## Metadata - Author: [[Eric L. Berlatsky]] - Full Title: Alan Moore - Category: #books ## Highlights - I don’t subscribe to the precious attitude toward art, where you sit and wait for the Muse to settle on your brow. You can’t just wait for an inspiration—not when you’re doing it for a living. I mean, Van Gogh could, but he ended up penniless in a loony bin. If you wait for the Muse to fly in your window, you’ll wait for weeks, and she’ll be off down the road somewhere screwing around with some fifteen-year-old kid who’s just written his first poem about the evils of modern warfare! ([Location 1170](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=1170)) - Much of comics writing comes down to finding interesting ways to change scenes, and I use overlapping dialogue a lot. That relies on the coincidence of what people are saying being relevant to a scene miles away, so the words link the scenes. ([Location 1186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=1186)) - I like building up situations and characters so that when something does happen, even if it’s only a little thing, it has that weight and that power. ([Location 1196](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=1196)) - My main concern was to show a world without heroes, without villains, since to my mind these are the two most dangerous fallacies which beset us, both in the relatively unimportant world of fiction and in the more important field of politics. Human instinct seems to categorize the world continually in terms of heroes and villains. I suspect that if we had the power to look inside Hitler’s head, into the heads of the greatest monsters in history, you would find heroes. The worst creatures no doubt saw themselves as heroes, so the whole category is rather pointless. ([Location 1276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=1276)) - To my point of view, our leaders are, in a sense, riding a wave on a surfboard. They’re not in control of the wave, but because they’re on top of it, we sometimes get that illusion. The wave is in fact something vast and unfathomable which has its beginning in the mass unconscious or whatever and works its way out. ([Location 1302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=1302)) - given the world of Watchmen, it seemed likely that there would be roughly the same percentage of gay people as in our own world, and that certain professions might attract a higher percentage of gays than other professions. It seemed sensible to me that costumed crime fighting might be one of those professions. ([Location 1357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=1357)) - As an intellectual, I’m incredibly lazy, and also something of a dilettante. I tend to pick an idea out of a book, hypothesize the rest, and fake it. ([Location 1410](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=1410)) - I’m interested in manipulating symbols and images in a way that will have a rather subliminal affect on the viewer. I think comics as a medium is ideally suited for this sort of thing, far more so than film, because with comics you can stare at the page for as long as you need in order to absorb all the little hints and suggestions going on in the background. ([Location 1415](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=1415)) - We found out while working on the book that the smiley face originated in a series of behavioral experiments with children. They were experiments to find the purest image of affection that a baby would respond to, and the smiley face is apparently it. The smiley face is evidently the purest symbol of innocence the human race has been able to come up with thus far. ([Location 1479](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=1479)) - We start out talking about how the “I” is its own blind spot. Mind has come up with this brilliant way of looking at the world, science, but it can’t look at itself. Science has no place for the mind. The whole of our science is based upon empirical, repeatable experiments, whereas thought is not in that category. You can’t take thought into a laboratory. The essential fact of our existence, perhaps the only fact of our existence—our own thought and perception—is ruled offside by the science it has invented. Science looks at the universe, doesn’t see itself there, doesn’t see mind there, so you have a world in which mind has no place. We are still no nearer to coming to terms with the actual dynamics of what consciousness is. ([Location 1640](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=1640)) - A lot of things we thought were givens have turned out to be local and temporary phenomena. Capitalism and communism felt like they were always going to be around, but it turns out they were just two ways of ordering an industrial society. If you were looking for more fundamental human political poles, you’d take anarchy and fascism, for my money. Which are not dependent upon economic trends because they are both a bit mad. One of them is complete abdication of individual responsibility into the collective, and one of them absolute responsibility for the individual. I think these will both still be with us, but fascism becomes less and less possible. We have to accept that we are moving towards some sort of anarchy. ([Location 1887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=1887)) - Take disintegration far enough and you get a new form of integration. I tend to see all this in neural terms. It doesn’t matter how big your brain is, or how many cells or neurons in it, what matters is the synaptic fusions, the connections that determine how intelligent you are. “As with the individual, so with the macrocosm.” That’s how the kind of society I live in works. Me and my friends and my contacts, we don’t work in any hierarchical sense. No one wants a boss, to be a boss, to work under a boss. The people you like working with are the people you respect as individuals. Sometimes in connecting up—and I’ve worked a lot in collaborative media—you get something that is better than either of you could do. I couldn’t have done the Watchmen without Dave Gibbons, and he couldn’t have done it without me. That was the result of an almost sexual union. Dave will be very surprised to hear about it in those terms, but in the creative sense, the procreative sense. His and mine mental genetics producing a healthy bouncing baby boy. The sexuality of creativity—on that level, human interaction becomes less of an oppressive pyramid and more of a dance, an orgy, something that you can imagine being a bit of fun. It seems to work naturally, except when order is imposed upon it, from above, and then everything starts getting a bit screwed up. The information, the energy, starts to get messed up. ([Location 1895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=1895)) - It suggests that you have two contrary organisational principles involved in anarchy. One is a kind of linear, meccano-like organization—tie up all the sticks, make sure they are the same length, and you have a brick wall or something. The other one—anarchy—is a more fractal, more natural, more human organisational system in that it organises society in much the same way that we organise our personalities, where it is purely the interplay of neurons. We haven’t got a king neuron that tells all the other neurons what to do. It seems to me to be a more emotionally natural way of working with other people. ([Location 1919](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=1919)) - Anarchy—anarchon—no leaders. Which means, everybody is a leader. You can’t have an official set of rules for anarchy. I tend to think such connections casually break and form, and break and form, throughout our lives. If you look back ten years, you will remember a group of friends who you were productively involved with at that time. Now some of them have drifted away. New people have come in. These are more naturalistic linkages, which exist while there is a need for them to exist. It’s more like the way ants work. Douglas Hofstadter did an illuminating piece called Ant Fugue, which is actually a picture by M. C. Escher. What Hofstadter does is frame it as one of his dialogues between Achilles, a tortoise, an anteater, and one other creature. It is a four-handed conversation about the idea of fugues, and it is talking about how, with a fugue, if you listen to one voice within it, you can follow it perfectly, but you can’t hear the overall music. If you listen to the whole fugue, it makes perfect sense and is beautiful, but you can’t hear the individual voice. Then they start talking about how this applies to consciousness, and they start talking about anthills. On the scent level, where a scent will be released—the signal level—ants will stop what they are doing and follow the scent until they reach a place in the nest where they are needed. At which point, the scent will break down. So you’ve got this perfect organisation going on. None of the ants are conscious, but the next level up is the signal level. And if you go right to the top, he says there is the symbol level of the anthill, which is what you could call the mass consciousness of the anthill, which no individual ant has. But it is what is really going on there. That seems natural—that we all follow our little scents and do what we need to do, and when there isn’t a need for us anymore, we move onto something else. Things tend to organise themselves. If there is any message from contemporary science, it is surely that. I am very fond of the anarchist proverb regarding laws, “Good people have no need for them. Bad people pay no attention to them. What are they there for, other than as a symbol of power?” We can say, “This is law.” I could say, “I rule the universe.” It depends on whether anyone believes me or not. To some degree, I don’t think the authorities care whether the law is observed or not, as long as it is there, and everyone accepts the idea of Law. As long as they buy into the idea of Law. These days it’s difficult to actually define anything as underground culture, but I can see things like this [holds up The Idler]—if the same impulse had been expressed thirty years ago, it would probably have been an underground magazine. They don’t really exist anymore, apart from on a fanzine level. So it has to be something like this. I can see that, you know. There is an eclecticism returning to a culture that I like. On one level, you get Qabbala turning up in New Scientist.… ([Location 1926](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=1926)) - I can’t go for that posturing, spooky guy stuff. When they wanted me to do Fortean TV it became apparent that they wanted me to be Spooky Bloke. But I’m not actually trying to look spooky. I dress in black because it makes me look less fat. It’s as simple as that. It’s not a gothic flourish. ([Location 1977](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=1977)) - Music is imposing a state of consciousness by its very nature. If what this Tree of Life is, is a hierarchy of different states of consciousness, would it be possible to simulate and stimulate those states of consciousness in the listener by producing the right sorts of music? ([Location 2008](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2008)) - The reason I got into magic was that it seemed to be what was lying at the end of the path of writing. If I wanted to continue on that path, I was going to have to get into that territory, because I had followed writing as far as I thought I could without taking a step over the edges of rationality. The path led out of rational confines. When you start thinking about art and creativity, rationality is not big enough to contain it all. ([Location 2022](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2022)) - To me, consciousness, the mind, language is the prime channel—part of this thing I am doing with the Moon and Serpent, this theory with Steve Moore, is any nascent consciousness, whether you are talking about an emerging culture or a single human infant, what they first have to do is undergo a process of discrimination when they are trying to come up with a worldview. What you have to do first is separate yourself from the world. Most newborn babies don’t see any difference between them, their playpen, and their Dad. It’s all them. Only after a little while do they start to realise that it’s not all me, just this bit is me. So by the invention of something similar to the word or concept “I,” we separate ourselves from the universe. Then we start to separate up the universe. We will divide sky from ground, the organic from inorganic. Looked at like this, doesn’t it provide a literal interpretation of the Biblical Creation story? If you take the idea of God in the Bible as a metaphor for any nascent, formative, just-created intelligence, is that not how we all create the universe? We divide the firmament up from the waters of the abyss, and the key to how to do this is in the first line, “In the beginning, there was the word.” By giving “sky” one word, the ground into another, we break the universe down into manageable things that we can interact with through language. ([Location 2030](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2030)) - The traditional definition of magic—and I think this comes from Crowley who laid down a lot of the ground rules—he defined magic as bringing about change in accordance with the will. I’m not sure about that. It’s certainly part of it, but to bring about change in the universe in accordance with your will seems to me to be misunderstanding the relationship between the individual and the universe. In my relationship with the universe, I do tend to see myself as very much the Junior Partner. I don’t want to impose my will on the universe. I’d rather the universe imposed its will on me. I would rather that what I wanted was more in tune with what the universe wanted. ([Location 2048](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2048)) - I see magic as a vantage point from which one can look down on the rest of consciousness. It’s a point outside normal consciousness from which you can look at normal consciousness. It’s a point outside beliefs from which you can look at beliefs. All beliefs are reality tunnels, to use Anton Wilson’s phrase. There is the Communist reality tunnel, the Feminist reality tunnel, all of which seem to be the whole of reality when you are in the middle of them. The whole universe is based on Marxist theory if you’re an intent Marxist. Magic is having a plan of all the tunnels and seeing the overall condition in which they all work. Being aware of different possibilities. If the universe is as a magician sees it, then there are wider possibilities. ([Location 2054](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2054)) - Madness and insanity are two terms that are so vague and relative that you can’t really apportion proper values to them. The only thing I can think of that has any use is “functional” and “dysfunctional.” Are you working as well? In which case, it doesn’t matter if you are mad. ([Location 2143](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2143)) - “All of us, as human beings, through our accumulated perceptions, that could be considered to be our window on reality—what we perceive. We know that it is limited, what we perceive, but it is still our window upon reality. Just as if you are looking out of a window from your house, you can see a little bit of the houses across the street, a little bit of sky. You know there is a whole universe out there, but the limits of your window just show you that view. ([Location 2174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2174)) - This reminds me of Lester Grinspoon’s experiments, when he compared transcripts between people under the influence of LSD and people under the influence of schizophrenia, and he concluded that the difference was that the people tripping had chosen to be dosed. That choice was what kept them sane. They knew what was happening to them. This is why they could come out of it afterwards. Right the way through the experience, you could always attribute it back to that choice to go into that area. ([Location 2198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2198)) - Magic is a response to the madness of the twentieth century. ([Location 2208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2208)) - There are books that have devastated continents, destroyed thousands. What war hasn’t been a war of fiction? All the religious wars, certainly, or the fiction of communism versus the fiction of capitalism—ideas, fictions, shit that people make. They have made a vast impression on the real world. It is the real world. Are thoughts not real? I believe it was Wittgenstein who said a thought is a real event in space and time. I don’t quite agree about the space and time bit, Ludwig, but certainly a real event. It’s only science that cannot consider thought as a real event, and science is not reality. It’s a map of reality and not a very good one. It’s good. It’s useful, but it has its limits. We have to realise that the map has its edges. One thing that is past the edge is any personal experience. That is why magic is a broader map to me. It includes science. It’s the kind of map we need if we are to survive psychologically in the age that is to come, whatever that is. We need a bigger map because the old one is based on an old universe where not many of us live anymore. We have to understand what we are dealing with here, because it is dangerous. It kills people. Art kills. ([Location 2225](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2225)) - The shaman is not a priest. The shaman has no secret knowledge. He is equivalent to the hunter. He has a specific skill that is subjugated to the needs of the group. He is prepared to take drugs, go loopy, visit the underworld, bring back knowledge, and tell everybody. He’s not keeping a secret knowledge. Originally, priests were instructors. They passed out the mysteries and revelations to the masses. Increasingly, they say, “You don’t need to have a religious experience, we are having that for you. That’s what we are here for.” Eventually, they start saying, “You don’t need to have a religious experience, and neither do we. We’ve got this book about some people who—a thousand years ago—had a religious experience. And if you come in on Sunday, we’ll read you a bit of that, and you’ll be sorted. Don’t you worry.” Effectively, a portcullis has slammed down between the individual and their godhead. “You can’t approach your godhead except through us now. We are the only path. Our church is the only path.” But that is every human being’s birthright, to have ingress to their godhead. Organised religion has corrupted one of the purest, most powerful, and sustaining things in the human condition. It has imposed a middle management, not only in our politics and in our finances, but in our spirituality as well. ([Location 2247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2247)) - It’s funny, you tend to find that your reaction to your past work is almost tidal. Sometimes I’ll pick up Watchmen and flip through it and think, “Oh, God, I can’t be bothered to read all this. It’s so wordy, and there are so many pictures. Nah.” And then, maybe a year later, I’ll pick it up again and will be sucked straight into the story and will think, “Actually, this is pretty good.” Maybe two years after that, I’ll be back to thinking that it’s dull, or less than satisfying. ([Location 2385](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2385)) - I like to show off, even if it’s only going to be to, in some cases, eight other comics writers who are going to realize what I’ve done. I like to show my might and power, so that they may grovel before me. ([Location 2430](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2430)) - We decided that we wanted to do something that was erotic. Why did we want to do that? Well, we decided that there was a need for it, that most erotica—or pornography (and the distinction seems to be largely in the income bracket of the person buying it)—most of it is shit, sadly. It’s ugly on all sorts of levels—aesthetically ugly, physically ugly, politically ugly, morally . . . on all sorts of levels . . . and there’s no reason why that should be. When you can get people beautifying violence in the cinema . . . ([Location 2635](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2635)) - If you think there’s a huge amount of difference between you and Paul Joseph Goebbels, you’re kidding yourself. Any form of art is propaganda. It is propaganda for a state of mind rather than a nation-state, but it is propaganda nonetheless, and it’s best if you accept that and understand what you’re doing and be honest about it. You are trying to change the mind of your target audience. You are trying to change their perceptions. You are trying to stop them from seeing things how they see things and start them seeing things the way you see things. The ethics of that we could debate all night [laughter] but basically, the thing is, I can, so I will. I’m aware of how words can change people’s minds, can change the way people think. So are all of the advertisers, so are all of the politicians, so are all of the people who run our lives. They’re not pulling any punches. I would say that it is beholden unto any writer to equally not pull any punches on the other side. If you believe something, if you believe something is right or something is wrong then yeah, try and convince other people. Spread the idea around like a designer virus. Make it so that other people will repeat it. ([Location 2797](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2797)) - As far as I know, the last figures I heard quoted, nine out of every ten writers will have mental problems at some point during their life. Sixty percent of that ninety percent—which I think works out at roughly fifty percent of all writers—will have their lives altered and affected—seriously affected—by those mental problems. I think what that translates to is—nine out of ten crack up, five out of ten go mad. It’s like, miners get black lung, writers go bonkers. This is a real occupational hazard. There’s plenty of ways to go bonkers, some of them a lot quieter, some more insidious than others—drink, heroin. There’s lots of other sorts of things, but this is dangerous. We’re dealing with the unreal. You’re dealing right on the borderline of fact and fiction, which is where our entire world happens. ([Location 2857](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2857)) - If you want to expand people’s consciousness, give them better language, wider language, new words. Learn to love words. Learn to delight over a new word that you’ve found. ([Location 2891](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2891)) - You can get involved in writing to whatever depth you want, but the thing is that really you have to kind of remember the best way to do it, with all this that I’ve said about the dangers of madness, treat writing the way that you would treat a god. If you believed in such things, if you were going to devote yourself to a particular god, then that’s the best way to treat it. Treat it as if it’s not just some abstract idea of a god. Treat it as if it was a real god that will maybe, if you do right by the god, will maybe grant all your wishes, will maybe lavish nothing but success and wonder upon you and, if you don’t do right by the god, will begin to fuck with you in ways you cannot even begin to imagine. Treat it like that, and you won’t go far wrong. In effect, that’s what you’re doing. Writing will consume your life, because so much of writing happens in your head. You don’t need to be “at work.” You don’t even need to be awake. You’re not gonna get a respite from writing when your head hits the pillow. You’re not gonna get a respite from writing when you go on a holiday caravan to Great Yarmouth, or anywhere—the moon. You can’t get away from it. It’s in your head. And if it’s working properly, it’s probably obsessive. If you’ve got a story on the boil, and if you’re a writer you probably will have, you’re probably thinking about problems with that story, good things about it that you wanna enhance and make even better, and you’re probably thinking that all the time. You might be thinking that when you’re having sex. You might be thinking that when you’re eating dinner. You might be thinking that on public transport. This is something that will take over your life. Surrender. Surrender to it right from word one. Don’t fight. It’s bigger than you are. It’s more important than you are. Just do what it says. Even if that seems to be completely ruining your life, do what it says. Even if it tells you to do something stupid—if it tells you to jump off a cliff—do it [laughter]. ([Location 2910](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2910)) - Mort Weisinger, because he was the toughest of the editors, I thought: “Alright, I’ll take his standard as the strictest.” What he said was: “If you’ve got six panels on a page, then the maximum number of words that you should have in each panel, is thirty-five. No more.” That’s the maximum: thirty-five words per panel. Also, if a balloon has more than twenty or twenty-five words in it, it’s gonna look too big. Twenty-five words is the absolute maximum for balloon size. Right, once you’ve taken on board those two simple rules, laying out comics pages—it gives you somewhere to start. You sort of know: “OK, so six panels, thirty-five words a panel, that means about 210 words per page maximum.” ([Location 2964](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=2964)) - I actually tend to think of drugs as an implement and a tool, rather than a thing that is interesting in itself. I’m reminded of that wonderful Spacemen 3 song: “Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To,” which is a pretty good description of my working methods. I’m kind of taking drugs to write comics to take drugs to. Most of the psychedelia, I want it to be there on the page in the writing. I want my work to be acting like a drug as near as I can manage. I’d like to think that if you put the words in the right order with the pictures, you can create a psychedelic state, a fugue state. ([Location 4370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005UW2R40&location=4370))