"Even though I've lived in Shepperton for 23 years, if I need an infinitely mysterious place I don't have any problems finding one. All my fiction is based on the perception of that set of mysterious cyphers which in fact constitutes reality. Our central nervous systems provide us with a conventional view of reality that most people accept in order to be able to cope with the day-to-day business of crossing rooms, walking up staircases. I mean, unless one accepted a high degree of conventionalizing, reality would be impossible. You can't start off every second by saying, "What is this white structure beside me? Uh--it's a wall.."The thing about reason is that it rationalizes reality for us. It provides a convenient explanation. Perhaps too convenient. I'm very interested in dismantling every assumption I can see, however trivial it might be. I'm making a whole sort of Christopher Columbus-like discoveries about the nature of floors, windows, carpets and the like. Because often, behind the most trivial things, lie enormous mysteries. I was joking about taking walls too seriously, but in fact the sort of architectural spaces we inhabit are enormously important--they are powerful. If every member of the human race were to vanish, our successors from another planet could reconstitute the psychology of the poeple on this planet from its architecture. The architecture of modern apartments, let's say, is radically different from that of a baroque palace. I'm interested in deciphering the whole system of codes that I see--in dismantling that whole conventionalized apparatus with which our central nervous systems cope with the business of day-to-day living--which of course, is the greatest trap facing us all"
J.G. Ballard in conversation with Graeme Revell
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