J. G. Ballard's Inner Spaces and the Psychological Landscapes of Silent Hill

In the sweep of human history, accounting for both where we're going and where we've been, the number of births will balance, completely and unalterably, the number of deaths.

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J. G. Ballard is usually shelved in the Science Fiction section.

Despite this, his work has only a surface resemblance to the tales of space opera and exploration portrayed by Isaac Asimov, Frederick Pohl, and the creators of Star Wars.

Ballard's stories aren't outer-space adventure tales. Instead, they are fantasies of psychological fulfillment.

You might argue that so many of his characters come to violent or tragic ends. How could this be fulfillment?

The author did not see things this way. He felt his characters were psychonauts of "inner space" who followed their true natures to destinies denied weaker men.

There's Laing from High Rise, who found peace in the disintegrating social structures in a Brutalist housing tower, ultimately cooking a neighbor's Alsacian for supper. There's the community of car-crash fetishists, one whose ultimate erotic desire was to perish in a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor. There's the man from The Enormous Space who abdicates all responsibility and contact with the outside world, and finds his home expanding until it fills the entire universe.

Ballard took scenarios of ecological destruction and physical isolation and then showed us the people who sought them out, because they could only be satisfied in a world with these conditions.

Ballard spent several years of his childhood held by the Japanese in a concentration camp in Shanghai. He describes this in his most famous work, Empire of the Sun. When the Japanese disappeared and left the camp un-guarded, the prisoners were reluctant to step out of their cage. This goes some way towards explaining his affinity for psychopathy.

But one does not have to spend years as a prisoner of war to step outside the psychological norm.

Our genes go deep into the past, and it's not easy to understand their every desire.

I recently worked my way through Ballard's collected stories, a sometimes-bewildering tome of 1400 pages. Pairing this with Extreme Metaphors, an equally lengthy collection of his interviews, shed a new light on his approach and obsessions. I found myself jumping back and forth between the volumes, devouring this fascinating life a decade at a time, first as fiction, than as recollection.

It was a journey worth undertaking. It brought me more completely into Ballard's particular fictive world, but it also allowed me to see the possibilities inherent in all fiction: both for psychological escape and fulfillment, and for breaking down the barriers between internal and external landscapes - or rather perhaps for laying them on top of each other like a pair of transparencies, to see where they align and diverge.

So, it turns out, those possibilities aren't just in fiction. They're in reality too, insofar as we can understand it.

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I'm not sure what's so mesmerizing about the town of Silent Hill.

Anyone of traditionally-considered "sound mind" would not want to spend any more time there than they had to. - but then again, isn't this what we volunteer for when we purchase a game that can take scores of hours to complete?

Silent Hill is a town of metaphor. Sure, you're taking on bandaged, pus-seeping zombie nurses and hiding from a butcher-executioner who drags around a cleaver horrifyingly over-proportioned for the bloodiest abbatoir. But you're chasing after a woman who, it turns out, is your wife recently dead from cancer. (Unless you run from all the conventional human concerns, flagrantly ignoring them, in which case you get the ending that has something to do with space-aliens.) Those monsters represent all the things you can't control, the worst of all being your own guilt.

What I don't understand, as I take stock of my own inner space and its relationship to this landscape, is why I should find the place so damned comfortable. The filthy, decaying apartment blocks, the constant sense of menace and danger always infuriatingly just-off-screen, the strange appeal of monstrosities so gory and glistening that they transcend disgust and enter a realm that's downright beautiful - it takes me to a place so familiar it feels like home. Maybe it's an externalization of the anxiety and dread that pervades even the best of my days. The overwhelming sense that, when it comes down to it, we're all just meat living on the wholesale slaughter and consumption of creatures whose lives are so bleak and dismal it's no longer legal to photograph their conditions. The sense that the world we perceive may or may not actually be out there, but exists instead as a reconstruction within our minds that has, thus far at least, allowed us to perpetuate our patterns and the ability to maintain what psychologists refer to as "consciousness," while understanding that every minute of this consciousness is a minute of borrowed time, revocable at any instant by a universe we only pretend we comprehend.

This is all on the surface, in Silent Hill. It's written into the landscape. So a man can settle in there. He knows where he stands.

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I'm a minimalist in my day-to-day life.

My tastes in architecture range towards clean, open spaces and unadorned surfaces, counters of grey marble and stainless steel and walls painted resale-friendly eggshell-white. I could live comfortably in the lobby of a law office, or in the operating theater of a surgery, taking my meals on surfaces that have held gore and ordure and been wiped down with bleach to gleam again.

I'm obsessed with getting by with as little stuff as possible, because I know that every object around me is going to rot, rust, and decay according to the dictates of an entropy which is tied to the pervasive clock ticking at the heart of our expanding universe.

The things we own are a burden. I've grown up around clutter and spent decades picking up the pieces left by hoarding grandparents. The photos in this post represent a small part of my family's legacy. At some point my mother will die and we will have to dispose of five generations' antiques, sorting the garbage from the treasure, for there are no future children to cherish and maintain these objects. I am tempted to just light them all on fire.

I've had tenants trash my house so badly that they turned it into a flea-infested diaper-strewn nightmare so foul the local health department nailed an official notice to the front door. The third time this happened it got to be too much, and we just handed the keys back to the bank. You can only battle so much chaos, and it's best to keep your struggles small.

If I let the dust accumulate, if I don't wash a dish before the sauce crusts over, if I don't throw out an unused object before purchasing a replacement, that ruined house rises around me again just to rot again. I know I'll soon be overwhelmed by gore, filth, ichor, blood and shit in a space with shattered windows and a soggy, leaking roof shedding plaster as it sags towards an inevitable collapse.

Horror tells us that this is survivable. Or it's not. Or only for some.

And that it doesn't really matter. Because in the sweep of human history, accounting both for where we are going and where we have been, the number of births will balance, completely and unalterably, the number of deaths.

Weighed across a span of infinite time, babies and corpses burden the scales in precisely equal measure. In a universe of such bewildering complexity, inconsistency, and chaos, where the arrow of time points irrevocably towards entropy and decay, this fact, at least, should bring some comfort to those who are troubled by uncountable numbers, randomness, and vague feelings of injustice.

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