THE IMPOSSIBILITY EXHIBITION was written for Jeremy Welsh's video tribute to J.G.Ballard TERMINAL ZONES, which was screened at the London Filmakers' Co-Op in May 1990 as part of the "Apocalypse Culture" series. Text © copyright Paul A. Green 1990,1996.
ARTISTE
All afternoon Dr. Greenhaus had wandered along the passages and hallways of the deserted school, watching the young woman as she staple-gunned the children's artworks to tall sheets of scarred plywood. These precariously mounted displays loomed along the corridors like protective screens in a hastily improvised ward for the victims of nuclear accidents. As Jacqueline Mayakovski deftly tacked up yet another rectangle of daubed sugar paper, Dr. Greenhaus speculated idly. Why was this mysterious girl in the paint-stained smock continually putting up these delinquents' paintings, day after day, as if to cover every surface in the building? Perhaps she found this display of motor skills compulsive, yet therapeutic. More likely she was an amnesiac performance artist, stranded in the school long after the expiry of her corporate sponsorship, and now unable ever to face her journey home across the reptile-infested subways of the ruined city. She was smiling enigmatically, like the sun-faded clipping of Brigitte Bardot he'd found pasted inside a staff-room locker; and her lips flickered, as if in synchronisation with some fleeting subliminal impulse. But her comment was drowned in the roar of a Sea King landing in the playground outside, bringing in another contingent of exhausted riot police and bewildered behavioural dysfunction specialists. Everywhere, they were arriving too late. Their clients, an army of proletarian artistes manques , were fleeing the schools in their thousands. As the helicopter settled, whirling vortices of dust and litter were scattered against the chain-links of the playground perimeter fence.
EXHIBIT 2000
Every morning, after a night of uneasy dreams on the broken staffroom furniture, and token breakfast from a vandalised vending machine, he would try to decode the latent content of these infantile artefacts. Jacqueline Mayakovski continued her silent work throughout the night, like a spectral handmaiden of Delvaux gliding through the marble amphitheatres of sleep. Soon she would have decorated every floor of the nine storey building with the pupils' imagery. He wandered among their abstractions, crude spirals of cerise or magenta hanging like deranged miniature galaxies against the grey rectangular geometries of the dinner-room. Upstairs, the walls outside the biology lab were covered in watercolour surreal pastiches, cryptozoic vegetation sprouting a giant penis with a bow tie, an insect-headed woman with a flaming whip. The landscapes of such primal terrors were presumably beyond the reach of the cadres of psychotherapists and social workers who had once filled the school every day. Indeed, despite his own basic training in psychopathology (a hurried crash-course, before his enforced redeployment to the school) Greenhaus was unable to enter the mindscapes of these remedial-room Dalis and Ernsts. The once-prized doctorate in comparative literature that had hung over his desk at All Souls' was little use to him in his role as supply teacher. He should have taken up that option of Communications Consultant with the Mitsoguchi Corporation, but it was too late now.
MEDIA MASTER
In the English Department stockroom, among the piles of burned books, he found a working TV set. As bands of purple cloud darkened around the silhouettes of the gutted office buildings, Greenhaus watched the Headmaster guesting on an early-evening talkshow. "We are bringing them back into the school system," the Head told the studio audience, "and we shall restart the heart of our nation's classrooms with our pedagogic skills, our curriculum- mapping skills, our pastoral management skills. We are waiting to reclaim our youth any day now. It is not an impossible task...." Greenhaus had not seen a pupil for seventeen days and now only a handful of teachers managed to arrive for the staff meetings and case conferences that had once dominated their working day. Those who survived commuting by armoured bus left well before dusk. Many, like the melancholy Traven or the introverted Koestler, had been kidnapped (or killed) by their ex-pupils, who now owed their loyalties to rival groups of local militia, each flaunting its distinctive style of weaponry and sportswear. Greenhaus heard a footstep in the corridor and instinctively reached for his largactil gun. Although its last dart had been discharged long ago, he found its presence reassuring. But the presence on the doorway was Jacqueline Mayakovski, who removed her dark glasses and produced a Luger from under her iridescent plastic raincoat. She held it in both hands, like a female investigator in a re-run of The Rockford Files. He could hear the distant throb of the helicopters. "You're always in the way, Dr Greenhaus. I've waited hours to get access to this room for the Exhibition. You're all making it impossible for us." Calmly she fired, into the heart of the TV set. The Headmaster's face imploded.
THE CATALOGUE OF APOCALYPSE
After their encounter in the English stockroom, Greenhaus saw little of Jacqueline Mayakovski in the days that followed. He imagined she held some private territory of her own, perhaps in the art studios on the fourth floor, where she nurtured edible fungi or cultivated luminous crystals. The security staff had finally withdrawn for the duration and there was no-one else left to challenge their free movement around the building, or indeed question any aspect of their identity. Greenhaus was more preoccupied with the increasing difficulty of finding food in the roach-infested kitchens and with his ongoing attempt to devise a definitive collection of significant artefacts, his own response to the proliferating collage of pictures that covered the interior walls of the building, his uniquely private view. Patrolling the site and picking up litter had always been one of his regular academic duties. Now it was imperative for his psychic survival, a perverse archeology of the future. As he discovered the objects he assembled them in one of the English Department classrooms and spread them across the empty desks, visual aids for a object lesson in his own increasingly fissile consciousness. At the end of the day he itemised them in an old register:
RED ALERT
The classroom was empty, like a drained swimming-pool. However, although the effort of scouring the overturned filing-cabinets in the Headmaster's office had exhausted Greenhaus, he still stood for a full fifty-five minutes at the front of the darkening room, shouting at the overturned chairs and tables, as if trying to admonish a gang of escaping poltergeists. Despite himself, it was impossible to stop his anxiety ritual of teaching. The rigid templates of the timetable had been etched into his fragile spinal geometry over years, maybe decades, in the industry. His neural warning systems had been on full alert for so long that he could not remember a time when he hadn't spent most of his waking hours pre-empting hostile missile attacks or intervening in minor tribal conflicts. The blank cuboid geometry of the room, its insolent void of wired glass and grubby melamine, might , even now, conceal some vindictive prank learned from Ulster or Vietnam, a sticky membrane of Semtex under a pile of folders, a poisoned thumb-tack on the teacher's chair. He groped for the edge of the graffiti-gouged chalkboard, his pitted lips twitching, his arms waving in the familiar rhythms of exhortation and rebuke, his ears already roaring with the white noise of rioting adolescent mobs, his vision a reddish mist of primal fury. It was his responsibility to preserve world peace. But this was a crisis of the cerebellum, the deep brain, the saurian guardian of his most secret uterine territories, the Mezozoic realms of his Id. His adrenalin overload would rush him down the time-corridors to press the red button, to unleash the purifying radiation of his submerged megatons, those ultimate global peacemakers, which alone could bring him the primaeval silence he craved, the infinite silence of archeopsychic time. That would teach them a lesson.
MADONNA OF THE SUBURBS
When, hours later, he awoke from the sudden fugue, he found himself sprawled on the floor, hands around the charred throat of the Rushdie effigy, which was already crumbling into fragments like a ravaged mummy. The firedrill alarm was still buzzing, a high-pitched sine- wave undulating as monotonously as a line of man-made concrete dunes on a weapons-testing range. Jacqueline Mayakovski stood over him with a cup of black coffee and an apple. Her long iridescent coat hung from her shoulders like the plumage of an exotic bird. "You're getting carried away again, Dr. Greenhaus." She knelt and studied the sutures of his skull with clinical calm. "These fantasies of cosmic destruction and re-creation are all in your head." She had the bright but firm manner of a young mother confronting a wayward toddler in its first Freudian excesses. "You're suffering from iconic over-dose, Doctor. It's just one of the symptoms. If you'd had to study those children's pictures for months on end, as I have, you might begin to understand the whole syndrome. You'd better hurry up, before I start taking the exhibition down." She raised the coffee cup to his lips and glided away. He could imagine her now as a housewife in the lost paradises of the leafy suburbs, guiding anima of Botticellian garden-parties, an enigmatic madonna smiling down from the balconies of memory.
THE TERMINAL REPORTS
In the evenings, as he sat in the physics labs on the sixth floor, the signals from hundreds of orbiting TV satellites penetrating every tissue of his body, Greenhaus was sometimes tempted to pick up his infra-red binoculars and scan the tower blocks on the far side of the motorway. He hoped to see someone watching alien porn, some ghostly conjunction of limbs as distant and implausible as the docking of Iraqi and Iranian space modules. But tonight, as every night, he only glimpsed the dark outline of satellite dishes, tiny excrescent fungi sprouting above blank windows and empty walkways. Soon he was overcome by his other obsessive urge, to complete his terminal reports, a task as huge (and seemingly futile) as Jacqueline Mayakovski's exhibition, curated for pupils and parents who had long ago turned their backs on the static hand-made artefact to participate in the ever-shifting continuum of an exploding electronic universe. A few lights flickered in the towers, like cave-fires in a cliff-face of the night. He tried to ignore their allure as he thumbed through the interleaved carbons of the report forms and attempted to find convincing formulae to explain the increasing inability of the species to educate its offspring. "Lack of attention..violently disruptive behaviour...an habitual non-attender..." - the ready-made phrases in boxes, designed for faster ticking and a rationalised assessment procedure, no longer made sense, for clients whose hyper-fast senses were unsystematically deranged. They had long since taken the extra-mural option. The rumble of distant explosions and the distorted blare of sound systems on the night wind disturbed his concentration. The actual topology of the laboratory, its cage-like enclosure of space, was contracting around him, as if the gravity of his presence was warping the flickering fluorescent light. He had to move from this constricting spatio-temporal matrix. As he left, in search of Jacqueline Mayakovski and her Sybilline folios, he tossed the report forms into a wastebin and added a lighted match.
THE IMPOSSIBILITY EXHIBITION
"You see, Doctor, the pictures regress as the pupils get older." Jacqueline Mayakovski sat among the Rousseauesque jungle of her potted plants and sifted through the piles of pictures. "Here is a standard third-year fantasy." She pointed to one of the pseudo-surrealist gouaches that Greenhaus had noticed outside the Life Science room. In a burning desert, under orange skies, a squat headless earth-coloured hermaphrodite was being eaten by a robotic crustacean. The picture was entitled "Deathworld - James Tallis 3B." "That's just apocalyptic mannerism, I realise, " she added, half-apologetically, "but compare it to what last year's fifth year were doing." The wall behind her was papered with torn sheets covered in wild scrawls, gestural spray-gun marks, a demented calligraphy that seemed compelled to cross a given space with as many savage loops and violent intersections as possible, as if that were the only way it could trace and affirm its actuality, in a polymorphous-perverse act of self-obliteration. "It's not just like the territorial death-tags on the subways," she said, with a faint shudder. Greenhaus recalled how travellers sometimes blundered into inner-city free-fire zones, often dying horribly, simply because they couldn't read such sinister tribal glyphs. "This is a unique collection of autographs, by a generation of autists. I'm not an intellectual, Doctor. I'll leave the rest of the explanations to you." She made for the door. He tried to follow, but her sure-footed agility had already taken her up the first turn of the darkened stairwell. His route also went upwards, through the smoke-filled corridors, where he lost her.
TERMINAL EXHIBITIONIST
"An electron, " shouted Dr. Greenhaus, to the masses far below, "is a photonic system trapped in a space-time cavity..." Police searchlight beams stabbed the night sky. A rising wind was blowing bitterly up here on the roof of the school and he doubted if the young bodies pressed against the mesh of the playground fence could hear a word. The cheap megaphone was already filtering and processing his utterance, turning him into a mere transient sample in an acid-house mix-down. In any case, he was certain that the crowd had been drawn by huge tongues of flame, now licking the windows of the labs, under the impression this was the work of their peers. They were chanting unintelligibly and surging against the wire, as firemen began to run a hydraulic hoist up the sheer glass side of the building. Policemen with perspex shields glinting in the firelight formed a hollow square around the edge of the playground. A smaller group of officers- marksmen, trained negotiators? - were waving him down. He gripped the side of a ventilation duct and began to hurl textbooks into the darkness; but it was a futile display. It was only a matter of time as to who would get to him first, the kids or the Educational Security forces. Both extrapolations were negative. He had only minutes to finish his exposition.
TIME-WINDOWS (1)
Greenhaus threw away the megaphone and lifted a pocket cassette machine to his lips. Despite the increasing noise and smoke, he was determined to file his last report from the terminal zone. "The students' "paintings" are not merely the expression of anomie or socio- economic malaise. They are the semiotics of a mutant ontology, an autistic withdrawal from the physical constraints of Newtonian time and causality. Faced with the conflicting claims of "reality" and the "virtual reality" of the electronic media landscape, with the bewildering seductions of hyper-possibility, in which even the simplest of our actions creates an unpredictable wave-front of improbability, they are seeking relief in atavism." He crouched on the flat asphalt roof, shouting into the tiny microphone while the great rotors of the Sea King throbbed overhead. "For, as they accelerate along the time-gradient of adolescence towards adulthood, they feel increasingly trapped in the black hole of their own body- identities. The continuum folds back in on them, like the roof of a sabotaged aircraft. Matter itself is a time-trap."
TIME-WINDOWS (2)
As armed Ed Sec officers leaped from the hatch of the Sea King, Greenhaus wondered if Jacqueline Mayakovski had escaped the multi-storey inferno. He could not help feeling admiration and even affection for this serene self-possessed young woman, who had survived the horrors of the recent months with such grace and aplomb. He wished he'd paid greater attention during her earlier conversational gambits, about everyday hobbies like cycling or swimming or handicrafts. A gun barrel prodded his left pectoral. He didn't resist as two burly Australian Ed Sec orderlies grabbed his arms, while a thin lizard-faced medic searched for a vein in his scabbed flesh. As the needle sank in, the gannet-like screaming of the children slowly faded like a huge panoramic sweep of white noise; and the whine of the helicopter turbines sank to a diminuendo. He looked up. It was almost dawn. Light was breaking against the black towers, bursting through the terraced citadels of indigo cloud, and against the light he could perceive motion, avian movement, the beat of angelic wings. In her flimsy hand-made craft of paper and wood, the ornithoptric bird-woman of the art room was rising on the thermals of the burning school, far above the all-consuming flames of the Impossibility Exhibition, towards her reborn paradises in the forests of the South.