The only truly alien planet is Earth. - UniCA Eprints - Università degli ...

La scena successiva al primo incontro con l’antico essere alato 442 , che vede protagonista la
madre di Miriam St. Cloud, prelude all’inglobamento dei corpi degli abitanti di Shepperton
all’interno del proprio da parte di Blake, in un misto di frenesia sessuale e cannibalismo metafisico,
al culmine di un vero e proprio delirio di onnipotenza pansessuale, a questo punto già chiaramente
delineato.
I imagined myself and Mrs. St. Cloud copulating on the air. I knew that there were four of us present,
locked in a sexual act that transcended our species – she and I, the great condor, and the man or woman who
had revived me and whose mouth and hands I could still feel in my skin. […] No longer concerned with her
sex, I was trying to fuse our bodies, merge our hearts and lungs, our spleens and kidneys into a single
creature. I knew then that I would stay in this small town until I had mated with everyone there – the
women, men and children, their dogs and cats, the cage-birds in their front parlours, the cattle in the watermeadow,
the deer in the park, the flies in this bedroom – and fused us together into a new being 443 .
È interessante notare a questo punto come anche l’aspetto della sessualità, contrariamente a
quanto forse si potrebbe immaginare, costituisca un elemento di collegamento con William Blake, il
quale riteneva che essa fosse complementare alla spiritualità nella ricerca di una realtà superiore 444 .
Tutta la vicenda di Blake, in questa commistione tra spiritualità e carnalità può essere letta in
quest’ottica, a conferma della non casualità della scelta del nome del suo protagonista da parte di
Ballard.
Non c’è dubbio che l’assimilazione degli abitanti di Shepperton da parte di Blake sia una
forma di violenza, almeno a prima vista. Ma non è la violenza del sacrificio rituale, per quanto
connessa a una forma di sacralità, che è quella derivante dalla natura ‘altra’di Blake 445 . Il suo
aspetto positivo, luminoso, solare, ne fa una figura di redenzione, laddove invece il suo aspetto
442 «Blake is strangely fascinated by this fossil. He reconstructs the creature as half-man, half-fish and half-bird, an inbetween
impossible being, and one with which he identifies.[…] [T]he fossil comes from the time before the
differentiation of species, it symbolizes the primordial chaos to which everything will eventually return. Blake misses
these ancient times, his misfortunes are partly due to the fact that he was born long after the epoch he belongs in [..].»
D. Oramus, op. cit., p. 236.
443 J. G. Ballard, Unlimited, op. cit., p. 64.
444 «Ballard’s work shares with that of Blake not only an essentially mystical and mythopoeic character, but also the
notion that sexuality and spirituality are complementary modes of attaining to higher reality, or as Blake states: “the
whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite & corrupt. This will come
to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 14). Ballard expresses his
vision of a similar sexo-spiritual apocalypse in such stories as “News from the Sun” and “Myths of the Near Future”,
developing the theme most fully in The Unlimited Dream Company, whose savior-protagonist is named Blake.» G.
Stephenson, op. cit., p. 162.
445 «Bataille explores the violence of difference in a reading of violence as a general economy. This requires careful and
critical reading because it becomes easy to assimilate Bataille to a culture of violence, and all too often ‘celebrations’ of
Bataille do just that. However, in breaking the (violently imposed) taboos on violence Bataille is not aiming to increase
violence but to examine how these strict taboos generate their own violence. In this exploration Bataille touches on
points of affective excess in his writings, which are heterogeneous in their refusal to be organised within a
homogeneous accumulation of knowledge. This is where impossibility and difference are knotted around an affect
which, as Bataille suggests of the sacred, both attracts and repulses us.» B. Noys, op. cit., p. 134.
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