Part of the footnote to ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’, a chapter from J.G. Ballard’s chaotic and sometimes confusing novel The Atrocity Exhibition.
In Springfield Mental Hospital near London a few years ago, while visiting a psychiatrist friend, I watched an elderly woman patient helping the orderly 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 she replied: ‘Jesus told me to.’ She was right, though I like to think what really compelled 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.
The novel also contains a chapter entitled ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ which is a fake psychoanalytic interpretation of experiments that supposedly study the sexual attractiveness of Reagan to potential voters.
Ballard writes in a footnote to this chapter: “At the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco a copy of my Reagan text, minus its title and the running sideheads, and furnished with the seal of the Republication Party, was distributed to delegates. I’m told it was accepted for what it resembled, a psychological position paper on the candidate’s subliminal appeal, commissioned from some maverick think-tank.”
Presumably, Ballard was not a fan of the Reagan or the Republican Party.
Link to Wikipedia page on The Atrocity Exhibition.
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