Location #8

Chapter 7.

At Northolt police pound I showed my pass to the guard, custodian of this museum of wrecks. I hestitated there, like a husband collecting his wife from the depot of a strange and perverse dream. Some twenty or so crashed vehicles were parked in the sunlight against the rear wall of an abandoned cinema. At the far end of the asphalt yard was a truck whose entire driving cabinet had been crushed...

Unnerved by the deformations, I moved from one car to the next. The first vehicle, a blue taxi, had been struck at the at the point of its near-side headlamp...

The glamour and poetry of Northolt continues unabated... Is this the car pound?... it backs onto the police station and certainly from google maps, if it is merely a car park then some of the cars appear seriously hemmed in...

What a strange metaphor Ballard applies: "collecting his wife from the depot of a strange and perverse dream..." strange unless we think of Orpheus searching for a Eurydice in an industrial cathone . There is a curious Delvaux quality to the image Ballard conjures.... made all the more pointed by the fact that the police station and car pound? backs onto the railway line, invoking Delvaux's famous painting "Trains du Soir"...

Talking of car pounds, I see the as part of the Forensic Science course at Islington College the students are offered the opportunity to visit the Metropolitan Police Car Pound at Charlton

Location #7

Chapter 6

We reached the multi-storey car-park behind the air-freight buildings. I drove around the canted floors of this oblique and ambiguous building and parked in an empty bay among the cars on the sloping roof...

Twenty feet away across the empty parking bays a man with a camera sat on the bonnet of a carp parked against the concrete balcony. I recognized the tall man with the scarred forehead who had watched near the accident site near below the flyover, the doctor in white coat at the hospital....

Stanley meets Livingstone, Ballard meets Vaughan... later (need to find the reference) it also suggests that Vaughan witnessed the aftermath of Ballard's alerted to the scene from the police radio accident reports. More and more it suggests that the character Ballard somehow 'mentally dies' in the crash, that Vaughan is a psychopomp, the crash being a metaphor for a nervous breakdown, an Osirian disintegration. Remember in Atrocity Exhibition there is the chapter 'Eurydice in a used parking lot'


Eurydice was the wife of Orpheus. Orpheus loved her dearly; on their wedding day, Orpheus played songs filled with happiness as his bride danced through the meadow. One day, a satyr had seen her and pursued her. According to legend, Eurydice stepped on a snake and fell to the ground. The venomous snake had bitten her, leaving Eurydice dead. Distraught, Orpheus played and sang so mournfully that all the nymphs and gods wept. In their saddened states, they told him to travel to the Underworld and retrieve her. Orpheus did so, and by his music softened the hearts of Hades and Persephone, his singing so sweet that even the Erinyes wept.'

Recently I have seen Ballard describe 'Crash' as a Psychopathic Hymn... perhaps he is hinting that it relates to the songs of Orpheus as he searches for his dead wife.... Again emphasising that Crash is in fact a tragedy about the psychopathological possibilities at every intersection of our daily lives. What most people refuse to admit in their criticism of Crash is that the language rendered by Ballard's genius is perversely beautiful, matched only in terms of outrage perhaps by Mirbeau's botanically infused cruelties in "Torture Garden"

Indeed there is a definite Pauline echo in the sudden and meaningless chance meeting of Ballard and the dead husband of Dr. Remmington, in the myth of Eurydice's snake bite in the meadow...

"Now, brothers, about times and dates we do not need to write to you, for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, "Peace and safety," destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape" 1 Thessalonians 5:1-5

Is there not a road safety, clunk-clink, think once think bike (or bite!), Public Infomation Film like quality to Paul's apocalyptic advertisement copy...

and as the 1st world war poet William Hodgson wrote so prophetically two days before he died:

I, on that on my familiar hill

Saw with uncomprehending eyes

A hundred of Thy sunsets spill

Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,

Ere the sun swings his noonday sword

Must say goodbye to all of this;

By all delights that I shall miss,Help me to die, O Lord.