on intellectual generosity

“we’re like: let’s see what happens if i do this thing,” aliza said over drinks in her apartment. “it bespeaks our intellectual generosity.” she meant that we have a penchant for being curious about unlikely objects and will follow them wherever they lead, and that this impetus is equally applicable to our lives as to the subjects of our seminar papers. it’s true that i like to pursue the potentially illogical, and that i enjoy being called intellectually generous, and that i think letting 4 sentences you read 20 years ago—or a moment that is unexpectedly visceral, or any other experience in a seemingly minor key—direct the rest of your life is actually a very nice way to be. 

SECONDS: Why not do it just because it fulfills an archetypal pioneering ideal?

BALLARD: I’m not sure that it does. It may be possible that the human central nervous system doesn’t have a designed capacity to explore Outer Space. Zero gravity perhaps recapitulates on the unconscious level various archaic fears in the human mind - falling off the branch into the jaws of the predator below. There’s all sorts of psychological reasons why we may not be suited as a species for Space Travel. The highly controlled, limited environment, the time distortion, the intense subjectivity; it’s an asexual and antisocial environment. All these together may make Space Travel not a dream of the future, but a half remembered nightmare from the past. To get beyond the solar system means a commitment to a one way trip. Not many people are prepared to spend their lives in a Spaceship that will never return.

…

SECONDS: Getting back to the psychological ramifications of the Space Age, has it left an alienated generation? They promised us the Space Ageand we didn’t get it. Are people disappointed?

BALLARD: Outside the ranks of Science Fiction enthusiasts, I’m sorry to say I don’t think they are disappointed. That’s the most mysterious thing about the Space Age. I can remember an intense interest in all the scientific record-breaking attempts that were made in the 1930s. Advances in aviation, high speed trains, rocketry - there was an intense interest in scientific advance, particularly in aviation. It was a source of enormous marvel. Planes would soon fly faster than sound; it seemed unbelievable. This had a huge spinoff in architecture. Everything was streamlined in those days - teapots, refrigerators and, later, cars. It affected fashion, interior decoration, and consumer design. If you look through collections of books from the Thirties devoted to fashion, you can see the influence laid out. Now, the Space Program had no spinoff. Its effects on architecture, furnishing, and fashion were absolutely nil. That’s extraordinary when you think of it.

SECONDS: No coffee cups shaped like the Apollo capsules?

BALLARD: It’s quite mysterious.

SECONDS: Did things reach a utilitarian stage where design was no longer necessary?

BALLARD: The iconic power of Armstrong and his fellow astronauts bouncing around on the Moon was enormous. These people were the closest you could get to the future. When Lindbergh landed in Paris, there were a million people there. The pioneers of aviation were some of the most celebrated people on the planet. The dream of flight entered everybody’s mind. With the Apollo program and its Russian counterpart, there was no dream of Space Flight.

SECONDS: Would we have had the film Star Wars without the Apollo program?

BALLARD: Yes, we would. Half of the great Hollywood blockbusters over the last twenty years have been Science Fiction films with nothing to do with the real Space Program. I was terribly disappointed with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. I saw it when it came out in 1968. The next year, Armstrong walked on the Moon. Dr. Strangelove, made a few years beforehand, leapt from our nightmare of nuclear armageddon. With 2001, it seemed Kubrick turned his back on the real Space program at Cape Kennedy. Star Wars and the imitators all move back into the security of fantasy.

…

SECONDS: We’re just going to have wait for the anti-gravity revolution.

BALLARD: I don’t think that world will ever come about. The human race will move on to other things. A huge inward migration is taking place at the moment; people are retreating from the outside world into the inner world. When virtual reality arrives, it won’t be necessary to goanywhere.

SECONDS: People’s memories will be composed of third-hand TV images.

BALLARD: Yes, they will. What we think of as first-hand experience will occur less and less.

SECONDS: There will only be the pioneers who go into the real world and record experiences for everyone else.

BALLARD: Exactly. I went to a wedding not so long ago where five cameras were working. We had a bizarre case in England a couple of years ago where a father had an incredibly lavish wedding for his daughter and hired a professional crew to record it, only to find out later there was something wrong with the film. He then, with the agreement of the hundreds of guests and the clergyman, restaged the entire thing right down to having a big reception, at the same cost all over again. Nothing is real until you can put it into the VCR.

-1996 Seconds Magazine JG Ballard interview with George Petros

all my seasick sailors | Lynn Crosbie

muscovite:

Sly and second-sighted, my friends have abandoned ship. Rats,
escaping in small grey
lifeboats, their annular tails turn the tide, their lambent eyes, like the
moon, dictate its flow.
The violinist plays Autumn as the masts unfold, water lilies in the
pitch of the sea.

A message in semaphore, what I have always longed to know — to stand
by the stern, and
with courage, let go. Nostalgia’s poison

love spreads out like a sheaf of photographs, memory without blood,
a fluked anchor,
undone. The line that breaks when the storm comes, the truth that
sailors know:
red skies without delight,

a bad sign. To navigate you must know where you are going, with an
exact chart,
pin-stuck with ellipses. Accidents, typhoon, the fibrous stakes of sea
monsters, the diamond ice caps,

miracles that have changed course, carved passages into the new
worlds, where sailors
arise. In white militia,

letters come like gulls flat on the crest of waves, infatuation coursing,
like a science of chaos,

they appear in envelopes of ice, intermittent ghosts — to remind me
that love is spectral,
unforeseen.

The rapids were turbulent toward the Asian corridor, sailing into
     Lachine. It is China, after all.
Rare and fragile, esteemed from a great distance,

protected in shelf-ice.

I touch this china from rim to stem, and feel its raised flowers,
brought to me from the ocean’s
floor.  In spite of the danger, the mariners have garlanded the stingray
—as the lashings narrowed,

they retrieved me from the wreck.