TAKE ME TO VERMILION SANDS - HERE'S TO A BALLARDIAN SUMMER

In Vermilion Sands, it’s the near future. We’re not sure if this is an imagined 1970s or 1980s, or a speculative 22nd century. We are deliberately displaced in time. We do not even know for sure where we are either. We might be in a crumbling ex-seaside resort, a Nevada desert, or a terraformed non-terrestrial planet.

Temporally and geographically severed, our frame of reference is untethered and dependent on our own misaligned interpretations. Some of the architecture here is evocative of the faded optimism of a 1950s space age, all art deco and glass front pavilions. But at the same time, coral reefs loom out of the dunes, while the taxonomically anomalous sand rays flock in their hundreds. We could be anywhere.

JG Ballard’s short story collection, Vermilion Sands, was first published in 1971. Everything is set in or around the Vermillion Sands area, a semi-meta-fictional place where the water - if there ever was any - has receded to make way for psychologically imposing strata and fauna. The stories take place during a recession - not just economic, but a recession of culture and ambition. The characters laze on sunbeds. They paint, they sculpt. They swipe sand out of their hair and their eyes. Life is slow and placid.

Many of these characters are eccentrics. Some are fading forgotten stars of the digital and holographic screens, worn out heiresses and vaguely non-human beauties who pass though the town to cause ontological havoc, whether intentionally or not. They are amoral and decadent.

The terrain is populated by singing sculptures, fantastic creatures and otherworldly characters. It all lends itself to the idea that also Vermilion Sands is the ultimate inner landscape, a place which exists only on some deeper plane, with a less literal meaning for the inhabitants and visitors. Ballard himself called Vermilion Sands an exotic suburb of the mind.

We might be tempted to wonder if they’re the lucky ones. Perhaps this is a shared universe with the Los Angeles of Blade Runner. Far off over the hills and dunes might be a sprawling, wet metropolis.

Ballard himself said the place reminded him of anywhere from Nevada, to Palm Springs, or maybe even any of the huge number of vacation resorts stretching from Gibraltar to Athens. I went to the freshly-laid holiday resorts of Maspalomas, Gran Canaria, for the explicit reason that I thought it looked like Vermilion Sands and I was spot on. Being closer to the Sahara than Spain, the island is awash with languorous tourists, myself included, draped over balconies or aquamarine swimming pools in the midday haze. The dunes are another landscape entirely.

It is in the story Prima Belladonna that we first encounter the place. Ballard mentions the Great Recess, ‘a world slump of boredom and lethargy and high summer’, a decade-long lockdown which is only addressed in passing. The story revolves around two men who own a shop which sells singing orchids, again evoking genetic manipulation or non-terrestrial species. Their tentative business is interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious singer named Jane Ciracylides, herself a beautiful, mutated anomaly. Her presence puts the plants out of tune.

If you squint, The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista becomes a haunted house story. A lawyer and his wife, who are looking for a new house. They move to a place in StellaVista, which is seemingly a borough of Vermilion Sands. All the houses there are psychotropic, made of a substance called bioplastic, which reacts to the psychological state of the homeowner. The previous owner was murdered, and the complex psychology still haunts the house.

Studio 5, The Stars is about a colony of poets who live in Red Beach. They use machines called Verse Transcribers, which, when fed input parameters, will spit out computer generated sonnets. The feminine shows up in Ballard’s work often as a disruptive force. In Studio 5, Aurora Day is chauffeured into town by the great God Pan. She begins writing poetry by hand, with her brain. The poets are shook. Aurora trashes their machines and blackmails them into printing her work. She is a vengeful muse, summoned into reality to remind people how to make art again.

To infer as much as possible about Vermilion Sands, we must look to its creator.

James Graham Ballard was born on 15 November 1930 in the Shanghai International Settlement, the Republic of China. He grew up living a Western life in a foreign enclave at the height of regional and international tensions, namely the Second Sino Japanese war, part of the composite of global airfare which comprised World War Two. The Japanese occupied Shanghai in 1942 and imprisoned many allied citizens living within.

The Ballards were essentially imprisoned in an internment camp called Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre. His experiences there, involving the war and involving the treatment and mistreatment of the detainees shaped his outlook on life. We might look at Empire of the Sun as a cathartic autobiographical fiction inspired by his early life in Shanghai.

After the war, his family moved to Britain, where Ballard studied medicine. His experiences with dissection and the viscerality of the human body contributed to his vision. He wanted to be a psychiatrist, but he began writing surrealist and avant garde fiction. In 1951, his first short story was published and, between a stint in the RAF and the Canadian Air Force in 1954, he established himself as a successful writer.

It was no secret that Ballard spent most of his adult life living in Shepperton. With Shepperton Studios nearby, Ballard, perhaps wryly, called the place the Hollywood of the suburbs. He lived near a huge concrete flyover..

Ballard wrote hundreds of short stories and 19 novels. In 1970, he published The Atrocity Exhibition, a novel composed of fragments, all to be intuited in whatever order the reader sees fit. The Atrocity Exhibition was Ballard’s attempt to find a logic in the violence he had witnessed in the decade before. Kennedy had been assassinated. His wife had died.

The violence in Ballard’s work is often the result of his characters’ exploitative and voyeuristic nature, but we never feel that Ballard was in any way sadistic. In Crash (1973), the characters fetishise automobile wrecks. They get turned on by crashing cars, capitalising on each other and the unwitting participants in their staged car wrecks.

In 1974, Ballard’s novel Concrete Island was published. The story follows a man called Maitland who’s driving home from work in London across the Westway dual carriageway and he crashes through the barrier and lands relatively uninjured, but stranded in this concrete space below the motorway.

We pass these in-between places, dotted with discarded traffic cones, seemingly abandoned. They can be below street level, inaccessible but paradoxically adjacent to the rush hour traffic of the city. You cannot get out, but if you did, you’d be run over. So you stay.

Ballard visits the theme of a dying near future earth many times. And why not? The planet has so many different ways that it might be destabilised. In The Drowned World (1962), global warming has rendered most of the planet’s surface habitable due to rising sea levels. Conversely, The Burning World (1964) or The Drought as it is sometimes known, is a world where water is a quickly becoming scarce. In both these novels, Ballard presents the slow-burn apocalypse as a catalyst for different states of awareness and being. Many of the characters succumb to their atavism, falling into habits of violence and isolation.

Ballard’s short stories vary widely in tone and theme. The Reptile Enclosure observes a middle-aged, middle-class husband and wife, a heteronormative, cosy couple who are enjoying themselves at a crowded beach.

In gestalt philosophical theory, Fritz Perls says that the shoreline is a perfect liminal space. It’s an emergent property of the interaction between the land and the sea. It belongs to neither and both. It is the quintessential liminal space and is often overlooked. The sea is also where we came from.

The beach is packed. Everybody is sunbathing. They are, to varying degrees aware that a satellite is to be launched which will complete a long-awaited surveillance and communication network. The infrared signals from this newly launched satellite initiate an atavistic reversion in anybody watching the launch. It triggers some deep-seated evolutionary desire to return to the sea. Thousands of people stand up, walk into the sea and drown.

The Life and Death of God takes a more omnipresent tone. It is composed like an historical account. It reports that proof has been found of the existence of God. Scientists and mathematicians have proven God exists. So there.

Mankind is united at first, even jubilant. But Ballad shows what happens when we are unable to doubt or to question. Life stagnates when all the answers are answered and there is absolute certainty. Moral absolutism takes its toll. Ultimately, many aspects of society shut down. Nobody is willing to lie any more, so advertising stops. As a result, world economies collapse. The proof then has to be PR managed back into uncertainty.

Low-Flying Aircraft was adapted by Swedish film-maker Solveig Nordlund, which was called Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude in 2002.

Human births have changed. It’s been happening for some time and the current generation is pretty much the last of its kind. All the babies are being born without eyes. Out of fear and rejection, they’re aborted, or otherwise ‘terminated’ afterwards.

We are shown the scope of this disaster. Entire countries are shut down because nobody is there any more. There is rampant bio-essentialism and authoritarianism. People who aren’t trying to have babies are seen as degenerate or treasonous.The last generation of humans spend their final days relaxing around slowly-draining swimming pools, sunning themselves at abandoned mediterranean resorts, mysteriously passive about the slow-burn end of the world.

But the children being born are not deformed at all. They don’t have eyes, but they can see. It’s all perfectly natural, if uncomfortable. And humanity’s passivity is nature’s way of telling us not to worry. We’ve done our bit. Time for the next species to prosper.

I’m struck, as I finish that previous sentence, by the sudden warmth sunlight coming through the window in front of me. I live by the beach in Kent and in the high summer months, one of my favourite things to do is to take my copy of Vermilion Sands and choose one of the many seaside bars to sit and read it. This usually involves a glass of wine or two. When combined with alcohol, Ballard’s writing has an hallucinatory effect on me. I can look out over the sands at low tide and imagine the stranded fishing boats might be coral reefs, and that the calling gulls (which I have always thought to be very majestic birds) could be flocks of sand rays.

While dyzlocation goes about its investigative narrations, Vermilion Sands is never far away. Its topography, shaped by the nostalgia for what never was or is-not-yet, informs this story, even as it is sculpted by the desert winds of the primordial psyche, neon-lit by vivid hues against the muted tapestry of rock formations and old cobblestones.

It will be summer soon. Meet me at Vermilion Sands.