J.G. Ballard's Advice

My advice to anyone in any field is to be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker.

La alternancia, el ritmo

Corazón, corazón, si te turban pesares

invencibles, ¡arriba!, resístele al contrario

ofreciéndole el pecho de frente, y al ardid

del enemigo opónte con firmeza.

Y si sales vencedor, disimula, corazón, no te ufanes,

ni, de salir vencido, te envilezcas llorando

en casa. No les dejes que importen demasiado

a tu dicha en los éxitos, tu pena en los fracasos.

Comprende que en la vida impera la alternancia.

Arquíloco de Paros

"Líricos griegos arcaicos" Juan Ferraté.

The Devil's Advice to Story-Tellers

Nice contradiction between fact and fact
Will make the whole read human and exact.

Robert Graves

¿Da lo mismo?

Cuando anochezca
¿qué puedo hacer con la memoria,
dónde guardo la barca de esos años,
dónde los imperdibles del soneto,
el llanto del cristal en las ventanas,
la amarga margarita,
el tiempo fraternal y fracturado?

Se habrá roto el zafiro
y por el suelo correrá, ya libre,
lo prisionero.
(El perro ladra y su ladrido
me arranca de la sombra en que caía).

Pero, de todos modos,
los helechos aquellos se quemaron,
la rosa -¿de quién era?- continúa
en algún libro, no sé cuál. A estas alturas
¿verdad que todo da lo mismo?

Hablando con un haya - Julia Uceda

Yo sé quién soy

--Mire vuestra merced, señor, pecador de mí, que yo no soy Don Rodrigo de Narváez, ni el marqués de Mantua, sino Pedro Alonso, su vecino; ni vuestra merced es Valdovinos, ni Abindarráez, sino el honrado hidalgo del señor Quijana.

--Yo sé quién soy -respondión Don Quijote-, y sé que puedo ser no sólo los que he dicho, sino todos los Doce Pares de Francia, y aun todos los nueve de la Fama, pues a todas las hazañas que ellos todos juntos y cada uno por sí hicieron, se aventajarán las mías.

Miguel de Cervantes, DON QUIJOTE DE LA MANCHA I, capítulo V.

To be strong

It was good to be strong enough for everything, even if all you made melted and changed and slipped under your hands, so that by the time you finished you almost forgot what you were working for. What was it I set out to do? she asked herself intently, but she could not remember. A fog rose over the valley, she saw it marching across the creek swallowing the trees and moving up the hill like an army of ghosts. Soon it would be near the edge of the orchard, and then it was time to go in and light the lamps.

Katherine Anne Porter, THE JILTING OF GRANNY WEATHERALL, 1930.

Narrative is time, hard-wired

Given the presence of narrative in almost all human discourse, there is little wonder that there are theorists who place it next to language itself as the distinctive human trait. Frederic Jameson, for example, writes about the "all-informing process of narrative," which he describes as "the central function or instance of the human mind." Jean-François Lyotard calls narration "the quintessential form of customary knowledge." Whether or not such assertions stand up to scrutiny, it is still the case that we engage in narrative so often and with such unconscious ease that the gift for it would seem to be everyone's birthright. Perhaps the fullest statement regarding the universality of narrative among humans is the opening to Roland Barthes' landmark essay on narrative (1966). It is worth quoting at length:

The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances -as though any material were fit to receive man's stories. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting (think of Carpaccio's Saint Ursula), stained-glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enojoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.

[...] Narrative capability shows up in infants some time in their third or fourth year, when they start putting verbs together with nouns . Its appearance coincides, roughly, with the first memories that are retained by adults of their infancy, a conjunction that has led some to propose that memory in itself is dependent on the capacity for narrative. In other words, we do not have any mental record of who we are until narrative is present as a kind of armature, giving shape to that record. If this is so, then "our very definitions as human beings," as Peter Brooks has written, "is very much bound up with the stories we tell about our own lives and the world in which we live. We cannot, in our dreams, our daydreams, our ambitious fantasies, avoid the imaginative imposition of form in life." The gift of narrative is so pervasive and universal that there are those who strongly suggest that narrative is a "deep structure," a human capacity genetically hard-wired into our minds in the same way as our capacity or grammar (according to some linguists) is something we are born with. The novelist Paul Auster once wrote that "A child's need for stories is as fundamental as his need for food."

[...] whether from nature or from nurture or from some complex combination of the two -the question remains: what does narrative do for us? [...] if we have to choose one answer above all others, the likeliest is that narrative is the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of time. [...] it makes evolutionary sense. As we are the only speies on earth with both language and a conscious awareness of the passage of time, it stands to reason that we would have a mechanism for expressing this awareness.

From Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

I think I could turn and live a while with the animals

I think I could turn and live a while with the animals... they are so placid and self contained,
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied... not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.

So they show their relations to me and I accept them;
They bring me tokens of myself... they evince them plainly in their possession.

Walt Whitman, Song to Myself, verse 32...

Maps

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

George Orwell