A Visit To Père Lachaise In Paris

Sooner Or Later, All Games Become Serious.

The Catastrophe Story, Whoever May Tell It, Represents A Constructive And Positive Act By The Imagination Rather Than A Negative One, An Attempt To Confront The Terrifying Void Of A Patently Meaningless Universe By Challenging It At Its Own Game. [. . .] Each One Of These Fantasies Represents An Arraignment Of The Finite, An Attempt To Dismantle The Formal Structure Of Time And Space Which The Universe Wraps Around Us At The Moment We First Achieve Consciousness.

Hell Is Out Of Fashion - Institutional Hells At Any Rate. The Populated Infernos Of The 20th Century Are More Private Affairs, The Gaps Between The Bars Are The Sutures Of One's Own Skull. A Valid Hell Is One From Which There Is A Possibility Of Redemption, Even If This Is Never Achieved, The Dungeons Of An Architecture Of Grace Whose Spires Point To Some Kind Of Heaven. The Institutional Hells Of The Present Century Are Reached With One-way Tickets, Marked Nagasaki And Buchenwald, Worlds Of Terminal Horror Even More Final Than The Grave.

Even One's Own Home Is A Kind Of Anthology Of Advertisers, Manufacturers, Motifs And Presentation Techniques. There's Nothing 'natural' About One's Home These Days. The Furnishings, The Fabrics, The Furniture, The Appliances, The Tv, And All The Electronic Equipment - We're Living Inside Commercials.

The Marriage Of Reason And Nightmare Which Has Dominated The 20th Century Has Given Birth To An Ever More Ambiguous World. Across The Communications Landscape Move The Specters Of Sinister Technologies And The Dreams That Money Can Buy. Thermonuclear Weapons Systems And Soft Drink Commercials Coexist In An Overlit Realm Ruled By Advertising And Pseudoevents, Science And Pornography. Over Our Lives Preside The Great Twin Leitmotifs Of The 20th Century-sex And Paranoia.