'Extending outwards for two or three yards from the bank were the long splinters of what appeared to be crystallizing water, the angular facets emitting a blue and prismatic light washed by the wake from their craft. The splinters were growing in the water like crystals in a chemical solution, accreting more and more material to themselves, so that along the bank there was a congested mass of rhomboidal spears like the barbs of a reef, sharp enough to slit the hull of their craft.'
(J G Ballard's The Crystal World, 1966, Jonathon Cape Ltd, UK)
In 'The Crystal World' the crystal growth like a virus spreads through the West African jungle. As it comes into contact with trees, buildings, rivers, bodies, the subject undergoes a crystallization process that begins like an icy frost which spreads until it engulfs the whole body. The body is both frozen in time and yet proliferates and grows as a crystal does.
Ballard explains this phenomenom using the relationship between matter and time. As time 'leaks' away, molecules produce 'spatial replicas of themselves'.
'It's as if a sequence of displaced but identical images of the same object were being produced through refraction through a prism, but with the element of time replacing the role of light.'
The analogy between leprosy and the crystallization are drawn, '... the virus, with its semi-animate, crystalline existence, half in and half out of our own time-stream, as if intersecting it at an angle...'.
There are parallels between the crystallized forest, with the trees, birds, plants, beasts, and people frozen within it, and the Archive, where time has been suspended and deterioration and death arrested.
The protagonist Dr Sauders writes 'Here we have always associated movement with life and the passage of time, but from my experience within the forest near Mont Royal I know that all motion leads inevitably to death, and that time is its servant.'
The drawing above tries to represent the dark heart where the object may be embedded, the idea of refraction, light and the prism.
