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The Cloud Sculptor of Terminal X
(J.G. Ballard)

The Stones of Circumstance. Ballard came from the tradition of the British disaster novel, a lexicon which perhaps predates modern science fiction as we have come to define it. The Drowned World, The Crystal World, all those sunken empires and bizarre formations are prefigured by Wyndham, Christopher, H. G. Wells . . . there is something about the ruination of the globe which has always fascinated Ballard's compatriots, perhaps it has something to do with the image of Empire being slowly disentangled, all of the rude colonies coming to storm the consulates at tea time, perhaps it has to do with their ruddy and difficult clime. In any case, the early Ballard novels, short stories too are surprisingly conventional in their background and data if not precisely in their articulation; they were more precise than The Midwich Cuckoos or Day of the Triffids, perhaps, but at the center of it was the same old stuff: it was going to become pictorially, illustratively very bad and Ballard would provide us the maps; it is nonetheless possible to conceive of a literature roughly equivalent to our own without those novels written in the early sixties.

Portents, Egalitarian Shifts. Not so the short stories which from the beginning were distinct, compressed visions of stoned disaster, an egalitarian doom visited upon the poor and rich, the sensibility and insensible alike; in those cracked swimming pools, drained bathtubs, odd, empty cities in which ruined surgical teams or demented astronauts paced out their rounds of denial and circumstance it was possible to see some refraction of the century itself; the machinery or its portents had created a democracy of doom. Still, Ballard was dealing in the apocalyptic, in various versions of games theory, closed cycles and winding down; his landscapes were encysted with the soft watches and auto-sodomized virgins of early Dali, but blinking beyond these, in the distances beyond the sightlines it was possible to grant a version of perfect peace. Like all of those bomb stories in the Astounding of the 1940s, a magazine which Ballard read on Army bases for a while until he began to feel that all the contents were the same, Ballard gave us, like Sturgeon, like Chan Davis or Bertram Chandler no clue beyond that perfect garnishment of mortality.

Interpolation. Ballard's "The Assassination of JFK Seen as a Downhill Motor Race" is a pastiche of Alfred Jarry's "The Crucifixion as an Uphill Foot Race"; in the Jarry an exhausted but almost debonair Jesus weaving to his outcome, in the Ballard a merry portrait of soldiers on the run, jostling a suicidal JFK who had been looking for something big enough to get him out. "If Oswald was the starter, who fired the gun?" Perhaps the first true Ballard story, the first of them which could have been written by no one else, it passed through every American market to varying reactions of incomprehension or disgust and was published, along with most of the contents of The Atrocity Exhibition, in New Worlds. Several editors questioned not only the taste but the sanity of the author. Jarry had a difficult time as well.

His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. But in "The Terminal Beach," "The Assassination of JFK Seen As a Downhill Motor Race," "The Drowned Giant," Ballard moved beyond his history, voyaged upon his strange and original contribution to the genres of science fiction and literature (held at this time in the 1960s, as they had been for decades before, as independent approaches to the reality problem; much would happen in the remainder of the decades to assault the barriers and Ballard was not the least of those effects but at the time of which we are obsessed, there were science fiction writers still and there were writers and they had relatively little to do with one another): consider a post-apocalyptic world Ballard said and consider that it will be as rich, as entertaining, as filled with possibility as that world which we think of as "before the disaster." More filled with possibility! For heavens, heavens, if the bomb fell, if the aliens sucked clean the planet, if we blew out the oceans and every head of state, if we fornicated ourselves into biological disaster . . . if any or all of these things happened we were freed at last of the shackles of the 20th century, we were released to a land where because anything had happened, anything could. Striding the terminal beach, peering through the wreckage, examining the detritus for signs of passage, the survivor had become, miraculously, the witness and at last the commentator. After the ooze of the soft watches, then, the imprint of chronology in the sands. The biology of the giant, his enormous hands, abscessed features, eyebrows like mountains, knees like the pilings of the Pequod . . . here was a lad, the exploration of whom could keep a platoon of scientists or research assistants cheerfully occupied for huge spans of timeless time, there was an energy and a sense of liberation to these aftershocks which the swaddling technology of the century had itself denied.

Because that was the answer, that was the essence of the Ballard insight: Technology, the evolved state of the planet, was merely a toy, a dream, a rest, a means of concealment; strip it away, get beyond it, turn that technology against itself to rend small or larger holes in the canvas and one could get a look at the true circumstance. "It is not a gloomy poem," Allen Tate says of Emily Dickinson's most famous work. "It merely takes a look at the situation." Ballard gave us a good look at the situation. Energized by disaster as they could never be by the concealments of their condition, his protagonists scampered through the ruins, glowing, learning.

The Actress's Limbs Enormous, Floating, the Planes of Her Face the Landscape of Our Regard. Past the disaster novels then and the profound investigations implied by "The Terminal Beach" came those "compressed novels" of the late sixties, compiled into The Atrocity Exhibition. The landscape had been admired and evaluated, the first scuttling procedures had been investigated, but it was left to the compressed novels to take compass and pickaxe, dig through the acknowledged, passive evidence of the disaster and slowly, slowly draw the generating lines. Tallis, Talbot, Travers, Travis, the one and several protagonists of the compressed novels, working their way through some kind constitutional maze to the purer, luminescent villages in the distance laid out the geometry for themselves carefully. Gigantic, synthesized, the torso of Marilyn Monroe floated in the discolored sky, the monumental failure of our own necessity reaching, then subsiding, plunging into the sands to form refractory commentary upon that enlarged and desperate mask of our necessity: Reagan, Kennedy, Connally, icon, all of them shadowed against the sands. Were they "real" or were they the dreams of Marilyn Monroe floating so tenderly, so wistfully beyond us? Were we ourselves "real" in our witness or had we merely been created by the apparatus of the state to mark its downfall? These were large questions, not inconsiderable at a time when questions themselves were the politics of the time. Can we live? Shall we die? Did we kill? Did we dream? Should we or should we not? the questions were killing us and in order to deal with them we gave them names and sometimes attribution, we called them "demonstrators" or "Vietnamese" or "politicians" or "hawks" or "doves" or "hippies." It is important to understand, to the degree that we can be granted any understanding of that time that it seemed to be on the verge of disassembly, everything which had seemed the constant was dripping into the pastel and liquefying colors of the Dali watches and the landscape which Ballard was articulating in those compressed novels seemed to be the one true paradigm of what was happening in what we called "reality." There is no way to describe the late sixties in America outside of The Atrocity Exhibition, it was all folding up from inside, huge masks of deceased heads of state and their assassins were unfurling in public squares from Arlington, Virginia to a certain ballroom in Los Angeles and there seemed to be no clear point of focus, certainly no point of disengagement.

Like the man with the lever, we might have moved the world if we had had a place to stand but the only such place was the Moon and we were raining debris upon it with fury, scampering hippity-hop! across its pitted and riven surfaces, the surfaces of the Terminal Beach to be sure, we had converted the Moon into only one more aspect of public policy and surely this was not the answer. 240,000 miles, nearly a quarter of a million miles from the White House, the enormous, distended form of the Actress, her limbs floating in the wake of the Apollos, the planes of her face, the landscape of our regard. Wakeup calls to space, from space, the enormous, thrusting force of the rockets carrying us to—well, where? to another enactment of Vietnam foreign policy, that was where.

Ballard was pure, clean, almost faultless; in the strange and pristine geometry of his design it was possible to see all of the juxtapositions that the liars in the temple, the Speakers of all the Houses were using their technology so desperately to force us not to see. Rip away the veil, however, and Travis could see her, could see her cool and deadly form entwined in the arms of her lover the President, the two of them banging and banging away at one another in an utter asepsis of conjoinment with an extension of three point five millimeters, the hanging gardens of their genitalia thrusting home again and again for us all.

Interpolation Two. The Atrocity Exhibition, published in England, was contracted by an American publisher, was printed and set to publish, was then pulped when the publisher himself balked at "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan." Arguments, reason, contracts, all or none of the above were invoked in this difficult year when Cambodia had become one of the stations of the cross and the nation had seemed to become composed only of prisoners, guards and potential prisoners and guards, detainees all. Years later, under the title Love and Napalm: Export USA the book was brought out by Grove Press (a different publisher) in this country and some time after that Ronald Reagan was elected President.

His Mouth a Circle of Fire; the Anapest of Limbs. Traditional American science fiction had either ended the world ("The Nightmare," "Dawn of Nothing") or had in its rueful and sentimental way showed us that there was an even better time for those survivors (who would inevitably include us) when all of the landscape had been swept away ("Lot," "Mother to the World," "Dumb Waiter") but it had been given to the rigorous and comical Ballard to show us that there was another alternative: the post-apocalyptic could be dared and it could be mapped and it could simply keep on coming, one could experience the grinding, roaring, smashing conflagration over and again and learn to live within it, perhaps even transcend: in the laboratory of Crash, then, the fatal accident was enacted over and again with various replacements of the crucial limbs, the impact of disaster could be contracted from forty-five degrees, sixty degrees, ninety degrees, a hundred and eighty degrees while the pillows and harnesses were adjusted and the careful, detached science faculty peered into that solemn estate. Clamped to the actress then, hurtling down the road at 100 mph, the transmission flat out and screaming, the tires beginning their slow, refusing scuttle, he could feel not merely his soul but his genitalia, his very corpus slowly ascend from the planet, depart from this place of strife and loss and then come back again and again to the momentary circle of consciousness. His mouth a circle of fire in those instants of recovery, the anapest of his limbs clutching and unclutching the floorboards, the actor felt himself Prometheus at some final dawn of light, coming back again and again then to this one stinging moment of desertion until he came to understand that what was being enacted upon him, what Ballard had found, what Ballard in rigor and the refusal of denial had ascertained was the essential secret of the time and that secret was that death is not opposed to life, death is not merged with life, no, it was simpler than that, death and life were indistinguishable, two aspects of the same floundering corpus and to know that, to know that the states were fused and therefore arbitrary was at last to be freed from that pointless dualism which had turned the world into bisected doom. Live or die. War or peace. Fuck or be fucked. Eat or starve. Rich or poor. Tits or cock. It took a simple man of simple tastes to understand that monotheism was the first and perhaps the central consideration; that tautology was all, that one worked within a tautology so absolute that the real question was not whether one was living or dead but, rather, who one was at this time.

Stalking the Barriers, Patrolling the Night. All of this, at least, seemed clear or clearer at the time; like all great writers (painters, composers, choreographers too but that is a different attack and words, unfortunately, are far too referential; are charged with overtones or common application which force the writer to compete with the debasement of his very medium) Ballard had made it powerfully simple, absolutely stark and clear; from the black and riven surfaces of the Moon to the awful places of Asia which had become in bombardment almost indistinguishable from the targeted swell of nipple in the supine Marilyn Monroe to the clattering shatter of limbs against harness in the crash factory . . . it was all the same, everything had fused into that perfect tautology and to understand one aspect of the disaster, then, was to comprehend all of it. The dead animal lay huge on the grey sands, extruding tendrils and tentacles partially dismembered by the force of the explosion; one could seize the animal anywhere, take any of these tentacles and slowly, hand over hand, clamber to the original source, the massive head, the sunken and staring eye. Touch The Atrocity Exhibition anywhere, follow Travers or Tallis at any gait, move the corpus against the dunes and one would inevitably come to that large and misshapen head which was the center of the disaster, trace outward from the head then to the tendrils and one could replicate the disaster in assimilable proportion.

Ballard brought the twentieth century home to us then, in small and manageable pieces, a do-it-yourself home kit for apocalypse. Just as Dali had furnished the sands or archways of his buildings with pieces of the larger context, just as Picasso in Guernica had taken us down the steps into the cellar of bombardment where the animals shrieked human sounds and the babies cried like animals, just as Dali and Picasso and Antheil in Ballet Mechanique had managed to put everything into one place, so Ballard had done it too; in his compressed novels were the lunchboxes from the time and one could slowly unpack to measure every aspect of the pain and denial which had manifested itself as our time. To see the distended features of the actress, to stroke her then was to know our own yearning, to feel our yearning hurled back at us along with the implacable stone flesh of the dead woman, likewise the crags and precipices of Reagan's face, the face of Ronald Reagan confronting the subject at a tilt of some 17 degrees would simulate the places of the Moon into which however casually the astronauts had stepped. One could land upon Ronald Reagan then as Armstrong had stepped upon the Moon and in the hard little spaces of his visage one could take serious steps for mankind. Nothing was apart, we were all a nation of the dead, this and much else lurked within those blood tales, handed over to us in the small, anguished proportions of a dream, with the expressivity of the logical voice of the nightmare. Stalking the barriers, patrolling the night, this wasn't so bad at all, Ballard was saying; if something was mapped it was already mastered. The dread of the Terminal Beach ebbed as one strolled through its dimensions, the horror of the Crash abated if one placed the pillars and barriers in a certain way and began to investigate how the impact could be applied. The lone assassin, hunched in the Depository, ready to blow a hole in the century, that was terrifying, yes, but if one could get upstairs there, if one could kick the cans out of the way, pull down the hastily constructed breakfront, move behind the newspapers and instructions and cleaning rods and soiled clothing to look the assassin clearly into place, one would see a man very much like oneself, perhaps it would be oneself in that high space, another, raddled, overexcited version of the self with whom one could reason and to whom one could pass words of comfort.

"Be reasonable," one might say to the assassin, "after all, it works out pretty much the same in the end, this dualism is only a function of your excitement, in the end you'll all be indistinguishable dust anyway." The assassin would nod, his eyes round and impressed, this was the first time someone had spoken to him man to man and it was an impressive, a soothing experience. "Put it down," one would say, gesturing to the rifle, "give up this demented hope of change, walk out into the light of the beach with me. Smell the roses in the lap of the candidate's wife, hear the cries of children. We will all be better for this." The assassin would nod, smile sweetly, convert the rifle to port arms and come to his feet, a haunted expression on his simple and honest features.

"Do you think it's possible?" the assassin would say, "do you think that one could touch the roses, could hold the roses in one hand?" and one would take the assassin by the hand and say, "Yes, yes, of course it would be possible, come with me," and so to the sudden and blinding light of the downhill motor race, the cries of the crowd high and arching in the air. Hand in hand with the assassin then, walking toward the light, the late twentieth century blooming about us.

Anomaly, Exegesis, Mystification. For who is to say? who is to know? It could yet have worked this way for us; when Tallis was killed, juxtaposed by burns or gunfire, he simply went back and formed the pattern again until it was right. Who is to speak of finality? What is there to be known of endings? If the years of that white and poisoned time taught us anything, they taught us of the lack of irrevocability, the infusion and exchange of possibility and so, in the compressed and terrible novels of our lives we have learned—thanks only to Ballard I sometimes think—that revisions if not inevitable at least are in order. Anomaly, exegesis, justification, time, all of this is material of solemnity and force and so as we gather with the researchers in the anteroom, awaiting that next appearance of our beloved, we do so with that sweet and gifted patience which he has given us. I am not speaking here of Empire of the Sun. Empire of the Sun is something else entirely. I would rather not concretize metaphor or know its antecedents, but I admit—ah, what a product I am of the times of which I speak—that this is almost certainly my own terminal beach.

 

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