Chronopolis

Secret Cinema

“…In J.G. Ballard’s short story Chronopolis,the inhabitants of a run-down city live without clocks. Time-keeping has been outlawed. But a young man’s curiousity (his name is Newman) leads him to a deserted part of the city where time once ruled peoples’ lives absolutely. Clocks are everywhere here, on the side’s of skyscrapers and in the central plaza that was ground zero for a civilisation controlled by time.

All the clocks have long since stopped at the exact time of the revolution that overthrew them. Newman sets his sights on restoring the enormous central clock through which all the others were once run. The idea of the story is that free of the tyranny of time, people gradually stagnate, society runs down, that while a society controlled by time may be highly efficent it is nevertheless soulless, a fascist state where human autonomy is virtually outlawed.

Let time take over and it will rule you like a dictator, ignore it and you’ll sink into boundless lethargy. It captures our natural fascination with clocks, with questing minds setting out in search of answers, but it also articulates our unease with time as a personal and political tool of oppression….”

J.G. Ballard (Surrealist, Scorpio) short stories are amazing and Chronopolis, as you can see from the above, has the most stunningly Saturnine themes. Essential Saturn transit reading for sure.

And the above dilemmas so aptly describe the task of coming to grips with our own personal Saturns.  Don’t you think?  In fact you could just replace the word “time” above with “Saturn” and you’d have some real useful astro advice.

The alternative name for Saturn  is, of course, Chronos.