Author: Chris

Assertively passive

My personal Ballard retrospective has continued with me reading two of his short story collections on the trot: The Voices of Time (aka The Four Dimensional Nightmare) and The Terminal Beach, both of which I first read as a teenager in the 70s when they were part of my father’s smallish but (for me) very influential SF collection.  I loved them both on re-reading as much as I did first time round.  Indeed I’ve been engrossed by them in a way that I haven’t been engrossed by any work of fiction for a very long time.   Sad to say it, but true.

I read The Crystal World immediately before these two collections and enjoyed it very much too, but reading the stories convinces me that the short form was Ballard’s natural medium.  The Crystal World, gorgeous as it is, doesn’t really have any more to say than the short story on which it’s based (‘The Illuminated Man’, included in Terminal Beach).  I remember throwing aside High Rise unfinished when I realised that the characters had accepted from the very beginning the collapse of civilized norms that the whole book was supposedly about and were going to simply watch the whole thing amusedly from the off.  My son made a very similar observation about Empire of the Sun.  Events happen, vivid scenes are shown, but there is no real progression.  Jim is already reconciled to darkness and violence before it even begins; he doesn’t change, but simply watches.   The novel is not the obvious form for an artist who is interested in inner states rather than relationships or external events.  The short story is much better suited for that (as is painting, to which Ballard frequently refers).

These stories are full of characters whose inner life is much more important to them than human relationships or the external world.   One rips out his own eyes, like Oedipus, the better to immerse himself in his inner world.   Another, with an injured foot going septic, refuses to move from the spot where he is communing nightly with legions of snakes (and feels grateful to the colleague who is meanwhile having an affair with his wife because it gets her out of his way).   Not all of the stories fall into the same mould, but the typical character is assertively passive – see also ‘The Overloaded Man’, ‘The Giaconda of the Twilight Noon’, ‘The Terminal Beach’, ‘The Voices of Time’ – insisting on his right to sink into his obsessions and dreams and deeply sceptical of rational modernity, with its busy projects of mastery and control.   Several of the stories read like re-writes of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in which apparent darkness turns out to be the true light, and western civilization merely a futile neurosis:

…there was a deeper reason for his scepticism, underlined by Ryker’s reference to the ‘real’ reasons for the space-flights.   The implication was that the entire space programme was a symptom of some inner unconscious malaise afflicting mankind, and in particular the western technocracies, and that the space craft and satellites had been launched because their flights satisfied certain buried compulsions and desires.  By contrast, in the jungle, where the unconscious was manifest and exposed, there was no need for these insane projections… (From ‘A Question of Re-entry’ in Terminal Beach)

At least there was a passive repose about the Indians, a sense of the still intact integrity of flesh and spirit…   It was this paradigm of fatalism which Gifford would have liked to achieve – even the most wretched native, identifying himself with the irrevocable flux of nature, had bridged a greater span of years than the longest-lived European or American with his obsessive time-consciousness, cramming so-called significant experiences into his life like a glutton.   (From ‘The Delta at Sunset’ in Terminal Beach)

Poppyfields in real life

My short story Poppyfields began in a patch of waste ground.   The ground had been cleared for a new housing estate, but a legal dispute had broken out, leading to a delay.  In the interim, plants and animals colonised the place, so that it became its own little world, cut off from the rest of the world behind a high fence and padlocked gates.   Of course in due course the legal dispute would be resolved, the bulldozers would come in, and the ground would be covered in houses and roads, but neither Poppyfields nor its creatures knew or cared about that one bit.  Death and extinction are purely human concerns.

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A real-life Poppyfields has now appeared, only a few streets away from where I live.   The old site of the Cambridge Water Company was cleared some years ago for development but, for whatever reason, nothing yet has happened.  Buddleia, birch and other plants have taken root, and have grown to become a small forest with trees two or three times my height, minding their own business, and separated from the human world by a high fence.  It’s just a small patch of ground, surrounded by residential streets, a Leisure Park and an industrial estate, but it doesn’t know how old it is, or how big it is, or how briefly it will exist.  It’s as green and alive as the most ancient of ancient woods.

Yesterday, cycling to the railway station, I looked through the padlocked gate, and there was a deer standing there, looking away from me at something among the trees.

Imagined languages

I compiled this list of fictional languages for Huffington Post.  There must be lots of others I could have included.   One I thought of including was the imaginary dialect of the ‘tell‘ from the movie Mad Max: beyond the Thunderdome, but as it’s the only part of the movie I’ve actually seen, I thought perhaps not.

After this was posted I also remembered the imaginary words, supposedly from the Republic of San Lorenzo, introduced by Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Cat’s Cradle.  The words are part of the San Lorenzo religion known as Bokononism.  Some of them are rather useful.   The word granfalloon, for instance: ‘a proud and meaningless association of human beings.’  (Vonnegut suggests nations, among other examples.)

The pleasures of 3Dness

Some people say that 3D movies are a superficial gimmick that won’t last.   Certainly, it’s hard to imagine any script for which three-dimensionality would be essential, but then this true of colour also.  What isn’t so often noted is that 3Dness, like colour, is a pure pleasure, a pleasure in its own right, regardless of the purpose to which its put.  It’s the pleasure of space itself.  Hence the long history of stereo viewers, which apparently go back to 1838.  The View-Master, for instance, has been a popular toy since 1939, yet there aren’t really games you can play with it, other than admire the 3Dness of the little scenes.

I’ve always loved 3Dness, but I’ve been struck again by it’s importance since I’ve been thinking about drawing and, specifically, since I’ve been thinking how drawing or painting could capture something of what is lovely about Spring.  Lots of artists have already tried this of course , and some with great success (see the famous picture by Sisley below), but they are nevertheless limited by the flat surface on which they work.  Look up through the branches of a tree on one of these sunny days – it’s another pure pleasure – then shut one eye.   It’s still lovely of course, it’s still the same scene, but one of the things that was most enchanting has gone, the sense of depth, the actual sensory experience of it: the layers, the bounded yet open spaces between the twigs and leaves.

Drawing and painting can hint at this, just as black-and-white can hint at colour, but it can’t directly capture it, while  sculpture, though it is 3D, deals with solid masses rather than open spaces.   Someone needs to invent a drawing app, to be used with goggles and a 3D screen, which would allow artists to reach into a virtual space and lay down lines and colours not on a flat surface but at different depths, and at whatever angle they liked.  Think of the possibilities not only for capturing real scenes but for abstract images.  It could be a whole new art form!

Alfred Sisley. Small Meadows in Spring. 1880
Alfred Sisley. Small Meadows in Spring. 1880

Eden on Earth?

“Spearheaded by two biologists and a former Bain & Company management consultant, the Glowing Plant Project has at least two goals. Long-term: creating trees that glow so powerfully through bioluminescence that they can function as street lights. Short-term: promoting grassroots innovation within the realm of synthetic biology…”   [Full article here.]

 

Crystal worlds

A pleasant spin-off of my recent interest in drawing has been a certain heightened appreciation of the visual world. I find myself noticing things more, asking myself what the essence is of a particular scene, and how a person might go about capturing something of that essence on paper. This April I’ve been taken a special delight in the brightness and colour of Spring, and the intricate three-dimensional patterns of light and space made by new leaves and blossom on the branches of trees. No idea how to draw it really – impressionist smudges capture the colour and light, but can only hint at the spatial complexity – but just thinking about how it might be done makes me feel more part of it.

Serendipitous that at this point, I should take it into my head that I want to read more J.G.Ballard, and specifically The Crystal World:

The long arc of trees hanging over the water seemed to drip and glitter with myriads of prisms, the trunks and branches sheathed by bars of yellow and carmine light that bled away across the surface of the water….

Then the coruscation subsided, and the images of the individual trees reappeared , each sheathed in its armour of light, foliage glowing as if loaded with deliquescing jewels…

When Ballard imagines a forest where trees, birds, insects, crocodiles, people are slowly being encased in brilliant coloured crystals that pour out light, he’s describing a sensual delight that’s not so very different from what I am enjoying about the Spring. After all leaves and flowers – complex but endlessly repeated forms, built according to a hidden underlying algorithm – are not really such very different things from crystals.

Ballard referred to surrealists such as Max Ernst among the influences that shaped his work, and he is surely an exceptionally painterly writer, not only because of the attention he gives to visual effects, but also because he is more interested in spectacle and mood than he is in plot. Things happen in his books, but the events are pretty incidental to the evocation of his imagined world, and, insofar as there is movement, it is a movement inwards, a movement towards deeper engagement with what is there from the early pages of the book. Indeed the book itself seems to be about the allure of stasis. The crystals themselves are a product of the leaching away of time.

His is a strange kind of Spring, a Spring that runs joyfully, not towards summer, but towards a kind of shining death.

Dort.con

Ich freue mich sagen zu können dass ich am DORT.con 2015 als internationaler Ehrengast teilnehmen werde. Weitere Details hier.

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Easter 2014 not yet here and I’ve got something in my diary for Easter 2015!   I’m proud to be a guest of honour at Dort-con (Dortmunder Science Fiction Convention) in Germany.  If you can read German, more details are here.   I’m looking forward to it.

Currently the only book of mine available in German is Messias Maschine.  I wrote a few notes for  German readers here, kindly translated by my friend Thure Etzold.

The EngLit gaze

Many years ago, I went through a phase of writing down all my dreams.  I quickly got much better at remembering them, to the point where writing down a night’s dreams could take an hour or more and was becoming quite a chore.   And then a weird thing happened: I began to dream about writing down my dreams.   After a long and complicated dream, I would write it down, feel relieved that the chore was done, and then wake to find that not only did I have to write down the initial dream, but the bit about writing it down as well.   The act of writing about the dreams, I realised, had changed the character of the dreams themselves, and I abandoned the  project.

*   *   *

In this short article, I included the following quote from a book review by Rachel Cusk:

How does the novel become new again? One way is by its movement into fields of life not yet documented.

I’ve not read any of Rachel Cusk’s books, or anything by Jonathan Lethem who she was reviewing, but when I read this I was immediately struck by her notion that the purpose of a novel was to ‘document’ areas of life.  It seemed to me an odd word and an odd conception of the function of fiction, and yet I felt I’d seen the same idea expressed in various ways many times before.  And the more I thought about it, the more it struck me what a recent conception of literature that is.  As I said in the article, it’s difficult to imagine that Shakespeare was trying to document anything.

Since writing the article, I’ve asked myself another question.  Document for whom?   Who is that looks at novels and works of literature as documentary records of their times?  And the answer, it seemed to me, was academic students of literature.   Of course if you study Shakespeare, or Jane Austen, or Virginia Woolf as an academic exercise, you inevitably read their work as, in part, a record of the times in which they were written, whether or not written with that intention.

EngLit as an academic subject is relatively recent, but many writers now, and particularly writers who aspire to write literature, have themselves studied it.   Even if they haven’t studied it, writers who want to be admired and taken seriously are surely aware of its gaze, aware that in the long run, literature academics are often the ones who determine which works continue to be read and contine to be seen as important.   And perhaps that makes ambitious writers crave the  approval of that particular set of eyes? ‘If those people want to read works of literature as documentary records,’ they perhaps at some level think, ‘then documentary records are what we must write.’

Or it might equally be: ‘If stylistic innovation is what impresses them, then stylistic innovation is what I’ll give them’.   My point here isn’t so much about the specific notion of literature as contemporary record, as about the way in which (as with my dreams) external observation of a process alters the character of the process itself.   Literary academics enjoy intertextuality, for instance (the way one text refers to, and plays with, other texts), and I’ve certainly come across works of fiction that played with intertextuality in such an arch and knowing way that it reminded me of a child trying to impress grown ups.

My hunch is, though, that in the long-run, the great books – the ones that students of literature end up finding interesting in the future – actually won’t turn out to be the ones that played too much to that particular gallery.   After all, whether intentionally or not, any book is a document of its times and any book includes resonances, shadows and borrowings from other works, so, with or without self-conscious gallery-playing, there will always be things for the literary studies people to explore.  And the great books of the past were written without having to consider that particular gaze.

“An academic-led literature is a gentrified suburb,” wrote the Australian poet, Les Murray, and I’m inclined to agree with him.   Gentrified suburbs tend to be pretty and nice to live in, but, with their self-consciousness, their inhibitions, their niggling social anxiety, no one would call them the most exciting places on Earth.

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