A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face / J.L.B. & J.G.B.

MUSEUM

On Exactitude in Science

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography

attained such Perfection that the map of a

single Province occupied the entirety of a City,

and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a

Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps

no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers

Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size

was that of the Empire, and which coincided

point for point with it. The following

Generations, who were not so fond of the Study

of Cartography as their Forebears had been,

saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not

without some Pitilessness was it, that they

delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and

Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today,

there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited

by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is

no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones

prudentes, LibroIV,Cap. XLV, Lérida,1658

In Memoriam, J.F.K.

This bullet is an old one.

In 1897, it was fired at the president of

Uruguay by a young man from Montevideo,

Avelino Arredondo, who had spent long weeks

without seeing anyone so that the world might

know that he acted alone. Thirty years earlier,

Lincoln had been murdered by that same ball,

by the criminal or magical hand of an actor

transformed by the words of Shakespeare into

Marcus Brutus, Caesar's murderer. In the mid

seventeenth century, vengeance had employed

it for the assassination of Sweden's Gustavus

Adolphus, in the midst of the public hecatomb

of a battle.

In earlier times, the bullet had been other

things, because Pythagorean metempsychosis is

not reserved for humankind alone. It was the

silken cord given to viziers in the East, the rifles

and bayonets that cut down the defenders of the

Alamo, the triangular blade that slit a queen's

throat, the wood of the Cross and the dark nails

that pierced the flesh of the Redeemer, the

poison kept by the Carthaginian chief in an iron

ring on his finger, the serene goblet that

Socrates drank down one evening.

In the dawn of time it was the stone that Cain

hurled at Abel, and in the future it shall be

many things that we cannot even imagine

today, but that will be able to put an end to men

and their wondrous, fragile life. J.L.B.

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?’

Notes to 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. J.G.B

Afterword

God grant that the essential monotony of

this miscellany (which time has compiled, not

I, and into which have been bundled long-ago

pieces that I've not had the courage to revise,

for I wrote them out of a different concept of

literature) be less obvious than the

geographical and historical diversity of its

subjects. Of all the books I have sent to press,

none, I think, is as personal as this motley,

disorganized anthology, precisely because it

abounds in reflections and interpolations. Few

things have happened to me, though many

things I have read. Or rather, few things have

happened to me more worthy of remembering

than the philosophy of Schopenhauer or

England's verbal music.

A man sets out to draw the world. As the

years go by, he peoples a space with images of

provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships,

islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars,

horses, and individuals. A short time before he

dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of

lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

J.L.B. Buenos Aires, October 31,1960



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 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. J.G.B

J.L.B. Museum and notes; 1960

J.G.B The Atrocity Exhibition and notes; 1969
images: italy dec-jan '13-'14