JG Ballard 1930-2009
JG Ballard
And so, another dead hero. I got a text message whilst sat bunched up, clinging onto my singing calf muscles, in a box room above a pub in Odiham - just off junction 5 of the M3: 'Ballard's gone' it said. I immediately told the people I was with then promptly forgot about it. I was too full of other things; and given that we'd been walking for two whole days, largely numb to anything except my immediate surroundings. I thought, briefly, about contacting the JGB group on Yahoo, of which I've been a sporadic member for the last 5 years or so, and which contains a number of Ballard luminaries, but the urge passed. Later, after a couple of beers, I thought about Shepperton - just a few miles away along the frozen scream of the motorway. If I hung my head far enough out of the window of my tiny room I could see the tarmac and hear the sibilant roar of the road and beneath that another noise, the hum of psychic freight, quieter now. Much quieter.
I came to Ballard via an odd route - a half read of Empire of the Sun in my early twenties, a confused wade through Rushing to Paradise, a lunge at Crash that didn't go anywhere. I had him as an idea in my head for a while, someone I wanted to return to. Then I studied Cocaine Nights, of all books, and the door was suddenly opened: I went on a wild thrashing binge through pretty much everything I could get my hands on - and in no particular order either. Once things had settled and the themes and obsessions had started to take shape I'd already decided to study Ballard for my MA (aye, I know - the surest way to kill any love of anything off is to study it intensely); perversely, I chose to study emotion in Ballard, or more precisely, the lack of it.
Ballard came up with the phrase The Death of Affect to describe our emotional condition in the face of total media domination - to the point where the media had even colonised our unconscious. On a crude level, you could say that Ballard's entire work from, say, 'The Terminal Beach' up until Empire Of The Sun is a study of our inability to feel. His characters - lost, generally or plain psychotic - flail around for new ways to feel, to make sense of the projected landscapes of the disordered self and the odd contours of the mediascape. Never one to fear the absurd, Ballard often pushed the scope of his ideas to their absolute logical conclusion - primarily to see what may lay beyond. Not necessarily on some transcendental quest for enlightenment but simply to understand. What I came to realise was that Ballard, like Francis Bacon, was a master of seeing: he had that cold-eyed ability to look at something for a second longer than most would dare, and, crucially, the ability to render it in an exact idiolect. And what I also came to realise was that Ballard was most likely a moralist, perhaps an ambivalent one (if that isn't a contradiction in terms), but a moralist all the same - and absolutely the towering figure at the centre of post-war literature.
When Miracles of Life came along I probably hadn't read any Ballard for close to two years. My initial thoughts were that it was a book that didn't really need writing, in that it sought to hard to explain away the theoretical framework at the heart of all his work; but that was before the sections in which he described his emotional and domestic life. We all knew of the horrors of the late '60s and his bringing up a young family but I'd never seen it described so nakedly, so affectingly. It brought me to my knees on a few occasions. And now at the time of his death - and I know this is probably a largely tautological statement - there seems an immense outpouring of genuine affection and grief. On returning to the work there seems a new shifting undercurrent of emotional depth that I simply hadn't cottoned on to before, or had simply been ignorant of a very obvious absent presence. I'm sure this intensity will fade as the news sinks in but for now passages like this from 'The Voices of Time' are almost unbearably poignant.
"Stepping into the inner circle of the mandala, a few yards from the platform at its centre, he realized that the tumult was beginning to fade, and that a single stronger voice had emerged and was dominating the others. He climbed on to the platform, raised his eyes to the darkened sky, moving through the constellations to the island galaxies beyond them, hearing the thin archaic voices reaching to him across the millennia. In his pockets he felt the paper tapes, and turned to find the distant diadem of Canes Venatici, heard its great voice mounting in his mind."
"Like an endless river, so broad that its banks were below the horizons, it flowed steadily towards him, a vast course of time that spread outwards to fill the sky and the universe, enveloping everything within them. Moving slowly, the forward direction of its majestic current almost imperceptible, Powers knew that its source was the source of the cosmos itself. As it passed him, he felt its massive magnetic pull, let himself be drawn into it, borne gently on its powerful back. Quietly it carried him away, and he rotated slowly, facing the direction of the tide. Around him the outlines of the hills and the lake had faded, but the image of the mandala, like a cosmic clock, remained fixed before his eyes, illuminating the broad surface of the stream. Watching it constantly, he felt his body gradually dissolving, its physical dimensions melting into the vast continuum of the current, which bore him out into the centre of the great channel, sweeping him onward, beyond hope but at last at rest, down the
broadening reaches of the river of eternity."
There has been a huge amount of coverage of Ballard's death, testament to his importance to so many people. Below are a few things worth reading:
A tribute from Michael Moorcock at Ballardian
The full text of David Pringle's excellent obituary over at Rick McGrath's site
A series of pieces in The Guardian showing Ballard's influence on a number of different artforms
A moving memoir from Will Self
Chris Petit at Granta
A couple of excellent video interviews Ballard gave to an Italian TV station