From Infinite Regress To Cul De Sac Poem by gershon hepner

Poets in their infinite regress
attempt to find what Kafka showed
cannot be found, the universe a mess,
blind cul de sac, and not a road.
On Zeno’s paradox they like to gnaw,
aware they never will arrive,
because their destination’s only door
is closed to those who are alive,
and open only to their predecessors
who’re remembered once they’ve died
for words regarded still as intercessors
for poets who cannot decide.

Inspired by an article by Jonathan Lethem, reviewing “Complete Stories of J. g. Ballard” (“Poet of Desolate Landscapes, ” NYT Book Review, September 13,2009) :
By the time J. G. Ballard died in April of this year, talk of his long struggle with cancer should have prepared his followers (“fans” is too pale a word for the devotion Ballard inspired) , yet the news still came as a shock. Ballard was, unmistakably, a literary futurist, at ease in the cold ruins of the millennium a lifetime sooner than the rest of us; his passing registered as a disorienting claim of time upon the timeless. Whether you embrace or reject on his behalf the label “science-fiction writer” will indicate whether you regard it as praiseful or damning, but no one reading Ballard could doubt the tidal gravity of his intellect or the stark visionary consistency of the motifs that earned him that rarest of literary awards, an adjective: Ballardian. Now, and not a moment too soon, comes The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (Norton, $35) , a staggering 1,200-page collection of a lifetime’s labors in the medium in which Ballard was perhaps most at home….
My own favorite of Ballard’s stories is “The Drowned Giant” (1964) . This tale of a vast carcass awash on a local beach is as elegant and devastating as any of Kafka’s or Calvino’s fantasies, simply asking: What happens when Gulliver drifts home? Equally perfect, “The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B., ” posthumously published in The New Yorker and the penultimate story in the collection, gently inserts the writer himself into an emptied-out version of his beloved London suburb of Shepperton, there to discover himself at an endpoint that is also a beginning. With his more celebrated role as a social critic of modernity, Ballard was also a poet of infinite regress (much as Borges described Kafka, in “Kafka and His Precursors”) , gnawing at the Zeno’s paradox of our place in the cosmos with the rigor of an Escher or Bach.

9/13/09