The Atrocity Exhibition

In a TV interview a few years ago, the wife of a famous Beverly Hills plastic surgeon revealed that throughout their marriage her husband had continually re-styled her face and body, pointing a breast here, tucking in a nostril there. She seemed supremely confident of her attractions. But as she said: ‘He will never leave me, because he can always change me.’

All political and military explanations fail to provide a rationale for the war’s extended duration.

Sexual intercourse can no longer be regarded as a personal and isolated activity, but is seen to be a vector in a public complex involving automobile styling, politics and mass communications.

During the Apollo flights I half-hoped that one of the spacecraft would return with an extra crew-man on board, wholly accepted by the others, who would shield him from a prying world.

The bizarre

Bulletin of Suicidology in an early 1970s issue analysed US physicians’ favourite methods that year, from the most popular, lethal injection, to the rarest, two deaths by deliberately crashed light aircraft.

As you and I know, the act of intercourse is now always a model for something else.

Any great human tragedy - Vietnam, let us say - can be considered experimentally as a larger model of a mental crisis mimetized in faulty stair angles or skin junctions, breakdowns in the perception of environment and consciousness.

The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex.’

They prefer not to understand what is going on around them, so they can impose their own subjective image upon the external world - a trait common to all psychotics.

Later, when he saw the young man in the laminated suit watching him from the abandoned amusement park, Trabert knew that the time had come for his rescue attempt: the resurrection of the dead spacemen.