Reposez en paix Mr Ballard

it is a great loss….

He couldn’t have written anything truer to his own work if he written this about himself. We have lost a powerful mind and an incredible prophet, let’s make sure his word is kept more alive than ever!

An amazing thought. I wonder if the students will even know who he was, that he’d meditated so interestingly on the subject.

And if he did in fact donate his body, I guess that would be one last gift he gave to the world.

When I was young Ballard not only showed me consistently perfect writing, but taught me lessons that no one else had and some that no one else ever would, certainly not half so well. Although I never knew him he was a friend, and although we never spoke, he was a mentor. He helped set the bar for what good writing is.

Every writing class addresses the ticking clock, the mainspring of suspense. It is the cataclysm we know will happen in 25 hours unless we can cripple the detonator. The strict regularity of the clock is the inflexible rhythm of all inevitability. Ballard’s clocks are never straightforward. They can tick backwards and turn inward on themselves; his characters are the dials upon which they register.

Ballard showed me that no wall divides dreaming and waking; they mutually interpenetrate. With his calm, avuncular voice he said “Given: your nightmare is reality. Task: Experience your nightmare’s nightmare. His writing is a careful arrangement of symbolic landscapes which reveal what we cannot otherwise see, the mystery behind the veil. Terminal Beach is the landscape of the late twentieth century.

His meticulously detailed scientific objectivity gives wing to a soaring romanticism. When flowers sing it is with the passionate intensity of Maria Callas. A slowly drowning world, where giant lizards stare menacingly from the terraces of submerged skyscrapers, is a lurid surrealist jungle. The Wind From Nowhere comes from nowhere. The Concrete Island, in the center of London, is worse than Robinson Cruesoe’s because it is encircled not by a blank and endless sea, but by the blind quotidian world. The limits of rationality can be reached and passed, and then the most accurate description of reality reads like a nightmare or an ecstatic vision. That was where Ballard lived.

He was the scientist poet of ultimate reality.

Larry Mellman
27.IV.09
Venezia

Touching stuff.

He’ll be missed.

Goodbye Eniwetok
Goodbye Los Alamos
Goodbye Hiroshima
Goodbye Alamagordo
Goodbye Moscow, London, Paris, New York

Goodbye Ballard, old friend..

- Henry

ps. Homework assignment: find your nearest dross-peddling literary agent, and slap their face in deep triassic memory of his passing.

Thank you Jim.

Here is my own modest tribute to the great JG Ballard, who was as you say one of the true great philosophers of our times: http://culture.ulg.ac.be/jcms/c_40289/jg-ballard-in-memoriam

Thanks for the work you’ve done on yr website, of which I was a regular visitor.

All the best,

Michel

In a wildlife hospital, nonhuman beings are tortured and repaired. Like in a Ballard novel they arrive maimed by cars, boats and power lines. They submit to further indignities by being x-rayed, sutured, lanced, injected, pinned, bound and intubated. And imprisoned. Their handlers come to know the smell touch and feel of their skin, feathers and fur. And the appearance of their organs, the smell of their droppings and their blood; the textures and phases of their diseases. The animals express signs of bodily functions, mental functions, and a range of behavior. Workers come to know the animals’ voices; learn how to hear which vocalizations convey pain, which envy, which anger, and which the final enthusiasm of returned vigor.

Then comes the climax of release back into the wild, upon recovery. Or the journey “over the bridge,” as we say, into euthanasia. After years in a hospital for wildlife, workers absorb a familiarity with the bodies and ways of their clients that is not unlike the familiarity of a lover’s body. I put my arm down a pelican’s throat to give it a pill and feel the warm/cool moist para-reptilian flesh close around my arm. Ballard also knew something of reptile birds.

Then, out in the world, I see the pelicans go by: “Hey, friend!” I call quietly, and wave, standing on the beach. Those years of touching and being touched (scars still show) have yielded a simulacrum of intimacy. I “know” — yet don’t know — those animals flying by. They certainly wouldn’t know me.

J. G. Ballard wouldn’t know me either. He no more shared my experience of his work than the pelican who flies by on the beach shares the intimacy I feel regarding her because I once slid my arm down her throat. Or her nest-mate’s, I can’t know. Reading. Tending. They’re both one-way streets of acquaintance. Simulacra. I don’t know her. I don’t know him. And yet.

Yesterday, sorting water infrastructure documents in the library a Ballardian wave hits. “…Irrigation pipes channel for miles …” I read, “… the mud plains soon farmlands… water … a foaming mass of water poured from the twin vents of a huge pumping system. … the emerging streets in the dim light around them, the humped backs of cars and buses appearing through the surface. …” the cracked issue of Reclamation Era I hold in my hands dissolves into the half memorized version of Drowned World that I carry in my head. On long drives through the reclaimed lands of the West, the car’s grinding engine always reminds me of Drowned World’s characters’ efforts to pump their world back into being. A glass of water drunk then becomes a piece of the liquid other. The other that consumes. The act of drinking collapses the self/other divide. Like reading does. Like putting one’s hand down the throat of a pelican. Anopheles. Palm fronds. Lots of authors change the way their readers hear words in their heads. Him among them. Ballard put his hands down my throat and also changed the way that I taste water.

Ballard’s Traven walks on Eniwetok. Thermonuclear noon. In 1984 I finished high school with the thesis project “On the Non-Survivability of Limited Nuclear Exchange.” A yearlong research project. In 1985, age 17, I discover in San Francisco the paperback of Terminal Beach and and Traven, and start carrying the book around with me everywhere. The one with the Richard Powers cover. Later, in 1989, I walked the perimeter of Tienanmen Square as it was encircled by troops bent on controlling the uprising. Otherwise disengaged from Ballard’s autobiographical writings I was still aware of his early years in China. I pondered the square-mile expanse of concrete of the Square on a hot May day. Thought of him and the terminal beach. Troops formed a new human perimeter. The breadth of the square and the dryness of the pavement are like a desert. I’m reminded of the desertification of the West that accompanies reclamation. Thought of Drowned World. Of high school field trips to its inverse: the dry, desertified former internment camp of Tule Lake. Built on reclaimed ground. Pumping stations whirring. Later, on a cool September day in 1991 I walk through the White Sands National Monument and search for its northern border, for a gaze onto the Trinity Site. Standing amid tall sand dunes of another terminal beach.

Ballard’s Traven thinks to himself, “The landscape is coded. Entry points into the future = levels in a spinal landscape = zones of significant time.” I know exactly what he means. In cars, planes and trains I spent the 1980s and early 90s circumnavigating the Cold War Pacific Rim: China, the Hanford-contaminated Columbia River gorge, the woods and waters of the West; sites of Japanese internment; learning the landscape and almost getting to Trinity. Pacific Ocean in between. “The landscape is coded,” writes Ballard. I didn’t need him to say it. But like putting one’s hand down the throat of a pelican, when he wrote down words that were already alive in my mind….

Artwork of the science fiction surrealist Richard Powers turned up again on the cover of my next Ballard pickup, The Impossible Man. I thereby learned, free of the strictures of school, of the similarities between surrealists of letters and of images.

Ballard wrote in perfect time for us Cold War children. His work also spoke for those of us pushing hard against the cobwebby softness of the pot-cured sixties youth culture we were born into. Adults around me smoked, laughed and lost while life went by them. Ballard talked about the “suburb of the soul” that worried him about the future. Over here in the Western U.S. we had to worry about it in our immediate past, the trouble of inheriting it rather than passing it on. I fled to San Francisco where the hard edges of traffic jams, punk rock, steep concrete staircases and all-night life were a balm on a spirit abraded by that gauzy haze. Always an audiophile, the aesthetics of dissonance at work in punk rock led to my escape.

Into the hole left behind by soft thinking I pushed smashed televisions (whacked gleefully with my ice axe), full-throttle spins on the pavement of the wide South of Market streets, and a thick accretion of dissonant experiences of street-level urban life. I understood when Ballard eroticized cars and crashes… He posed a series of propositions for understanding human interaction with material culture that crushed assumptions of normalcy. I understood. I smashed televisions. I chose to hear music that pulled the sound of metal on metal out from the ambient audioscape and made it art.

Down in the lower level of the Albatross bookstore The Atrocity Exhibition sprung into my hands. 1989 or so. I think it was just after getting back from China. Atrocity’s aesthetic of dissonance was instantly familiar. This went beyond Terminal Beach. It was silent punk rock. When well-intentioned family members sent me a dog-eared What Color Is Your Parachute? to help me through young adulthood I threw it away immediately. Me, who would later come to co-own a collection of over 40,000 books. That one, I threw away. While down my gullet went J.G. Ballard. Like putting one’s hand down the throat of a pelican.…

Through the years I held, off-and-on, a low-key assumption that I would one day make contact with Ballard. Such a think-alike he was to me — or I experienced him to be, anyway. A co-inhabitant, co-interpreter of the Cold War Pacific Rim. A co-revolter against cobwebby minds. For my entire adult life he has been an impish uncle of the perverse, perched above my shoulder, encouraging certain special ways of thinking and looking. That perch a simulation of intimacy. Writing a fan letter seemed so banal. And so unlikely even to reach him. And for years I wasn’t ready. “Maybe I’ll write him a fan letter when I’ve really got something to say and show for myself,” I thought at times. “He’s only 37 years older than me.… I’ve got years… I’m going to write books… smash that suburb of the soul he worries about, and then show the perverse uncle what I’ve done…” Though it’s a risky proposition. I’ve met people whose works have been important to me before, and occasionally they’ve been jerks.

Ballard’s name came up recently as a possible blurber for the book I’ve just finished writing, Another Science Fiction. Still, decades after that first virtual taste of the inside of his mind, I hesitated. Awed into shyness. The perverse uncle… would it really be right to breach the cherished, safe, simulated intimacy, and enter the barrens of formal, real-world acquaintance? Hard to imagine. Yet a tantalizing prospect. And then abruptly last Sunday afternoon the news that he had died. There was nothing more to be done. No more letters left unwritten, no more life there at all. No blurbs, no hand-shake with the far-away “uncle.” Not even a good-bye.

Later that day, out in the world, I thought of his passing while looking at the ocean: “Hey, friend!” I called quietly, and waved, standing on the beach. The Pacific’s horizon stretched toward China. Eniwetok far to the southwest. Pelicans flew north up the coast, three at a time.

His style is not bleak realism that rubs your nose in despair, but enhanced hyper-realism closer to lucid dreaming or trance states. His protagonists populating his fictions seek transformation or psychological fulfilment not through extraversion-a sane and gregarious hero figure conquering his enemies and getting the girl-but by going inward, deep into the inner space of our minds, embracing obsession near to the threshold of madness. (and some times stepping over that threshold into genuine insanity.) The imagination is brought into the foreground, the source of personal liberation, highly appealing to my introverted and “stay at home’ personality.

“I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

“I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-story car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels…”

But here we come to another important facet of J.G. Ballard; his critique of late-capitalism. Ballard’s fictions are ambivalent: on the one hand he reached out to the deviant and most alienated side of our society, the revitalising effects of violence or extreme sexuality, the leeching away of emotion to allow the imagination full reign-the death of affect. But on the other hand he understood the dangers residing in our modern day dystopias, high rises, gated communities and shopping malls, sapped of all human agency and community. J.G. Ballard was not left wing as such and leaves us with no social solution for our predicament. It’s difficult at times to reconcile my leftist hunger for class struggle and collectivism, albeit of the autonomist persuasion, with what seems on the service a middle-class individualist outlook. But his novels and stories depicted nightmares of capitalism, ruthlessly dissecting the psychopathology of corporatism and consumerism-offering a psychological or artistic solution not a political one. Anyway like all great artists he went beyond mere ideology, a subversive act in itself.

I suppose another factor in my love of J.G. Ballard was he lived very nearby. He was not a distant literary figure living the high life, but was almost a neighbour. It was only a few years ago I found out his address by looking in the local phone book (yes, there it was in the local phone book!) I would never intrude on his privacy but I did take a walk from Walton where I live to Shepperton to view his house. And it’s as ordinary as everyone says it is. It would be really great if a J.G. Ballard fan bought the house and turned it into a sort of Ballard museum by keeping it exactly as it is.

I will miss J.G. Ballard. I never know him but his writing has lodged itself into my brain like no other writer. He has literally changed my mental map, no cliché. J.G. was never a believer in God or an afterlife but let’s hope like a ‘second Adam,’ he has found at last ’the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun.’

Thank you so much, JG.

We know who wrote that story.

Thank you Mr. Ballard, for helping us to process the experience of civilization.

Any tribute in a comment that I attempt to pen seems pointless; just read his books. Again and again and again.

“Patiently Traven waited for them to speak to him, thinking of the great blocks whose entrance was guarded by the seated figure of the dead archangel, as the waves broke on the distant shore and the burning bombers fell through his dreams.”

Farewell to Jim Ballard, a generous-hearted man and brilliant visionary.

His books enriched my life and showed me possibilities and truths that I did not know existed, or that I was afraid to admit. In his own way, he was a very courageous man.

When I first started reading Ballard, it was the RE Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition. I didn’t know what alarmed me more; The intensity of the work, the exploration of the darker side of the psyche, or that I felt that I understood exactly where he was coming from.

I did know that I had to read more, and so I did. And now, when I think of his work, cinematic images pour through my mind, juxtapositions. Cubists play the glass bead game while Oppenheimer stubs out another cigarette.

Thanks, Jim.

“There are tides in the sky” – JG Ballard, may you be harbor-master in some far off kingdom of sea and sand. Your prophetic gaze stretching infinitely across a better Terminal Beach than this one you have left the rest of us here upon to burn and burn…

Godspeed, James Graham Ballard. Thank you. You will be remembered.

“The hands of his broken watch contained the one point of finite time left to him, like a fossil cast on to a beach, crystallizing forever a brief sequence of events within a vanished ocean.” – High Rise, 1975

Rob.

This accords with everything I’ve heard about The Man – his heroic single-parenting, his love of life, friends, family – all somehow salvaged from the trauma of his Lungwha experience.

Like a Chirico statue he casts a long shadow down the colonnades of post-modernity.

He was an absolute fucking genius….

Per Thunell

I’ve spent the last few years training to be and developing my skills to be a writer and only began to read JGB during that process. What a revelation! How could I have got through to my age without being more familiar with his work. He managed to combine social commentary and prediction with an easy, fluid style that novice observers such as myself can only stand back in awe and admire.

My deepest condolences to friends, fans and family alike.

My sincere respects

Darryl Read

I probably read him most in the late 70s and early 80s, but then there was stuff to catch up with. When I was a student and Ronald Reagan was shot I made a collage of photos of the event and stuck to it a copy of “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”. Not that anyone saw it in the wider world, but still.

I got his autobiography Miracles of Life a year ago and then I managed to get hold of a second-hand hardback Complete Short Stories for not very much – I saw the other day it can be on sale for hundreds of pounds – to make sure I had all of them. Not long after I read Miracles of Life I found myself in Tunisia, working on a film project in Nefta on the edge of the desert. The location was a large abandoned tourist hotel and as I stood by its drained swimming pool I naturally came over all Ballardian and decided I ought to write to him and tell him how much I had enjoyed reading him over the years. But I didn’t get round to it, which I now regret.

His autobiography had some personal resonances for me. His childhood Shanghai was overtaken by war and dislocation; in my case it was childhood Beirut, where I was born and lived for several years. I was there for the last time as a teenager a few months before the civil war started in 1975, the year after my father, an airline pilot (who’d been a wartime RAF flight instructor in Canada, incidentally), retired. So I didn’t experience the war first hand, but I went back on business in the mid-90s and my impressions of the city and of dislocated life among the still-fresh ruins of civil war was definitely Ballard-informed. For some reason I only read his “War Fever”, set in a deliberately non-realistic version of Beirut, a few weeks ago.

One of my own short stories I thought of as a Ballard-lite effort: a man losing control of his life builds a nest-cum-flight deck in his sitting room out of all the buttons, dials, levers and switches we all need to run our modern environment. It was published by Ballard-fan David Pringle in Interzone 142, though I don’t know if that was because or in spite of any perceived similarity.

Various things in the world seem increasingly Ballardian… Princess Diana, California, 24-hour news. At the moment, it is Dubai. When my father first flew there in the 1950s its airport still had a compacted-sand desert runway and parking apron and the town was presumably kind of authentic and integrated with and built from its landscape. Now the city is full of fantasy high-rises, imported fashion goods, indoor ski slopes, reclaimed-from-the-sea building sites in the shapes of a palm tree or the world, and now, in a credit crunch time, it is generating stories about debt-ridden foreigners escaping and leaving their shiny new cars at the airport with the keys still in them. A High Rise Crystal World on Vermilion Sands at Terminal Beach experiences a financial Wind from Nowhere, a Crash and a Four-Dimensional Nightmare, you could say.

Anyway, RIP JGB.

Thank you for the many hours of joy that your work gave me. I read “The Drought” as a teenager in the late 70’s and was hooked. I have read everything that I could get my hands on since , loved most of it , didn’t understand some of it but admired the hell out of him for writing it. Deepest sympathies to his Miracles of Life

a tribute to J. G. Ballard:
http://vimeo.com/4249077
http://vimeo.com/album/69846

On Ballard’s novel Crash, Baurdillard said: “it is the first great novel of the universe of simulation”, (Simulacra and Simulation, 1981:119) and that “it is our world” (125).

The final scene of David Cronenberg’s film shows the “Ballards”, in a ditch, making love beside their smoldering wrecked car. I believe that image best captures the essence of our culture at the end of the 20th century. JG Ballard said he liked Cronenberg’s truth to the book.

I will remember JG Ballard for his discerning eye, able as it was to penetrate past the gloss of our globalizing culture, to the vast wasteland which undergrids it… the ever expanding suburbs under the totalitarian eye of television.

Some have said elsewhere that his later works didn’t have the same power as the earlier ones, but I disagree – profoundly. Take a copy of ‘Kingdom Come’ and go read it in any one of these faceless shopping malls (there is one near you). I defy you not to flee from it in fear and loathing. Orwell and Ballard – we need your visions more than ever in this apocalypse now.

JGB wrote about the times we are living through now and those to come (The Drowned World, The Drought etc). So many other writers, despite their contemporary content, are actually writing about the past. He saw reality more clearly than any writer I have read. A wonderful human being has left the planet.
Sincere condolences to his family and friends.

JG Ballard is immensely important to me and will forever stimulate my imagination alongside Dali, Delvaux, de Chirico, and Ernst.

Simon, thank you for a brilliant epitaph. And thank you for your site. For me it’s always been very much in the spirit of JGB’s writing – as Will Self said of John Gray, easy to swallow but hard to digest.

Mr Ballard, thank you for your autopsies of the near future.

Interloper gets a handle,
Fixed on a lucid spleen,
Under ultra-violent heights,
There is, for once, silence in his head.

And the snap-jar heart,
Just went and shut UP shop.
Feathered ears clothed in banded hair,
Trying to sign,
Trying to hide,
Away her preened scream.

Overhead ceilings flaunt gestation,
Unaware that eyes start to yearn for neon.

‘I’ll have another,’
Punch to the arm.
Let’s drink to hats,
Style and blanket.
‘This is not a neutralised notion,
This is not demo-crazy.’

A small coal felt cat slinks over,
Her mask is slipping fast,
The irony is a mast of abstinence,
By our glance.

We are living in Ballardian times.

Thankyou for the pages.

A fan

I looked for new works by him every year for many years. Sadly, this will not happen again.

Thanks, Mr. Ballard, for your insight into the modern condition. You will be missed.
Here’s to Vermillion Sands…

J.G. Ballard RIP
I was deeply saddened by the news that my favorite author and one of the leading lights in my life, J.G. Ballard, passed away yesterday. There is no other author that I have identified with as deeply, and felt so in tune with what he wrote. Ever since I first stumbled across “Vermilion Sands”, with it’s psycho-sexual landscapes of deserts and dried up coral reefs right out of a Max Ernst painting, I have been hooked. Without books like “Myths of the Near Future” and “Voices of Time”, a lot of my music wouldn’t have existed. White Willow’s album “Storm Season”, and especially the song “Chemical Sunset” was deeply indebted to him, and The Opium Cartel’s “Beach House” is a direct homage to him. In fact, the original idea was to use snippets of Ballard’s texts at the end of the song, but somehow it became even more Ballardian with just the desolate noises of the slowly disintegrating song. “There is a pool that’s filling with sand/lizards can sleep there when we are gone” – that’s me doing Ballard.

In the story “News from the Sun”, Marion tells her husband, the one-time NASA doctor Franklin: “Think of yourself – what you’ve always wanted – alone in the world, just you and these empty hotels”. She might as well have been speaking to Ballard himself. All his works reveal a longing for some kind of socio-cultural extinction, where infrastructures collapse, order crumbles, the masses disappear and the protagonist is left to himself, to his own musings of the world around him, ending, changing, re-emerging.

In Ballard’s heaven I am sure he is now sitting on some rooftop of some abandoned motel, quietly scanning the horizon of some dried out ocean, contemplating the empty swimming pools and the sleeping night clubs along the beach, watching the cerise dusk settle on vermilion sands.

http://www.myspace.com/opiumcartel
http://www.myspace.com/whitewillowband