#Psychose Unit

[mariacallous]

Antipsychotics come from a long line of accidents. In 1876, German chemists created a textile dye called methylene blue, which happened to also dye cells. It meandered into biology labs and, soon after, proved lethal against malaria parasites. Methylene blue became modern medicine’s first fully synthetic drug, lucking into gigs as an antiseptic and an antidote for carbon monoxide poisoning. Cue the spinoffs: A similar molecule, promethazine, became an antihistamine, sedative, and anesthetic. Other phenothiazines followed suit. Then, in 1952, came chlorpromazine.

After doctors sedated a manic patient for surgery, they noticed that chlorpromazine suppressed his mania. A series of clinical trials confirmed that the drug treated manic symptoms, as well as hallucinations and delusions common in psychoses like schizophrenia. The US Food and Drug Administration approved chlorpromazine in 1954. Forty different antipsychotics sprang up within 20 years. “They were discovered serendipitously,” says Jones Parker, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. “So we don't know what they actually do to the brain.”

But Parker really wants to know. He has spent his career studying brains flooded with dopamine, the condition that underpins psychosis. And while he doesn’t pretend to fully understand antipsychotics either, he believes he’s got the right approach to the job: gazing directly into brains. With a combination of tiny lenses, microscopes, cameras, and fluorescent molecules, Parker’s lab can observe thousands of individual neurons in mice, in real time, as they experience different antipsychotic drugs. That’s now paying dividends. In results appearing in the August issue of Nature Neuroscience, Parker shows that an assumption about antipsychotics that’s almost as old as the drugs themselves is …. well, wrong.

Neuroscientists have long thought that antipsychotics dampen extreme dopamine transmission by sticking to receptors in a type of cell called spiny projection neurons, or SPNs. The drugs basically box out the dopamine at receptor proteins called D1 or D2 (where “D” stands for dopamine). Each of the spiny neurons sport either D1 or D2—they’re genetically distinct. Experiments on calf brain extracts in the 1970s showed that the most powerful antipsychotics are the ones that cling strongly to the D2 SPNs in particular, so decades worth of antipsychotics were designed and refined with D2 in mind.

But when Parker’s team probed how four antipsychotics affect D1, D2, and mouse behavior, they found that the most drug interaction is actually happening at D1 neurons. “It’s good to start with a logical prediction and then let the brain surprise you,” Parker says.

The notion that D1 receptors may be a more important target upends decades of research in a $15 billion market for drugs that are famously erratic. Antipsychotics don’t work for about 30 percent of people who try them. They’re plagued by side effects, from extreme lethargy to unwanted facial movements, and rarely address the cognitive symptoms of psychosis, like social withdrawal and poor working memory.

Assumptions about D2 ran deep, says Katharina Schmack, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who was not involved in the work and studies psychosis at the Francis Crick Institute in the United Kingdom: “This was the textbook knowledge.”

“I was surprised, but kind of excited” by the new study’s conclusions, she continues. Now, she says, “We can start to understand the actual mechanism. And that is the first step to then really get to much better treatments.”

Psychosis flares up in the striatum, a small, curved tissue tucked deep in the brain that helps control how you move, feel, and make decisions. Densely packed neurons extend their spiny branches out of the striatum like ribbon cables. Dopamine prompts those neurons to send signals elsewhere in the brain. This interface is where a blaze of dopamine is thought to overwhelm the mind.

About 95 percent of the neurons connecting the striatum to the rest of the brain are SPNs, each sporting either a D1 or D2 receptor. When dopamine clings to D1, those neurons become more excitable; when it clings to D2, those get less so. The entire system interconnects, so it’s hard to pin down true causes and effects. But Parker believes that by monitoring individual cells, scientists can reverse engineer enough of the circuitry to learn how to deliver drugs to it in the most effective way possible.

The first step in his experiment was to mimic excess dopamine in mice by giving them amphetamines. “You inject them with amphetamine, and they run more. If you inject them with antipsychotics first, they run less. That’s the state of the art,” Parker says.

Then, to find out exactly which neurons the amphetamines were interacting with, his team implanted small endoscopes into each mouse’s brain and rigged tiny 2-gram microscopes to peer through the endoscopes. Parker learned this type of in vivo imaging during a postdoc as a Pfizer employee doing research at Stanford University with Mark Schnitzer, a biophysicist who pioneered the method to study neurons more generally. The endoscopes are invasive, but not so bothersome that they get in the way of experiments.

Since D1 and D2 neurons are genetically distinct, the scientists were able to study each individually. As a way to tell them apart, they had designed fluorescent molecules that tagged only the cells with a particular genetic sequence. They then recorded how the neurons reacted after amphetamine injections: D1 SPNs became more excitable, or responsive, and D2 became less so. This matched the textbook theory, Parker says, “but no one had actually shown that yet.”

Then things got weird. Each of the mice had already been injected with one of four drugs: haloperidol, a first-generation drug from the 1950s known for motor side effects; olanzapine, a second-gen drug; clozapine, a powerful drug that’s administered when others don’t work; and MP-10, a drug candidate Pfizer had developed that looked effective in animals but failed during clinical trials in 2019 when it exacerbated psychosis in humans.

Most neuroscientists would wager that the three effective drugs should ignite some action in D2 SPNs, and might do nothing at D1. Indeed, haloperidol and olanzapine countered the amphetamine’s effect on D2, as expected. But clozapine didn’t. And the big surprise was that controlling D1 neurons seemed to be the factor that mattered most. All three effective drugs normalized the action at D1, and MP-10 didn’t. In fact, MP-10 had leveled out activity at D2 but actually made the abnormal D1 activity worse. “It exacerbated the hyperactivity,” Parker says. “That kind of sealed the deal.”

Next, Parker wondered how general this effect is. Most antipsychotics developed over the past 70 years stick to dopamine receptors, but a new generation binds to other sites, like acetylcholine receptors. Might these new drugs still be doing something to D1 neurons indirectly?

Parker’s team picked three promising new drugs—all in the final clinical trials needed for FDA approval—and repeated the first round of experiments. All three somehow normalized D1 activity too. “We were really surprised,” Parker says.

Schmack says it’s “fascinating” that this pattern holds for antipsychotics that target different receptors. “It seems to be a very consistent observation,” she says.

The behavior of the mice also told a consistent story. In both rounds of testing, all of the antipsychotics—except MP-10, which was already known to be ineffective—helped amphetamine-agitated mice slow down and move normally. And their neural activity told a consistent story about why. While the effects on D2 neurons varied, each of those six drugs normalized D1 neurons—suggesting D1 is the receptor that matters more.

To Schmack, these results suggest that drug companies should target D1 in testing—she thinks a drug candidate’s effect on that receptor could be a good proxy for its likelihood of success. “It’s something that we are always desperately in need of,” she says.

“It is extremely powerful, and a wonderful screening tool,” agrees Jessica Walsh, a neuropharmacologist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who was not involved in the work. “With all the drugs that already exist, this really shows that with drugs that we thought selectively targeted one receptor—perhaps that’s not the entire story.”

Parker makes a convincing case for targeting D1, Walsh says, by running through the “whole gamut” of drugs: “It was a humongous effort.” Yet Walsh notes that the interconnections between neurons like D1 and D2 SPNs mean that D2 SPNs may still be important. It’s possible that some drugs level out D1 activity by sticking to D2 receptors.

“It is tricky to shift the role of D2 receptors as being crucial,” Robert McCutcheon, a psychosis researcher at the University of Oxford, England, wrote in an email to WIRED. He suggests testing other approved drugs with no supposed attraction to D1 receptors, like amisulpride.

The field still longs for a better grasp of which neural circuits respond most to antipsychotics. “This is the first step to actually disentangling the exact effects,” says Schmack. “We can develop new antipsychotic drugs that target new points in this way, and might have less side effects than the antipsychotic drugs that we have right now.”

Parker’s current plan is to test what happens when he blocks the D1 receptor just sometimes, with drugs called “partial agonists.” The drugs compensate for high dopamine and low dopamine. It’s a different approach than just blocking dopamine altogether, and Parker hopes his new results bode well for D1 partial agonists in particular. That’s because despite having more dopamine in their striatum, people with schizophrenia actually have lower dopamine levels in their cortex, a feature that neuroscientists think contributes to social withdrawal and forgetfulness. “Such a drug could be both antipsychotic and cognition-promoting,” Parker says. His lab has begun testing candidates.

The Nature Neuroscience study’s results open new inroads to treating psychosis, Parker says. “If we’re not constrained by this idea that they always need to bind this receptor or do this one thing to this type of neuron, we can begin to think about what might be possible in other ways.”

[iikciim]

Psychotherapeutic Drugs

Anatomy, Physiology, and Pathophysiology Overview

The treatment of mental disorders is called psychotherapeutics.

Long-term pharmacotherapy in conjunction with psychotherapy is recommended when emotions or behaviors compromise the quality of life, ability to carry out normal activities of daily living, social functioning, or occupational functioning over a prolonged period.

In the biochemical imbalance theory, mental disorders are thought to arise as the result of abnormal levels of endogenous chemicals in the brain known as

Drugs used to treat mental illnesses, including anxiety, affective disorders, and psychoses, work by blocking or stimulating the release of various endogenous neurotransmitters.

Patients with mental illness are at greater risk for physical illnesses associated with obesity, including diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.

Economic, educational, and psychosocial issues may preclude a mentally ill person from seeking psychiatric health care, resulting in self-medication with substances of abuse, including alcohol, tobacco, and illegal or unauthorized prescription drugs.

Ideal mental health care involves many components, including a carefully detailed patient interview and carefully chosen and regularly monitored drug therapy.

Nonpharmacologic treatments include psychotherapy, support groups, social and family support systems, and often spiritual support systems.

There are three common types of mental illness: anxiety, affective, and psychotic disorders. The drugs used to treat anxiety are anxiolytics. Mood stabilizers and antidepressants are used to treat affective disorders, while antipsychotics are used to treat psychotic disorders.

Psychosis is a major emotional disorder that impairs mental function. A person experiencing psychosis cannot participate in everyday life and shows a loss of contact with reality.

Affective disorders are emotional disorders characterized by changes in mood. They range from mania to depression and include anxiety, a normal emotion that may be a healthy reaction but becomes pathologic when it is life-altering.

Anxiety disorders occur in approximately 18.1% of the adult population in the US.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is twice as common as schizophrenia or panic disorders in the general population.

Situational anxiety arises in response to specific life events, and nursing assessment is key to identifying patients at risk.

https://bb-csuohio.blackboard.com/bbcswebdav/pid-7116321-dt-content-rid-80385689_1/xid-80385689_1

Pharmacology Overview

Psychotropic drugs are among the most commonly prescribed drugs in the United States.

The effectiveness of drug therapy is often measured by verbal reports from patients regarding the level of improvement (if any) in their social and occupational functioning.

Nonadherence to the prescribed regimen is common as patients may remain in denial about the reality of their mental illness, including the need to take psychotropic medications.

Anxiolytic Drugs

Primary anxiolytic drugs include the benzodiazepine drug class and the miscellaneous drug buspirone. The benzodiazepines are commonly used as first-line drug therapy for both acute and chronic anxiety disorders.

Other drugs that are effective as anxiolytics include selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs), monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), antipsychotics, and the antihistamine hydroxyzine.

All anxiolytic drugs decrease anxiety by reducing overactivity in the central nervous system (CNS).

Benzodiazepines are the largest and most commonly prescribed anxiolytic drug class because they offer several advantages over other drugs used to treat anxiety.

Benzodiazepines exert their effect by depressing activity in areas of the brain when they increase the action of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), which is an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain that blocks nerve transmission in the CNS.

The most common undesirable effect is overexpression of their therapeutic effects, in particular CNS depression. Benzodiazepines can also cause hypotension.

Elderly patients tend to be more sensitive to the sedating effects of benzodiazepines, which can increase their risk for falls; lower doses are usually needed.

When benzodiazepines are taken alone, an overdose is generally not life-threatening. When they are combined with alcohol or other CNS depressants, the outcome is much more severe.

Buspirone (BuSpar) is an anxiolytic drug that is different from benzodiazepines; it appears to have agonist activity at both serotonin and dopamine receptors.

https://bb-csuohio.blackboard.com/bbcswebdav/pid-7116321-dt-content-rid-80385687_1/xid-80385687_1

Affective Disorders

Mood-Stabilizing Drugs

Mood stabilizers are drugs used to treat bipolar illness. Catecholamines play an important role in the development of mania; serotonin also appears to be involved.

Lithium has been in use for many years and is still used to effectively alleviate the symptoms of acute mania in bipolar disorder as well as for maintenance therapy to prevent episodes.

When taking lithium, patients need to maintain their sodium intake and not change it dramatically.

A new antipsychotic, cariprazine (Vraylar), was approved in 2016 for the treatment of bipolar disorder.

A variety of medications may be used in conjunction with lithium to regulate mood or achieve stability, including benzodiazepines, antipsychotic drugs, antiepileptic drugs, and dopamine receptor agonists.

Antidepressant Drugs

Antidepressants are the pharmacologic treatment of choice for major depressive disorders. They are also useful in treating other disorders, such as dysthymia, schizophrenia, eating disorders, and personality disorders.

Some of the antidepressants are also used in the treatment of various medical conditions, including migraine headaches, chronic pain syndromes, sleep disorders, premenstrual syndrome, and hot flashes associated with menopause.

Many drugs used to treat affective disorders increase the levels of neurotransmitter concentrations in the CNS, including serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine.

The permissive hypothesis led to the creation of the selective SSRI drug class. The permissive theory postulates that reduced concentrations of serotonin are the predisposing factor in patients with affective disorders. Depression results from decreases in both the serotonin and catecholamine levels, whereas mania results from increased dopamine and norepinephrine levels but decreased serotonin.

Anxiety and depression commonly occur together, so there is much crossover in symptom control between antidepressant and anxiolytic drugs.

A nonresponse to antidepressant drug therapy is defined as failure to respond to at least 6 weeks of therapy with adequate drug dosages. Twenty percent to 30% of patients who do not respond to the usual dosage of an antidepressant will respond to higher dosages.

In 2005, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued special black box warnings for all classes of antidepressants in both adult and pediatric patient populations; data indicated a higher risk for suicide in patients receiving these medications.

Current recommendations for all patients receiving antidepressants include regular monitoring for signs of worsening depressive symptoms, especially when the medication is started or the dosage is changed.

Tricyclic Antidepressants

TCAs were the original first-generation antidepressants; their use has largely been replaced with SSRIs and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors.

The TCAs are considered second-line drug therapy in patients for whom the SSRIs are ineffective or as adjunct therapy with newer drugs.

Originally used to treat depression, currently, TCAs are most commonly used to treat neuropathic pain syndromes and insomnia.

Undesirable effects of TCAs are a result of their effects on various receptors.

Blockade of cholinergic receptors results in undesirable anticholinergic adverse effects, the most common being constipation and urinary retention.

TCA overdoses are notoriously lethal. It is estimated that 70% to 80% of patients who die of TCA overdose do so before reaching the hospital, especially if the drugs are taken with alcohol. The systems affected are the CNS and cardiovascular system.

Most TCAs are rated as pregnancy category D drugs, which makes their use by pregnant women relatively more hazardous than that of most of the newer drugs.

Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors

MAOIs, along with TCAs, represent the first generation of antidepressant drug therapy; they are rarely used as antidepressants but are used to treat Parkinson’s disease.

MAOI use may cause a hypertensive crisis when taken with stimulant medications or with a substance containing tyramine, which is found in many common foods and beverages.

Clinical symptoms of MAOI overdose generally do not appear until about 12 hours after ingestion. The primary signs and symptoms are cardiovascular and neurologic. 

Second-Generation Antidepressants

The second-generation antidepressants include trazodone, bupropion, SSRIs (e.g., fluoxetine, sertraline, paroxetine), serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (e.g., venlafaxine), and miscellaneous drugs, nefazodone, and mirtazapine.

The inhibition of serotonin reuptake is the primary mechanism of action of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRIs).

SSRIs and SNRIs are often prescribed because of their superiority to older antidepressants.

The adverse effect profiles of second-generation antidepressants are associated with significantly fewer and less severe effects than TCAs and MAOIs.

Second-generation antidepressants take the same amount of time to reach maximum clinical effectiveness as do the TCAs and MAOIs—typically 4 to 6 weeks.

Although depression is the primary indication, the drugs have shown benefit in treating other mental and physical disorders, such as bipolar disorder, obesity, eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic attacks or disorders, social anxiety disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, the neurologic disorder myoclonus, and various substance abuse problems such as alcoholism.

Some of the most common adverse effects are insomnia, weight gain, and sexual dysfunction, primarily related to the inability to achieve orgasm.

One potentially hazardous adverse effect of any drug or combination of drugs that have serotoninergic activity is known as serotonin syndrome.

SSRIs are associated with a discontinuation syndrome or withdrawal syndrome, and the drugs must be very slowly tapered. SSRIs with the shortest half-lives (citalopram, escitalopram, sertraline, paroxetine) are most commonly associated with discontinuation syndrome. Symptoms include flulike feeling, difficulty concentrating, faintness, and GI symptoms. While most commonly associated with SSRIs, it can occur with the SNRIs: venlafaxine, desvenlafaxine, duloxetine, milnacipran, and levomilnacipran.

To prevent potentially fatal pharmacodynamic interactions with the MAOIs, a 2- to 5-week washout period is recommended between the use of SSRIs and MAOIs.

https://bb-csuohio.blackboard.com/bbcswebdav/pid-7116321-dt-content-rid-80385688_1/xid-80385688_1

Nursing Process

Nursing considerations related to psychotherapeutic drugs include the need for skillful patient assessment with an emphasis on past and present medical history, physical examination, and a thorough medication history and profile as a comparative baseline for the patient during and after initiation of therapy.

Thoroughly assess the patient’s neurologic functioning, including level of consciousness, mental alertness, and level of motor and cognitive functioning.

The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) is one tool that you may use to assess cognitive status and help identify impairments often found in mental illnesses.

Constantly assess the patient for any suicidal ideations or tendencies because of the potential for suicide, with or without the concurrent use of other medications or alcohol.

If an assessment reveals any concerns and/or the patient acknowledges suicidal thoughts, it is critical to share assessment findings with nursing staff so that an appropriate referral for immediate assessment and/or treatment may be initiated.

It is important to assess sleep habits and nutritional intake and to perform a head-to-toe physical examination for baseline and comparative purposes. Note any drug allergies as well as any contraindications, cautions, and potential drug interactions.

With psychotherapeutic drug therapy, assess the patient’s mouth and oral cavity to make sure the patient has swallowed the entire oral dosage. This helps to prevent hoarding or “cheeking” of medications, and noncompliance that may lead to drug toxicity or overdose.

All psychotherapeutic drugs are to be taken exactly as prescribed and at the same time every day and without failure. If omission occurs, contact the prescriber immediately. Abrupt withdrawal may have negative effects on the patient’s physical and mental status.

Patients taking psychotherapeutic drugs who have a history of cardiac disease may be at a greater risk for experiencing dysrhythmias, tachycardia, stroke, myocardial infarction, and/or heart failure.

Always provide a medication guide and instructions upon dispensing all psychotherapeutic medications.

Monitor the therapeutic effects of psychotherapeutic medications and the patient’s progress before and during drug therapy. Mental alertness, cognition, affect, mood, ability to carry out activities of daily living, appetite, and sleep patterns are all areas that need to be closely monitored and documented.

[the-chomsky-hash]

[C. There is no unitary pathology which would use the same methods and the same concepts in the psychological field and in the physiological field - cont'd]

[2. The normal and the pathological - cont'd]

b. In psychiatry, on the contrary [to medicine], the notion of personality makes it particularly difficult to distinguish between the normal and the pathological.

i. Bleuler, for example, had opposed two poles of mental pathology,

the group of schizophrenia, with the rupture of contact with reality

the group of manic-depressive madness, or cyclical psychoses, with the exaggeration of affective reactions

Now, this analysis seemed to define both normal and morbid personalities; and Kretschmer was able to constitute in this spirit, a bipolar characterology, comprising

schizothymia

cyclothymia (the pathological accentuation of which would present itself as schizophrenia and as "cyclophrenia")

But, as a result, the transition from normal reactions to morbid forms depends

not on a precise analysis of the processes

[but rather] it only allows a qualitative appreciation which authorizes all confusions

ii. While the idea of organic solidarity makes it possible to distinguish and unite morbid attack and adapted response, the examination of the personality, in mental pathology, prevents such analyses.

– Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, (Chapter 1: Mental and Organic Medicine), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954

[mrmustachious]

For Gordon’s birthday, I decided to put together a rec list of a bunch of Gordon fics I love! There are so many more I could rec, so these are just a few of the amazing fics out there. Feel free to add your faves too, whether that be your own ones you’ve written or fics by others you love! I’m sure Gordon would approve of sharing the love 💛

List below the cut because it got loooong

AO3

-Stars in the Sea by Fyoex

The Tracy family thought the hydrofoil accident had been left far behind them. But head trauma is a fickle beast that isn’t quite ready to let go.

-Scenes from Gordon’s Bedside by @gaviiadastra

One-shot exercises, connected by a family grieving, hoping, and trying to make sense of why. Blended Universe

-Gordon & Explosive Device & Storage Unit by @strongerwiththepack

Gordon's in trouble when an underwater storage facility explodes with him still inside.

(Note: I requested this so I am a little biased!)

-Risky Rockpools by @strongerwiththepack

The Tracy family get a reality check when they remember that living on an isolated island in the middle of the South Pacific ocean isn't actually all that safe.

-Being Gordon Tracy by @psychoseal

Gordon’s life story!

-Malfunction by shadowfox8

Gordon is enjoying some time in the ocean when Thunderbird 4 decides to play some tricks, giving our loveable prankster decompression sickness.

-Where the mermaids live by @fallenfurther

Gordon decides to cheat on an important test but is caught by the school bullies. They are happy to let him keep the grade as long as he does something for them. Gordon knows he's getting in deeper than he should, but the consequences go far beyond what he expected.

-The Most Dangerous Game by @godsliltippy

Scott and Gordon find themselves unwilling participants.

-Motionless by @godsliltippy

One can never expect a rescue mission to go smoothly when Langstrom Fischler is involved. Gordon knows this and yet, that information does him no good when lives are at stake and it's his job to get everyone out safely.

-Every time it snows by allandmore

A simple mountain rescue goes wrong for International Rescue. Gordon battles the elements and his memories, and Scott has a tough decision to make.

-An Aquanaut Walks Into a Bar... by Corby

Gordon has a conversation in a bar, and Virgil has strong opinions about that. Childhood memories, and the stories we tell ourselves and others.

-Picnic by ThatGirlSix

Every Tracy has a type of job they hate, be them car crashes, hotel fires, mine collapses, whatever. Gordon absolutely hates tornadoes with a passion. No, really, he hates tornadoes. His life would be so much better if they never did another tornado job ever again. The rest of the family is starting to think so, too.

-Consequences by @tracybirds

Gordon is in a bit of a bind, and the older bros will need to help him out of it in a big way.

-Tears Of The Ocean by @janetm74

The ocean is a harsh mistress and Gordon has been burned by her. Will Scott be able to help him get through this? A pre-iR, military bro's fic.

FF

-No Accidents by Glazier Blue

Gordon thought the Hydrofoil crash was behind him. But there was a lot more to his "accident" than his family realised. It looks like the past with WASP has come back to finish what it started. Now Gordon's life hangs in the balance. Can his family stop history from repeating it self?

-Conformity by Figure in black

It was nothing...just a small boy grasping onto his understanding of language. He would soon grow out of it...

-My Brother’s Pain by FABThunderbird

Virgil and Gordon are both exhausted after a dangerous rescue. On their way home Virgil notices that Gordon is not only dealing with an injury, but he sees his brother struggling to open up about what he had witnessed during this rescue.

-Look Before You Reach by nhsweetcherry

Gordon experiences trouble on a rescue - all because he dropped his watch!

-A Tangled Web by crystalquirt

Something has caused heat and trace amounts of radiation in the deep sea. Thinking it volcanic, Gordon takes Thunderbird Four to be sure after John detected an unusual amount of dead sea life in the area. The water around the phenomenon has turned brownish yellow, all the way up to the surface. One species still thrive there.

My Fics!

Well I couldn’t make this without dropping some of my faves that I’ve written!

-Birthday Surprise

It's Gordon's birthday and the first one since his dad came home. He deserves a great day, doesn't he? Maybe not.

(Note: It’s his birthday, I had to include this one!)

-Into the Spider’s Nest

When Gordon comes across something he was never meant to see, he ends up tangled in a potentially deadly web made up of his worst nightmares. His chances of getting out dwindle with each passing day, but when he finds someone just as stuck as he is, they may end up becoming each other’s lifeline, as well as their only chance to make it home.

-Not Ever

Gordon has a confession to make, and Penelope feels like the worst girlfriend ever.

-Just Keep Swimming

A nice, relaxing day on Tracy Island leads to Gordon discovering something that shouldn't exist.

-Breathless

The one scene that was missing from the finale, plus all the scenes that led up to that moment.

-these drugs, they separate me from my mind

Gordon has big dreams. He is going to make it far, and knows he has what it takes to get there. Until one day he is offered an easier, faster way to get to where he wants to be. The only problem is it goes against everything he believes, but maybe he should take the opportunity whilst he has it?

-Sleep Under the Fish

One day, a strange boy appeared on Penelope's beach. And then he disappeared. Little did she know about the world that lived beneath the sea, and what that one encounter would open her up to. A Thunderbirds/Luca AU

To-read Recs

So I have yet to read any of these, but they are just a few of the fics I have marked for later that seem interesting! And I thought it would be fun to rec them in case others find them interesting too (yes I am behind on a lot of fics!)

-Live and learn by Scherzandro

Scott and his brother have been at odds since Gordon joined International Rescue a couple of months back, but when the pair are stranded in hostile territory they might just learn a thing or two about each other, if they live long enough...

-One Word by alchemistsarego

If Gordon Tracey was asked to describe his current situation in a single word, that word would be ‘uncomfortable’. Now of course being trapped in a volcanic cave with only his radio as a source of light while covered not only in his own sweat but his blood also, the word didn’t quite do what he was experiencing justice. In fact, there were many other words that would describe it better. Claustrophobic. Terrified. In agony, perhaps.

-Tracy Seaside Orchard and Farm by @gaviiadastra

An alternate universe. Gordon has a successful farm... and seems to have nothing to do with this International Rescue thing.

-The Heart of Te Fiti by Eraman

So this is gonna be a major AU which will mostly follow the plot of Moana/Vaiana with many changes. Gordon hears the sea calling him, but with his three older brothers missing and his father forbidding him from going near the ocean what is Gordon to do? He knows there is something he and Alan has to do, something only they can do but how can they when they are not allowed to leave?

-Terrors in Space by @godsliltippy

Just a routine space rescue. Sure. "Routine"

There’s soo so many more fics I could add here, but I need to stop at some point lol. But like I said, if anyone else has any more recs, they can drop them below. I’m sure there’s many fics even I haven’t read yet! Anyways, I hope at least someone found something here they like, and if you did, be sure to drop a comment on whatever you read 💛💛

[tagsecretsanta]

From @Angelofbenignmalevolence

to @psychoseal

Secret Santa does not own this work, full credit to the author mentioned above!

Summary: Tracy Island has a situation! There is a missing stuffed cuddly squid. Gordon Tracy is on the hunt for a squidnapper!

-------------

“Alright, which one of you chuckleheads is responsible?”

The whole room seemed to freeze in place at the obvious vitriol in the statement. Virgil’s paintbrush paused mid stroke as he leaned around the canvas. Scott looked up from where he was seated behind their father’s desk. Alan looked at him from where he was laying upside down with his feet over the back of the couch, the sound of a game over emitting from the small system in his hands as he pushed the VR headset up off his eyes.

“Responsible for what, Gordo?” Virgil asked. Gordon frowned, his hands on his hips.

“You know perfectly well what!” Gordon said.

“No Gordon, we don’t,” Scott said, giving his younger brother a confused glance. Gordon took in an annoyed breath.

“Which one of you took Squidge?” He demanded. Virgil exchanged a confused look with Alan.

“Squidge?” he asked.

“My squid!” Gordon said. Virgil looked at Scott. Since when had Gordon gotten a live squid?

“He used to call him ‘Squiddy’ before he got big enough to give him a real name,” Scott reminded Virgil. A look of recognition crossed his face. The stuffed squid that Lucille had given Gordon on a trip to the aquarium when the boys were young. Gordon had taken to keeping the stuffed animal in Thunderbird 4, ostensibly for when he rescued children who were nervous and needed some kind of comfort.

“Guys, focus!” Gordon said, trying to bring his brothers’ attention back to the matter at hand. “Squidge is missing!”

“Are you sure that a kid didn’t just walk off with him after a rescue?” Alan asked helpfully.

“I’m sure that I got him back from the last rescue,” Gordon said. “Virgil and I stopped for coffee because it was so stupidly cold after that rescue. I have a picture of Squidge next to my coffee cup.”

“Oh yeah!” Virgil said.  That rescue was coming back to him now. “You threw him in the wash when he got coffee on him after a little turbulence.”

“Ok, that was more than ‘a little turbulence,’ but that’s not the point,” Gordon said folding his arms. “The point is that Squidge is missing and one of you took him!”

“No we didn’t, Gordon!” Alan said.

“You must have just misplaced him,” Scott said, trying to defuse the situation. Gordon sent a glare at his eldest brother, as if the very suggestion offended their ancestors. Virgil shook his head.

“At the risk of asking the obvious, have you checked the washer?” Virgil asked. Gordon turned his scowl on the second eldest.

“Of course I did! That was the first place I looked,” Gordon said with an indignant huff. “Honestly, I didn’t want to believe that I was living in a den of thieves!”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Gordon,” Scott said. “Did you look through all the compartments on Thunderbird Four. He might have gotten lost amidst all the canned cheese and other assorted snacks you have stashed away in there.” Gordon’s scowl turned more into a pout.

“Har, Scott,” he said. “Yes, I cleaned out all the compartments. He’s not in there!”

“But I’ll bet Four has never looked cleaner,” Alan said. Gordon picked up a pillow from the couch and threw it at Alan, who awkwardly deflected it and nearly overbalanced himself on the couch. Virgil rolled his eyes.

“Did you check the linen closet? He might have gotten swept up in some of the sheets from when we last did laundry,” Virgil supplied.

“Tried there. I didn’t find him.”

“Laundry hamper?”

“No sign of him.”

“Have you tried under your bed?”

“Nope, he’s not there either.”

“Did you check in Thunderbird Two?” Scott asked. This time it was Virgil’s turn to scowl.

“You are not ripping apart Two to find your squid,” Virgil protested before Gordon could answer. “I just took stock and got her all ready for her next call out. He’s not there. That’s a fact.”

“Have you asked grandma?” Alan asked. “She always seems to know where everything is.”

“And risk breaking her heart when she finds out that at least one of her grandsons is a squidnapper?” Scott rubbed his temples he opened his mouth to say something when Lady Penelope’s portrait made a soft ping.

“Hold that thought, Gordon,” Scott said, activating the holoprojector. Lady Penelope’s hologram winked into being in the center of the room. Gordon smoothed down his shirt as Lady Penelope smiled.

“Good afternoon,” she said, looking around at all of the boys gathered in the living room. Usually such gatherings meant either the beginnings of a callout for International Rescue or some kind of family meeting. “I certainly hope that I haven’t interrupted anything important.”

“No, no,” Scott replied. “We were just having a…brotherly chat. What can we do for you Lady Penelope?” She pushed the hair back off her shoulder.

“I’m afraid that I must report to you that my efforts in converting over many of the leftover oil rigs in the Atlantic to clean solar energy may have inadvertently caused a situation,” She said. She made a motion and a small screen appeared next to her on her holoprojection. The footage shown was of an oil well that had been capped but had begun to leak oil. “While this is by no means an emergency situation, a crew cannot get out to cap it for longer than I truly feel comfortable with. I was wondering if I might impose on our friendship to have Gordon come out to take a look at it?”

“I’d be happy to,” Gordon said, all thought of the lost squid forgotten, at least for the moment. Virgil set down his paint palette and got to his feet.

“I’ll go get Thunderbird Two ready for transport. I’ll meet you down in the hangar, Gordon.”

“F.A.B.” Gordon gave Lady Penelope a smile. “Don’t you worry, Lady Penelope. I’ll take care of that leaking oil.” Gordon headed straight for his chute, pressing his hand against the aquarium glass and beginning his descent. The case of the missing squid would have to wait until he returned.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Gordon came out of the shower unit in two, having rinsed off the oil that had been clinging to his suit. Once he and Virgil had told Lady Penelope of their success in capping the leaking oil well, Lady Penelope had insisted on their presence for afternoon tea to thank them both for the favor. Virgil happily accepted and Gordon normally would have jumped at the chance but he was starting to worry that he still hadn’t found his little cuddly squid. Virgil landed Thunderbird Two in the courtyard of Penelope’s manor. She met them at the door.

“Virgil, Gordon,” she greeted warmly.

“Lady Penelope,” Virgil said in return. “Gordon was able to cap the well. You shouldn’t be having any more trouble with it. Lady Penelope smiled.

“Thank you so much for your efforts. I very much appreciate you allowing me to abuse our friendship like this,” Lady Penelope said.

“Oh it was no trouble at all,” Gordon said.

“Are you sure? You look a little troubled,” Penelope said.

“I��oh…it’s…it’s nothing…”

“One of the things Gordon got from mom went missing a little earlier,” Virgil explained. “We were trying to help him find it when you called.”

“Oh no,” Lady Penelope said understandingly. “I’m so sorry to hear that. Is there anything I can do?”

“No no, it’s just…I’m afraid I might have left it at a rescue site somewhere. We couldn’t find it anywhere at home.

“Oh dear…” Gordon sank onto the couch, putting his elbows on his knees as Parker brought in a tray of tea and sweets. Sherbet looked up from where he laying in the sun streaming through one of the windows. His little tail wagged slightly at the company, but stopped wagging when he saw how sad Gordon looked. He didn’t like it when Lady Penelope’s Tracy friends were sad. Sherbet decided to do something about it.

He moved over to his bed and rooted around for a toy he had buried in there for safe keeping. His little teeth grabbed the plush toy and dragged it across the floor, bumping into Gordon’s leg. Gordon looked up.

“Hey little buddy. What do you have – Squidge!” His eyes went wide with surprise and delight. Sherbet wagged his tail as Gordon lifted the pup triumphantly in the air, spinning him around. Yes, Sherbet had done something right. Nothing left but smiles now.

[my-name-is-dahlia]

Vocabulary (pt.cmlxxiv)

Words taken from #avLatinGreekRoots:

dysgeusia (n.) a bad taste in the mouth; also called parageusia. [x]

dysrhaphism (n.) [I have no clue (I think there may be another spelling for this word) ... but this paper uses it: “‘High spinal’ (cervical and upper thoracic) dysrhaphism usually involves either a meningocele or a dermal sinus tract. These high spinal lesions can have a complex intradural anatomy at the level of the lesion (as this case reports) and are associated with an increased incidence of lower spinal occult dysrhaphic anomalies.”]

dyslogia (n.) difficulty in expressing ideas through speech caused by impairment of the power of reasoning (as in certain psychoses). [x]

dolichorrhine (n.) having a long nose. [x]

dorsalgia (n.) severe back pain, which [can come from] different parts of the spine. Depending on the specific section of the spine where the pain is coming from, there are six types of dorsalgia: cervical, cervicothoracic, thoracic, thoracolumbar, lumbar, and lumbosacral. [x]

diotic (adj.) medical. affecting or relating to the two ears: binaural. [x]

diphyletic (adj.) derived from two lines of evolutionary descent. [x]

dyschroa (n.) an alteration of colour on the skin. [x]

deciliter, decilitre (n.) a metric unit of capacity, equal to 0.1 liter (litre).

dyslexic (adj.) relating to or affected by dyslexia.

[halocantik]

Psychology has struggled for a century to make sense of the mindne

Psychology has struggled for a century to make sense of the mindne

 Crucial details of the Little Albert experiment remain unclear or in dispute, such as who the child was, whether he had any neurological conditions and why the boy was removed from the experiment, possibly by his mother, before the researchers could attempt to reverse his learned fears. Also uncertain is whether he experienced any long-term effects of his experience.

 Although experimental psychology originated in Germany in 1879, Watson’s notorious study foreshadowed a messy, contentious approach to the “science of us” that has played out over the last 100 years. Warring scientific tribes armed with clashing assumptions about how people think and behave have struggled for dominance in psychology and other social sciences. Some have achieved great influence and popularity, at least for a while. Others have toiled in relative obscurity. Competing tribes have rarely joined forces to develop or integrate theories about how we think or why we do what we do; such efforts don’t attract much attention.

 But Watson, who had a second career as a successful advertising executive, knew how to grab the spotlight. He pioneered a field dubbed behaviorism, the study of people’s external reactions to specific sensations and situations. Only behavior counted in Watson’s science. Unobservable thoughts didn’t concern him.

 Even as behaviorism took center stage — Watson wrote a best-selling book on how to raise children based on conditioning principles — some psychologists addressed mental life. American psychologist Edward Tolman concluded that rats learned the spatial layout of mazes by constructing a “cognitive map” of their surroundings (SN: 3/29/47, p. 199). Beginning in the 1910s, Gestalt psychologists studied how we perceive wholes differently than the sum of their parts, such as, depending on your perspective, seeing either a goblet or the profiles of two faces in the foreground of a drawing (SN: 5/18/29, p. 306).

 And starting at the turn of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, exerted a major influence on the treatment of psychological ailments through his writings on topics such as unconscious conflicts, neuroses and psychoses (SN: 7/9/27, p. 21). Freudian clinicians guided the drafting of the American Psychiatric Association’s first official classification system for mental disorders. Later editions of the psychiatric “bible” dropped Freudian concepts as unscientific — he had based his ideas on analyses of himself and his patients, not on lab studies.

 Shortly after Freud’s intellectual star rose, so did that of Harvard University psychologist B.F. Skinner, who could trace his academic lineage back to Watson’s behaviorism. By placing rats and pigeons in conditioning chambers known as Skinner boxes, Skinner studied how the timing and rate of rewards or punishments affect animals’ ability to learn new behaviors. He found, for instance, that regular rewards speed up learning, whereas intermittent rewards produce behavior that’s hard to extinguish in the lab. He also stirred up controversy by calling free will an illusion and imagining a utopian society in which communities doled out rewards to produce well-behaved citizens.

 Skinner’s ideas, and behaviorism in general, lost favor by the late 1960s (SN: 9/11/71, p. 166). Scientists began to entertain the idea that computations, or statistical calculations, in the brain might enable thinking.

 At the same time, some psychologists suspected that human judgments relied on faulty mental shortcuts rather than computer-like data crunching. Research on allegedly rampant flaws in how people make decisions individually and in social situations shot to prominence in the 1970s and remains popular today. In the last few decades, an opposing line of research has reported that instead, people render good judgments by using simple rules of thumb tailored to relevant situations.

 Starting in the 1990s, the science of us branched out in new directions. Progress has been made in studying how emotional problems develop over decades, how people in non-Western cultures think and why deaths linked to despair have steadily risen in the United States. Scientific attention has also been redirected to finding new, more precise ways to define mental disorders.

 No unified theory of mind and behavior unites these projects. For now, as social psychologists William Swann of the University of Texas at Austin and Jolanda Jetten of the University of Queensland in Australia wrote in 2017, perhaps scientists should broaden their perspectives to “witness the numerous striking and ingenious ways that the human spirit asserts itself.”

Revolution and rationality

Today’s focus on studying people’s thoughts and feelings as well as their behaviors can be traced to a “cognitive revolution” that began in the mid-20th century.

 The rise of increasingly powerful computers motivated the idea that complex programs in the brain guide “information processing” so that we can make sense of the world. These neural programs, or sets of formal rules, provide frameworks for remembering what we’ve done, learning a native language and performing other mental feats, a new breed of cognitive and computer scientists argued (SN: 11/26/88, p. 345).

 Economists adapted the cognitive science approach to their own needs. They were already convinced that individuals calculate costs and benefits of every transaction in the most self-serving ways possible — or should do so but can’t due to human mental limitations. Financial theorists bought into the latter argument and began creating cost-benefit formulas for investing money that are far too complex for anyone to think up, much less calculate, on their own. Economist Harry Markowitz won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1990 for his set of mathematical rules, introduced in 1952, to allocate an investor’s money to different assets, with more cash going to better and safer bets.

 But in the 1970s, psychologists began conducting studies documenting that people rarely think according to rational rules of logic beloved by economists. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University, who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002, and Amos Tversky of Stanford University founded that area of research, at first called heuristics (meaning mental shortcuts) and biases. of the most infamous psychology experiments ever conducted involved a carefully planned form of child abuse. The study rested on a simple scheme that would never get approved or funded today. In 1920, two researchers reported that they had repeatedly startled an unsuspecting infant, who came to be known as Little Albert, to see if he could be conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs.

 Psychologist John Watson of Johns Hopkins University and his graduate student Rosalie Rayner viewed their laboratory fearfest as a step toward strengthening a branch of natural science able to predict and control the behavior of people and other animals.

 At first, the 9-month-old boy, identified as Albert B., sat placidly when the researchers placed a white rat in front of him. In tests two months later, one researcher presented the rodent, and just as the child brought his hand to pet it, the other scientist stood behind Albert and clanged a metal rod with a hammer. Their goal: to see if a child could be conditioned to associate an emotionally neutral white rat with a scary noise, just as Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov had trained dogs to associate the meaningless clicks of a metronome with the joy of being fed.

 Pavlov’s dogs slobbered at the mere sound of a metronome. Likewise, Little Albert eventually cried and recoiled at the mere sight of a white rat. The boy’s conditioned fear wasn’t confined to rodents. He got upset when presented with other furry things — a rabbit, a dog, a fur coat and a Santa Claus mask with a fuzzy beard.

[mcatmemoranda]

Symptom Media

Mental Disorder/Illness Symptoms:

Adolescent Risk Taking – During puberty the brain remodels the dopaminergic system. This leads to changes in the socio-emotional system with the result that adolescents seek behaviors that increase “rewards” for their adolescent brains. Such behaviors are additionally impacted by peer influence. These changes decrease as the brain’s cognitive control systems take over in adulthood, leading to improved self-regulation.

Clang Associations – Clang Associations are the expression of ideas based upon the sounds of words rather than the meanings. Shifts in conversation often occur based upon rhyming. This is most often a defense that is seen in psychoses.

Command Hallucinations – Command Hallucination is a condition in which individuals hear and sometimes obey voices that command them to perform certain acts. The hallucinations may influence them to engage in behaviors that are dangerous to themselves or to others.

Compulsions - Compulsions are repetitive or ritualistic behaviors that people perform to reduce anxiety. Compulsions often develop as a way of controlling or “undoing” obsessive thoughts.

Concrete Thinking – Concrete thinking is thinking of objects or ideas as specific items rather than as abstract representations of more general concepts, as contrasted with abstract thinking. (Example: perceiving a chair and a table as individual useful items and not as members of the general class: furniture).

Derailment – Derailment is pattern of communication (speech or writing) in which a person’s ideas slip off one track and onto another that is completely unrelated or only obliquely related. In moving from one sentence or clause to the next, the patient shifts topics from one frame of reference to another and things are said in juxtaposition that lack a meaningful relationship. This disturbance occurs between clauses, in contrast to incoherence, in which the disturbance is within clauses.

Flat Affect – Flat Affect is a severe reduction in emotional expressiveness. People with depression and schizophrenia often demonstrate flat affect. A person with schizophrenia may not show the signs of normal emotion, may speak in a monotonous voice, have diminished facial expressions, and appear extremely apathetic. Also known as blunted affect.

Grandiose Delusions – Grandiose delusions are fantastical, beyond ordinary beliefs that people truly believe and cannot be persuaded otherwise. The beliefs include people believing that they have great political power, are famous, are wealthy, are omnipotent, have supernatural powers, have great religious powers, or believing any other fantastic, impossible traits about themselves. Grandiose delusions are most often seen in mania and schizophrenia.

Inappropriate Affect – Inappropriate Affect is an emotional tone or outward emotional reaction out of harmony with the idea, object, or thought accompanying it.

Mania – Mania is an abnormally elated mental state. Mania is typically characterized by feelings of euphoria, lack of inhibitions, racing thoughts, diminished need for sleep, talkativeness, risk taking, and irritability. Obsessions – Obsession is a persistent unwanted idea or impulse that cannot be eliminated by reasoning.

Pressured Speech – Pressured speech (or Pressure of Speech) is a tendency to speak in a rapid and frenzied manner with a great sense of urgency. The speech may be so rapid that people slur or stumble over words and their speech can become difficult to comprehend. People with pressured speech are difficult to interrupt. Pressured speech is sometimes observed in people with mania or drug-induced mania and more rarely observed in people with schizophrenia.

Self-Reference – “Ideas of reference” is an extreme form of the normal phenomenon of “self-reference.” In self-reference people refer to themselves in the first person. Ideas of reference, however, is a pathologically delusional phenomenon in which people experience innocuous events as being enormously significant to their personal lives. (Example: A person may believe that an advertisement on TV was designed as an exclusive personal message. A person may believe that a comment of the President of the United States meant the comment only for that one viewer, when the context of the President’s speech is far from that). This phenomenon is sometimes observed in schizophrenia, mania, and delusional disorders.

[ainsleys-interests]

J.G. Ballard

The Atrocity Exhibition with an Preface by William Burroughs

A Flamingo Modern Classic edition published 2001 Copyright © J G Ballard 1993

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

A revised, expanded, annotated and illustrated edition first published in the USA by Re/Search, 1990 Copyright © J G Ballard 1990

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

Copyright © J G Ballard 1969

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.

<Annotations>

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.

<Annotations>

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.

<Annotations>

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.

[searchingforthestage]

If I Could Direct One Play on Broadway. . .

CW: Talks of bodily violence.

If I only had one chance to direct a play on Broadway I would want to direct a revival of Sarah Kanes' 'Cleansed'.

Cleansed originally premiered in 1998 and had a Broadway production in 2016 at the National Theatre and it is her third play written. Her brother Simon Kane is quoted of saying in 2005 that "overseas many, many people think that Cleansed is Sarah's best play."

If you don't know anything about the works of Sarah Kane than to sum them up they are radical pieces usually involving bucket loads of violence, sexuality, and impossible stage directions (or in the case of 4.48 Psychoses, no stage directions at all). Cleansed in particular features stage directions like tongues, hands, and legs being cut off, rats appearing on stage and carrying off the body parts, and hundreds of daffodils suddenly appearing before the characters. However, Kane didn't agree with the description as 'impossible' as she has said  "There's a Jacobean play with the stage direction 'Her spirit rises from her body and walks away, leaving her body behind.' Anyway, Shakespeare has a bear running across the stage in A Winter's Tale, and his stage craft was perfect".

Sarah Kane is my favorite playwright and Cleansed is my favorite work from her. Out of every play I've ever read I would love to put on a production of Cleansed the most and here is how I would do it!

A brief rundown of the plot is: A group of people are in an institution meant to purge society of 'undesirables' and it is run by the violent and sadistic Tinker. Patients include Grace, Graham, Robin, Rod and Carl (the last two being in a relationship at the start). They attempt to save themselves through love, but that doesn't provide much protection against the extreme violence Tinker enacts on them.

Many of the scenes feel like they just happen and it gives the whole play a dream like feel, which have made their way to the most popular interpretation of the play as a dream that Grace is having and is more abstractly relating to their pain that they are going through. Many directors have chosen to have Grace on the stage the entire time to connect them with the scenes that they aren't in, continuing the dream that they are having.

I want to push that aspect as not only do I want to further imply that it is Grace's dream, but I believe there is a connection between the characters Grace and Tinker. I think Tinker is an extension of Grace's angry and violent side and he is expressing the emotions that Grace typically wouldn't express. One example why is the scene where (spoilers and content warning) Tinker performs surgery on Carl without his consent to give Grace his genitals and also remove Grace's breasts. Carl cries at this act of cruelty but Grace thanks the tinker for performing the surgery on them.

I also think that the violence Tinker performs on Rod and Carl represents Grace's internalized homophobia/transphobia. Rod and Carl as symbols represent that Grace resents their queerness and it causes them more pain. As for how I imagine some of the impossible scenes: the rat that drags off with the discarded hand would be a huge puppet, operated by a stagehand in black, and it would be nightmarishly disgusting. The daffodils I would stage as the lights becoming progressively more yellow until it is completely washing the stage, and then a background would reveal itself as a field of flowers. The cutting of the tongue I would have the actor hiding a large red cloth in their mouth and they would expel that, implying something in a horror movie but way more theatrical.

Why should Cleansed be revived? With transgender rights constantly under attack in the United States, a play that talks about the violence that trans people can and do go through. Also representation for transmasculine individuals isn't really a thing, especially on Broadway, so expanding that aspect as much as I can is ideal. I would want to cast a nonbinary or transmasculine actor to play the part of Grace, as that is an integral part of the character in my opinion.

[hardnekkig]

"Hey biomassa." zegt Chris. Shit, dacht ik, die klootzak van een Chris leert van ons. Maarja, hij was dan ook onderdeel van onze unit. Wij zochten zulke mensen. Neurodiversiteit. "Ja Chris is nou eenmaal een autist." verzucht Alice. Wat het was dat Chris, Chris maakte? Misschien was het de de overgroei, de verbeterde visueel-ruimtelijke vaardigheden, de verbeterde lokale verwerking,  de hyperlexia, de relatief rechter-hemisfeer dysfunctie, en het abnormale filteren van sensorische invoer. En Bas? Die was een schizo. Hij had waarschijnlijk een sterk immuunsysteem of het feit dat hij meer visuele informatie binnen kreeg. Hij had visioenen en psychoses. Hij was een pattern-maker. En Alice? Die had een betere theory of mind. En een hoge g, dat ook. Een pattern-breaker.

Sommigen van ons, hebben neanderthaler-genen. Roodharigen hebben een hogere pijngrens. Alice is volledig nieuw.

[tagsecretsanta]

From @Psychoseal

to @avengedbiologist

Full credit to the author above, secret santa does not won this work!

“Ugh it is freezing” Gordon complains to the empty changing room. It is the final day of school before Christmas break, and it has been heavily snowing all day, and he is getting changed after swimming practise. Jamming his head under the hand dryer to try to dry his hair off, Gordon can’t stop himself from shivering. He has been cold all day, apart from the blissful hour he spent in the pool. 

Grabbing his bag, he leaves the changing room and goes out into the snow to wait for his bus. Pulling his hood up over his head, his hands gloved and in his pockets, but the tips of his fingers are already numb. 

Minutes tick by like hours, as he leans against the sign for the bus, but it doesn’t show up. “Great. Just bloody great” Gordon screams. It will take him over an hour to walk home, it is cold and dark and he knows that there is no way Scott will agree to come and get him. not after the argument the pair had over breakfast this morning. 

*FLASHBACK*

“GORDON COOPER TRACY. GET YOU BUTT DOWN HERE NOW” Scott yells angrily. 

Gordon is up in his room putting the finishing touches to last weeks book report. Groaning he gets up and walks as slowly as possible, knowing that he is heading to his own execution. Finding Scott in the kitchen, covered from head to toe in glittery flour. “Oh yeah that!” Gordon thinks. 

“What’s wrong Scott?” he asks innocently pretending that he can’t see the glitter in his hair and sitting down at his usual spot next to John and starting on his cereal. 

“I am going to shower and change and be late for school because of your childish immature prank, and dad isn’t here to write me a note so I will end up in detention. You are ruining my life brat features.” And with that Scott storms from the room. 

“I don’t think he liked your joke Gordy” Alan says once he has calmed down from hysterical laughter. 

“No, I don’t believe he did Allie” Gordon says. He too is laughing. “He will get over it, he just has to be a drama queen first”

“Come on you two, we have a bus to catch. Fish, I suggest you are gone when Scott gets downstairs” John says, throwing Gordon his bag before helping Alan with his shoes. “Good luck Virg!” John says to his second eldest brother, the one unfortunate enough to be in the same school as Scott and stuck in the car with him! 

Virgil rolls his eyes at Gordon. Before turning to John “Everything will be okay, Gordon is right. Scott will be fine he just needs to vent first.” 

“Gordon is always right” Gordon replies. 

“Gordon is never right and stop talking about yourself in the third person it is annoying” John says rolling his eyes at his younger brother. 

“I AM ALWAYS RIGHT!” Gordon cries. 

“NEVER!” John cries back. 

“ALWAYS!” 

“NEVER!” 

“ALWAYS! 

The boys are still arguing when Scott gets back downstairs. “WHAT ARE YOU LOT STILL DOING HERE?!” he shouts over their arguing. “Your bus left five minutes ago” 

“It was Gordon’s fault” John immediately blames the blonde, who is so taken aback he is momentarily speechless. 

“Of course it is. It is always Gordon’s fault! Right. All of you get in the car, and don’t think for one second I am going to write you notes. I get detention then you beasts get it too” Scott says, grabbing Gordon and pushing him out of the door. 

“Ow! Not so hard Glitter head” Gordon complains, before regaining his composure and jumping into the passenger’s seat of Scott’s car, leaving Virgil, John and Alan to squash themselves into the back seat. 

Scott doesn’t say a word to Gordon during the trip. Gordon tries, but he ignores everything, choosing instead to concentrate on getting to the middle school Gordon and John attend as fast as possible in order to be rid of them.

“TAKE ALAN TO THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL!” Scott yells, speaking for the first time, as Gordon, John and Alan hop out of the car. Not bothering to make sure they actually do as they are told before he spins the car around and wheelspins out the carpark, leaving dark tyre marks on the road. 

To make matters worse, Gordon doesn’t get detention! 

*TB*

Now he is starting a three-mile hike home, in a heavy snowstorm. In normal weather conditions, he can do the walk in an hour but battling against the winds and the snow drifts. Wishing he could just phone Scott for a lift but knowing that he will never come for him and even the tears are frozen to his face as he slowly battles the elements. 

The sidewalk is icy, and more than once Gordon almost falls over his feet slipping and sliding along the pathway, causing him to swear loudly. The cold wind is biting his face, and it is not only his fingers that are numb now. His toes will probably need to be amputated to prevent gangrene from frost bite. 

Another patch of ice causes a further slip, and this time he is unable to stop himself from falling putting both his arms out to stop himself from landing on his face, his right arm hits the concrete first, making a sickening snapping sound before pain shoots up his arm. He whimpers in agony as he staggers to his feet, his arm clutched to his chest. 

He stumbles and staggers slowly towards home. Every step is more painful than the last, and he has no idea how long he has been walking for, or even how far he still has to go. Maybe, just maybe he should call Scott. 

*TB*

“ALAN STOP THAT!” Virgil shouts, calling his youngest brother away from his easel where he is trying to get his art project finished but Alan wants to help. Gordon is usually home by now and ready to entertain him but he is late. 

“I’m bored” Alan complains before he grabs the brush from Virgil and leaps up onto the sofa and paints purple streaks across his nose. “Oops!” 

“Run” is the only word Virgil needs before Alan jumps down from the sofa and races through the hallway and into the kitchen where Scott and John are making dinner. 

“SCOTTY HIDE ME!” Alan calls crawling under the kitchen table to escape Virgil’s wrath. 

Scott rolls his eyes. “What now?” it has been a really long day. First Gordon flour bombed him, then he got detention for being late and had to spend his lunch hour writing lines and now this. 

“He threw paint at me” Virgil says disgusted. “Get out from under there.” 

“No!” Alan replies “Not until Gordon gets home to protect me!” 

“Gordon’s not home yet?” John asks surprised. “He is usually back by now” 

Scott rolls his eyes again. It seems like that is all he has done all day. Why did he ever tell his dad that he can handle his brothers alone for a few days? 

“Nope” Alan confirms. “And it is really snowing out there again. Poor Gordon” 

“Poor Gordon?” Scott scoffs. “He deserves whatever he gets.” 

Scott doesn’t even notice Virgil glaring at him as his phone starts to ring, Scott groans as he sees Gordons name on the caller ID. “We have said his name too many times and summoned him. WHAT?” he barks into the phone. “Where are you?” another eye roll. 

Virgil and John and staring at him in confusion as they can only hear one half of the conversation. “What?” this what is totally different, now Scott sounds concerned which brings Alan out from under the table. “Where are you?” more silence. “Calm down Squid, don’t cry. Okay I am on my way, talk to Virgil” 

Scott hands his phone to Virgil “Keep him talking while I go and get him” he orders. “John keep an eye on the oven it should be ready in about fifteen minutes, I will be back as soon as I can” 

This is all his fault, he knew that the blizzard would cause chaos with the transport systems, he should have gone to collect him. Their dad left him in charge, and the only thing he has done is endanger his brother’s life. There is a fluffy purple blanket on the back of the sofa, which he grabs on the way out the front door.

The driveway has disappeared under a sheet of pure white snow, and Scott’s car has been half buried in just the hour and a half he has been home. But Gordon is counting on him to rescue him, he needs a plan B and he needs it fast. 

Looking around the yard for inspiration Scott spies the old tractor near the barn. 

“Perfect” he says aloud, a smile crossing his face for the first time all day. His car is fitted with a snow dispersal unit, an invention of Brains’, which Scott unattached with a push of a button on his keys and installs it on the tractor before climbing up into the cab and starting up the engine. 

To his relief the engine roars to life, noisily, belching out black smoke from the exhaust. The temperature gauge is telling him that the outside temperate is now minus three and getting colder by the minute. 

Scott puts the tractor into first gear and it slowly starts to move down the driveway. the large tyres biting down onto the snow-covered tarmac. Barely able to see where he is going due to the onslaught of fog, which even his fog lights don’t completely clear him a path, Scott’s hands are gripping the steering wheel in terror as he turns left onto the main road. 

Keeping his eyes focused on the road, for a sign of his brother, Scott has never felt so afraid. The cab of the tractor is starting to heat up as the engine gets warm, but his hands are still shaking. 

“Come on Gords, where are you?” he says to himself. 

The progress is slow, but steady as he carefully drives along the icy road, tight bends, potholes and patches of ice are navigated successfully until he finally spots his brother who is still on the phone to Virgil and to Scott’s regret is still crying. 

Scott pulls over to the side of the road before jumping down from the cab and scooping Gordon up into his arms. “Scotty?” Gordon asks unable to believe that his brother has found him, his voice hoarse. His whole body is shivering violently. 

“Let’s get you to hospital, get that arm checked out” Scott says, still holding onto him. Now he has him, he is never going to let him go again. “I have him Virg, call dad and let him know what has happened” he says once he has gotten Gordons phone. 

The cab only has one seat and it is a tight squeeze, but Scott has Gordon wrapped up in the blanket, and squashed up against the window. He is safe, even if uncomfortable. 

*TB*

Lying back on the soft pillow, Gordon doesn’t want to open his eyes. He can feel the presence of his eldest brother. He doesn’t need to look he just knows he is there with him. The room is warm and he is covered in a thick blanket, he still can’t wriggle the fingers on his right hand, which is now encased in a cast which ends just below his elbow, or feel his toes but he is definitely warmer than he was an hour ago. 

“Scott?” he asks, eyes still firmly closed.

“I’m here Fish. How are you feeling?” Scott takes Gordon’s hand and gently squeezes his fingers. 

“I’m sorry Scott” 

“It’s okay, you’re safe now. And I should have come to get you. I knew that the roads were closed near the bus depot. I knew that it was never going to come. Gords, I am so sorry.” There are tears in Scott’s eyes, he knows that he is responsible for putting his own brother in the hospital. 

“Stop it” Gordon demands, finally opening his eyes and fixing them on Scott’s. “Ugh my head hurts. Can I go home?” 

“Just waiting for the doctor to finish the paperwork” Scott confirms. 

Gordon grins at Scott. A sparkle now in his deep amber eyes for the first time since he was reunited with his big brother. “Can I drive?” he asks.

Those three words are all Scott needs. A smile breaks out on his face before he starts to laugh. “Never change Squid” 

*TB*

Scott is not surprised to find the lights on when they get home, nearly two hours later. According to the clock on Gordon’s phone It is nearly three in the morning. 

The snow has relented but not stopped, the flakes are now lighter and whirling in the wind. “It is really pretty when it is like this” Gordon says. 

“I would rather live on a tropical island any day” Scott replies. “Come on, let’s get inside.” 

They find Alan fast asleep on the sofa, his head is resting on Johns leg. John and Virgil have the television on, but neither are watching the screen. 

“Hi honeys, we’re home!” Scott calls.

“Gordy” Virgil calls happily, getting up from the sofa and wrapping his arms around his younger brother. 

Gordon nuzzles into his shoulder. “Virgy” he replies happily. 

“Come on, let’s get you comfortable” Virgil says, leading him back to the sofa. “John run upstairs and grab his pyjamas” 

John doesn’t argue the order and he comes back minutes later with Gordon’s pyjamas and a big bag or marshmallows. 

“Really?” Gordon asks. “I thought you would make me go to bed” 

“Are you tired?” 

Gordon yawns heavily, and dramatically. “Yeah, but not enough to miss out on my marshmallows!” 

Virgil helps him get changed into his pyjamas, before they gather around the fireplace on bean bags and the squashy armchairs. The room is warm and cosy. Virgil spears a marshmallow on his toasting fork before melting it on the fire and handing it to Gordon. 

“Can we make smores?” Alan asks having been woken up by the smell. 

“Nope. marshmallows is all we have” John replies. “Trust me I looked” 

The marshmallows don’t last long. Gordon and Alan have a contest to see how many they can fit in their mouths in one go, which Gordon wins. 

“Do you still want to move to a tropical island?” Gordon asks. His mouth full of melted, slightly burned marshmallow. 

“How many times have I got to tell you not to talk with your mouth full?” Scott replies in mock disgust.

Gordon swallows before replying. “About a thousand so far, but I have never listened to you before. What makes you think I am going to start now?” 

“That and it would scare you if he started doing what you said!” John adds, while he gently pokes his marshmallow onto the end of the fork before lightly toasting it on the fire. 

“Very true!” Scott replies. He can’t even remember what it was Gordon asked and he is so tired and warm and comfortable that he doesn’t even care. Leaning back against the chair Virgil is sitting on, his eyes closed with the people he loves the most in the world is all he wants and it really doesn’t matter where he is as long as he is with his brothers. 

Alan crawls into Scott’s lap. “I love you Scotty” 

“Yeah me too” Gordon adds, climbing down from his bean bag and joining Alan. “Thank you for rescuing me” 

“Any time Squid” Scott replies ruffling his hair before planting a kiss on the top of his head. 

“EUW! SCOTTY!” Gordon complains, wriggling off his lap giggling. “Are there any more marshmallows left?” 

John throws him the bag which he expertly catches in his left hand. “This is empty!” he complains. 

“Yeah, chuck the rubbish in the bin” John replies. 

Gordon drops it on the floor before letting out another large yawn. 

“Bed Squid” Scott orders. 

“Carry me” Gordon replies, leaning back and looking up at Scott. 

“Come on then” Scott says helping him to his feet and letting him climb up on his back. “You too please Alan” 

“No thanks Scotty, it is daytime now” Alan replies, pointing out the window, which sure enough is now lightening as the sun slowly rises. 

“Bed” Scott repeats in a no-nonsense tone which has even Virgil and John getting to their feet and running for their bedrooms. 

“You never answered me earlier” Gordon reminds Scott once he is tucked up under the blanket. 

“That’s because it doesn’t matter where I am, as long as I have marshmallows. I mean you” Scott says. “I love you Gordy” 

“Can I flour bomb you again?” he asks. 

“No. but if you want I will help you prank dad!” Scott replies with a grin. “Now get some sleep” 

“Night Scotty. Love you” 

Scott makes sure Gordon and Alan are both asleep before he slips back downstairs. 

“Where is the spare bag of marshmallows?” he asks Virgil, who has also come back into the living room. 

Virgil lifts up a cushion, revealing a full bag. 

Grinning Scott grabs his fork. “Chuck them my way bro.” 

They sit in silence for several minutes while they eat their way through the bag, before Virgil realises that Scott is crying. 

“Scott?” he questions. 

“I was so angry with him Virg and he was in trouble. I should have been there for him” 

“You were, the second you knew he needed you, you were out the door so fast you left scorch marks on the kitchen floor! You saved his life Scott” Virgil says. “Marshmallow?” 

Scott takes the offered marshmallow and just holds it in his hand. Absently turning it over and over while he thinks. “I don’t know what I would do without him” 

“He certainly makes life interesting” Virgil agrees. “Have you had any sleep?”

“No. I don’t think I can sleep” Scott replies. 

“Scott, come on. Bed” Virgil says, using the same tone Scott used with Alan. 

Together they make sure the fire is out, and that the evidence of their secret marshmallow stash is well hidden from their younger brothers’ eyes before they make their way up the stairs. 

“Virg?” Scott says when they reach his bedroom and he stops to open the door.

“Yeah?” Virgil replies. 

“Thank you” 

“It’s okay Scott. Just try and get some sleep okay?” 

Scott nods before entering his room and finally collapsing onto the bed where he falls asleep before Virgil has even reached his own door, his own exhaustion overpowering all other emotions. 

*TB*

“Is that a true story?” Kayo asks.

They are gathered around a bonfire on the beach toasting marshmallows after a difficult rescue. something that they have been doing since they started international rescue. 

“Every word” Scott replies. “Marshmallows are a Tracy family comfort food, and yes Virg and I still have a secret stash hidden in the house that John, Gordon and Alan have never known about until now!” 

Gordon looks over at Alan and John, an impish grin lighting up his whole face. “Come on you two. Let’s go and hunt their stash!” 

Gordon leads John and Alan back up into the house. 

“Oh God. I think we just created a marshmallow war!” 

[drughard]

Psychedelics Drugs- One of the strongest mind-enhancing drugs

Psychedelic drug, also known as psychotomimetic drug or hallucinogen, is one of the self-styled mind-enhancing drugs that can stimulate states of distorted insight and notion, often with a heightened consciousness of sensory input but with an enhanced power over what is being experienced.

Among all the psychedelic drugs available in the market is d-lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25. The drug was synthesized in 1938 by a chemist involved in Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland. LSD turned out to be a very dominating drug, several times more influential compared to other hallucinogenic substances, for example, mescaline, psilocin, and psilocybin. LSD may provoke sympathomimetic effects, for example, an enhanced heart rate, albeit no cases of death are reported in a straight line. Chronic exposure, on the other hand, is responsible for causing psychoses or hardships with memory or problem-thinking. Although their efficacy has not been established beyond doubt, psychedelic drugs have been considered as the best treatment aids for dealing with psychotherapy, alcoholism, and psychological issues. The exact mechanisms of the drugs are not all the way understood, albeit these and other trendy mood-altering substances seem to work by imitating or supervening the effects of naturally coming about neurotransmitters. LSD has a chemical similarity to serotonin, asymmetry in which have been connected to a variety of problems of mind and mood, for example, hopelessness, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia. However, research has revealed that LSD experiences involve neither true hallucinations nor actual schizophrenic or psychotic episodes.

Psychedelic drugs earned the broadest reputation during the 1960s and early ’70s, when drugs, for example, LSD were essential to the “hippie” subculture in Western Europe and the United States. Nevertheless, the popularity of the drugs lessened in terms of popularity, they retained a following in certain regions and cultures and achieved improved popularity during the 1990s, when LSD and Ecstasy had a significant youth following in the US and Europe.

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[derekhernandezfuentes]

Certified Public Accountants Josephine Fifi Viera Coca and Alexander Viera, and Alexandra Martinez should admit to Everyone that they have been seeing their Psychiatrists for over 30 years, for the last 30 years, explaining that their Psychiatric medications cause them to be Fat or Obese, instead of working with Psychiatrists across America such as Cuban American Dr. Charles Anthony Barrios and Dr. Svetlana Lana Schwartz in turning me along with half of the 300 million United States Americans Obese with Water Weights or Fat Weights. They are supposed to be, instead of turning Everyone Fat, working with their Psychiatrists for over the last 30 years or longer in taking Prozac and Wellbutrin as Anti-Depressants in lowering fat weights and water weights. Alexandra Martinez, and both Certified Public Accountants Josephine Fifi Viera and Engineer Alexander Viera intimidated me and psychosed me with their Authoritarian Business Management in my homes where I have lived, causing me a nervous breakdown, two suicide attempts, and to undergo dangerous Obesity upon both my type 1 self-attacking autoimmune diabetes that they don’t have and on my type 2 diabetes that they do have. #Lawsuits #MartinezFatMafia #VieraFatMafia

[siglerprescriptiondrugcards]

Metronidazole

Common Brand Names: Flagyl

Therapeutic Class: A synthetic, nitroimidazole-derivative antibacterial and antiprotozoal

Common Injectable Dosage Forms:

Powder for Injection (Lyophilized): 500 mg vials

Injection, ready to use: 500 mg/1000 mL vials.

Dosage Ranges:

Infants/children: 30-50 mg/kg/day in divided doses. Maximum of 2 gm/day.

Adults (anaerobic infections): 500 mg IV every 6-8 hours. Maximum of 4 gm/day.

Adjust dosage in renal failure when CrCl <10 mL/min to 50% of dose.

Administration and Stability: The powder for injection is reconstituted for administration with 4.4 mL of sterile or bacteriostatic water or NS, which provides a 100 mg/mL solution. This must be further diluted before giving with NS, D5W, or LR to a concentration not to exceed 8 mg/mL and neutralized with 5 mEq of sodium bicarbonate per 500 mg of metronidazole. Alternatively, the commercially available ready-to-use units may be utilized. It is recommended that IV infusions of metronidazole be given over 1 hour. Solutions made from powder are stable for 24 hours at room temperature. Metronidazole solutions should never be refrigerated or frozen. pH 4.5-7

Pharmacology/Pharmacokinetics: Metronidazole exerts bactericidal, amoebicidal, and trichomonacidal activity by its mechanism not clearly understood. It is thought that metronidazole in the unionized form is taken up by the organisms intracellularly where reduction takes place to a product which disrupts DNA and inhibits nucleic acid synthesis. Spectrum of activity includes anaerobes such as B. fragilis and C. difficile, and protozoans including Entamoeba histolytica, Trichomonas vaginalis, and Giardia lamblia. Also exhibits activity against Helicobacter pylori in combination with other antibacterial agents. Widely distributed into most body tissues and fluids, the drug is metabolized in the liver to an active metabolite and has a half-life of 6-11 hours. Excretion is via the urine and feces.

Drug and Lab Interactions: Potentiates the prothrombinemic effects of oral anticoagulants. Causes disulfiram-like reactions when alcohol is ingested during metronidazole use and can also cause psychoses when taken concomitantly with disulfiram itself. Concomitant use with phenobarbital may decrease serum half-life of metronidazole. The drug has also been reported to increase serum lithium levels. Serious cardiovascular effects may occur when used with terfenadine and astemizole. May also interfere with ultraviolet determinations of AST, ALT, LDH, triglycerides, or blood glucose.

Contraindications/Precautions: The drug should be used with caution in patients with evidence or past history of blood dyscrasias, and blood counts should be monitored closely during therapy. Care should also be taken for use in patients with severe hepatic impairment or signs of abnormal neurological symptoms. The possibility of bacterial overgrowth or superinfection should always be considered. Pregnancy Category B.

Adverse Effects: Fairly well tolerated, however leukopenia, convulsions, and peripheral neuropathy have occurred with prolonged therapy. Other reported effects include nausea, headache, urine discoloration, and thrombophlebitis.

Common Clinical Applications: Effective in the treatment of anaerobic infections, giardiasis, amoebic hepatic abscess, and for antibiotic-associated pseudomembranous colitis.

[ruddsmyname]

Reflexology

The human foot is a complex framework, obtained of several different tendons, tendons and little bones. As an example, if you were experiencing sinus blockage, you could trigger your sinuses to remove by applying gentle stress to the ideas of the toes just around the toe nails in addition to walking your thumbnail up the bottoms of the toes. Professional athletes should see a good foot medical professional who comprehends sports injuries as well as could help, as extreme tendonitis can hamper their sports occupation. Between walking days, execute various other tasks that are much easier on your feet such as water strolling as well as cycling to preserve foot health and also prevent further discomfort. Here are some fast fitness suggestions that can begin helping you today if you are prepared to get started and do just what it takes. The overlapping of the toes commonly develops corns as well as callouses that guarantee that individuals feel discomfort throughout the foot. Orthotics are gadgets, typically personalized or semi-customized, that support part or all of the foot. Podiatric doctors are university enlightened wellness expert with substantial skills in the medical diagnosis, management and therapy of clinical conditions of the foot and also leg. Checkout one of the most extensive wellness guide on All-natural Fat Loss as well as discover one of the most effective diet plan as well as workout programs to shed fat. Sebelius came to be the Assistant of Health And Wellness and also Human Providers in 2009, and went to the center of the debate and also rollout of medical care reform in the United States. Recently a. good friend started complaining regarding this brand-new pain under the round of his foot. Anybody who is literally able can and also need to stroll for their health and they are walking wise. Entrance into the RFHP is specifically scheduled for those professionals who have finished a program of research that is Across the country certified and recognised by the RFHP Entry onto the RFHP assures customers as well as the general public at large that the specialist is suitably certified as well as trained to conduct the greatest requirement of foot treatment therapies. Peter Lazzarini, Elder Research Other at the Queensland College of Innovation and City North Hospital as well as Health And Wellness Service, that was an author of the research, clarified that co-ordinated health Sole Therapy center and also community-based foot treatment teams, protocols as well as study concentrated on diabetic foot wellness such as those in Queensland hold the trick to lowering foot hospitalisation as well as lower limb amputation among all Australians with diabetic issues. The Mayo Clinic website specifies that study has actually connected vitamin B12 deficiency with many other unusual neurologic and psychological symptoms, including spasticity, urinary incontinence, low blood pressure, vision issues, psychoses as well as state of mind disturbances. The Health and wellness location is likewise the area where you can deal with life circumstances not especially dealt with by the various other eight areas. For those that need an excellent soak in a warm foot bath, Epsom salts aid draw toxins from the feet while reducing puffy tissues. We must state NO to the GMOs, its herbicides and chemical roundup that is killing our and impacting our very own health just for the advantage of some to earn a fast buck. Aching Feet - Foot Pain - Avoidance: Treat your feet excellent and also they will possibly excel to you. New research study by health psycho therapists has actually revealed that the ideas and also assumptions of individuals with diabetic person foot abscess about their health problem have a significant independent effect on their survival. To stop future foot injuries and also pain, wear well-cushioned, comfortable as well as encouraging shoes, and replace them when they become worn.