A Visit To Père Lachaise In Paris

I Don't Think It's Possible To Touch People's Imagination Today By Aesthetic Means.

A General Rule: If Enough People Predict Something, It Won't Happen.

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.

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.

Perhaps Violence, Like Pornography, Is Some Kind Of An Evolutionary Standby System, A Last-resort Device For Throwing A Wild Joker Into The Game?