Sculpting the Clouds. The Magical Future of JG Ballard

Hello, welcome back to our series on books you can't miss. And today, I really want to talk about this one: J.G. Ballard, Vermillion Sands.

This is one of the most remarkable books I've ever read. And I know that I say this about all the books we are discussing, but you know, all these books are remarkable. This is why I am making these posts and videos, right? I wouldn't make them for books that everybody knows or books that are not remarkable. So obviously, all these books are special.

But some books have a magic in them. The language reaches back to some mythical time, when words had this power to enchant people, to enchant the reader. And I feel that Ballard and some other writers can go back to that and give us this language that is more than just the description of plot.

You know, this is the opposite of Dan Brown, for example. Dan Brown — and I love Dan Brown, I’ve read all his novels, and I have read novels of his that kept me up all night because he has this trick of ending the chapters always when you want to know what happens in the next chapter. So I really enjoyed Dan Brown, but his language is there to serve the plot. The words are just there to create an image in your mind that helps you understand what's happening. And the whole interest in the book is in what's happening.

But with some books, like this one, this is not the case. These books are not about what is happening, although magical things happen in these books too. But a big part of the fun of reading these, perhaps the most fun in reading it, is in enjoying the language. And this, I feel, fits well with the previous video, which was about how to read and how to enjoy poetry. And some of you told me in the comments that it resonated with you and that you thought in similar ways about it. And I feel that you will also enjoy this if you were one of those who enjoy poetry because this is poetry. It is poetry. It is magic put in the service of a story.

But the story is itself a story about poetry and magic. It is not a realistic story. None of the things that happen in this book could happen. It is a kind of science fiction. It is a kind of fantasy world that half exists in some imagined future, or that could exist in some imagined future. And nobody knows exactly where it is or what it is exactly about, or when these things happen or how they work, because it is full of magic.

It is perhaps similar to some novels of magical realism, of Salman Rushdie for example, who has similar things happening in his novels. But Ballard is still stranger than Rushdie. And the magical pieces in Rushdie are more there to provide the plot points where the real people go through, while here the whole world, this weird world, is actually the protagonist.

This is a collection of stories, and the only thing that connects these stories is the words. And therefore, it's right that the book is called Vermilion Sands because these vermilion sands are what connects everything in the story. And vermilion, of course, is the shade of red. And so these are red sands. And I always thought of it as describing some future version of Mars, or perhaps some imagined, some magical version of Mars. Perhaps like Bradbury also does it, you know, Ray Bradbury in his Martian stories. He also has a magical version of Mars which contains canals and water and ancient civilizations of Martians who still walk around as shades and have an influence on the landscape and communicate with the astronauts who go there. And it's all steeped in poetical and allegorical motifs.

And something similar is happening here. You have this, as I imagine it, (although he never talks about Mars) Martian background, a world of red sand. But it's a world in which the red sand has become normal. It has become something like a seaside resort place where people go to relax, where people go to have a good time. And it very much resembles what I imagine would be going to the sea in England, where you have things like these little cabins that you can rent, these wooden cabins where you can store your stuff, or perhaps you can, you can put, uh, something in there, some chairs, or you can sit comfortably. It has all these, you know, beach chairs and these things. It has bars on the beach. But the beach borders a sea of sand.

And not only this, but it also has other incredible things. It has scorpions that have diamonds on them, they have precious jewels on them. And this is such a powerful image, these little scorpions with the jewels on them, because it gives you this magical, almost 'yung' you could say, connection between the danger of the scorpion, who is going to bite you if you come too close, and the attraction of the jewel that is incorporated in this scorpion.

Then we have plants that sing. They sing so well that they can sing operas, and they are inspired by other singers. And so a singer can sing, and the plant will sing with them. And there are psychotropic clothes, where the clothes react to the emotions of the wearer. And so you're wearing these clothes, and if your emotions are right, and if the clothes you are wearing feel relaxed and in harmony with the wearer, then they look brilliant and beautiful. But if you have negative thoughts, if you are anxious and you wear the clothes, then they might fall off you, they might look wilted, or they might even strangle you.

And this magical world is so convincing and it is so real. And throughout the book, it undergoes a transformation. This is the whole history of this holiday resort of Vermillion Sands. And it begins at its height, where everybody goes to Vermillion Sands because it's the 'in' thing. It's where you go to have a good time. It's where you go to have holiday. It's full of these bars where the rich people go, but it's still accessible in the beginning. Normal people also go there and try to make money by catering to the rich.

And then it becomes more and more crazy. It becomes more and more exclusive, and it becomes more and more decadent. And over the course of the book, which is all short stories (this, there's no overarching story, and there is no cast of characters that is constant, it's all different stories), but the overarching thing is a development of Vermillion Sands, of this resort. And so over time, it becomes more exclusive, but they're more decadent and more expensive. And then people start leaving, and things are starting to fall apart.

And then towards the end of the book, it gets this air of an abandoned fairground, which is also again a magical environment. Bradbury has also used that in his stories, the idea of this fairground that still contains the ghosts of the people having fun, and somehow their shadows are still there, but in reality, they have departed. And now everything is falling apart, and it's the sadness of the abandoned fairground. And this is what happens to Vermillion Sands too. So everybody goes, everybody leaves, and there is nothing left there anymore. And only a few people are left, only a few people are there, often crazies, loners, people who are left behind when the party has already moved on to some other place. They are left behind in this broken place, and they still create their own stories in this place, which now are stories of abandonment and of decay.

And so this is a beautiful book. It's a beautiful book because it's not only beautiful in its language, it is wonderful in its images, and it is also, in this overarching sense, it is a history of a place that begins as a young and strong and crazy place of fun and ends as a place of sadness, in a kind of walk through the seasons where you start in spring and you go through the summer, and in the end, you have the fall, where the fall, the word 'fall' itself, right, indicates a fall, the falling of leaves, the falling of the season, and the decay that comes with it. And so in the end, you have fall and winter in this book, and Vermillion Sands is abandoned.

But we have its stories in this book. They are here forever, and we can always access them.

And we will start with the first story. I will just read you two pages, the first two pages from the first story. It is not enough to get an idea of what the story is about, and although the story is beautiful, it is wonderful as a story, and the whole book is wonderful as a book, as I said. We will just be able to hear a little bit of this magic of language in this. And I want you to relax and not to think too much about it. Like I said in this poetry video, it's not about really understanding what's happening. It's about closing your eyes and living there, going to Vermillion Sands, being part of it, seeing it in front of your eye. And I will also put up some pictures that I think fit it. So let's enjoy these two pages together. The story is called "The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D".

All summer the cloud sculptors would come from Vermillion Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers that rose like wide pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon West.

The tallest of the towers was Coral D, and here the rising air above the sand reefs was topped by swanlike clumps of fair weather cumulus. Lifted on the shoulders of the air above the crown of Coral D, we would carve seahorses and unicorns, the portraits of presidents and film stars, lizards and exotic birds.

As the crowd watched from their cars, a cool rain would fall onto the dusty roofs, weeping from the sculptured clouds as they sailed across the desert floor towards the sun.

Of all the cloud sculptures we were to carve, the strangest were the portraits of Leonora Chanel. As I look back to that afternoon last summer when she first came in her wide limousine to watch the cloud sculptures of Coral D, I know we barely realized how seriously this beautiful but insane woman regarded the sculptures floating above her in that calm sky. Later her portraits, carved in the whirlwind, were to weep their storm rain upon the corpses of their sculptors.

I had arrived in Vermillion Sands three months earlier. A retired pilot, I was painfully coming to terms with a broken leg and the prospect of never flying again. Driving into the desert one day, I stopped near the coral towers on the highway to Lagoon West. As I gazed at these immense pagodas stranded on the floor of this fossil sea, I heard music coming from a sand reef 200 yards away.

Swinging on my crutches across the sliding sand, I found a shallow basin among the dunes where sonic statues had run to seed beside a ruined studio. The owner had gone, abandoning the hangar-like buildings to the sand-rays and the desert, and on some half-formed impulse I began to drive out each afternoon. From the lathes and joists left behind, I built my first giant kites, and later gliders with cockpits. Tethered by their cables, they would hang above me in the afternoon air like amiable ciphers.

One evening, as I wound the gliders down onto the winch, a sudden gale rose over the crest of Coral D. While I grappled with a whirling handle, trying to anchor my crutches in the sand, two figures approached across the desert floor.

One was a small hunchback with a child's overlit eyes and a deformed jaw twisted like an anchor barb to one side. He scuttled over to the winch and wound the tattered gliders towards the ground, his powerful shoulders pushing me aside. He helped me onto my crutch and peered into the hangar. Here my most ambitious glider to date, no longer a kite but a sail-plane with elevators and control lines, was taking shape on the bench.

He spread a large hand over his chest. "Petit Manuel. Acrobat and weightlifter. Nolan!" he bellowed. "Look at this!"

His companion was squatting by the sonic statues, twisting their helixes so that their voices became more resonant.

"Nolan's an artist," the hunchback confided to me. "He'll build you gliders like condors."

The tall man was wandering among the gliders, touching their wings with his sculptor's hands. His morose eyes were set in a face like a board box's. He glanced at the plaster on my leg and my faded flying jacket, and gestured at the gliders.

"You have given cockpits to them, Major?" The remark contained a complete understanding of my motives. He pointed to the coral towers rising above us into the evening sky. "With silver iodide we could carve the clouds."

The hunchback nodded encouragingly to me, his eyes lit by an astronomy of dreams.

I don't know what you think, but for me, these are two of the most beautiful pages of text, of prose, I've ever read. And it goes on like that. It never lets you down, this book. You read, and every page is a discovery of a new marvel, of a new wondrous world full of magic and full of beauty and full of tragedy also.

It is always the danger that is close to the beauty. Here we have the beautiful clouds and the sculptures made of clouds, but there's also this crazy woman. We know from the beginning that somebody will die, and the clouds will rain upon the corpses of the sculptors. We know that these airplanes are dangerous, they are homemade. We know later that together with the jewels come the scorpions on which the jewels are fastened. There's always this sense of danger being ever-present around the corner while people have fun. There is fun, but there's also this danger.

The author himself, J.G. Ballard, writes in the beginning, in the preface to the book:

"Vermillion Sands is my guess at what the future will actually be like. It is a curious paradox that almost all science fiction, however far removed in time and space, is really about the present day. Very few attempts have been made to visualize a unique and self-contained future that offers no warnings to us. Perhaps because of this cautionary tone, so many of science fiction's notional futures are zones of unrelieved grimness. Even its heavens are like other people's hells. By contrast, Vermillion Sands is a place where I would be happy to live."

So this is all I have for today. I don't want to talk much more after these beautiful sentences by J.G. Ballard. And I encourage you to get this book, read it. It will change how you think about writing. It will change how you think about books. It will accompany you for years, like it does me. I've carried this book around for three decades now, from Germany to Hong Kong, and I've always had it with me. And I hope that it will also become your friend and companion in a similar way.

Tell me in the comments what you thought about it. I'm curious if it resonates with you in the same way like it does to me, or if it left you indifferent, or if you hated it.

See you next time.