Reflecting these intermittent flares, the deep bowl of the water shone in a diffused opalescent blur, the discharged light of myriads of phosphorescing animalcula, congregating in dense shoals like a succession of submerged haloes. Between them the water was thick with thousands of entwined snakes and eels, writhing together in frantic tangles that tore the surface of the lagoon.
As the great sun drummed nearer, almost filling the sky itself, the dense vegetation along the limestone cliffs was flung back abruptly, to reveal the black and stone-grey heads of enourmous Triassic lizards. Strutting forward to the edge of the cliffs, they began to roar together at the sun, the noise gradually mounting until it became indistinguishable from the volcanic pounding of the solar flares. Kerans felt, beating within him like his own pulse, the powerful mesmiric pull of the baying reptiles, and stepped out into the lake, whose waters now seemed an extension of his own blood-stream. As the dull pounding rose, he felt the barriers which divided his own cells from the surrounding medium dissolving, and he swam forwards, spreading outwards across the black thudding water....
It's bloody cold at the minute, isn't it? My car's breaks were frozen the other day, totally fused together. Then a few days after the snow was so high my car couldn't get off my own driveway. Overpriced trains are getting cancelled left right and centre, the panicked masses are staying at home behind bolts and wood-burning stoves, gritting firms have switched into overdrive, and Tesco is out of stock of everything but pitta breads. Like every year, this winter seems like the 'worst winter ever', but who's tallying any more? Everything is getting worse. If we didn't already have snow storms and frostbite to contend with, we've got to live with the knowledge that we also had the hottest summer 'since time began'. Going by what misery the lefty-press is chucking around, we've basically got a summer that's going to burn the eyes out of our sockets and a winter that will kill every elderly person north of Watford to look forward to next year.
In an attempt to warm my cockles, I finally got round to finishing JG Ballard's The Drowned World, which I started earlier this year. Being a fickle fucker, I tend to have at least 8 books on the go at once, one for the toilet, one for bed, one for buses and trains, one small enough to keep in my back pocket and whip out when I want to feel superior to the world-at-large, etc. The Drowned World was my 'read in the garden' book but I only got a few weeks decent weather in my garden before my stupid house blocked all the sunlight. So it gathered dust on a window sill until one of my other books got finished (appalling english, I do apologise).
Anyway, The Drowned World is a sort of Sci-fi Heart of Darkness, replete with all the colonial Conrad-style racism ofwhich we are so fond. The story follows a scientist, Kerans, living out the end times in the rooftops and penthouse suites of a now-underwater earth, the sun now so bright that it has become near-impossible to spend any length of time out of shade. Originally accompanied by soldiers assisting him with his biological research, it doesn't take long for Kerans and a couple of his associates to become stranded with only the lizards and the hellish, oppressive heat for company. Such incessant temperatures take their toll on those left behind, who find themselves going a little crazy. Part of the charm of The Drowned World is in its exploration of madness. There's no Jack Nicholson cackles or Dennis Hopper cocaine fits here, it's instead a quiet, considered descent into nincompoopia. The beauty of the book is its grasping of the inevitable early on. By page 50, Kerans is undoubtedly fucked, but it's the exploration and journey into madness that holds court.
The introduction of Strangman's gang act as an agent of change in the same way the bikers/soldiers of the Living Dead series. Before their entrance, you see equilibrium, between the survivors and the living dead, or or Kerans and the drowned world. This calm will undoubtedly resolve in death or failure, but at least the particular failure could be measured and anticipated. The outside force in Strangman however creates an unknown chaos to both the protagonist and the world around them. The drowned world itself literally ceases to be such, as Strangman serves his motives. Similarly, Kerans and Beatrice's acceptance of their fate and reunion with the new wild and untamed landscape cut short by the presence of Strangman. This particular plot development gives a unique insight into a different kind of protagonist. Heroes that exist for illogical interests, or in another sense heroes who live in a world that no longer has a need for them.
I have no idea whatsoever if the passage below makes any scientific sense, but there's no denying its eloquence. archaopsychic past, yes Mr.Ballard, that is top form use of the queens! What a lovely way to write 'loads of sunlight is making us go loopy'. Roll on summer 2011
These are the oldest memories on Earth, the time-codes carried in every chromosome and gene. Every step we've taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories - from the enzymes controlling the carbon dioxide cycle to the organisation of the brachial plexus and the nerve pathways of the Pyramid cells in the mid-brain, each is a record of a thousand decisions taken in the face of a sudden physico-chemical crisis. Just as psychoanalysis restructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs. The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old at the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.
No comments:
Post a Comment