J. G. Ballard on My Mind

We are closing in on fall here at the Perry Farm, which is always good news and bad news. Good because we are exhausted from our outdoor work; bad because for the first time, it’s difficult for us to imagine what comes next. Not a vacation, even though October traditionally is our vacation month. Not a family Thanksgiving or Christmas, at least not unless the weather cooperates and we can gather outdoors, since two of us are immune-compromised and at least four of us still go to school or work in person. 

I’m getting anxious. Since April, we have existed by wrapping the farm around us like a weighted blanket. It comforted us by keeping us busy in the garden, the bee yard, the woods, those hundred acres of native forbs and grasses. But this week after I prepped the garden for fall, I realized that there was nothing left for me to do there this year but pull the carrots and beets, cut the last of the cabbages, pick the tomatoes and squash we’re really tired of eating, collect some seeds for next year, and plant some winter greens. Then what? I’ve got seventy-five pounds of honey sitting here that I need to extract. We’ll have to winterize the hives, and we need to chop a few hundred (maybe a few thousand) cottonwoods and sycamores out of the fields.

But this won’t keep us busy until next spring, when maybe, just maybe, the world will be safer, and we won’t have to stay hunkered down out here.

Of course there is plenty I could be doing indoors. Reading, for one thing—my TBR stacks have gotten taller thanks to COVID-19, likely because my desire to lose myself in reading isn’t as strong as my need to keep moving. This week, I made a point of setting a book next to my teacup each morning, so I’m working my way through a collection of J. G. Ballard short stories. It is science fiction, though along the lines of David Mitchell or Haruki Murakami. Most of the stories focus on what it’s like to be the last human in a world that humans have destroyed. Ahem. 

Two examples. “Billenium” examines what it’s like to live in a country whose solution to overpopulation is to require everyone to live in tiny, urban apartments so that all adjacent land can be used to grow food. Every time the rate of population growth increases, the government reduces the amount of space each person is allowed. By the end of the story, the main character, Ward, is shoe-horned into a space that is only three meters square. (For comparison, our hundred-acre farm is 404,686 square meters!) Worse, Ward has become so accustomed to doing with less and less that he’s become an expert at rationalizing that it’s really not so bad. (It is, Ward. It really is.)

And then there’s “Thirteen for Centarus,”  which tells the story of crewmembers who believe they’re traveling in a spaceship to Alpha Centauri. It’s a very long trip, and the crew understands that only their ancestors will survive it. What they don’t know is that they really aren’t going anywhere—their ship is docked on earth, an experiment designed to determine whether humans can withstand extended space travel. There are a couple of twists near the end, but the message seems to be this: When those in charge act immorally, they tacitly empower those in their charge to do so, too.

I feel better already, don’t you?