wet stockings in the handbasin. As his fingers touched her armpits she stared into the sculpture garden between the apartment blocks. The sallow-faced young man in the fascist overcoat who had followed her all week was sitting on the bench beside the Paolozzi. His paranoid eyes, with their fusion of passion and duplicity, had watched her like a rapist’s across the café tables. Talbot’s bruised hands were lifting her breasts, as if weighing their heavy curvatures against some more plausible alternative. The landscape of highways obsessed him, the rear mouldings of automobiles. All day he had been building his bizarre antenna on the roof of the apartment block, staring into the sky as if trying to force a corridor to the sun. Searching in his suitcase, she found clippings of his face taken from as yet unpublished news stories in Oggi and Newsweek . In the evening, while she bathed, waiting for him to enter the bathroom as she powdered her body, he crouched over the blueprints spread between the sofas in the lounge, calculating a stochastic analysis of the Pentagon car park.

Crash Magazine. Catherine Austin moved through the exhibits towards the dark-skinned young man in the black coat. He leaned against one of the cars, his face covered by the rainbows reflected from a frosted windshield. Who was Koester: a student in Talbot’s class; Judas in this scenario; a rabbi serving a sinister novitiate? Why had he organized this exhibition of crashed cars? The truncated vehicles, with their ruptured radiator grilles, were arranged in lines down the showroom floor. His warped sexuality, of which she had been aware since his arrival at the first semester, had something of the same quality as these maimed vehicles. He had even produced a magazine devoted solely to car accidents: Crash! The dismembered bodies of Jayne Mansfield, Camus and Dean presided over its pages, epiphanies of violence and desire.

A Cosmetic Problem. The star of the show was JFK, victim of the first conceptual car crash. A damaged Lincoln had been given the place of honour, plastic models of the late President and his wife in the rear seat. An elaborate attempt had been made to represent cosmetically the expressed brain tissue of the President. As she touched the white acrylic smears across the trunk Koester swung himself aggressively out of the driver’s seat. While he lit her cigarette she leaned against the fender of a white Pontiac, their thighs almost touching. Koester took her arm with a nervous gesture. ‘Ah, Dr Austin . . . ’ The flow of small talk modulated their sexual encounter. ‘ . . . surely Christ’s crucifixion could be regarded as the first traffic accident - certainly if we accept Jarry’s happy piece of anti-clericalism . . . ’

The Sixty-Minute Zoom. As they moved from apartment to apartment along the motorway, Karen Novotny was conscious of the continuing dissociation of the events around her. Talbot followed her about the apartment, drawing chalk outlines on the floor around her chair, around the cups and utensils on the breakfast table as she drank her coffee, and lastly around herself: (1) sitting, in the posture of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’, on the edge of the bidet, (2) watching from the balcony as she waited for Koester to find them again, (3) making love to Talbot on the bed. He worked silently at the chalk outlines, now and then rearranging her limbs. The noise of the helicopters had become incessant. One morning she awoke in complete silence to find that Talbot had gone.

A Question of Definition. The multiplying outlines covered the walls and floors, a frieze of priapic dances - crash victims, a crucified man, children in intercourse. The outline of a helicopter covered the cinder surface of the tennis court like the profile of an archangel. She returned after a fruitless search among the cafés to find the furniture removed from the apartment. Koester and his student gang were photographing the chalk outlines. Her own name had been written into the silhouette of herself in the bath. ‘ “Novotny, masturbating,” ’ she read out aloud. ‘Are you writing me into your scenario, Mr Koester?’ she asked with an attempt at irony. His irritated eyes compared her figure with the outline in the bath. ‘ We know where he is, Miss Novotny.’ She stared at the outline of her breasts on the black tiles of the shower stall, Talbot’s hands traced around them. Hands multiplied around the rooms, soundlessly clapping, a welcoming host.

The Unidentified Female Orifice. These leg stances preoccupied Talbot - Karen Novotny (1) stepping from the driving seat of the Pontiac, median surface of thighs exposed, (2) squatting on the bathroom floor, knees laterally displaced, fingers searching for the diaphragm lip, (3) in the a tergo posture, thighs pressing against Talbot, (4) collision: crushed right tibia against the instrument console, left patella impacted by the handbrake.

The Optimum Wound Profile.‘One must bear in mind that roll-over followed by a head-on

collision produces complex occupant movements and injuries from unknown sources,’ Dr Nathan explained to Captain Webster. He held up the montage photograph he had found in Koester’s cubicle, the figure of a man with itemized wound areas. ‘However, here we have a wholly uncharacteristic emphasis on palm, ankle, and abdominal injuries. Even allowing for the excessive crushing movements in a severe impact it is difficult to reconstruct the likely accident mode. In this case, taken from Koester’s scenario of Talbot’s death, the injuries seem to have been sustained in an optimized auto-fatality, conceived by the driver as some kind of bizarre crucifixion. He would be mounted in the crash vehicle in an obscene position as if taking part in some grotesque act of intercourse - Christ crucified on the sodomized body of his own mother.’

The Impact Zone. At dusk Talbot drove around the deserted circuit of the research laboratory test track. Grass grew waist high through the untended concrete, wheel-less cars rusted in the undergrowth along the verge. Overhead the helicopter moved across the trees, its fans churning up a storm of leaves and cigarette cartons. Talbot steered the car among the broken tyres and oil drums. Beside him the young woman leaned against his shoulder, her grey eyes surveying Talbot with an almost minatory calm. He turned on to a concrete track between the trees. The collision course ran forwards through the dim light, crushed cars shackled to steel gondolas above a catapult. Plastic mannequins spilled through the burst doors and panels. As they walked along the catapult rails Talbot was aware of the young woman pacing out the triangle of approach roads. Her face contained the geometry of the plaza. He worked until dawn, towing the wrecks into the semblance of a motorcade.

Talbot: False Deaths.(1) The flesh impact: Karen Novotny’s beckoning figure in the shower stall, open thighs and exposed pubis - traffic fatalities screamed in this soft collision. (2) The overpass below the apartment: the angles between the concrete buttresses contained for Talbot an immense anguish. (3) A crushed fender: in its broken geometry Talbot saw the dismembered body of Karen Novotny, the alternate death of Ralph Nader.

Unusual Poses.‘You’ll see why we’re worried, Captain.’ Dr Nathan beckoned Webster towards the photographs pinned to the walls of Talbot’s office. ‘We can regard them in all cases as “poses”. They show (1) the left orbit and zygomatic arch of President Kennedy magnified from Zapruder frame 230, (2) X-ray plates of the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald, (3) a sequence of corridor angles at the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane, (4) Miss Karen Novotny, an intimate of Talbot’s, in a series of unusual amatory positions. In fact, it is hard to tell whether the positions are those of Miss Novotny in intercourse or as an auto-crash fatality - to a large extent the difference is now meaningless.’ Captain Webster studied the exhibits. He fingered the shaving scar on his heavy jaw, envying Talbot the franchises of this young woman’s body. ‘And together they make up a portrait of this American safety fellow - Nader?’

‘In Death, Yes.’ Nathan nodded sagely over his cigarette smoke. ‘In death, yes. That is, an alternate or “false” death. These images of angles and postures constitute not so much a private gallery as a conceptual equation, a fusing device by which Talbot hopes to bring his scenario to a climax. The danger of an assassination attempt seems evident, one hypotenuse in this geometry of a murder. As to the figure of Nader - one must remember that Talbot is here distinguishing between the manifest content of reality and its latent content. Nader’s true role is clearly very different from his apparent one, to be deciphered in terms of the postures we assume, our anxieties mimetized in the junction between wall and ceiling. In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace. In twentieth-century terms the crucifixion, for example, would be re-enacted as a

conceptual auto-disaster.’

Idiosyncrasies and Sin-crazed Idioms. As she leaned against the concrete parapet of the camera tower, Catherine Austin could feel Koester’s hands moving around her shoulder straps. His rigid face was held six inches from her own, his mouth like the pecking orifice of some unpleasant machine. The planes of his cheekbones and temples intersected with the slabs of rain-washed cement, together forming a strange sexual modulus. A car moved along the perimeter of the test area. During the night the students had built an elaborate tableau on the impact site fifty feet below, a multi-vehicle auto-crash. A dozen wrecked cars lay on their sides, broken fenders on the grass verges. Plastic mannequins had been embedded in the interlocked windshields and radiator grilles, wound areas marked on their broken bodies. Koester had named them: Jackie, Ralph, Abraham. Perhaps he saw the tableau as a rape? His hand hesitated on her left breast. He was watching the Novotny girl walking along the concrete aisle. She laughed, disengaging herself from Koester. Where were her own wound areas?

Speed Trials. Talbot opened the door of the Lincoln and took up his position in agent Greer’s seat. Behind him the helicopter pilot and the young woman sat in the rear of the limousine. For the first time the young woman had begun to smile at Talbot, a soundless rictus of the mouth, deliberately exposing her wound as if showing him that her shyness had gone. Ignoring her now, Talbot looked out through the dawn light at the converging concrete aisles. Soon the climax of the scenario would come, JFK would die again, his young wife raped by this conjunction of time and space. The enigmatic figure of Nader presided over the collision, its myths born from the cross-overs of auto-crashes and genitalia. He looked up from the wheel as the flares illuminated the impact zone. When the car surged forward he realized that the two passengers had gone.

The Acceleration Couch. Half zipping his trousers, Koester lay back against the torn upholstery, one hand still resting on the plump thigh of the sleeping young woman. The debris-filled compartment had not been the most comfortable site. This zombie-like creature had strayed across the concrete runways like a fugitive from her own dreams, forever talking about Talbot as if unconsciously inviting Koester to betray him. Why was she wearing the Jackie Kennedy wig? He sat up, trying to open the rusty door. The students had christened the wreck ‘Dodge 38’, furnishing the rear seat with empty beer bottles and contraceptive wallets. Abruptly the car jolted forward, throwing him across the young woman. As she woke, pulling at her skirt, the sky whirled past the frosted windows. The clanking cable between the rails propelled them on a collision course with a speeding limousine below the camera tower.

Celebration. For Talbot the explosive collision of the two cars was a celebration of the unity of their soft geometries, the unique creation of the pudenda of Ralph Nader. The dismembered bodies of Karen Novotny and himself moved across the morning landscape, recreated in a hundred crashing cars, in the perspectives of a thousand concrete embankments, in the sexual postures of a million lovers.

Interlocked Bodies. Holding the bruise under his left nipple, Dr Nathan ran after Webster towards the burning wrecks. The cars lay together at the centre of the collision corridor, the last steam and smoke lifting from their cabins. Webster stepped over the armless body of Karen Novotny hanging face-down from the rear window. The burning fuel had traced a delicate lacework of expressed tissue across her naked thighs. Webster pulled open the rear door of the Lincoln. ‘Where the hell is Talbot?’ Holding his throat with one hand, Dr Nathan stared at the wig lying among the beer bottles.

The Helicopters are Burning. Talbot followed the young woman between the burning helicopters. Their fuselages formed bonfires across the dark fields. Her strong stride, with its itemized progress across the foam-smeared concrete, carried within its rhythm a calculated invitation to his own sexuality. Talbot stopped by the burning wreck of a Sikorsky. The body of Karen Novotny, with its landscapes of touch and feeling, clung like a wraith to his thighs and abdomen.

Fractured Smile. The hot sunlight lay across the suburban street. From the radio of the car sounded a fading harmonic. Karen Novotny’s fractured smile spread across the windshield. Talbot looked up at his own face mediated from the billboard beside the car park. Overhead the glass curtain-walls of the apartment block presided over this first interval of neural calm.

The Conceptual Death.

Experiments often test the experimenter more than the subject. One remembers the old joke about the laboratory rat who said: ‘I have that scientist trained - every time I press this lever he gives me a pellet of food.’ For me, the most interesting aspect of the work of Masters and Johnson, collected in Human Sexual Response, was its effect on themselves. How were their sex lives influenced, what changes occurred in their sexual freedoms and fantasies? In conversation they seemed almost neutered by the experiments. I suspect that the copulating volunteers were really training the good doctors to lose all interest in sex, just as computerized diagnostic machines, where patients press buttons in reply to stock questions, are inadvertently training them to develop duodenal ulcers or varicose veins.

Talbot. Another face of the central character of The Atrocity Exhibition. The core identity is Traven, a name taken consciously from B. Traven, a writer I’ve always admired for his extreme reclusiveness - so completely at odds with the logic of our own age, when even the concept of privacy is constructed from publicly circulating materials. It is now almost impossible to be ourselves except on the world’s terms.

Obscene Mannequin.

The time-music of the quasars. A huge volume of radio signals reaches this planet from space, crossing gigantic distances from the far side of the universe. It’s hard to accept that these messages are meaningless, as they presumably are, no more than the outward sign of nuclear processes within the stars. Yet the hope remains that one day we will decode them, and find, not some intergalactic fax service, but a spontaneously generated choral music, a naive electro-magnetic architecture, the primitive syntax of a philosophical system, as meaningless but as reassuring as the pattern of waves on a beach.

Reassembling the furniture of his mind, Talbot has constructed a primitive antenna, and can now hear the night sky singing of time, the voice of the unseen powers of the cosmos.

A Sophisticated Entertainment.

Has a festival of atrocity films ever been held? Every year at the Oscars ceremony, some might say. It seemed likely in the late 60s, but the new puritans of our day would greet such a suggestion with a shudder. A pity - given the unlimited opportunities which the media landscape now offers to the wayward imagination, I feel we should immerse ourselves in the most destructive element, ourselves, and swim. I take it that the final destination of the 20th century, and the best we can hope for in the circumstances, is the attainment of a moral and just psychopathology.

The Image Maze.

After a dinner party in the 1970s I almost came to blows with a prominent New York poet (in fact, I tried playfully to run him down with my car, if such an act can be playful). He had derided my observation that cruel and violent images which elicit pity one day have by the next afternoon been stylised into media emblems. Yet the tragic photograph of the Saigon police chief shooting a Viet Cong suspect in the head was soon used by the London Sunday Times as a repeated logo keying its readers to Vietnam features in the paper. If I remember, the tilt of the dying man’s head was slightly exaggerated, like a stylized coke bottle or tail-fin.

Towards the D.M.Z.

Max Ernst’s paintings run through The Atrocity Exhibition, in particular ‘The Eye of Silence’ and ‘Europe After the Rain.’ Their clinker-like rocks resemble skeletons from which all organic matter has been leached, all sense of time. Looking at these landscapes, it’s impossible to imagine anything ever happening within them. The neural counterparts of these images must exist within our brains, though it’s difficult to guess what purpose they serve.

Mimetized Disasters.

Most of the machines that surround our lives - airliners, refrigerators, cars and typewriters - have streamlined their way into our affections. Now and then, as in the case of the helicopter, with its unstable, insect-like obsessiveness, we can see clearly the deep hostility of the mineral world. We are lucky that the organic realm reached the foot of the evolutionary ladder before the inorganic.

The Persistence of Memory.

Dali’s masterpiece, and one of the most powerful of all surrealist images.

The Plaza.

Dealey Plaza in Dallas, re-imagined in Talbot’s eye as the end of the world.

The Annunciation.

Nader has only just survived into the 1990s, and it’s difficult now to imagine his name leaping to anyone’s lips, but at the time he sent a seismic tremor through the mind of the US consumer, challenging the authority of that greatest of all American icons, the automobile. Every car crash seemed a prayer to Ralph Nader.

Stochastic Analysis.

Believe it or not, some researcher did carry out a stochastic analysis of the Pentagon car park, translating the guesstimated flow-patterns of vehicles into a three-dimensional volume graph.

Crash Magazine.

This was written two years before my 1969 exhibition of crashed cars. Scouring the wreckers’ yards around London, I was unable to find a crashed Lincoln Continental, perhaps fortunately. As it was, the audience reaction to the telescoped Pontiac, Mini and Austin Cambridge verged on nervous hysteria, though had the cars been parked in the street outside the gallery no one would have given them a glance or devoted a moment’s thought to the injured occupants. In a calculated test of the spectators, I hired a topless girl to interview the guests on closed-circuit TV. She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only appear topless - an interesting logic was at work there. As the opening night party deteriorated into a drunken brawl she was almost raped in the back seat of the Pontiac, and later wrote a damning review of the show in the underground paper Friendz. The cars were exhibited without comment, but during the month-long show they were continually attacked by visitors to the gallery, who broke windows, tore off wing mirrors, splashed them with white paint. The overall reaction to the experiment convinced me to write Crash, in itself a considerable challenge to most notions of sanity.

I’m told that cars purporting to be the JFK Continental are often exhibited in the United States, and that a white Continental claiming to be the car in which Kennedy met his death was recently the centrepiece of a small museum on the causeway leading to Cocoa Beach, Florida.

The Optimum Wound Profile.

In February 1972, two weeks after completing Crash , I was involved in my only serious car accident. After a front wheel blowout my Ford Zephyr veered to the right, crossed the central reservation (I received a bill for the demolished sign, and was annoyed to see later that I had paid for a more advanced model, with flashing lights), and then rolled over and continued upside-down along the oncoming lane. Fortunately I was wearing a seat belt and no other vehicle was involved. An extreme case of nature imitating art. Curiously, before the accident and since, I have always been a careful and even slow driver, frequently egged on by impatient women-friends.

Unusual Poses.

Abraham Zapruder was a tourist in Dealey Plaza whose amateur cine-film captured the President’s tragic death. The Warren Commission concluded that frame 210 recorded the first rifle shot, which wounded Kennedy in the neck, and that frame 313 recorded the fatal head wound. I forget the significance of frame 230.

The Warren Commission’s Report is a remarkable document, especially if considered as a work of fiction (which many experts deem it largely to be). The chapters covering the exact geometric relationships between the cardboard boxes on the seventh floor of the Book Depository (a tour de force in the style of Robbe-Grillet), the bullet trajectories and speed of the Presidential limo, and the bizarre chapter titles - ‘The Subsequent Bullet That Hit,’ ‘The Curtain Rod Story,’ ‘The Long and Bulky Package’ - together suggest a type of obsessional fiction that links science and pornography. One shudders to think how the report’s authors would have dealt with any sexual elements, particularly if they had involved Jacqueline Kennedy (perhaps The Atrocity Exhibition fills that gap), or how their successors might have coped with the assassination of Vice-President Quayle and his evangelist wife in a hotel suite - say in Miami, a good city in which to be assassinated,

within sight of those lovely banyan trees in Coral Gables, ambling pelicans and the witty Arquitectonica building.

Speed Trials.

Special Agent William R. Greer of the Secret Service was the driver of the Presidential limousine. One can’t help wondering how the events in Dealey Plaza affected him. Has his sense of space and time been altered? What role in his imagination is played by the desperate widow? The facilities exist for a complete neuro-psychiatric profile, though one will never be carried out. The results would be interesting, since we were all in a sense in the driver’s seat on that day in Dallas.

CHAPTER THREE

THE ASSASSINATION WEAPON

Thoracic Drop. The spinal landscape, revealed at the level of T-12, is that of the porous rock towers of Tenerife, and of the native of the Canaries, Oscar Dominguez, who created the technique of decalcomania and so exposed the first spinal landscape. The clinker-like rock towers, suspended above the silent swamp, create an impression of profound anguish. The inhospitability of this mineral world, with its inorganic growths, is relieved only by the balloons flying in the clear sky. They are painted with names: Jackie, Lee Harvey, Malcolm. In the mirror of this swamp there are no reflections. Here, time makes no concessions.

Autogeddon. Waking: the concrete embankment of a motorway extension. Roadworks, cars drumming two hundred yards below. In the sunlight the seams between the sections are illuminated like the sutures of an exposed skull. A young woman stands ten feet away from him, watching with unsure eyes. The hyoid bone in her throat flutters as if discharging some subvocal rosary. She points to her car, parked off the verge beside a grader, and then beckons to him. Kline, Coma, Xero. He remembered the aloof, cerebral Kline and their long discussions on this terminal concrete beach. Under a different sun. This girl is not Coma. ‘My car.’ She speaks, the sounds as dissociated as the recording in a doll. ‘I can give you a lift. I saw you reach the island. It’s like trying to cross the Styx.’

Googolplex. Dr Nathan studied the walls of the empty room. The mandalas, scored in the white plaster with a nail file, radiated like suns towards the window. He peered at the objects on the tray offered to him by the nurse. ‘So, these are the treasures he has left us - an entry from Oswald’s Historic Diary, a much-thumbed reproduction of Magritte’s “Annunciation”, and the mass numbers of the first twelve radioactive nuclides. What are we supposed to do with them?’ Nurse Nagamatzu gazed at him with cool eyes. ‘Permutate them, doctor?’ Dr Nathan lit a cigarette, ignoring the explicit insolence. This elegant bitch, like all women she intruded her sexuality at the most inopportune moments. One day . . . He said, ‘Perhaps. We might find Mrs Kennedy there. Or her husband. The Warren Commission has reopened its hearing, you know. Apparently it’s not satisfied. Quite unprecedented.’ Permutate them? The theoretical number of nucleotide patterns in DNA was a mere 10 to the power of 120,000. What number was vast enough to contain all the possibilities of those three objects?

Jackie Kennedy, your eyelids deflagrate. The serene face of the President’s widow, painted on clapboard four hundred feet high, moves across the rooftops, disappearing into the haze on the outskirts of the city. There are hundreds of the signs, revealing Jackie in countless familiar postures. Next week there may be an SS officer, Beethoven, Christopher Columbus or Fidel Castro. The fragments of these signs litter the suburban streets for weeks afterwards. Bonfires of Jackie’s face burn among the reservoirs of Staines and Shepperton. With luck he finds a job on one of the municipal disposal teams, warms his hands at a brazier of eyes. At night he sleeps beneath an unlit bonfire of breasts.

Xero. Of the three figures who were to accompany him, the strangest was Xero. For most of the time Kline and Coma would remain near him, sitting a few feet away on the embankment of the deserted motorway, following in another car when he drove to the radio-observatory, pausing behind him as he visited the atrocity exhibition. Coma was too shy, but now and then he would manage to talk to Kline, although he never remembered what they said to each other. By contrast,

Xero was a figure of galvanic energy and uncertainty. As he moved across the abandoned landscape near the overpass, the perspectives of the air seemed to invert behind him. At times, when Xero approached the forlorn group sitting on the embankment, his shadows formed bizarre patterns on the concrete, transcripts of cryptic formulae and insoluble dreams. These ideograms, like the hieroglyphs of a race of blind seers, remained on the grey concrete after Xero had gone, the detritus of this terrifying psychic totem.

Questions, always questions. Karen Novotny watched him move around the apartment, dismantling the mirrors in the hall and bathroom. He stacked them on the table between the settees in the lounge. This strange man, and his obsessions with time, Jackie Kennedy, Oswald and Eniwetok. Who was he? Where had he come from? In the three days since she had found him on the motorway she had discovered only that he was a former H-bomber pilot, for some reason carrying World War III in his head. ‘What are you trying to build?’ she asked. He assembled the mirrors into a box-like structure. He glanced up at her, face hidden by the peak of his Air Force cap. ‘A trap.’ She stood beside him as he knelt on the floor. ‘For what? Time?’ He placed a hand between her knees and gripped her right thigh, handhold of reality. ‘For your womb, Karen. You’ve caught a star there.’ But he was thinking of Coma, waiting with Kline in the espresso bar, while Xero roamed the street in his white Pontiac. In Coma’s eyes runes glowed.

The Impossible Room. In the dim light he lay on the floor of the room. A perfect cube, its walls and ceiling were formed by what seemed to be a series of cinema screens. Projected on to them in close-up was the face of Nurse Nagamatzu, her mouth, three feet across, moving silently as she spoke in slow motion. Like a cloud, the giant head moved up the wall behind him, then passed across the ceiling and down the opposite corner. Later the inclined, pensive face of Dr Nathan appeared, rising from the floor until it filled three walls and the ceiling, a slow mouthing monster.

Beach Fatigue. After climbing the concrete incline, he reached the top of the embankment. The flat, endless terrain stretched away on all sides, a few oil derricks in the distance marking the horizon. Among the spilled sand and burst cement bags lay old tyres and beer bottles. Guam in 1947. He wandered away, straddling roadworks and irrigation ditches, towards a rusting quonset near the incline of the disused overpass. Here, in this terminal hut, he began to piece together some sort of existence. Inside the hut he found a set of psychological tests. Although he had no means of checking them, his answers seemed to establish an identity. He went off to forage, and came back to the hut with a collection of mud-stained documents and a Coke bottle.

Pontiac Starchief. Two hundred yards from the hut a wheel-less Pontiac sits in the sand. The presence of this car baffles him. Often he spends hours sitting in it, trying out the front and back seats. All sorts of rubbish is lying in the sand: a typewriter with half the keys missing (he picks out fragmentary sentences, sometimes these seem to mean something), a smashed neurosurgical unit (he pockets a handful of leucotomes, useful for self-defence). Then he cuts his foot on the Coke bottle, and spends several feverish days in the hut. Luckily he finds an incomplete isolation drill for trainee astronauts, half of an eighty-hour sequence.

Coma: the million-year girl. Coma’s arrival coincides with his recovery from the bout of fever. At first she spends all her time writing poems on the damaged typewriter. Later, when not writing the poems, she wanders away to an old solar energy device and loses herself in the maze of mirrors. Shortly afterwards Kline appears, and sits at a chair and table in the sand twenty yards from the hut. Xero, meanwhile, is moving among the oil derricks half a mile away, assembling immense Cinemascope signs that carry the reclining images of Oswald, Jackie Kennedy and

Malcolm X.

Pre-uterine Claims.‘The author,’ Dr Nathan wrote, ‘has found that the patient forms a distinctive type of object relation based on perpetual and irresistible desire to merge with the object in an undifferentiated mass. Although psychoanalysis cannot reach the primary archaic mechanism of “rapprochement” it can deal with the neurotic superstructure, guiding the patient towards the choice of stable and worthwhile objects. In the case under consideration the previous career of the patient as a military pilot should be noted, and the unconscious role of thermonuclear weapons in bringing about the total fusion and non-differentiation of all matter. What the patient is reacting against is, simply, the phenomenology of the universe, the specific and independent existence of separate objects and events, however trivial and inoffensive these may seem. A spoon, for example, offends him by the mere fact of its existence in time and space. More than this, one could say that the precise, if largely random, configuration of atoms in the universe at any given moment, one never again to be repeated, seems to him to be preposterous by virtue of its unique identity . . . ’ Dr Nathan lowered his pen and looked down into the recreation garden. Traven was standing in the sunlight, raising and lowering his arms and legs in a private calisthenic display, which he repeated several times (presumably an attempt to render time and events meaningless by replication?).

‘But isn’t Kennedy already dead?’ Captain Webster studied the documents laid out on Dr Nathan’s demonstration table. These were: (1) a spectroheliogram of the sun; (2) tarmac and take-off checks for the B-29 Super-fortress Enola Gay; (3) electroencephalogram of Albert Einstein; (4) transverse section through a pre-Cambrian trilobite; (5) photograph taken at noon, August 7th, 1945, of the sand-sea, Qattara Depression; (6) Max Ernst’s ‘Garden Airplane Traps’. He turned to Dr Nathan. ‘You say these constitute an assassination weapon?’

‘Not in the sense you mean.’ Dr Nathan covered the exhibits with a sheet. By chance the cabinets took up the contours of a corpse. ‘Not in the sense you mean. This is an attempt to bring about the “false” death of the President - false in the sense of coexistent or alternate. The fact that an event has taken place is no proof of its valid occurrence.’ Dr Nathan went over to the window. Obviously he would have to begin the search single-handedly. Where to begin? No doubt Nurse Nagamatzu could be used as bait. That vamp had once worked as a taxi-dancer in the world’s largest nightclub in Osaka, appropriately named ‘The Universe’.

Unidentified Radio-source, Cassiopeia. Karen Novotny waited as he reversed the car on to the farm track. Half a mile across the meadows she could see the steel bowls of the three radio telescopes in the sunlight. So the attempt was to be made here? There seemed to be nothing to kill except the sky. All week they had been chasing about, sitting for hours through the conference on neuro-psychiatry, visiting art galleries, even flying in a rented Rapide across the reservoirs of Staines and Shepperton. Her eyes had ached from keeping a lookout. ‘They’re four hundred feet high,’ he told her, ‘the last thing you need is a pair of binoculars.’ What had he been looking for - the radio telescopes or the giant madonnas he muttered about as he lay asleep beside her at night? ‘Xero!’ she heard him shout. With the agility of an acrobat he vaulted over the bonnet of the car, then set off at a run across the meadow. Carrying the black Jackie Kennedy wig as carefully as she could in both hands, she hurried after him. One of the telescopes was moving, its dish turning towards them.

Madame Butterfly. Holding the wound under her left breast, Nurse Nagamatzu stepped across Webster’s body and leaned against the bogie of the telescope pylon. Eighty feet above her the

steel bowl had stopped revolving, and the echoes of the gunshots reverberated among the lattice- work. Clearing her throat with an effort, she spat out the blood. The flecks of lung tissue speckled the bright ribbon of the rail. The bullet had broken two ribs, then collapsed her left lung and lodged itself below her scapula. As her eyes faded she caught a last glimpse of a white American car setting off across the tarmac apron beyond the control house, where the shells of the old bombers lay heaped together. The runways of the former airfield radiated from her in all directions. Dr Nathan was kneeling in the path of the car, intently building a sculpture of mirrors. She tried to pull the wig off her head, and then fell sideways across the rail.

The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. Pausing outside the entrance to the tea terrace, Margaret Traven noticed the tall figure of Captain Webster watching her from the sculpture room. Duchamp’s glass construction, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art, reminded her of the ambiguous role she might have to play. This was chess in which every move was a counter-gambit. How could she help her husband, that tormented man, pursued by furies more implacable than the Four Riders - the very facts of time and space? She gave a start as Webster took her elbow. He turned to face her, looking into her eyes. ‘You need a drink. Let’s sit down - I’ll explain again why this is so important.’

Venus Smiles. The dead face of the President’s widow looked up at him from the track. Confused by the Japanese cast of her features, with all their reminders of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, he stared at the bowl of the telescope. Twenty yards away Dr Nathan was watching him in the sunlight, the sculpture beside him reflecting a dozen fragments of his head and arms. Kline and Coma were moving away along the railway track.

Einstein.‘The notion that this great Swiss mathematician is a pornographer may strike you as something of a bad joke,’ Dr Nathan remarked to Webster. ‘However, you must understand that for Traven science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography. How different from Lautreamont, who brought together the sewing machine and the umbrella on the operating table, identifying the pudenda of the carpet with the woof of the cadaver.’ Dr Nathan turned to Webster with a smile. ‘One looks forward to the day when the General Theory of Relativity and the Principia will outsell the Kama Sutra in back-street bookshops.’

Rune-filled Eyes. Now, in this concluding phase, the presence of his watching trinity, Coma, Kline and Xero, became ever closer. All three were more preoccupied than he remembered them. Only Coma, with her rune-filled eyes, watched him with any sympathy. It was as if they sensed that something was missing. He remembered the documents he had found near the terminal hut.

In a Technical Sense. Webster’s hand hesitated on Karen Novotny’s zip. He listened to the last bars of the Mahler symphony playing from the radiogram extension in the warm bedroom. ‘The bomber crashed on landing,’ he explained. ‘Four members of the crew were killed. He was alive when they got him out, but at one point in the operating theatre his heart and vital functions failed. In a technical sense he was dead for about two minutes. Now, all this time later, it looks as if something is missing, something that vanished during the short period of his death. Perhaps his soul, the capacity to achieve a state of grace. Nathan would call it the ability to accept the phenomenology of the universe, or the fact of your own consciousness. This is Traven’s hell. You can see he’s trying to build bridges between things - this Kennedy business, for example. He wants to kill Kennedy again, but in a way that makes sense.’

The Water World. Margaret Traven moved through the darkness along the causeways between the reservoirs. Half a mile away the edge of the embankment formed a raised horizon, enclosing this world of tanks, water and pumping gear with an almost claustrophobic silence. The varying levels of water in the tanks seemed to let an extra dimension into the damp air. A hundred yards away, across two parallel settling beds, she saw her husband walking rapidly along one of the white-painted catwalks. He disappeared down a stairway. What was he looking for? Was this watery world the site where he hoped to be reborn, in this fragmented womb with its dozens of amniotic levels?

An Existential Yes. They were moving away from him. After his return to the terminal hut he noticed that Kline, Coma and Xero no longer approached him. Their fading figures, a quarter of a mile from the hut, wandered to and fro, half-hidden from him by the hollows and earthworks. The Cinemascope billboards of Jackie, Oswald and Malcolm X were beginning to break up in the wind. One morning he woke to find that they had gone.

The Terminal Zone. He lay on the sand with the rusty bicycle wheel. Now and then he would cover some of the spokes with sand, neutralizing the radial geometry. The rim interested him. Hidden behind a dune, the hut no longer seemed a part of his world. The sky remained constant, the warm air touching the shreds of test papers sticking up from the sand. He continued to examine the wheel. Nothing happened.

Thoracic Drop.

Oscar Dominguez, a leading member of the surrealist group in Paris, invented the technique of crushing gouache between layers of paper. When separated they reveal eroded, rock-like forms that touch some deeply buried memory, perhaps at an early stage in the formation of the brain’s visual centres, before the wiring is fully in place. Here I refer to Ernst’s ‘Eye of Silence’.

Googolplex.

Oswald’s Historic Diary, which he began on October 16th, 1959, the day of his arrival in Moscow, is a remarkable document which shows this inarticulate and barely literate man struggling to make sense of the largest issues of his day. Curiously, many prominent assassins have possessed distinctive literary styles, as if they had unconsciously rehearsed and rationalized their crimes on the verbal level long before committing them. Arthur Bremer, who critically wounded George Wallace, composed his own diary with great literary flair, while Manson has a unique apocalyptic style. ‘Paycheck whore wears a dollar bill gown to the funeral of hope and love . . . ’ (The Manson File, Amok Press).

Xero.

These three figures, who are shadows projected from Traven’s unconscious, had been in my mind since the end of the 1950s (see Re/Search #8/9, pages 38-40). They materialized in The Atrocity Exhibition, but then exited and never returned. I wait patiently for them to reappear.

Beach Fatigue.

Guam in 1947. The B-29s which bombed the airfield beside Lunghua Camp, near Shanghai, where I was interned during the Second World War, had reportedly flown from Guam. Pacific islands with their silent airstrips among the palm trees, Wake Island above all, have a potent magic for me. The runways that cross these little atolls, now mostly abandoned, seem to represent extreme states of nostalgia and possibility, doorways into another continuum. It was from the island of Tinian, in the Marianas, that the atom bombs were launched against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended the war unexpectedly and almost certainly saved the lives of myself and my fellow internees in Shanghai, where the huge Japanese armies had intended to make a last stand against the expected American landings.

‘But isn’t Kennedy already dead?’

Kennedy’s assassination presides over The Atrocity Exhibition, and in many ways the book is directly inspired by his death, and represents a desperate attempt to make sense of the tragedy, with its huge hidden agenda. The mass media created the Kennedy we know, and his death represented a tectonic shift in the communications landscape, sending fissures deep into

the popular psyche that have not yet closed.

#Ballard #william burroughs #jg ballard #the atrocity exhibition #writing #literature #art experiment #experimental

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