The Drowned World.

That's "The bridge shadow," posted yesterday, turned upside down, as recommended, in the comments, by The Crack Emcee.

"The Drowned World" floated into my head as a good title for this picture, and I had to look it up to remember what it was.

The Drowned World is a 1962 science fiction novel by J. G. Ballard. In contrast to much post-apocalyptic fiction, the novel features a central character who, rather than being disturbed by the end of the old world, is enraptured by the chaotic reality that has come to replace it....

[A] natural catastrophe causes the real world to transform itself into a dream landscape, causing the central characters to regress mentally.

Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.

The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard... p. 41.

I'd like to read that. Perhaps there's an insight into how we might adapt to the future of rising sea levels. Maybe I have that book in the house, in amongst the old SF paperbacks that my first husband left behind when he moved out:



I was reading this New Yorker article about the book genre of books about books, where the author undertakes some reading project, like "The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading," where writer reads through a set novels that just happened to be shelved together because of the authors' names and alphabetical order.  Also: "The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World" (2004), "Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages" (2008),  and "The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everthing Else" (2010).

I got the idea of reading all the sci-fi books in that box. They're from an era in the past. They are the selections of my ex-husband, and he left them in the house. Who knows what all I could bullshit about reading all that and riffing however the mood strikes me?

.... plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory....