Thought of the day

The only things which are consistent in man are the way he loves and the way he thinks. Everything else is characterized by the lack of consistency, thereof by contigency which is the effect of time. The one's body and personality can change radically over the time, to an extent that they become unrecognizible. But thought and love  always remain the same, they are the essence(s) of man which are equally immanent as life itself. The man thus can in his life love only one woman (and all the women he loves are therefore in one and the same woman) and the way he loves her (including the structure of his desire) remains unchanged. The same goes for thought. Although contours of one's thinking can change over time, there is no radical break or rupture. Behind every ostensible break there is a continutiy to be proved. From the day one starts thinking, one always thinks on the same path.

Reading Crash by J.G. Ballard

I have first read Ballard's Crash as an undergraduate in my third year of college. Though I already had some traumatic experience involving technics/technology to invest in the reading of the novel, I wasn't able to appreciate it as a work of literature. The story certainly was interesting (though bordering sometimes with appal) but I couldn't find much enjoyment in writing itself. One of the reasons might be that I was reading it in Croatian translation. The other might be that I was simply too young and inexperienced for that kind of literature. Finally, I was still a bit traumatized so it wasn't the easiest for me to read such text which could stimulate unpleasant memories.

Reading it this year, it really feels like (perverted) poetry of cars and highway overpasses. Ballard's descriptions are simply beautiful, both clinically precise and poetically imaginative with its various analogies between the shapes of the human body and that of the car. And it goes especially, of course, for his descriptions of sexual intercourses. But it should be noted that it is not so much eroticism per se (play between desire and its object) that interests Ballard (or characters in the novel), but new possibilities of sexuality that are opened by the convergence between human and technology. It is the world of pure geometric forms that apply equally to organic and artificial beings. It is pornography! Although not experimental as Atrocities Exhibition, Crash marks already on its formal level one of the peaks of Ballard's writing.

It somehow beautifully coincided that at the same time as I was reading Ballard's novel, I was going through the discography of Ultravox. I would say that of all the British singers/songwriters influenced by Ballard's fiction (Ian Curtis, Mark E. Smith and others), John Foxx probably stands as the closest musician to the "sage from Shepperton". The reason is that Foxx's lyrics do not only deal with the same topic of intertwinement between eroticism and technology (or inscription of the former into the latter) Ballard's fiction but also possess something of Ballard's style of writing, transposed into lyrics, of course. So while it may be that "The Cars" by Gary Numan comes as the most easily remembered song representing the 80's fascination with cars, it is actually Ultravox's "Maximum Acceleration" that conveys the same reciprocity between human sexuality and technological landscape as found in Ballard's cult novel. John Foxx will continue to investigate the same phenomenons in his first solo album which can also be regarded as the best soundtrack to Ballard's Crash. 

* John Foxx will later pay homage to Ballard with a conceptual album B-Movie (Ballardian Video Neuronica) released in 2014.