What I belive J.G. Ballard

Alguns extractes del següent text de Ballard són part del muntatge audiovisual de l'exposició del CCCB J.G. Ballard. Autòpsia del nou mil·leni.

"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-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

I believe in the forgotten runways of Wake Island, pointing towards the Pacifics of our imaginations.

I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel; in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.

I believe in the beauty of all women, in the treachery of their imaginations, so close to my heart; in the junction of their disenchanted bodies with the enchanted chromium rails of supermarket counters; in their warm tolerance of my perversions.
I believe in the death of tomorrow, in the exhaustion of time, in our search for a new time within the smiles of auto-route waitresses and the tired eyes of air-traffic controllers at out-of-season airports.

I believe in the genital organs of great men and women, in the body postures of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Princess Di, in the sweet odors emanating from their lips as they regard the cameras of the entire world.

I believe in madness, in the truth of the inexplicable, in the common sense of stones, in the lunacy of flowers, in the disease stored up for the human race by the Apollo astronauts.

I believe in nothing.

I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dali, Titian, Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, Redon, Duerer, Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, the Watts Towers, Boecklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists within the psychiatric institutions of the planet.

I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humor of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.

I believe in adolescent women, in their corruption by their own leg stances, in the purity of their disheveled bodies, in the traces of their pudenda left in the bathrooms of shabby motels.

I believe in flight, in the beauty of the wing, and in the beauty of everything that has ever flown, in the stone thrown by a small child that carries with it the wisdom of statesmen and midwives.

I believe in the gentleness of the surgeon's knife, in the limitless geometry of the cinema screen, in the hidden universe within supermarkets, in the loneliness of the sun, in the garrulousness of planets, in the repetitiveness or ourselves, in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom.

I believe in the light cast by video-recorders in department store windows, in the messianic insights of the radiator grilles of showroom automobiles, in the elegance of the oil stains on the engine nacelles of 747s parked on airport tarmacs.
I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.

I believe in the derangement of the senses: in Rimbaud, William Burroughs, Huysmans, Genet, Celine, Swift, Defoe, Carroll, Coleridge, Kafka.

I believe in the designers of the Pyramids, the Empire State Building, the Berlin Fuehrerbunker, the Wake Island runways.

I believe in the body odors of Princess Di.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in the history of my feet.

I believe in migraines, the boredom of afternoons, the fear of calendars, the treachery of clocks.

I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.

I believe in the perversions, in the infatuations with trees, princesses, prime ministers, derelict filling stations (more beautiful than the Taj Mahal), clouds and birds.

I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination.

I believe in Tokyo, Benidorm, La Grande Motte, Wake Island, Eniwetok, Dealey Plaza.

I believe in alcoholism, venereal disease, fever and exhaustion. I believe in pain. I believe in despair. I believe in all children.

I believe in maps, diagrams, codes, chess-games, puzzles, airline timetables, airport indicator signs. I believe all excuses.

I believe all reasons.

I believe all hallucinations.

I believe all anger.

I believe all mythologies, memories, lies, fantasies, evasions.

I believe in the mystery and melancholy of a hand, in the kindness of trees, in the wisdom of light."

"Saw Iain Sinclair read this at the M25 Orbital launch thing at the Barbican. Most impressed, i was, and still am."


Ballard, J.G. “What I Believe.” J.G. Ballard. Eds. V. Vale and Andrea Juno. San Francisco: RE/Search, 1984. Fuente: 2bro2b

There will be no peace

Though mild clear weather
Smile again on the shire of your esteem
And its colours come back, the storm has changed you:
You will not forget, ever,
The darkness blotting out hope, the gale
Prophesying your downfall.

You must live with your knowledge.
Way back, beyond, outside of you are others,
In moonless absences you never heard of,
Who have certainly heard of you,
Beings of unknown number and gender:
And they do not like you.

What have you done to them?
Nothing? Nothing is not an answer:
You will come to believe –how can you help it?-
That you didk you did do something;
You will find yourself wishing you could make them laugh,
You will long for their friendship.

There will be no peace.
Fight back, then, with sich courage as you have
And every unchivalrous dodge you know of,
Clear in your conscience on this:
Their cause, if they had one, is nothing to them now;
They hate for hate’s sake.

W. H. Auden

Sóc Vertical

Però m'estimaria més ser horitzontal.
No sóc cap arbre amb les arrels dins de la terra
xuclant minerals i amor matern
perquè cada març esponerosa brosti,
ni tinc la bellesa d'un jardí amb flors
que faci que m'emplenin d'ohs, i espectacularment em pintin
ignorant que aviat m'esfullaré.
Comparat amb mi, un arbre és immortal
i una tija en flor no és alta, però és més vistosa,
i d'un en voldria la longevitat i la gosadia de l'altra.

Aquesta nit, a la llum infinitesimal de les estrelles,
els arbres i les flors han estat escampant la seva fresca olor.
Em passejo entre ells però cap no se n'adona.
De vegades penso que quan dormo
dec assemblar-m'hi a la perfecció
-esl pensaments abaltits.
Per a mi és més natural, ajaguda.
Aleshores el cel i jo conversem obertament,
i seré útil quan definitivament m'ajegui;
llavors els arbres sí que podran tocar-me, i les flors tindran
temps per a mi.

Sylvia Plath

I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimallight of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

Sylvia Plath

Ara és demà

Ara és demà. No escalfa el foc d'ahir
ni el foc d'avui i haurem de fer foc nou.
Del gran silenci ençà, tot el que es mou
es mou amb voluntat d'esdevenir.

I esdevindrà. Les pedres i el camí
seran el pa i la mar, i el fosc renou
d'ara mateix, el càntic que commou,
l'àmfora nova plena de bon vi.

Ara és demà. Que ploguin noves veus
pel vespre tèrbol, que revinguin deus
desficioses d'amarar l'eixut.

Tot serà poc, i l'heura i la paret
proclamaran conjuntament el dret
de vulnerar la nova plenitud.

Miquel Martí i Pol

Kerouac's Belief and Technique for Modern Prose

List of Essentials


• Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
  
• Submissive to everything, open, listening
  
• Try never get drunk outside yr own house
  
• Be in love with yr life
  
• Something that you feel will find its own form
  
• Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
  
• Blow as deep as you want to blow
  
• Write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind
  
• The unspeakable visions of the individual
  
• No time for poetry but exactly what is
  
• Visionary tics shivering in the chest
  
• In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
  
• Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
  
• Like Proust be an old teahead of time
  
• Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
  
• The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
  
• Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
  
• Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
  
• Accept loss forever
  
• Believe in the holy contour of life
  
• Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
  
• Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
  
• Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
  
• No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
  
• Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
  
• Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
  
• In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
  
• Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
  
• You're a Genius all the time
  
• Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
  
  As ever,
  Jack
  

Jack Kerouac "Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials" from a 1958 letter to Don Allen, in Heaven & Other Poems, copyright © 1958, 1977, 1983. Grey Fox Press.

Y de pronto una voz, mirada, un gesto

Y de pronto una voz, mirada, un gesto
tropieza con mi idea de mí mismo
y veo aparecer en el espejo
a un ser inesperado, insospechado,
que me mira con ojos que son míos.

Ese desconocido que soy yo.
Ese al que los demás se dirigían
al dirigirse a mí, sin yo saberlo.
Ese irreconocible ser inmóvil
que inspecciona mis rasgos hoscamente.

En vano apremio al otro, el verdadero,
a aquel que unos segundos antes yo era.
Sólo está frente a mí, con ceño adusto,
ese desconocido inesperado
que me mira con ojos que son míos.

Destrucción de la mañana, Jose Maria Fonollosa