Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.
Interpretation
This quote explores the connection between technology and human experience, highlighting the dark side of innovation.
In this passage, J. G. Ballard presents a chilling vision of how technology can shape human sexuality and experience through pain and injury. Vaughan's obsession with the violent and traumatic aspects of technology raises questions about the relationship between modernity and the human condition, suggesting that our advancements may carry unsettling implications that are often overlooked. This perspective invites readers to consider the hidden costs of technological progress and its potential to distort our understanding of intimacy and desire.
In practice
In a discussion on the impact of technology on relationships during a seminar.
Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?
Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.
Keeping religion immune from criticism is both unwarranted and dangerous.
Are we the only members of the Galaxy that can actually understand what a galaxy is? Could Homo sapiens really be the pinnacle of Creation - the cleverest critters in the cosmos? If we learn the answer is 'no,' that would affect our philosophies forever.
'Melancholy' is prettier than 'depression'; it connotes a kind of nocturnal grace. Makes one feel more innocently beleaguered.
Seek not abroad, for in the inner man dwells the truth.
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