ON MY way to meet Alan Moore, the creator of some of the greatest comic-book stories in the last 40 years, I take a stroll around Northampton. He has lived his whole life in this historic town in central England. Leaving All Saints’ Church in the town centre, I almost step on a fluffy and bloody chick, fallen to its death from a nest high above. I recall the start of one of his best-known works, Watchmen: “Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach.” What an omen. I’m about to meet Moore and I’m having a Mooresian moment.
Moore is a singular and titanic figure in the comic-book world. Winner of many awards and a writer of bestsellers – Watchmen was listed by Time magazine as one of the top 100 novels published since 1923 – he is one of the most influential writers of our time. Yet after disputes with publishers, he has disowned most of his output and has turned down millions of dollars by not cooperating with movie adaptations of his books.
An occultist and self-declared ceremonial magician, Moore is nevertheless a rationalist who is deeply immersed in ideas from science. A huge fan of New Scientist, Moore says: “When I read it, it’s like a parasite winnowing for gold. Like, yes… what can I use here?”
Advertisement
I am here to meet him as his epic novel Jerusalem is published in paperback. The book explores his version of eternalism, through his argument that space-time exists in a four-dimensional block, and we start by talking about how an interest in time has run through much of his work.
Moore recalls when he was very young, in the family house, looking at old photographs of bewhiskered relatives smiling at the novelty of a camera. He realised there would come a time when people would be looking at photographs of him, and he felt as if, in some sense, that moment was already happening: “That was probably the first time that I started to think of time as a place where the future already existed.”
That realisation intrigued more than panicked him, he says. A deep interest in the nature of time took hold. Part of his trailblazing story The Ballad of Halo Jones is set on a planet where time runs differently in different places. And the quantum superhero Dr Manhattan in Watchmen doesn’t distinguish between past and future. “With Dr Manhattan, I was thinking there haven’t been any quantum characters in comics.” So he created someone who can be in several places at once and for whom the future and the past are not delineated.
Moore has a far broader world view than most of the people (scientists) I interview. Where I might think a scientific basis is all you need to explain the world and everything in it, Moore thinks you also need magic. He defines magic as any purposeful engagement with the phenomena, or possibilities, of consciousness.
“What if,” he says, eating some vegetarian lasagne, “we regard consciousness as a space?” Max Planck, he adds, said something similar. (Planck said he regarded consciousness as fundamental, and that matter was derived from consciousness.) Much of Moore’s thinking about consciousness seems to have come from having mucked around with it on magic mushrooms. I don’t know where Planck’s came from.
If consciousness is a kind of space, Moore says, then it might imply that, as in the real world, we all have our private address, but the street outside is everybody’s. It’s a lovely idea, but I’m not sure we need to posit a physical shared space. People share experiences all the time, and brain waves sync when listening to the same music.
But Moore goes even further, suggesting – for fun, I think – that this mutual space could be inhabited. “What if,” he asks, “there were creatures, entities, that were made up purely of ideas, purely of language or something – wouldn’t that explain everything from Smurfs to gods, to demons, to angels, to leprechauns, to all of this nonsense that we have been obsessed with throughout our development as a species?”
It sounds a bit like Richard Dawkins’s memes, competing in a pool of ideas, but before we can get into that, he’s off, asserting that all our culture emerged from shamanism. And then he says: “Magic, in a certain sense, is the palaeontology of science. It’s where science comes from.”
That’s another lovely idea, even if you do have to keep a grip on what he means by magic. It may be interchangeable with art, in that you don’t need to prove things in either, while you do in science. The Renaissance ideas of Galileo, Copernicus and Bruno, Moore says, grew out of ideas from Alexandria, where people believed planets orbited the sun rather than Earth – although their belief was based on “magical” rather than scientific thinking.
“Science,” Moore is careful to emphasise, “is the most beautiful and elegant tool that humanity has yet developed with which to actually investigate the physical universe, to measure it, to test it. Science evolved out of magic.”
Where we differ is that he thinks we need something more when we try to explain consciousness. I think the problem is we can’t even properly define consciousness and that it is better to break it up into units, such as awareness, or perception, that we can study, and hope it all comes together later.
But perhaps that mindset is limiting. In the 1980s, Moore worked on an obscure vegetable-based monster in the DC Comics stable called Swamp Thing. He turned it into an eco-warrior, using it to explore ideas of non-animal consciousness and eco-connectivity that are now gaining credibility. Certainly a strictly scientific mindset can be a limit to the imagination, but Moore thinks it is a limit to our accumulation of knowledge, too, and that if we could link what he calls magic with art and creativity and science, it would be to the benefit of all.
“The man is a walking Wikipedia, albeit one with psychedelic and deeply compassionate leanings”
Since having grandchildren, Moore says he has become even more aware of the precarious state of the world. But he is encouraged by the opposition the US president is generating. Paradoxically “we may be looking back on the election of Donald Trump as the planet’s environmental salvation”, he says. Trump’s climate denialism may spur US states and countries worldwide to strengthen their commitment to reducing carbon emissions.
He is optimistic, despite – or perhaps because of – adopting eternalism as a world view. “If time is not actually passing, if this is a block universe, then, yes, your mum is going to die sometime, just as we all die individually sometime,” he says. “But that doesn’t matter because it [your consciousness] is saved somewhere.” If we repeat our lives forever, we’ll get to revisit the highs as well as the lows. He sees it as a secular view of human continuity beyond the normal lifespan. “As I say in Jerusalem, the best moments of your life forever, that’s paradise, isn’t it? And the worst moments of your life forever, that is unending damnation. This is heaven, this is hell, right here. Deal with it.”
This view of time runs through Jerusalem. Eternity unravels in the Boroughs area of Northampton, where the industrial revolution and Blake’s dark, satanic mills got going. When Adam Smith, father of the free market, saw the mills, his idea of the “invisible hand” shaping the market was born. The county town is now in crisis. The council is bust, cutting services and jobs. “Northampton is the centre of England,” Moore says. “The emotional and historical centre of Northampton is the Boroughs, and the Boroughs is a completely devastated area. So you have a hole in the middle of the tapestry of England and if you don’t do something it will run to the edges of the fabric.”
We stroll through the town after a 3-hour lunch and several people hail him. He gives a bundle of cash to a homeless guy he knows. Our talk has ranged from Einstein to the band Gorillaz, taking in British comic 2000 AD, Nietszche, and Moore’s view that superhero movies are responsible for the infantilisation of Western culture. The man is a walking Wikipedia, albeit one with psychedelic and deeply compassionate leanings. He picks up on Nietzsche’s views on eternal recurrence, which are similar to Moore’s on eternalism. “It doesn’t even matter if it’s true,” Moore says. “If you lived according to this belief, you would have a better life.”
We part at Northampton station, and one thing he said stays with me: “If you think that every second is eternal, don’t do anything that you can’t live with forever.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “Magic and science fuel Middle England cult hero”
