9: TOLERANCES OF THE HUMAN FACE
[RMcG: 20 February 2007]
yes, a complicated chapter, a complex extension of some of the themes developed in Summer Cannibals...
let's analyze with a plot summary:
"later, tman remembered the camera crew"... a retrospective intro JGB would revisit in the opening of high-
so back we go in time... to the day tman resigned from the institute (disassociated himself?) and co-
tman runs away and the crew chases! the director, in a white safari suit, stares at tman with "unpleasant eyes"... tman is surprised... and being confused with the intellectually-
hmmm... rarely are we given so much information as to the causes of tman's usual "disassociation" from "narrative reality"... unhappy at work, and obsessively returning to the deserted cinema to re-
in the next chapter, "fake newsreels", we discover one of the areas of irritation between tman and nathan: tman seems to be running some kind of death of affect experiment with housewifes and students: they are rendered insensitive to pain and feeling, and asked to put together montage photographs... the results are the usual psychotic images... nathan has cancelled the exercise, which made catherine austin sick, but the volunteers "increasingly enjoyed"... tman is obsessed by the images, and catherine wonders how he be so, as their sexual relationship appears to be the opposite...
the next chapter introduces vaughan, but in a confusing way: just as tman looks for the last time at his office (old life) "a young man in a shabby flying jacket" comes up and gets in the car... when I read thois I immediately thot of the shabby flying jacket that's appeared in all the other stories... in those cases, it was tman wearing it... might vaughan be an extension of tman? another courier from the unconscious? or a variation on koester? regardless, he is violent, and he's been committed to the institute by nathan... while tman dithers, vaughan turns on the car...
jump cut to nathan's office, where he's eyeballing bruises on a young woman's hips and butt... she claims tman did it, but catherine's not so sure... nathan decides for her... tman was "trying to make contact with her, but in a new way"... ahh... the sadistic pain/pleasure inversion?
tman, in the meantime, has spent days allowing vaughan to drive him around... they visit places of technology and death.. finally vaughan reaches a sort of peak of danger and violence and tman becomes bored with the "experiment" and abandons vaughan at a gas station...
tman meets another accident, and this time the helicopter appears with a film crew... they shoot the truck, and when tman drives out of the traffic jam, the helicopter follows him... he sees the director from the institute
jump cut to karen's apartment, where tman is suddenly curious about a character called koester, who apparently staged that day's traffic accident... "half the time we're moving about in other people's games", tman astutely observes... and we find out a bit about karen: "strange young woman, moving in a complex of undefined roles, gun moll of intellectual hoodlums with her art critical jargon and bizarre magazine subscriptions"... say, could this be claire churchill? tman asks if she'd like to be in the movies... she replies "we're all in the movies"... especially if your worldview is generated by the movies...
the next chapter, "death of affect", explicitly reveals this condition as a type of emotional entropy... time reduces all to a "debris of memory and regret" which "provide nothing" at this "terminal moraine of the emotions".... death in life, no?
jump to the gallery, where vaughan's atrocity film festival has been a success... and vaughan has been busy: at a police brawl, organizing a film fest, and writing, producing and staging a play... which leads one to wonder just how much time is passing by here... months, at least... and vaughan has met karen, only to be instantly hostile to her, and his interest in her wound areas has led tman to expose karen to vaughan whenever possible...
the next chapter is an ernst-
cut to karen being massaged by tman... it's her POV in this paragraph... they're watching the US in vietnam on TV... tman seems to have disconnected: "for days the whole world had been slow motion"... he's responded by creating his own collage of activities, a sort of watered-
next, tman follows vaughan to an exhibition hall, but tman is held back by the landing chopper, and waits by a lake... he then returns in the evening, and mingles with the cinephiles... the films are also of violent and disturbing human themes, with a montage of war and death images surpassing all... cut to italics voice-
the next long para is a journalistic account of a situation in which japanese pows were inhumanly treated by the americans... it's matter-
now, tman nightly follows vaughan thru his rounds of cinematic mayhem... koester is still lurking around, small talking with his women, with a face that looks like a "fake newsreel"... he obviously returns later as David Cruise in Kingdom Come
cut to another montage/collage: this time a list of famous deaths -
the next para -
back to the country... and tman is returning to his car... karen is in the driver's seat... she's been spying with binoculars... we discover tman likes his women with big hips (all the better for childbirth)... and karen's been away
cut to another collage of images: nathan reads a list of diseases, an analysis of feces, how parents would kill their kids, and a list of someone's faults... nathan considers these items might be part of a conceptual game, but still wonders if karen should be warned... then we get the scientific nathan rap: "tman's problem is... the biomorphic horror of our own bodies"... well, what to make of that? why is the fact our bodies change/decay of such importance to tman? is it this "horror" that makes him want to remove time from consciousness? or is his revulsion based on a rejection of the Body and celebration of the Mind?
and tman realizes the "real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term 'the death of affect'"... aha... here's an equation that makes sense: prolonged exposure dulls our emotional responses, kills our interest, renders us less "human" insofar as we can physically feel empathy for/with another person... and we become psychopathic ...
nathan then offers another dark collage of examples of this death of affect:
consider our "most real and tender pleasures" -
"sex as the perfect arena" -
OK, here's a cat with some issues about emotions... perverse? inverted? you bet... pleasure as a function of sadistic activities... and sex? it's an exhibition grounds on its own.. an "arena" where our bodies are revealed as dirty, messy, organic things and our minds hold the real meanings, which turn out to be making a game out of "the study of psychologic and behavioral dysfunction", and becoming increasingly intellectual about it... hmmm... sounds like nathan describing himself
but the good doctor goes on: "the only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations"... this is, of course, one of the Big Ideas in AX... that we can only deal with each other through a complex system of symbols -
actually, there's a philosophic thought called conceptualism, a theory intermediate between realism and nominalism which states that universals exist in the mind as concepts of discourse or as predicates which may be properly affirmed of reality... nominalism is the theory that there are no universal essences in reality and that the mind can frame no single concept or image corresponding to any universal or general term... basically, that only individuals exist -
yes, this may seem off topic, but I think that AX is ultimately about "the angle between two walls", which I now understand to be the dialectic between reality and fiction (not the dualism), and these concepts are played out by JGB in the arena of his own psychosis... his own reliance on "found" and "invisible" input
"Violence is the conceptualization of pain" ... brilliant intellectualizations by dr doom... of course, pain (physical and/or mental distress) has many conceptualizations (fear, strength, sadness, love)... but pain conceptualized into violence is pain going back in time, pain as the result of a prior intense state... "By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex" -
meanwhile, tman has returned to karen's apartment to create another collage -
for catherine, tman's activities are evidence of his deeper psychosis, of his "deliberate summoning of the random and grotesque"... to calm him, she reads about a catalogue of imaginary diseases... which, of course, focus on the body's most symbol-
catherine next analyses tman, conceptualizing his embraces as "displaced affections", a "deformed marriage" represented by freud (fiction) and euclid (reality), even tho both obtained their results from deductive reasoning... tman is obsessed by obscene photographs, turning all into its "inherent pornographic possibilities"... he manhandles her and tman reminds her of koester
"Death Games (a) Conceptual" is a stunning collage of biography, madness and loss... as JG appears to attempt to explain the ways of fate as a series of intellectual games -
this intellectual sex will allow for the guilt-
after this long, philosophic paragraph, we're back to the action as tman and karen, following and yet being stalked by vaughan, are chased by koester in his chopper... they fly under an overpass
tman is next in an auditorium, coaching a class on inventing the sex-
back on the embankment, tman and karen walk... tman is thinking of a new type of erotic film: roads, cars and karen... the mist clears and tman sees vaughan on the car park... the conjunction of vaughan, the car decks and karen proves erotic... it appears karen is to be raped... tman sends karen up the ramp and signals to catherine and nathan, who are parked nearby, waiting for the chopper... they leave... tman returns to the car park and goes to the stairway...
next, nathan appears on the roof of the car park... vaughan has escaped from the elevator, hurting nathan in the process... as nathan approaches the dead young woman on the roof, the chopper rises vertically, shooting the scene... nathan turns... tman is there, staring at karen... her body "like jetsam on a terminal beach"... he nods at nathan and leaves
in the final para tman is at "calm and rest" in the deserted cinemas... time for a "re-
wow... and you know what's really amazing? all that endless preoccupation with sex and violence... and once again there really isn't any actual sex or violence... yes, karen is dead, but there is no clue as to how it happened... or if it was tman or vaughan who did the deed... and it's odd tman is now calm, altho karen's death nearly always "assuages" tman's anxieties, in this case it seems that she seems to be filling some kind of role in lieu of tman, as the actual documentary starts with koester aggressively pursuing tman... is karen's death the "surprise ending" nathan predicted?
at any rate, tman has used karen all the way thru in a variety of deviant ways, "as if hoping to recapitulate his wife's death"...
in that sense, as no "surprise", what about the connection between karen and mary ballard?... at first I wondered if karen might be an extension of claire churchill (in JGB's late 60s landscape), but I'd say it recalls Mary's death, and perhaps every karen is mary, and every time karen dies it's a way of negating or reducing the psychic damage incurred not only by mary's irrational death but also by JG's now-
the death of affect is also elaborated upon... diagnosed as well as cured: tman can overcome his emotionless state by inventing a series of sexual deviations... he appears to achieve this goal -
as for vaughan and koester... dark brothers of kline and xero?
I didn't get a chance to introduce the other dualism I'm interested in: idealism and rationalism, which I think is another way of expressing fiction and reality... so, ultimately, is AX a dialectic on idealism (tman) and rationalism (nathan), with JGB's viewing habits tossed in as a backdrop? Or perhaps a look at the creative process itself...
anyway... a first cut, mike... on a long and complex chapter
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[RMcG: 20 February 2007]
after all this miniscule analysis, I'd like to try "big-
but it would be pretty e-
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[MH: 21 February 2007]
RMcG wrote: anyway... a first cut, mike... on a long and complex chapter
Yes ... after the rather limited chapters that preceded it -
It's different stylistically as well -
Another thing that struck me about TOTHF is the extent of the autobiographical material in it. Firstly, Travers is obsessed with his wife's death in a car crash, and with his memories and feelings about it ... the enactment of Karen's death at the end of the story is in some oblique way a replay of that event. Secondly, there's the lengthy "Too Bad" section, based on JGB's memories of Shanghai after the end of World War II -
And there's more of a sense of the existence of time in this chapter. Right at the start we are told about Travers remembering the events of the day he left the Institute (Travers looks back to the past), and at the end he's contemplating going out into the crowded streets with their 'undying eroticism' (Travers looks ahead to the future).
These aspects of TOTHF make Travers appear more human, albeit psychologically stressed, compared to most of his other incarnations. This was the last chapter to be written, and it's as if -
But as T-
How might we understand this? Well, pain and sex are feelings/activities that in the past were central to lives of all humans (indeed, to all vertebrates) ... and at one time they were central to *our* lives as well. But for us, today, "pain" and "sex" represent something else. To a large extent they've lost their links to the natural world: "sex" is more like a game that we play, and "pain" is not so much physical pain but located in our minds, in our reactions to what's happening to us, the way others behave towards us, and so on. This is really just a reflection of JGB's point that "outside a relatively few enclaves in Western Europe and the United States for the past few decades, the vast majority of the world has always lived the sort of life I lived in Shanghai, in that close proximity to violence, death, disease ..." ('From Shanghai to Shepperton'). So what this means is that we approach pain and sex in a more mediated (or conceptualised) way.
But once we lose this 'natural link' between pain/sex and the world around us, there are no pre-
But Nathan, being the epitome of rationality, has no way of limiting the excesses of conceptualisation. So in his next little set speech, he concludes: "why not, for example, use our own children for all kinds of obscene games? Given that we can only make contact with each other through the new alphabet of sensation and violence, the death of a child or, on a larger scale, the war in Vietnam, should be regarded as for the public good." From which the only conclusion, surely, is that it is Nathan, rather than Travers, who is unhinged. They both have a similar diagnosis of our condition ... but Nathan ends up with his logical and inhuman conclusion, whereas Travers may find a form of peace after his explorations of the imagination.
Key to Travers' "explorations" are his feelings about his wife's death in a car crash four years earlier. These seem to match JGB's own feelings: for example, in the annotations for TOTHF he says "clearly, my younger self was hoping to understand his wife's meaningless death. Nature's betrayal of this young woman seemed to be mimicked in the larger ambiguities to which the modem world was so eager to give birth, and its finish line was that death of affect, the lack of feeling, which seemed inseparable from the communications landscape."
So it's not unexpected that the first use of the phrase "Death of Affect" is as the heading of the paragraph where Travers revisits the site of the fatal car crash. There's a suggestion that Travers is puzzled by the way this event has lost meaning for him: "After four years the oil stains had vanished. These infrequent visits, dictated by whatever private logic, now seemed to provide nothing. An immense internal silence presided ..."
Now that the meaning of his wife's car crash is no longer apparent, Travers is able to ponder how Karen might re-
Therefore when Travers is in the exhibition hall watching a series of atrocity films, he is able to relate these back to elements of his own history. The "images of neurosurgery and organ transplants, autism and senile dementia, auto-
But "too bad" for whom? For the wretched Japanese soldiers? Or for the young Travers, who keeps looking forward to his trip to Japan, and is always turned back ("too bad", "never mind"). Here we have the contraposition of "pain" in its natural sense as displayed in the situation of the Japanese soldiers, and "pain" in the internalised, conceptualised, sense of the disappointments of the teenage boy.
After the enactment on the top of the multi-
......
Here's a few comments on specific points that Rick raised:
RMcG wrote: we discover one of the areas of irritation between tman and nathan: tman seems to be running some kind of death of affect experiment with housewifes and students: they are rendered insensitive to pain and feeling, and asked to put together montage photographs... the results are the usual psychotic images... nathan has cancelled the exercise, which made catherine austin sick
At the beginning we're told about Travers' "long and wearisome dispute with Nathan", and at the end when they are both looking at Karen's body, Travers nods at Nathan and leaves. Some point proved between them?...
So what was at issue between the two of them at the Institute? I'd see it as the difference between Travers' use of imagination and Nathan's unchecked rationality. So in a way, maybe it's Nathan who is T-
And I might as well throw in here a related point about Travers. Early on in TOTHF, when Catherine Austin wonders about his interest in photos of "strange sexual wounds, imaginary Vietnam atrocities, the deformed mouth of Jacqueline Kennedy", she wonders to herself "Why was Travers obsessed by these images? Their own sexual relationship was marked by an almost seraphic tenderness ...". Is there perhaps some element of autobiographical puzzlement here? ... that neither JGB nor his friends can quite understand how he can be obsessed with all that stuff? "After all," they must say to themselves, "he seems pretty normal most of the time."
RMcG wrote: .. an "arena" where our bodies are revealed as dirty, messy, organic things and our minds hold the real meanings, which turn out to be making a game out of "the study of psychologic and behavioral dysfunction", and becoming increasingly intellectual about it... hmmm... sounds like nathan describing himself
Exactly!
RMcG wrote: ... and we find out a bit about karen: "strange young woman, moving in a complex of undefined roles, gun moll of intellectual hoodlums with her art critical jargon and bizarre magazine subscriptions"... say, could this be claire churchill?
Perhaps more like Pamela Zoline. Wasn't she involved with the New Arts Lab, and helped with the Crashed Cars Exhibition? (I have a feeling someone's suggested this comparison before -
RMcG wrote: ... and you know what's really amazing? all that endless preoccupation with sex and violence... and once again there really isn't any actual sex or violence... yes, karen is dead, but there is no clue as to how it happened... or if it was tman or vaughan who did the deed...
Yes ... in a way the violence is all in the mind, or to use JGB's term "conceptual", and needs to be explored with the use of the imagination. If our problem is that reality has become internalised, our path doesn't lie back towards an unobtainable "natural existence", but forwards ... using our imagination and conceptualisations. Which is why JGB says that "perhaps psychopathology should be kept alive as a repository -
RMcG wrote: what about the connection between karen and mary ballard?... at first I wondered if karen might be an extension of claire churchill (in JGB's late 60s landscape), but I'd say it recalls Mary's death, and perhaps every karen is mary, and every time karen dies it's a way of negating or reducing the psychic damage incurred not only by mary's irrational death but also by JG's now-
Agreed ... she dies over and over again.
RMcG wrote: yes, this may seem off topic, but I think that AX is ultimately about "the angle between two walls", which I now understand to be the dialectic between reality and fiction (not the dualism), and these concepts are played out by JGB in the arena of his own psychosis... his own reliance on "found" and "invisible" input
... so, ultimately, is AX a dialectic on idealism (tman) and rationalism (nathan)
I'd say "imagination" rather than "idealism" -
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[RMcG: 21 February 2007]
just a few observations....
MH wrote: It's different stylistically as well -
whereas other stories veered towards TV and advertising copy, I think this one is the most "painterly" with its endless emphasis on collages...
MH wrote: Another thing that struck me about TOTHF is the extent of the autobiographical material in it. These aspects of TOTHF make Travers appear more human, albeit psychologically stressed, compared to most of his other incarnations. This was the last chapter to be written, and it's as if -
yes, I agree: and this is the first story in which cultural icons are not used as "intermediaries"... karen is the "mary"... the background "noise" for tman is war this time out... generalized, not a personality... a step forward?
MH wrote: But once we lose this 'natural link' between pain/sex and the world around us, there are no pre-
spot on, mike... I think this is JGB's longstanding theme... "in a way that is meaningful"... that's the defining point...
MH wrote: But Nathan, being the epitome of rationality, has no way of limiting the excesses of conceptualisation. Nathan ends up with his logical and inhuman conclusion, whereas Travers may find a form of peace after his explorations of the imagination.
I think we'll see this now in most of the nathan/tman stuff when we revisit all the stories...
MH wrote: Now that the meaning of his wife's car crash is no longer apparent, Travers is able to ponder how Karen might re-
I think it's any meaning for tman... he seems to be groping around uselessly til the magic conjunction appears: vaughan, karen & the car park... vaughan represents an id-
death of affect is also vulnerable to time... it becomes stronger as time passes... perhaps that's one reason why time has been collapsed in this collection?
MH wrote: But "too bad" for whom? For the wretched Japanese soldiers? Or for the young Travers, who keeps looking forward to his trip to Japan, and is always turned back ("too bad", "never mind"). Here we have the contraposition of "pain" in its natural sense as displayed in the situation of the Japanese soldiers, and "pain" in the internalised, conceptualised, sense of the disappointments of the teenage boy.
isn't tman like a teenaged boy thru all of this? he's self-
MH wrote: So what was at issue between the two of them at the Institute? I'd see it as the difference between Travers' use of imagination and Nathan's unchecked rationality. So in a way, maybe it's Nathan who is T-
I bet you're right...
MH wrote: And I might as well throw in here a related point about Travers. Early on in TOTHF, when Catherine Austin wonders about his interest in photos of "strange sexual wounds, imaginary Vietnam atrocities, the deformed mouth of Jacqueline Kennedy", she wonders to herself "Why was Travers obsessed by these images? Their own sexual relationship was marked by an almost seraphic tenderness ...". Is there perhaps some element of autobiographical puzzlement here? ... that neither JGB nor his friends can quite understand how he can be obsessed with all that stuff? "After all," they must say to themselves, "he seems pretty normal most of the time."
who knows what lurks in the mind of man? it was a sexy, violent time, and JG was on his way to creating his badboy rep, which would define him as an outsider til Empire and popular appreciation... he could be quiet on the outside, porno star on the inside...
MH wrote: Yes ... in a way the violence is all in the mind, or to use JGB's term "conceptual", and needs to be explored with the use of the imagination. If our problem is that reality has become internalised, our path doesn't lie back towards an unobtainable "natural existence", but forwards ... using our imagination and conceptualisations. Which is why JGB says that "perhaps psychopathology should be kept alive as a repository -
question on this: my understanding of the term psychopathology is that it's the "study" of mental & physical defects from a medical or psychoanalytic POV... why is JG always focussing on the "form" -
MH wrote: I'd say "imagination" rather than "idealism" -
well, I'm coming from here... I scanned this last week)... I'd say "idealism" and imagination are very close, if not one and the same
In philosophy, you can be a "realist" or you can be an "idealist”. You are a realist if you believe that the universe exists independently of our minds, and that it would be more or less the same even if we weren't around to observe it. You are an idealist if you believe that reality is somehow mentally generated, that we "make" the world. Idealism may seem a little daft at first blush.
Yet even die-
When idealists say that we "make the stars," they don't mean that we make them the way a brickmaker makes a brick; rather, they mean that we make them conceptually, right down to the elementary particles of which they consist. (But how, you ask, could we have made the sun if it was around long before we were? By making time too, the idealist knowingly replies.)
It was more than two centuries ago that Immanuel Kant brought idealism to respectability. Kant argued that the world as we know it is a mind-
Realism was further bolstered by the prestige of science, which seemed to be converging on a complete description of an objective, external world.
In recent decades, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam and others have moved away from the more extreme forms of realism, while, on the Continent, Jacques Derrida sounded a rather idealist note by maintaining that reality is nothing but a text that we write and rewrite.
Today, though, the consensus probably tips toward realism -
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[MH: 22 February 2007]
RMcG quoting MH: Nathan ends up with his logical and inhuman conclusion, whereas Travers may find a form of peace after his explorations of the imagination.
Then RMcG wrote: I think we'll see this now in most of the nathan/tman stuff when we revisit all the stories...
And in most of the stories, Nathan seems to end up with a minor injury of some sort: he's hobbling around, or he's got a bruise. What's that all about?
RMcG wrote: I think it's any meaning for tman... he seems to be groping around uselessly til the magic conjunction appears: vaughan, karen & the car park... vaughan represents an id-
Yes, I see what you mean ... his projects that keep him "moving from art gallery to conference hall" don't really get him anywhere, do they? ... at least directly.
And I think we can take the elements that form the "magic conjunction" as something like: Vaughan -
RMcG wrote: isn't tman like a teenaged boy thru all of this? he's self-
And sometimes he's withdrawn and a bit sulky!
RMcG wrote: question on this: my understanding of the term psychopathology is that it's the "study" of mental & physical defects from a medical or psychoanalytic POV... why is JG always focussing on the "form" -
I think it's because he sees psychopathology as a stimulant to the imagination, so he's interested in its effects on our thoughts. I came across something he said about "Crash" that bears on this: "I've never said that car crashes are sexually exciting; I've been in a car crash, and I can tell you it did nothing for my libido! What I have said is that the idea of car crashes is sexually exciting, which is very different and, in a way, much more disturbing." (J. G. Ballard: Quotes, p. 228)
RMcG wrote: well, I'm coming from here... I scanned this last week)...
I've now found that stuff you quoted, it's available online and is from a review of Michael Frayn's book "The Human Touch".
The review of "The Human Touch", quoted by RMcG: In recent decades, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam and others have moved away from the more extreme forms of realism.
Well once you start referring to Rorty and Putnam, you're moving into my territory, Rick ... in fact I've got a series of philosophy web pages which has stuff on Putnam in particular. If you go to http://www.holli.co.uk/philosophy.htm you'll also find lots on realism and similar topics. I can hardly pretend it's bedtime reading, though ;)
Most of that stuff was written two or three years ago, and as I was doing it I felt that it might somehow be connected up to JGB's writings. So once I'd finished, I decided to re-
Well I had fun re-
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[RMcG: 22 February 2007]
MH wrote: Well once you start referring to Rorty and Putnam, you're moving into my territory, Rick ... in fact I've got a series of philosophy web pages which has stuff on Putnam in particular. If you go to http://www.holli.co.uk/philosophy.htm you'll also find lots on realism and similar topics. I can hardly pretend it's bedtime reading, though ;)
mike...
I have to say I have poked around yr philosophic section... yeah, heavy stuff
OK, here's some heavy stuff back... you know how I'm going on about norbert brown and his life against death book... one of the key chapters of that tome is called "Apollo and Dionysus", and it deals with a lot of the concepts we've discussed during this AX escapade...
now, I don't expect any of you to read this, (except you mike) and it's really long... so I might suggest you print it out...
also, I can't use italics or any other text enhancers brown used, so it's bland looking
but it does say a lot about AX... or at least it says a lot about "object-
<book chapter snipped>
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