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

months later. Other traces of his ‘mortal remains’ were found in a number of unexpected places: in a footnote
to a paper on some unusual aspects of schizophrenia published thirty years earlier in a since defunct
psychiatric journal; in the pilot for an unpurchased TV thriller, ‘Lieutenant 70’; and on the record labels of a
pop singer known as The Him — to instance only a few. Whether in fact this man was a returning astronaut
suffering from amnesia, the figment of an ill-organized advertising campaign, or, as some have suggested,
the second coming of Christ, is anyone’s guess 48 .
Lo stato psicotico di Travis si manifesta anche nella sua esasperata sensibilità rispetto agli
elementi geometrici o simmetrici che osserva nella natura del mondo che lo circonda. È il sintomo
di un’acuta nostalgia per la simmetria perduta dopo l’evoluzione dell’embrione dallo stato di
blastula (struttura che si forma in seguito alla segmentazione di un uovo fecondato). Uno dei brevi
paragrafi del romanzo si intitola infatti ‘The Lost Symmetry of the Blastosphere’:
[Dr. Nathan:] «Much of Travis’s thought concerns what he terms “the lost symmetry of the
blastosphere – the primitive precursor of the embryo that is the last structure to preserve perfect symmetry in
all planes. It occurred to Travis that our own bodies may conceal the rudiments of a symmetry not only about
the vertical axis but also the horizontal. One recalls Goethe’s notion that the skull is formed of modified
vertebrae – similarly, the bones of the pelvis may constitute the remains of a lost sacral skull. […] [I]t seems
that Travis’s extreme sensitivity to the volumes and geometry of the world around him, and their immediate
translation into psychological terms, may reflect a belated attempt to return to a symmetrical world, one that
will recapture the perfect symmetry of the blastosphere, and the acceptance of the ‘Mythology of the
Amniotic Return.’ In his mind World War III represents the final self-destruction and imbalance of an
asymmetric world, the last suicidal spasm of the dextro-rotatory helix, DNA. The human organism is an
atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator…» 49 .
Su un manifesto parapubblicitario ideato da Ballard e pubblicato sul numero 33 della rivista
Ambit nel 1967 campeggia la scritta “Does the angle between two walls has a happy ending?” Il
manifesto contiene l’immagine di una donna tratta dal film Alone di Steve Dwoskin:
48 J. G. Ballard, Atrocity, a cura di V. Vale e A. Juno, op. cit., p. 81.
49 Ivi, pp. 13-14.
- 17 -