vines on a telephone pole: the writings of J.G. Ballard

   Yesterday's hike took us to the area close to Eglinton and Avenue Road, close to an old Jewish cemetary. I pointed out to Judy a telephone pole with vines growing along it, proliferating into an almost tree-like protuberance. The experience somehow reminded me of books I had read years ago by the British science fiction author, J.G. Ballard, and how his portrayal of technology being
over-run by the natural world was quite new to me at the time. In fact, it still feels new to me to this day. I could devote quite some time to exploring what J.G Ballard's life and writing meant to me, particularly in my late teens and early twenties.

  I think I must have been around 15 or 16 when I first discovered the J.G. Ballard collection of short stories, The Terminal Beach. I even remember where it was that I had first discovered that rare find. It was a library sale in a newly opened shopping mall, of all things. (Ballard would later explore the notion of the shopping mall as a kind of modern church, in some of his later novels). The cover was garish and psychadelic, and I think it portrayed two semi-nude bodies on a beach, using a kind of infra-red technology that must have been new at the time when the book was first published (late 60s).

The cover of this book gave me a clue into the themes that Ballard painstakingly explored in his illustious oeuvre: the divides between appearance and reality, technology and nature, human reason and the subconcious. And he was writing at a time when America must have been divided between the race to beat the Russians to the moon, and the terrors unleashed through the Vietnam War. Ballard's title piece actually talks about Hiroshima, as reflected in the psychological guilt of a man grieving for his lost family. The threat of Cold War hangs over many of his novels and stories, creating a paranoid mood in many instances, particularly his works Hello America and Low Flying Aircraft. Perhaps the most intriguing and terrifying story I recollect from The Terminal Beach involves a satellite that descends close to earth, as people start to congregate toward the beaches, in search of some watery, distant paradise of the mind.

Ballard's stories were full of queer juxtapositions, long before there was even such a thing as 'queer theory.' The most remarkable juxtapositions were that between the technological marvels of the present, and a creeping natural world that threatens to overtake that world. Many of Ballard's characters are rational at the outset, only to find themselves succumbing to the fevers and calamities that they are meant to be investigating with an objective eye. In his novel Concrete Island, Ballard writes about a man named Maitland, an architect who crashes onto a concrete island after having a harrowing day. Maitland's concrete island becomes his own prison as he tries, in vain, to flag a ride from passing cars, only to be cruelly ignored. It is at this point that Ballard's writing reminds me of a science fiction Kafka: the premise is so absurd that one would wonder whether any of those motorists are real or not. Maitland becomes a prisoner of his own unconscious, as his reveries take him back to a childhood when he was similarly ignored. Did his later actions only reinforce psychic isolation? We can never know if it is really his fate to be on that island, surrounded by fellow drifters who befriend him and take him into their makeshift shelters.

Nobody can really tell whether Maitland accidentally lands there, or intentionally does as an expression of his psychic isolation. But I do recollect an interview with Ballard which explores the idea of whether it is his characters' fate to 'leave their islands' or perhaps find a home on the island. Ballard seems to think the latter: people find themselves in their isolation, because that is where their true hearts reside. Of course, Ballard would not have put it in this way, but I think that is how I have come to understand it. Many of Ballard's protagonists are emotional recluses who find consolation in fellow reclusives, reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. They start out wanting to distance themselves from chaos and destruction, only to return to the chaos of their own heart and recapitulate it by accepting that chaos. Ballard's protagonist in the story "Terminal Beach" finds a similar consolation in acceptance of the collective historic guilt that envelops him.

Toward the end of his life, Ballard was exploring the modern obsession with media culture and fashion (Super Cannes) and the mega-complex of the supermall. I start to feel that his later works were more blatant critques of a corporate and highly repressive consumer culture. But he always had this unusual and extremely potent way of reframing technology in a way that makes it look strange. Ballard queered science fiction by making technology that we have today problematic and entrophic. In Ballard's worlds,  developing nations are overtaken by strange droughts and floods, and trees turn into crystals. Ballard inspired me to see my own suburban life in a new way. It allowed me to cultivate a beginner's mind and see the landscape of my young adulthood as an extension of my inner psyche and feelings.