Drain the Swamp

When I lived on the thirty-first floor of a condo in downtown Miami, I became preoccupied with the idea that the city surrounding me and the writings of J.G. Ballard were inexorably linked. That they endlessly fed upon each other, ouroboros-style, that any attempt to understand one led back again to the other, and, in understanding them, they tightened, resulting first in a nice erotic charge, an unexpected connection, and then distention, shock, and strangulation. Absurd, sure, but it makes a kind of sense. The highways and the homeless, the condos, climate change. It’s all there. Cocaine Nights on The Terminal Beach.

Consider the images coming out of South Florida the past few weeks—sailboats capsized and clotting on the shore; high-rises looking on, humiliated by their reflection in the flooded streets; palm carnage. These could easily be used to illustrate J.G. Ballard’s 1962 novel, Though he considered the novel his first, it was preceded by the, which he wrote in two weeks the previous year. It is also one of his best.