Self

Best in Black

Drastic

 

I feel the fear

I fear the fear

F E A R

Instinct is a name

Where do you come from?

Why do I fear fear?

 

HKD

 

When we are young, life is very drastic

Existential fear

Fear the world

Afraid of outside

Afraid of everything

Afraid of contact

 

HKD

 

Angst vor Angriffe

Angst vor dem Leben

Existenzangst

 

HKD

 

If you like see my YouTube Video:

 

"Dark Night of the Soul"

 

www.youtube.com/user/koppdelaney#p/a/u/1/EaRQPzamppo

Ceci nous permet de comprendre ce que recouvrent des mots un peu grandiloquents comme angoisse, délaissement, désespoir. Comme vous allez voir, c'est extrêmement simple. D'abord, qu'entend-on par angoisse ? L'existentialiste déclare volontiers que l'homme est angoisse. Cela signifie ceci : l'homme qui s'engage et qui se rend compte qu'il est non seulement celui qu'il choisit d'être, mais encore un législateur choisissant en même temps que soi l'humanité entière, ne saurait échapper au sentiment de sa totale et profonde responsabilité. Certes, beaucoup de gens ne sont pas anxieux ; mais nous prétendons qu'ils se masquent leur angoisse, qu'ils la fuient ; certainement, beaucoup de gens croient en agissant n'engager qu'eux-mêmes, et lorsqu'on leur dit : « mais si tout le monde faisait comme ça ? » ils haussent les épaules et répondent : « tout le monde ne fait pas comme ça. » Mais en vérité, on doit toujours se demander : qu'arriverait-il si tout le monde en faisait autant ? Et on n'échappe à cette pensée inquiétante que par une sorte de mauvaise foi. Celui qui ment et qui s'excuse en déclarant : tout le monde ne fait pas comme ça, est quelqu'un qui est mal à l'aise avec sa conscience, car le fait de mentir implique une valeur universelle attribuée au mensonge. Même lorsqu'elle se masque l'angoisse apparaît. C'est cette angoisse que Kierkegaard appelait l'angoisse d'Abraham.

 

Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Existentialisme est un humanisme

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Explored March 25, 2018

All The World's a Stooge is the 55th short film released by Columbia Pictures in 1941 starring American slapstick comedy team The Three Stooges (Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard). The comedians released 190 short films for the studio between 1934 and 1959.

 

For We're Here — The Three Stooges Existential Balloon Factory.

 

Put some zing into your 365! Join We're Here!

 

Orchard Road, Singapore - November 2014

…a very tired but no less stoical wife after ‘a day in the field’….

 

Western NC mountains e6 slide home scanned Kodak tabletop scanner. Mono conversion in Snapseed. Guessing Canon 1n with 24-105L..

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Rovingian Council - Nomad Monks - Non-Theistic and Pluralist Spirituality by Daniel Arrhakis (2026)

 

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The Rovingian Conception of Animism as a Critique of Modernity - Non-Theistic and Pluralist Spirituality - Theological Implications

 

The Rovingian conception of animism, as practiced by the Nomad monks, offers a profound critique of modernity by redefining the relationship between the human subject and the cosmos.

 

Below is an analysis of this worldview and its theological implications:

 

1. Animism as a Response to Modernity

 

The Rovingian perspective positions animism as a spiritual antidote to the "rationalist project of modernity." While modernity treats the environment as a "commodity" or "resource" input for profit, Rovingian animism restores the world's status as a living, subjective presence. It argues that the modern ecological and existential crisis stems from the loss of this vital connection with the world we inhabit.

 

2. Immanence vs. Transcendence

 

A key distinction in this conception is the location of the sacred:

 

Immanence:

The divine is not a distant, "outside" force (transcendent) but is found "inside" every physical manifestation—trees, rocks, rivers, and even artistic creations.

 

Vitalism:

The world is populated by vital forces or spirits. Unlike classical theism, there is no requirement for a "creator god" or "supreme legislator" to give the world meaning; meaning is inherent in existence itself.

 

3. Non-Theistic and Pluralist Spirituality

 

Rovingian animism challenges traditional religious structures:

Beyond Monotheism, Polytheism and Pantheism: It is described as a "universalist and pluralist" worldview that does not necessarily require the worship of "deities" in the classical sense. Instead, it focuses on interacting with local or ancestral spirits who are not omnipotent or distant.

 

Horizontal Hierarchy:

There are no fixed sacred texts or rigid hierarchies. Spiritual truth is seen as a pluralistic journey beyond a single, dogmatic path.

 

Radical Equality:

It rests on the belief that everything that exists has the "same rights to existence," elevating the non-human world to a status of equal moral consideration.

 

4. Integration of the Divine

 

In the Rovingian conception, the "divine" is not a separate category of being but a quality of daily experience. By respecting all rites and religions as sources of humanistic and cultural enrichment, this worldview allows for a synthesis where various spiritual traditions are seen as valid expressions of the same underlying vital force.

 

Rovingian Axiom Summary:

"Everything that exists is part of, is alive, has consciousness and has the same rights to exist".

 

This framework transforms spirituality from a set of beliefs into a way of being-in-the-world, where the sacred is rediscovered in the mundane and the environmental.

  

__________________________________________________________________

  

A Conceção Rovingiana do Animismo como Crítica à Modernidade - Espiritualidade Não Teísta e Pluralista - Implicações Teológicas

 

A conceção rovingiana do animismo, tal como é praticada pelos Monges Nómadas, oferece uma profunda crítica à modernidade ao redefinir a relação entre o sujeito humano e o cosmos.

 

Segue-se uma análise desta visão do mundo e das suas implicações teológicas:

 

1. O Animismo como Resposta à Modernidade

 

A perspetiva rovingiana posiciona o animismo como um antídoto espiritual ao "projeto racionalista da modernidade". Enquanto a modernidade trata o ambiente como uma "mercadoria" ou um "recurso" para fins lucrativos, o animismo Rovingiano restaura o estatuto do mundo como uma presença viva e subjetiva. Defende que a crise ecológica e existencial moderna decorre da perda desta ligação vital com o mundo que habitamos.

 

2.º Imanência vs. Transcendência

 

Uma distinção fundamental nesta conceção é a localização do sagrado:

 

Imanência:

O divino não é uma força distante, “externa” (transcendente), mas encontra-se “dentro” de toda a manifestação física — árvores, rochas, rios e até mesmo criações artísticas.

 

Vitalismo:

O mundo está povoado por forças vitais ou espíritos. Ao contrário do teísmo clássico, não há necessidade de um “deus criador” ou “legislador supremo” para dar sentido ao mundo; o sentido é inerente à própria existência.

 

3. Espiritualidade Não Teísta e Pluralista

 

O animismo rovingiano desafia as estruturas religiosas tradicionais:

Para além do Monoteísmo, Politeísmo e Panteísmo: É descrito como uma visão do mundo “universalista e pluralista” que não exige necessariamente a adoração de “divindades” no sentido clássico. Em vez disso, concentra-se na interação com espíritos locais ou ancestrais que não são nem omnipotentes nem distantes.

 

Hierarquia Horizontal:

Não existem textos sagrados fixos nem hierarquias rígidas. A verdade espiritual é vista como uma viagem pluralista que transcende um único caminho dogmático.

 

Igualdade Radical:

Baseia-se na crença de que tudo o que existe tem os mesmos direitos de existência, elevando o mundo não humano a um estatuto de igual consideração moral.

 

4. Integração do Divino

 

Na conceção rovingiana, o "divino" não é uma categoria separada do ser, mas uma qualidade da experiência quotidiana. Ao respeitar todos os ritos e religiões como fontes de enriquecimento humanístico e cultural, esta visão do mundo permite uma síntese onde várias tradições espirituais são vistas como expressões válidas da mesma força vital subjacente.

 

Resumo do Axioma Rovingiano:

"Tudo o que existe faz parte de algo, está vivo, tem consciência e tem os mesmos direitos de existir".

 

Esta estrutura transforma a espiritualidade de um conjunto de crenças numa forma de estar-no-mundo, onde o sagrado é redescoberto no quotidiano e no meio ambiente.

   

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Peat

Dramatization

To her, life may be confusion and anxiety in the face of a meaningless or absurd world.

Credits goes to...

 

Clouds borrowed from:

Calm by Nicholas A. Tonelli

and the green tint and texture on the floor from:

Cromarty by Evelyn Flint

 

A big thank you both for sharing.

ift.tt/2knL5hE

To do, uh, um... well, so that I may, um, uh. Uh, it's like this - I'm here to... you know... um, to, uhh...

Some say birds don’t contemplate the nature of existence. This White Wagtail would disagree. Caught mid-stare at a particularly lichen-heavy rock, it appears to be either pondering the meaning of life or just deciding whether the moss looks edible. Tail flick: paused. Inner monologue: active. This is what happens when a hyperactive insect-chaser hits a philosophical wall… literally.

gizmodo.com/115165/starcks-ak47

 

moralism/ethics and jgb

 

In other words, the breakdown of the formalized social order, and its replacement with one based on more ruthless, informal, spontaneously generated rules, can liberate in a certain sense, in that it permits what was previously impermissible. In Freudian terms, the id escapes the power of the superego; what results both repels and attracts. This lesson Ballard never forgot.

 

Ballard arrived in England during the austere postwar years, the austerity lengthened by government policy that saw in it an opportunity for ideologically inspired social engineering. (Even now, one occasionally senses nostalgia in medical journals for the era of rationing, which imposed a scientifically approved diet on the population.) Ballard began medical school, but dropped out after two years to become a writer. He never entirely lost his interest in medicine, however, and it is worth noting that doctors are important figures in his novels, the first of which came out in 1962.

 

All of Ballard’s novels have a Robinson Crusoe theme: What happens to man when the props of civilization are removed from him, as they so easily are, by external circumstances or by the operation of his secret desires or by both in concert? Ballard’s past gave him an awareness of the fragility of things, even when they appear most solid; and in the introduction to his collected short stories, he tells us that he is “interested in the real future that I could see approaching.” His method: extrapolate something—a trend, a feeling of dissatisfaction—that he detects in the present; magnify it; and then examine its consequences. He is a recorder of what he calls “the visionary present,” a sociological Swift who claims (half-mistakenly, I think) that he does not write with a moral purpose but instead serves as “a scout who is sent on ahead to see if the water is drinkable or not.”

 

In Ballard’s earlier novels, the decomposition of society results largely from natural processes. For example, in his debut novel, The Drowned World, the earth has undergone an extremely rapid warming. (Ballard has an uncanny ability to anticipate future anxieties.)

 

...

It is significant that Maitland is an architect, for it is the architects, with their modernist dreams of making the world anew according to implacably abstract principles, who have created the wasteland in the first place. Ballard captures the socially isolating nature of modern architecture—and the modern way of life associated with it—with great symbolic force. The taxi driver, encased in his cage of pressed steel, can see in Maitland only a lunatic with whom he shares no humanity. The other drivers have lost their ability to choose: once on the road, they must inexorably move forward. They do not control the situation; the situation controls them. What should liberate—the car, with its theoretical ability to take you anywhere you want to go, whenever you want to go—becomes dehumanizing.

 

In the same year, Ballard published his most controversial book, Crash, later made into an equally disturbing film by David Cronenberg. The book is a kind of visionary reductio ad absurdum of what Ballard sees as the lack of meaning in modern material abundance, in which erotic and violent sensationalism replace transcendent purpose: the book’s characters speed to the sites of auto accidents to seek sexual congress with the dying bodies and torn metal. Ballard’s method is Swift’s, though with a less general target. To object that Ballard exaggerates the existential predicament of the modern middle classes is to miss the point, just as to object that Swift exaggerates man’s absurdity, pretensions, and nastiness is to miss the point.

 

In his next book, High-Rise, published in 1975, Ballard sets a small civil war in a luxurious 40-story apartment building, where “the regime of trivial disputes and irritations . . . provided [the] only corporate life” of the 2,000 inhabitants. Robert Laing is a doctor who is divorced, like all of Ballard’s protagonists.

 

“This over-priced cell, slotted almost at random into the cliff face of the apartment building, he had bought after his divorce specifically for its peace, quiet and anonymity,” Ballard writes. It seems to be part of the modern condition that people find difficulty in living together, preferring an isolation in which human contact becomes superficial, fleeting, and primarily instrumental to immediate needs or desires.

 

Where people have few affective ties but nonetheless live together in close proximity, the potential for conflict is great. Though all the residents are well-heeled, a version of class war breaks out in the high-rise, pitting the residents of the upper floors, who have paid the most for their apartments, against those of the lower floors. Boredom and a lack of common purpose provoke aggression, and self-destruction follows. Prosperity is not enough.

 

...

If anything, Ballard’s vision has darkened. Twenty years after High-Rise, prosperity had increased enormously, and Ballard published Cocaine Nights, an attack on the very idea of the good life engendered by British consumer society. The novel is set in imaginary rich expatriate enclaves on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, towns “without either centre or suburbs, that seem to be little more than dispersal ground for golf courses and swimming pools.” As one character says, “It’s Europe’s future. Everywhere will be like this soon.”

 

The utter vacuity of the abundant life that the inhabitants have worked to achieve, enabling them to retire before 50, is reflected in the enclaves’ architecture and social atmosphere. “I looked down on an endless terrain of picture windows, patios and miniature pools,” relates the protagonist, a travel writer:

 

Together they had a curiously calming effect, as if these residential compounds were a series of psychological pens that soothed and domesticated. . . . Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm, where entropic drift calmed the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools.

Everywhere satellite dishes cupped the sky like begging bowls. The residents had retreated to their shady lounges, their bunkers with a view, needing only that part of the external world that was distilled from the sky by their satellite dishes.

The residents are refugees from a disordered world: “There’s excellent security and not a trace of graffiti anywhere—most people’s idea of paradise today.” Freed from economic anxiety, they are also “refugees from time”: in fact, they have “travelled to the far side of boredom” and are now “desperate for new vices.”

 

A young tennis coach, Crawford, responsible for arranging the social life of the enclaves, hits on the idea of crime as the solution to the prevailing boredom. Unknowingly, he recapitulates sociologist Emil Durkheim’s view that criminals fulfill an important social function by providing the rest of the population with a cause for solidarity: for one can exercise solidarity only against something and somebody else. “How do you energize people, give them some sense of community?” Crawford asks. Politics is boring, religion too demanding. “Only one thing is left which can rouse people, threaten them directly and force them to act together. . . . Crime and transgressive behaviour. [They] provoke us and tap our need for strong emotion, quicken the nervous system and jump the synapses deadened by leisure and inaction.” His conclusion: “A certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation.”

 

By arranging for crimes to be committed at random, including a deliberate fire that kills five, Crawford brings the enclaves back to life, including cultural life. The residents start to play music and participate in theater productions. Instead of living in solipsistic isolation, they now meet regularly. Ballard is not suggesting that the immolation of people is a worthwhile price if only people take to the violin and footlights as a result. He is suggesting that, absent a transcendent purpose, material affluence is not sufficient—and may lead to boredom, perversity, and self-destruction.

 

In his two most recent novels, Millennium People and Kingdom Come, Ballard treats England as a country gripped by a consumerist fever, half-aware that something more is necessary to lead a bearable human life, and thus vulnerable to an inchoate revolutionism whose inspiration is part fascist, part socialist. The books’ characters are, as usual in Ballard, educated and middle class; no member of the underclass ever appears in his pages. This is not accidental. It is the educated class that is essential to running the country and that sets its moral tone; but “sheltered by benevolent shopping malls,” Ballard writes in Kingdom Come, it “waits patiently for the nightmares that will wake [it] into a more passionate world.” Believing in nothing, sated materially, it is capable of anything to escape boredom.

 

This represents an important insight. When I briefly served as a kind of vulgarity correspondent for a British newspaper—it sent me anywhere the British gathered to behave badly—I discovered to my surprise that the middle classes behaved in crowds with the same menacing disinhibition as their supposed social and educational inferiors. They swore and screamed abuse and made fascistic gestures and urinated in the street with the same abandon that they attributed to the proletarians. It was Ballard who first spotted that the bourgeoisie wanted to proletarianize itself without losing its economic privileges or political power.

 

In Millennium People, the residents of an affluent housing project called Chelsea Marina “had set about dismantling their middle-class world. They lit bonfires of books and paintings, educational toys and videos. . . . They had quietly discarded their world as if putting out their rubbish for collection. All over England an entire professional caste was rejecting everything it had worked so hard to secure.”

 

This strikes me as a suggestive metaphor for much that has happened over the last four decades, not only in England (though especially here) but also throughout parts of Western society. We have become bored with what we have inherited, to which, for lack of talent, we have contributed so humiliatingly little. Ballard understands why educated people, haunted by the pointlessness of their lives, feel the need to protest, and he satirizes it in Millennium People. The book’s protagonist, a psychologist, infiltrates the growing middle-class revolutionary movement and attends a protest against a cat show in a London exhibition hall with Angela, a revolutionary:

 

Angela stared across the road with narrowed eyes and all a suburbanite’s capacity for moral outrage. Walking around the exhibition two hours earlier, I was impressed by her unswerving commitment to the welfare of these luxurious pets. The protest rallies I had recently attended against globalisation, nuclear power and the World Bank were violent but well thought out. By contrast, this demonstration seemed endearingly Quixotic in its detachment from reality. I tried to point this out to Angela as we strolled along the line of cages.

“Angela, they look so happy. . . . They’re wonderfully cared for. We’re trying to rescue them from heaven.”

Angela never varied her step. “How do you know?”

“Just watch them.” We stopped in front of a row of Abyssinians so deeply immersed in the luxury of being themselves that they barely noticed the admiring crowds. “They’re not exactly unhappy. They’d be prowling around, trying to get out of the cages.”

“They’re drugged.” Angela’s brows knotted. “No living creature should be caged. This isn’t a cat show, it’s a concentration camp.”

“Still, they are rather gorgeous.”

“They’re bred for death, not life. The rest of the litter are drowned at birth. It’s a vicious eugenic experiment, the sort of thing Dr. Mengele got up to.”

The press recently ran obituaries of Peter Cadogan, whom one paper called a “professional protester.” Another wrote that Cadogan “spent fifty years on a long quest of resistance to global injustices.” He appeared inseparable from a megaphone, and no man would have been more disappointed to wake one day to a world denuded of injustice. Apparently, someone read the protest poems of William Blake to him on his deathbed, and these roused him temporarily from a coma. Protest was the meaning of his life. His dying words evoked Blake: “Live differently.” Not better, but differently.

 

This mind-set can result in the violence from which, as Ballard discovered early in life, we are always but a hairbreadth away, however solidly founded our comfort may seem. Civilization’s fragility does not make it unreal or valueless—quite the reverse. And while I suspect that Ballard would dislike seeing conservative implications drawn from his work, they are most certainly there.

 

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

  

dalrymple - city mag: a moralist reading ballard

 

now compare to waxman: a doctor friend reading ballard:

(the reality - the books - the writer)

(our bleak society - literary representations of that - the man himself completely unscathed by our bleak society, while thoroughly engaged with it..?)

 

He was a “Jimmy”, a surprisingly sweet name for a man of such seeming austerity. Although this austerity seemed to be part of the public persona, this view had no origin in fact. He was a man of warmth and love, and a man who himself inspired great love. I was a witness to the affection that people had for him and the tenderness that came to him from his partner Claire and his children.

 

Perhaps many will not be able to credit that a man who imagined gangs of bored people indulging in random violence (Super Cannes) or protagonists having sex in smashed-up cars (Crash) could be described as a gentle man who inspired great affection. But that is to focus too much on his dystopian writings rather than taking into account his polymathic range - a range that encompassed everything from genre fiction to his most traditional novel, Empire of the Sun.

 

The occasional brutality of his work was not a reflection of a dark personality. They were instead the fruit of a man who lived the life of the mind to the full, who had a knack of looking at the world in a different way and asking “what if?”. What if, as he imagined in Millennium People, the middle-classes rose up in a tax rebellion?

 

Though Jimmy had an original mind he was utterly conventional on the surface. He was like any man of his time and upper-middle class upbringing, right down to his tweed jacket and reserved, polite manner.

 

He was also generous, a great supporter of all who came into his life.

 

....

 

baLLArdian.com

 

‘Content in their little prisons’: J.G. Ballard on ‘The Towers’

Author: Dan OHara • Nov 21st, 2008 •

 

Category: France, Lead Story, architecture, archival, crime, technology, urban decay

   

L’ile de béton (Concrete Island), French edition, Calman-Lévy (1974). Thanks to Herve for the scan.

  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Interview by Philippe R. Hupp.

 

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

  

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Ballard’s novels have always been translated into French with alacrity. His 1974 novel, Concrete Island, was already in translation in time for review in the January 1975 edition of the major Paris literary organ Magazine Littéraire, and Antoine Griset’s review was both penetrating and positive. Griset immediately connected the predicament of Ballard’s protagonist, stranded on an urban desert island between motorway intersections, with the extremes of social inequality within our society.

 

‘The image or the idea of a man dying of hunger only a step away from a haven of abundance is tragically familiar’, Griset writes, noting how absurd it is that such distress has become a banal commonplace. Whilst admiring the ‘immense talent’ of Ballard in transforming a vague, banal terrain into a hallucinatory hell — a feat also achieved in Crash — Griset observes that although Concrete Island may be a continuation of the earlier novel, this time the automobile is a mere symbolic pretext for an examination of the flip-side of our ordered, automated, aseptic lifestyle.

 

Griset sees the real focus of Concrete Island as being on the flotsam of urban Man Fridays (or should that be ‘Men Friday’?) living in the interstices of modern cities: the invisible masses we observe daily from behind the safety of the windscreen or the office window. In the novel Maitland, an affluent architect who crosses this invisible barrier, decides to remain on the concrete island, having triumphed over its obstinate vagrants. Yet Griset suggests that, if the Maitland who first arrived on the island dies and is transformed into a new, stronger version of himself, he also remains afraid to recognize his own true nature. In a brilliant insight into Ballard’s metafictional method, Griset implies that this transformation of the protagonist is intended to provoke a similar transformation in the reader. Concrete Island is less concerned with awakening a new moral knowledge than with demonstrating the ways in which the mirror-world of own native brutality is just on the other side of the windscreen.

 

The following brief interview was printed alongside Griset’s review. Mostly concerned with the novel he was then in the early stages of writing, High-Rise, it does however contain an intriguing reference to Ballard conducting research on the relation between criminal behaviour and the urban environment. Whatever the sources of this research might have been, it seems that it started a line of enquiry which became a central topos of his writing, leading from Concrete Island through High Rise to Running Wild and the loose tetralogy bookended by Cocaine Nights and Kingdom Come.

 

Dan O’Hara

  

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PHILIPPE R. HUPP: You’re in the process of writing a new novel called The Towers…

 

JGB: In fact I still haven’t found a title. It’s a book about what in England and the USA are called ‘high-rises’, these residential towers which can have forty or fifty floors or more. I saw a film about Poland last week, in which one complex of apartments had twenty floors and was a kilometre in length! I’ve been interested for several years now in new lifestyles which permit modern technology; skyscrapers have always attracted me. The life led there seems to me very abstract, and that’s an aspect of setting with which I’m concerned when I write — the technological landscape.

 

Have you read The World Inside by Robert Silverberg? It’s a novel in which people live in groups of 800 thousand in vertical cities. And Silverberg, instead of simply planting the people of today in a futuristic setting, is concerned with showing how their mentality and their social life would be affected.

 

I haven’t read that book, but what interests me is the present. I don’t want to extrapolate too far – there’s the risk of becoming detached from reality. Although I did write a story a few years ago, ‘Build up’, in which one city occupied the entire universe. It’s a quite fascinating subject.

 

You’ve already examined housing schemes?

 

I did research before sitting down to write. For example, in cities, the degree of criminality is affected by liberty of movement; it’s higher in culs-de-sac. And high-rises are culs-de-sac: two thousand people jammed together in the air…

 

Entirely isolated.

 

Cut off from the rest of the world. In this kind of situation, all sorts can happen. Above all I’d like to examine the psychological modifications which occur without the knowledge of the inhabitants themselves, to see to what degree the mind of someone who drives a car or lives in a concrete high-rise has been altered. In the course of my investigations, I observed that there now exists a new race of people who are content in their little prisons, who tolerate a very high level of noise, but for whom the apartment is nothing more than a base allowing them to pass the night in comfort, as they’re absent during the day.

 

Will this new novel be as symbolic as Crash and Concrete Island?

 

I think it will be in the same vein, although this time I’m no longer concentrating on one single character.

 

And after that, will you further continue your series on the ‘technological landscape’?

 

No. I don’t have an idea for a novel, but I’d very much like to write several stories that I haven’t had the time to write these last few years. And it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything in the way of imaginative narratives, romances…

   

I.G.H. (High-Rise), French edition, Calmann-Levy, Dimensions SF (1976). Thanks to Herve for the scan.

  

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Originally published in French as ‘Entretien avec J. G. Ballard’, Magazine Littéraire 96 (January 1975), 54.

  

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Author: Dan OHara

 

Find all posts by Dan OHara

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2 Responses »

Rick McGrath on November 24th, 2008 at 1:00 am:

 

Great one, Dan… thanks!

 

Clearing the tabs on November 27th, 2008 at 8:16 pm:

 

[...] Ballardian » ‘Content in their little prisons’: J.G. Ballard on ‘The Towers’ "For example, in cities, the degree of criminality is affected by liberty of movement; it’s higher in culs-de-sac. And high-rises are culs-de-sac: two thousand people jammed together in the air…" (tags: Ballardian Ballard architecture highrise interview urbanism crime) [...]

   

my final 3D project for advanced 3D techniques.

 

done in cinema4d r11 and after effects cs3

 

assignment was to do "anything." awesome.

 

music by stars of the lid

This project takes a view on how seeking acknowledgment in a rapid stream of external demands and expectations influences this particular human being. It can increase a sense of existential loneliness - and the feeling of being numb.

 

See the full project: www.bendikjohan.com/the-depleted-self

It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment. G.G.Márquez

“Certified,Qualified,Underemployed”

 

She graduated with honors,

a minor in existential dread and a major in “please hire me.”

 

She used to think “cloud computing” meant working from anywhere.

Turns out it means your job disappears into thin air.

 

The job market applauded politely and handed her a part-time badge at a mall kiosk

 

Now she sells scented candles labeled “Entrepreneurial Spirit” that smell faintly of burnt dreams.

 

The IT bubble had promised her a kingdom—remote work, stock options, kombucha on tap.

Instead, she learned to say,

“Would you like that gift-wrapped?” in three tones:

hopeful, robotic, and spiritually absent.

 

“LOST” on her left hand.

“SOUL” on her right.

 

Her hands spell “LOST SOUL,” but management insists she rotate them to spell “SOUL LOST” for better visual merchandising.

 

The bubble floats on.

She clocks in.

 

Turns out, it’s the fastest-growing demographic.

© Rajesh Pamnani 2026

Alter Ego.The moment the mind turns on itself.This is where I split

to survive.

 

The more I learn about myself, the more I fear myself. I’m told I should remain neutral. A Switzerland of the mind.

Existential Archeology. The color of Adam but not Eve.

www.schmutzie.com/weblog/terrible-horrible-no-fun-haiku-c...

One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness—the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.

 

- Norman Mailer in Writers at Work

Today the We're Here group members are pondering about the meaning of life for the Existential - Picturing the questions {and vice versa} group.

We're Here! - April. Existential

 

„One must imagine Sisyphus happy“ - Albert Camus

The Black Rail at the Cape May Migratory Bird Refuge (aka the South Cape May Meadows) forges on, undaunted by the impending lack of cover. A typical rail attitude, sometimes they act like no one can see them even up close and in the open. This rail showed very little concern over the group of photographers and birders not ten feet away.

© BlueFunambulist 2015 | Spain

 

Seven years ago, in winter season, I had for the first time an existential dilemma: what seemed the eternal conflict between heart and mind. The impulses they sent were hardly ever in the same direction, although is true that there were not many options to choose. I called it Duality. My Duality. As the years were passing by, I kept applying the term for other quandaries in Life and I became more and more analytical. Since 2010 until 2013, included, I started to follow my own rational and aristotelian theories based on finding the reason why things were as they were or can be. Feelings were hardly questioned. And they kept acting wild in many situations, specially inside. I felt what I felt. And it was as frustrating as senseless trying to make myself a perfect individual. I wrote during those years about two hundred personal writtings that I called «Feelings of Dusty Memories» what absolutely helped me to reach my own conclusions after a period of time.

 

In between those years, closer to the last times, I started to shyly include what I felt as a magical factor. Something what rested apart from science and methods. Something dependent of an unknown variable. The universe laws, the planets of the solar system and Pluto had an special space in my life, but never analysed as before. I would say that it was a middle point, neutral. Harmonious. I travelled to get lost and I truly found myself, as a solitary soul. A sensitive soul, an inquisitive mind and a human body, with it human needs.

 

And this is how Rinae Duality turned out into Plutonian. And that is how Plutonian grew up into Life Funambulist, who felt that to describe herself better, has to give birth to Blue Funambulist. Because Blue is the name of an alter-ego character moved by the heart call. Because it has always been my favorite colour, intrinsic to the ocean, and created by the light. The only colour that keeps an emotional state inside. A state that always should be alive.

 

Listening to: Rivers Flows in You, Yiruma.

 

russellmoreton.blogspot.com

 

Working with the imagination of matter.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

Gaston Bachelard.

 

The Daughter of Butades.

An explicitly corporeal gesture/process.

 

Driveby photo. It's a loop--does it really matter?

The painter of the scream. Francis Bacon's raw, unsettling works explored the existential agony and biological reality of the human condition. View on SteveHammond.Art