a repeat of 2006 ‘’south bank 75th birthday” interview with melvyn bragg is called for.

rip jg ballard

In Nietzsche, circular time features as “eternal recurrence”, which some interpret as having an existential and aesthetic import, along the lines of “construct your life (and your interpretation of your life) as a whole, such that you would be satisfied to live that entire life over again”. See, for example, The Gay Science, paragraph 341 (online at http://uk.geocities.com/p.rogers100/TheGayScience.htm). Interestingly, given Simon’s comments above, Deleuze has a rather different (and idiosyncratic) interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine – that it allows for endless permutation via difference.

My own interest is in the way that Ballard relates past, present, and future to find the different ways in which we might construct a life as a meaningful whole. That sort of self-creation is what Charles Taylor was on about in his book “Sources of the Self” (please forgive the length of the following quote!):

“One consequence of objectifying the world has been the development of the idea of a ‘homogeneous, empty time’, the time of physics, whose events are related diachronically purely by efficient causal relations, and synchronically by mutual conditioning. This has come to pose an unavoidable, but also at times apparently unanswerable, question of how we relate our own lives to this time. … This objectification of time has had its effect on literature, … in making it normal and easy for us to envisage (provisionally) unconnected events as occurring simultaneously in the same story-space. The reader is made into an omniscient observer, able to hold these independently unfolding trains of events together. But the new time sense has also changed our notion of the subject: the disengaged, particular self, whose identity is constituted in memory. Like any other human being at any time, he can only find an identity in self-narration. Life has to be lived as a story … But now it becomes harder to take over the story ready-made from the canonical models and archetypes. The story has to be drawn from the particular events and circumstances of this life; and this in two interwoven senses. First, as a chain of happenings in world time, the life at any moment is the causal consequence of what has transpired earlier. But second, since the life to be lived has also to be told, its meaning is seen as something that unfolds through the events. These two perspectives are not easy to combine … This mode of life-narration, where the story is drawn from the events in this double sense, as against traditional models, archetypes, or prefigurations, is the quintessentially modern one, that which fits the experience of the disengaged, particular self. It is what emerges in modern autobiography, starting with the great exempla by Rousseau and Goethe. And it is what determines the narrative form of the modern novel” (Sources of the Self, pp. 288-289).

We might see Ballard as providing versions of self-creation that are more attuned to the world of the late-20th and 21st centuries – versions that understand that personal time is no longer simply linear, and that past, present, and future can in a sense interpenetrate each other. Perhaps that’s hinted at in something that Taylor says about Proust:

“In the scene in the Guermantes’s library, the narrator recovers the full meaning of his past and thus restores the time which was ‘lost’ in the two senses [of being wasted, and of being beyond recall]. The formerly irretrievable past is recovered in its unity with the life yet to live, and all the ‘wasted’ time now has a meaning, as the time of preparation for the work of the writer who will give shape to this unity” (Sources of the Self, p. 51).

Time is the psychological enemy of man.
- J. Krishnamurti

The clip from Solaris at the beginning set up the appropriate ambience of the subject in a very moving way. [I'm very fond of the movie.]

Thank you for the clear, thoughtful meditation.

And Mark, you’re absolutely correct in my opinion about the open-endedness of Ballard’s writing. The mountain analogy is a fabulous one, too … Which Ballard story would you say speaks to you the most about memory and time?

Maybe I’d expand on this, but I’m about to leave for a few days to visit relations in Liverpool. Perhaps later!

“One of the underlying attractions of apprehending the simultaneity of all existence is that it will somehow enable us to transcend death. In ‘Myths of the Near Future’, Sheppard is convinced that his wife is still alive even though she has died, and explains: ‘Everything that’s ever happened, all the events that will ever happen, are taking place together. We can die, and yet still live, at the same time. … No one who has ever lived can ever really die.’ And in an interview, Ballard tells us why The Crystal World is one of his favourite novels: ‘the idea that time might condense like ice, that we might somehow escape from that flux of time that sweeps us towards the end … is intriguing’ (interview in SFX, 1996).

If we can put to one side the ecstatic descriptions in Ballard’s fiction, it becomes apparent that an eventless eternity is the predictable result of the emasculation of the past and the future. Without memories, hopes or ideals to give meaning to the events of our lives, we find merely a series of occurrences, and the present starts to blur into an endless procession. But if this is the case, then the nature of such a world-without-time is ambiguous — instead of being a life lived to the full, an endless present can instead be deadening and boring, a major concern in Ballard’s later writings

Mike Holliday, ‘Ballard and the Vicissitudes of Time’.”

I wished I’d had Mike’s work in mind when I wrote mine. Never mind: read ‘Ballard and the Vicissitudes of Time’ (http://www.ballardian.com/ballard-and-the-vicissitudes-of-time) — it’s brilliant.

“The way we reconcile the idea of a no-beginning/no-ending aspect of time with the idea that there can be only a limited number of moments in time is by seeing that an analogy can be made to a sphere having a limited amount of surface area without there being edges or boundaries involved. Time can be seen as being finite, but without boundaries (without beginning or end).

A good name for this is “circular time,” instead of “cyclical time,” since “cycle” implies repetition, whereas a temporal circle does not. If one were to orbit the earth, one would not say that there are an indefinite number of continents because they are continually coming back into view. Similarly, if one were to imagine traversing the entire temporal circle of the universe in one’s mind’s eye and then mentally re-traverse the entire circle a number of times, one would not then say that those mentally re-traversed moments are additional moments in time and that time is “infinite.” No matter how many times one imagines a particular moment in time, it is still just one moment in time.”