M E T A B U N K E R
Slowed down in his physical activity but attentive, anxious over the catastrophic probabilities of his environment, the visitor in this perilous place is beset with a singular heaviness; in fact he is already in the grips of that cadaveric rigidity from which the shelter was designed to protect him.
The actual and potencial destructiveness of the atomic bomb plays straight into the hands of the Unconscious. The most cursory study of the dream-life and fantasies of the insane shows that ideas of world-destruction are latent in the unconscious mind...
Nagasaki destroyed by the magic of science is the nearest man has yet approached to the realization of dreams that even during the safe immobility of sleep are accustomed to develop into nightmares of anxiety.
Elements in a quantal world:
The terminal beach.
The terminal bunker.
The blocks.
"The key to the past lies in the present". Here, the key to the present lay in the future. This island was a fossil of time future, its bunkers and blockhouses illustrating the principle that the fossil record of life was one of armour and the exoskeleton.
Above him, the five apertures looked upon this scene like the tutelary symbols of a futuristic myth. a city of deserted mausoleums, abandoned even by the dead...
...like the abandoned wombs that gave birth to this herd of megaliths.
an "archaeology of the brutal encounter"
The system of megaliths now provided a complete substitute for those functions of his mind which gave to it its sense of the sustained rational order of time and space.
the tomb of the unkown civilian, Homo hydrogenensis,
Eniwetok Man
The sun divided into its five emblematic beacons their common focus dominated the landscape and gave it a unique perspective tutelary symbols of a futuristic myth faceless lines of tomb-booths
...like the abandoned wombs that gave birth to this herd of megaliths.
James G. Ballard, The Terminal Beach
Edward Glover, War, Sadism and Pacifism
Mordecai Roshwald, Level 7
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archeology
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster
W.G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn