Free The atrocity exhibition by J. G. Ballard Page B

President. But she killed herself, slamming the door in the world’s face. Here Tallis, trying to make sense of her tragic death, has recast her disordered mind in the simplest terms possible, those of geometry: the shapes and volumes of the apartment house, the beach, the planetarium.
    Suite Mentale.
    The paintings of mental patients, like those of the surrealists, show remarkable insights into our notions of conventional reality, a largely artificial construct which serves the limited ambitions of our central nervous systems. Huge arrays of dampers suppress those perceptions that confuse or unsettle the central nervous system, and if these are bypassed, most dramatically by LSD, startling revelations soon begin to occur. In Springfield Mental Hospital near London a few years ago, while visiting a psychiatrist friend, I watched an elderly woman patient helping the orderly to serve the afternoon tea. As the thirty or so cups were set out on a large polished table she began to stare at the bobbing liquid, then stepped forward and carefully inverted the brimming cup in her hand. The hot liquid dripped everywhere in a terrible mess, and the orderly screamed: ‘Doreen, why did you do that?’, to which Doreen matter-of-factly replied: ‘Jesus told me to.’ She was right, though I like to think that what really impelled her was a sense of the intolerable contrast between the infinitely plastic liquid in her hand and the infinitely hard geometry of the table, followed by the revelation that she could resolve these opposites in a very simple and original way. She attributed the insight to divine intervention, but the order in fact came from some footloose conceptual area of her brain briefly waking from its heavy sleep of largactil.
    Some of these transformational grammars I have tried to decode in the present book. Do the deaths of Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, the space programme and the Vietnam war, the Reagan presidency make more sense seen in different terms? Perhaps. In ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ the characters behave as if they were pieces of geometry interlocking in a series of mysterious equations.
    Impressions of Africa.
    Raymond Roussel (1877 -1933), author of Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus , travelled with a coffin in which he would lie for a short time each day, preparing himself for death. Graveyards and cemeteries have the same calming effect, the more ornate the better. A visit to Père Lachaise in Paris adds a year to one’s life, and the pyramids in Egypt stare down time itself. It would be intriguing to construct a mausoleum that was an exact replica, in the most funereal stone, of one’s own home, even including the interior furniture (reminiscent of Magritte’s strange stone paintings, with their stone men and women, stone trees and stone birds). One could weekend in this alternate home, and probably soon find oneself stepping out of time.
    On the mortuary island of San Michele, in the Venice lagoon, a gloomy and threatening place that inspired Arnold Bocklin’s ‘Island of the Dead’, one comes across an extraordinary parade of ultra-modern bungalows among the graves and tombs, with white walls and wrought iron grilles, like demonstration models of a Spanish-style nightclub waiting shipment to the Costa del Sol. These are family mausoleums, and it’s touching to see the coffins sitting together in the breakfast rooms.
     

CHAPTER FIVE
NOTES TOWARDS A MENTAL BREAKDOWN
    The Impact Zone . The tragic failure of these isolation tests, reluctantly devised by Trabert before his resignation, were to have bizarre consequences upon the future of the Institute and the already uneasy relationships between the members of the research staff. Catherine Austin stood in the doorway of Trabert’s office, watching the reflection of the television screen flicker across the slides of exposed spinal levels. The magnified images of the newsreels from Cape Kennedy dappled the enamel walls and ceiling,