“There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go.”

“Lost in the mantra of stylised violence, Ballard hypnotised himself, exorcising his grief with the ritual repetition of automobile trauma, exploring it from every conceivable angle across every artistic discipline available to him. But isn’t it the case that artists dabbling in the black arts, mediators between worlds, tend to lose themselves in the glare after flying too close to the sun? For incantations of this kind, repeated often enough, can bring something back with them when the voyager, the cosmonaut of inner space, re-enters our world. There are ruptures in space-time. Matter collides and there is fallout, like a Sumerian demon woken from the dead and hungry for souls.”

“It is unfair how familiar some of us are with struggle, how fluently we speak its language.”