Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that fiction is deeply intertwined with human psychology, reflecting our memories and desires.
J. G. Ballard's quote implies that fiction serves as a bridge between our neurological makeup and our emotional experiences. It indicates that the stories we create and consume are not just mere entertainments but are intricately connected to the underlying neural processes that shape our memories and desires, effectively turning fiction into a manifestation of our deepest psychological truths.
In practice
In a literary analysis class, discussing how fiction reflects real human emotions.
Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?
Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.
Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.
I was captured by music at a really early age. I was really captured by it. Everything about it. It was my mother… It was my father… It was my play thing. It was my toy. It was the best thing in my life.
I feel that buildings often have a workaday aspect that you see during the daylight hours, and a more resplendent side that emerges after dark.
Music is part of the life of fashion, too.
For me, the way to approach a subject such as Vietnam is through storytelling.
If the King loves music, it is well with the land.
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