#existentialis

I made a video.

Why do humanity, therewith us human beings, posess such an increasingly demanding urge and fixation as well as starting point to shape society and [limit] ourselves after [the concept of] deadlines? Surely, balance must be of priority even here. We [in order to conformingly please another part] cannot detail our lives in every single tingly and timely aspect and way. We break apart then, if not now, then eventually we do. One by one, bit by bit.

Limit theretillwith liminality…I presume.

Just be it/one in/with the momentariness. Just once. Try to remember how it used to be…and how it used to feel…life that is. Tailor it when you must instead, but more importantly; when you get/have the feel for it. That is more in tune (I avoided the word ‹line› here…intentionally) with life.

Or does spontaneousness frighten you [people] that much?

Or perhaps it is the longing after that, instead of fright, which saddens one.

I simply donʼt get it…but then again, maybe I do (get it, that is)…

My tendency has, for as long as I can remember, been that of avoiding deadlines, mostly so subonsciously. This has caused me much and many problems and also anxiety, et cetera. So that's my fault. It is my fault for avoiding what constitutes much of our lives today. But I will not abide to everything, and if that means I cannot get to grow old, well…then so be it.

I wonder where the term (and prefix in this case..?) comes from and when, and I also wonder why they used the word (dead-) and combined it with the word 'line'. Wasn't there a next moment in the past? Moment as in next hour, day or week et cetera to do what you were supposed to do, or be where you were supposed to be?

Expectations. I presume it all comes down to expectations and expectability. Set, not unset, ones. And traditions of course. Something in of which I tend to generally [try to] avoid as well (the set ones) and have been avoiding—at least subconsciously, because I become growingly irritable whenever there is the afore-/abovementioned at stake—ever since I can remember. So it checks out.

In a review of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a critic pointed out the “childlike innocence and openness in the face of the unknown.” This film predates Spielberg’s involvement with the adaptation of Empire of the Sun, but it speaks to what could have interested him in Ballard’s text. Jim is a child open to all possibilities.

It’s not that children are passive in their interactions with the world, they just begin from a pure place of unknowing (they know nothing and therefore it is possible for them to know everything – there are no limits except those placed on them by others or by themselves). They are willing to learn through experience and adventure (big or small). They want to be shaped. They want to live to become an adult. Darwin might call this imperative a survival instinct (to learn is to be able to keep yourself alive providing the maximum amount of opportunity to keep your genes alive). This is what Jim does in Empire of the Sun. He survives. But instead of having a society or a parent dictate limits, he has to feel for the limits himself.

His journey follows a particularly conventional arc – the coming of age, from boy to man – but Ballard frames this arc as a very unconventional tragedy. The more Jim interacts with the world, the more the shapeless clay (a ball of infinite possibilities) becomes inevitably, tragically defined. Lines are drawn, the world narrows, imagination gives way to monotony.

Many thinkers have mulled the canvas of childhood. Locke believed it to be blank. Hobbes believed it to contain a mirror (the reflection of the self being of the utmost importance i.e. we are born inherently selfish). Darwin might agree with Hobbes, we are born with an inherent imperative to insure our immortality through our genes. And Ballard at one time believed in an archaic imprint (a genealogical memory). A more accurate metaphor for the canvas of childhood might be the filter. You are born with a frame of defined limits (the limits of your physical species) and advantages and these limits and advantages define how you will engage the world and how the world engages with you. But hung on this frame (you, your physical self) there is a sheet with a million perforations. As you begin to interact with the world, as its light passes through you and you pass through it, these perforations begin to clog up with experiences and lessons and constructions (societal and physical) that predate your existence. The places where light can pass, as you age, become few if not, at some point, non-existent and the places clogged up with information, experiences, and lessons harden and become almost permanent.

Instead of celebrating Jim’s coming of age (as most cultures do), Ballard turns Jim’s growth into a tragedy and he does this by slowly siphoning out the joy Jim finds in the most horrible circumstances (the joy he finds not because of the horrible circumstances, but in spite of them) and by clogging up the possible avenues for light to pass through him.

There is always a lurking sense of dread behind his experiences and the people Jim meets (a threat of impending doom, of adulthood, of the filter getting clogged up and hardening). Even though he finds joy, Ballard makes Jim aware it will not last forever. It’s as if Jim can sense, behind their skin walls, that these adults – the world – want to steal his identity and solitude and joy from him, to infringe on it and take away the happiness and freedom of being alive and alone even in the midst of floating coffins and mounds of death piled like matchsticks. It is this optimism in the face of this dread that endears the reader to Jim and it is his pluck and knack for staying alive that makes the reader admire Jim (even envy him). But Ballard never lies to the reader. The tragedy of a constricting worldview is always present lurking behind every character Jim meets (society and those who people it conspiring to turn Jim into one of them).

Although all the characters to some degree exemplify this dread, it’s Basie and the Americans who truly personify it. They acknowledge their existential solitude by being selfish and treating other beings, including Jim, as tools in their survival (as items to be collected like tinkers or condoms). But they get no joy from this knowledge. Instead, they get what seems to be a compulsive fear of being left with themselves, of being in control of nothing but themselves (of being alone). Basie, a trickster like Jim, lives on the fringes of the rules and joylessly manipulates them. Jim, at least for a time, isn’t even aware there are rules (he makes his own rules). In his ignorance of society, even a society constructed in a warzone, Jim is free.