TH4. Pharyngeal Phantasy & Spinal Polyptoton

We find Ballard rehearsing the Meckel-Serres Law when he writes that the foetus’s ‘uterine odyssey [recapitulates] the entire evolutionary past’1—a statement that also helps decrypt the novelist’s preoccupation with Elizabeth Taylor’s ‘lost gill-slits’,2 for Haeckel had theorized that the human embryo’s pharyngeal grooves are palingenetic repetitions of ichthyic branchia, or gill arches—that the ‘human gill slits are (literally) the adult features of an ancestor’.3 Ballard himself, in 1970, acknowledges the naturphilosophische provenance of this idea, citing ‘Goethe’s notion that the skull is formed of modified vertebrae’ and that ‘the bones of the pelvis may constitute the remnant of a lost sacral skull’.4

But the true progenitor of ‘Goethe’s notion’ was the towering Lorenz Oken (1779–1851), who, among other startling hypotheses, maintained that the entire human musculoskeletal system was procedurally constructed from a single self-iterating and self-deforming vertebra.5 Beginning as a calcified vertebral ‘vesicle’, elongated to make a ‘spine’, and differentiating into poles to render ‘head and pelvis’, Oken deduces the human from the metamere. The ‘entire human being is only a vertebra’: the ‘brain’ is repeated ‘spinal marrow’; the ‘braincase’ a refrain of the ‘backbone’. (A noteworthy reversal of the supposition of ancient Galenic medicine that the spine sprouts from the brain ‘as a trunk’.)6 ‘The skeleton is only a fully grown, articulated, repetitive vertebrae’, he expatiated.7 There can be no doubt that in Oken we have recapitulation’s most profligate proponent, and one of the most important progenitors of Spinal Catastrophism.

Oken’s schema implied that the skull and pelvis are morphic moieties and should be considered as resonant polarities or tectological echoes of one another. This theory of the ‘sacral skull’, it is reported in The Atrocity Exhibition, succeeds in uncovering the ‘rudiments of symmetry not only about the vertical axis but also the horizontal’—i.e., not just across the sagittal but also the transverse plane. Here Ballard clearly alludes to the idea, popularized by palaeontologists since the 1880s and only recently fully discredited, that dinosaurs owned a posterior ‘second brain’ housed in the pelvic cavity. This idea of a saurian lumbar brain arose from the discovery of fossil traces of dorsosacral nervous enlargements and the subsequent theorization that the prodigious Stegosaurus, given the pitiful size of its primary brain, would require a secondary plexus to which it could outsource the processing of digestive and reproductive operations.8 (This duocephalon would make the dinosaur alike to the amphisbaena of the mediaeval bestiary.) In 1914, the palaeontologist Wilhelm von Branca (1844–1928) went so far as to venture that, in the neural swelling of our solar plexus, humans appear to retain traces of the saurian pelvic encephalon.9

Ballard immediately links the suggestion of this vestigial sacral braincase to a longing for the ‘lost symmetry of the blastosphere’, ‘precursor of the embryo’ and the ‘last structure to preserve perfect symmetry in all planes’.10 A longing that recalls naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s (1772–1844) attempts to discover an underlying topological continuity across divergent phyla by modelling the contortion of the vertebrae into a cephalopod (imagining that, if one were to bend a chordate backwards about the dorsal axis—so that the head conjoins with the backside and cephalic and caudal ends converge—one would derive a squid).11 Such secret morphisms and tectologies, Ballard suggests, are the cryptic source of our desire to ‘return to a symmetrical world, one that will recapture the perfect symmetry of the blastosphere’,12 a desire to regress from bilateral schism back into radial immersion. Fulfilment of which, incidentally, would cement a new alliance with the echinoderms: starfish and urchins are genetically bilaterian animals that have ‘retrogressed’ to a radial body-plan, sacrificing their heads to globular immanence. Their self-immolating ecstasies make them the true mystics of the sea. And with the attendant decerebration, these pentamerist beings simultaneously revolted against cephalization. (In the ‘Voices of Time’, Ballard describes a mutated cnidarian—a genetically radial sea anemone—prematurely wrenched from spherical immersion via genetic modification; it develops a ‘rudimentary notochord’, or proto-spine; the creature soon self-destructs, however, violently rejecting the phaneroscopic perversity of a spinal axis.)13

Ballard connects this longing for egress from the bilateral to the ‘Mythology of Amniotic Return’: the ‘impulse’ to ‘re-enter the amnionic corridor and [regress] through spinal [time]’.14 It is dramatized in The Drowned World by the outbreak of suicidal compulsions to drown oneself in the so-called ‘Pool of Thanatos’: the ‘uterine night’ of a deep jungle lagoon.15 Free-flowing liquidity revolts against spinal erection: postural differentiation contra oceanic Indifferenz.16 As Barker himself later noted, ‘[n]umerous trends in contemporary culture attest to an attempted recovery of the icthyophidian- or flexomotile-spine: horizontal and impulsive rather than vertical and stress-bearing’.17 Flatten deep time into the unconscious by interpreting it precisely as a species of forgetfulness, and immediately there arises the desire for recollection and return. We long to lapse, hoping for the ‘rapture of rupture’, the rupture that will rid us of all individualising boundaries.18

Here we finally arrive at the core Spinal Catastrophist contention: that each threshold in life’s serial deviations from immersion (CNS-implosion → spinal-wrenching → glottogonous encasement) instates thanataxic impulses toward rupturous resolution (return) into the surrounding media. This would be the ultimate form of recall, or anamnesis. Oken and the Naturphilosophen were reticent about willing this total recall (though it is there, as a tragic undercurrent or Todessehnsucht, within much Idealist thought). Schelling accepted that nature strives constantly for ‘annihilation of the individual’ and that it longs to ‘revert to universal indifference’ (with ‘life itself’ thus being ‘only the bridge to death’).19 ‘Left to itself, nature would […] lead everything back into the state of utter negation’, he admitted, darkly.20 Nonetheless, aside from the centuries, what separates Ballard from his naturephilosophische forerunners is that he not only accepts but overtly champions this tendency. For Ballard, regardless of whether or not it is just or justifiable, it is undeniably desirable and, as such, a source of utter fascination. It is the point upon which the speeding highways of modernity converge. And, as the Naturphilosophen before him had nervously realised, total anamnesis is indistinguishable from annihilation. Indeed, Ballard prophesies that, at the lowest spinal-neuronic levels, organic self-inclusion completely evaginates into the ‘inhospitality of the mineral world’, its ‘inorganic growths’, its ‘profound anguish’, as in The Crystal World, where the deepest entropic future leaks backwards into the present.21 Time bends into itself, cephalopod-like: accelerative lurch into the entropic future is nothing but thoracic drop into the preorganic past.