In a short remembrance for Ballard this morning, Iain Sinclair said "our last conversation was about the Westfield Shopping Centre, this amazing reef that brings the cathederal of nonidentity to its perfect apogee".[1]
And here's Lawrence back in 1925 (Morality and the Novel):
The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment. As mankind is always struggling in the coils of old relationships, art is always ahead of the 'times', which themselves are always far in the rear of the living moment...[2]Footnotes
[1] (added 23 April): Chris Petit writes:
Boredom underpins consumerism. It defines leisure (and desire), which collapses into shopping. Boredom invites terror (as its only cure).[2] (added 25 April) I had been looking for the short essay on poetry from which this comes:
This is the momentous crisis for mankind, when we have to get back to chaos. So long as the umbrella serves, and poets make slits in it, and the mass of people can be gradually educated up to the vision in the slit: which means they patch it over with a patch that looks just like the vision in the slit; so long as this process can continue, and mankind can be educated up, and thus built in, so long will a civilization continue more or less happily, completing its own painted prison. It is called completing the consciousness.
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