Image: Farewell, Drawing of JG Ballard by his daughter Fay Ballard
One of the major tensions in my life is between my strong desire for self-expression, to be an artist and the daily realities of survival. I spend the overwhelming majority of my time either earning income at my job or taking care of my two sons. Me and their mother are not together and so I spend a good amount of time doing solo child rearing. This leaves precious little time for the things I find individually meaningful, my own creative works. It’s a painful situation for me and one I am always wrestling with. A lot of my turning over ideas about artistic process, productivity and so on is all a thinly veiled circling around this central challenge in my life. I spent the day today with my sons traveling out to the misty gray forest outside Berlin and building a fort out of sticks. It was great, and these type of activities are some of the only ones that tie me back to reality away from a screen, but at the same time I feel the gnawing tension of ‘when will I have time for myself?’ It feels petty, ungrateful and self-centered to feel this way, much less to admit it publicly. Parenting is one of those social high wire acts over the abyss of shame. There is always an audience, real or imagined, there to judge your parenting. After going to the forest I put the kids in front of the video games and took a bath. I was raised without being allowed to watch television at all so every time I let the kids watch TV so that I can sleep an hour longer, or relax, or work, I feel guilty. The further I go down this path the better I get at detecting and deflecting these kind of thoughts, but it’s a constant process. I find it far more easy these days to tell other people who offer unsolicited parenting advice to politely fuck off, but the internal voice is harder.
I am subscribed to Maria Popova’s newsletter for her excellent site Brain Pickings. I highly recommend both the site and the newsletter if you’re not familiar. She is intimidatingly intelligent, well read and apparently works like a machine so it’s unsurprising that her output is so good. This lead me down a small rabbit hole of Popova’s writings about the letters and life of Georgia O’Keefe, the American painter. O’Keefe is one of those people who was apparently relentless in her desire to express herself and live life on her own terms, choosing later in life to live in solitude with her dog in order to focus and work intensely on her paintings. Reading the letters she wrote to friends, writers and artists you get this wonderful clear sense of a singleminded and determined person. Being an egomaniac (does everyone do this?) I of course compare myself to her unfavorably. I am unfocused, pulled in multiple directions, scattered and shattered. Making no progress. This lead me to go down a further rabbit hole of trying to find artists I admired who had been parents or more specifically, single parents. This is of course weird and embarassing to admit that one does this. It’s like Googling your own name. People do it, but don’t admit to it.
This search however, via an article by Hari Kunzru, turned up the name of one of my heroes: JG Ballard. Ballard, for those unfamiliar, is a British science fiction writer who wrote some of the strangest and most modern feeling SF works of the 20th century. He shifted the focus of science fiction from rocket ships and robots to sexualized car crashes and empty swimming pools. He was singular and brilliantly shameless and had a major impact on me, particularly in my young adult life. I recommend you start with Crash, High Rise and Concrete Island if you want to get a very strange flavor of what he was about. The detail that I learned and that stupidly was a wonderful consolation to me was that Ballard was a single father raising three kids, and still managed to write his strange books. Tragically his wife died of pneumonia while the family was on vacation in Spain when his oldest daughter was 7, and he raised the children on his own from then on. He continued writing his novels and by all posthumous indications lived both a happy familial and creative life. Not only was Ballard successful in the literary sense but he was boldly experimental and creative, with a true sense of unique creative vision. On his family life, he wrote that he and the kids raised each other, over those years, which is a beautiful sentiment which I can relate to a great deal. To learn that he was able to thread the needle of being both a good artist and a parent on his own was something I found personally very encouraging.
