...As I see it there's a glossary of imaginary beings. My experience with demons suggests they are a very different category of being than gods. It's something to do with complexity, and it's something to do with emotions. The demons that I have seemingly encountered, and this is probably complete hallucination, or schizophrenic episode, whatever, have recognisably human traits. They were different to us and Other than us. But you could see that they liked to show off, had vanities, rage, closer to us than the couple of gods I seem to have encountered, which are a different level of complexity and have no recognisable human emotion at all. They are more complex, they are higher. Some entities I've encountered seem to be completely stupid, they're like astral fish. Spectacular, but they're not there for much. Not very intelligent, they have their properties and peculiarities but they're not that interesting...
... they're us unfolded in some way. I don't know what I mean by that. In a sense, they are all, for want of a better word, God...
So that's a rough mapping of how it seems to me. That there is this rich world of the mind, and also one of my nuttier ideas, I mean so far as this waffle about Idea Space is still fairly within the bounds of sanity, I'm just talking about the possibility of an imaginary space, but I also suspect that ultimately this space we are in now and Idea Space are the same space, it is just that....
Everything we're wearing, sitting amongst, had its origins in this nebulous and, according to science, non-existent territory of the human mind. It's what Koestler called the ghost in the machine. Now I've entered a real problem. You can see how much of a problem it is when you look at people like B.F. Skinner, the father of Behaviourism, who managed to explain away consciousness by saying we're not really thinking, aren't really conscious, it's all done by a vibrational by-product of the vocal cords. What a contortion to have to go through, to explain this bothersome numinous conscious-ness of ours.
To me magic is a very political thing, it's ultimate politics. You're not just questioning how the state is governed, you're questioning reality, the rock that it's all standing on, dangerous shit like that, but necessary at this juncture, at the end of the 20th century, when we have been removed from ( I almost want to use the word grace ( you know what I mean, the age of reason seems to have set up some kind of standing wave of interference between us and any kind of spiritual or further mental territory that we might have otherwise inhabited. Religion has done a lot of this as well.
As I understand the original Gnostic Christians, 'gnosis' means 'to know'. You don't want to be told, you don't believe in anything, you don't have faith, you know because you've seen it. Doubting Thomas, my favourite Apostle, sounds like he comes from Northampton, he's like, 'I want to stick my hand in here, this could be a hologram'. I can respect that. What happened with the invention of Christianity, which as far as I can see was the invention of Constantine and his advisors, they needed a composite religion to solve the political problems in ancient Rome. That was invented out of a blend of other beliefs and all of a sudden it was no longer required that you have a personal divine vision, they're saying "Come to us". In fact they're saying it doesn't even matter we haven't had a divine vision, we've got this book, and this book is about people a long time ago, and they had divine visions and we'll read to you about them. In effect it's putting a dam between people and what you might call the godhead, their personal power.
Which is why the more radical splinters of Christianity are all about getting past the priests.
Getting past the priests, getting past the middle men who are the problem with everything. Look at Karl Marx, those who control the means of production will inevitably control the society, and he'd never heard of the middle class. It's those who do the paperwork that will control society and the same is true of spirituality, the middle men, the agents, the ones who can get between you and your personal idea of God. If you get in the way of their fear-based virus ( "If you don't believe this you're going to Hell" ( this idea virus based upon fear. And just as it turns out Christianity was designed to solve a political problem ( the first thing Nicodemus did, the second Christian Emperor, was to have all the tax papers, the census that related to the Galilee area during the first century, brought to Rome and burned, because they were in the business of setting up some kind of myth; a useful political myth. The Ten Commandments were built into it, social controls. These guys back then were thinking of long-term gain, you've got to admire them, the bastards, no matter what they've doomed us to they were very competent Imagineers.
What it seems we have to do now most of us have been disenfranchised from any sort of power, whether material or spiritual, is to find a way to connect back with the source of our personal power. I do not believe that is to be found in religion or mass movements. Power has to be personal, the only form of power worth having is personal power, any other form is poisonous. Power over someone else is poison. To get that personal power we need to connect personally. That doesn't mean joining a cult, it means, and to me this is the definition of shamanism, we are first individuals and we must reconnect with something that is a personal truth. Something that we knew when we were five and were then tricked out of in some way, or led or bullied out of.
Now, on a political level this is anarchy... Take responsibility completely for yourself, or hand it over completely to a governing body. [fascism]
...of course history, as with any fiction, like the story of Superman, can be revised endlessly. We suddenly find what we had taken for three separate Egyptian dynasties was in fact one Pharaoh with two nicknames. All of a sudden 120 years collapse into 40 and we shift everything around accordingly.
It struck me when I got around to the London pentacle [in From Hell] and I actually had people saying, "Is that real?" And I was saying yes and no. Those sites are really there, they do line up like I say they do, they do have the significance that I apply to them. Do I believe that a group of Freemasons got together to map London into the shape of a diabolical pentacle? Of course not. I don't believe bollocks like that. Do I believe that the pentacle has meaning and relevance? Of course I do.
All points in the past, whether they're so-called history or so-called myth, are points of information like the stars are points of information. We cannot reach out and touch them but we can see them, perceive them. We look at the stars and we say, Oh well, that group of stars look like a hunter, hey, we're on drugs, we're pissed. Now they only look like that from here, the three stars that are so neatly lined up in Orion's belt are light years away from each other except from here, where they're all in a neat little line. Just as we might say that pentacle does not exist apart from here, from Alan Moore, and from bits of Iain Sinclair that I've borrowed. So these constellations aren't real, we've created them with imposed patterns, but we can use those patterns to navigate, which has changed the entire human history. So even though the stars are untouchable, unguessable, they've changed the course of history.
...There was a good article in The Independent ( I say it was good because it was very flattering to me. It said that the Booker Prize is not the salvation of British literature but the wake of British literature. These traditionalist confines, you know, are the very antithesis of what living British literature is about. This article cited people like Moorcock, Ballard, the New Worlds school of sf, Angela Carter, Iain Sinclair. This is the life blood; Iain Banks, Irvine Welsh, etc. On her death bed, everybody was thinking wouldn't it be nice if Angela Carter got a Booker, but I doubt she would have bothered for a moment, she always talked about "shortlist victims". Good phrase. To me British culture is always happening at the margins. This is not approved, this is not within captivity.
I know you based the first story in Voice of the Fire on aboriginal language, but what I both liked and found frustrating was the way you had almost half sentences/half meanings, so the reader got a world through a language that seemed half formed, catching glimpses of the world, but never quite its totality.
Well that's the thing, you were half removed because of the language, but it's because of the language you were even halfway there. Half removed is better than completely removed. I take your point, and it's a true one. It seems to me now that it was an experiment.
When I did 'Hob's Hog' I wanted a distinct voice for each chapter. Now that's okay up to recorded history, when you've got recorded history you know pretty well how these people thought up to a point, and how they spoke. If you go back beyond the Romans into prehistory, you don't know these people thought or spoke, and if you go back to the Stone Age there's no written language. So what I thought I'd have to do was come up with some kind of make-believe Stone Age tongue, based upon English but following certain rules I applied....
...If this seems hard to believe you only have to go back as far as the early part of this century, to Winsor McCay, who is generally recognised as a great cartoonist, but also as the father of animation. Now he did some early animated films, one of which was Gertie, the Dinosaur. He was a clever bastard. It was early animation, simple black and white lines, but he used to go around with the film when it was showing, to give a little talk while it was going on. He had structured it so he could appear to give questions or commands to Gertie and she would obey him. At one point he would walk offstage and then walk back, or an animation of him would walk back on and interact with the dinosaur, ride on her back, stuff like that.
The dinosaur is in a landscape that includes a lake or inland sea, distant mountains. Now the people in that theatre knew it only went back a hundred yards and then there was a wall. However, when they came out, all of them, without exception, believed they had seen a real dinosaur on stage. They did not have the concept of animated film. Even though this meant they somehow had to block their logic and assume you could fit a mountain range and a lake into a space they knew was a hundred yards deep.
... the idea of satire as a vent of anger, that prevents true rebellion.
That's satire in the modern sense, what satire has been diminished to. I'm talking about satire in its old magical sense. A satire was feared because it would destroy you in a way that a bullet couldn't...
To go back to satire, when you did Watchmen, which is a satire of sorts on superhero comics, was your aim to kill something?
These things work on a lot of levels. Watchmen to some degree, yes, it was a satire on superhero comics, just like V was a satire of adventure comics. But they were both satires of the broader cultures that spawned them. V was a pointed, black satire of England and what it was becoming. I still remember, in 1982 I thought, yeah, I'm going to do this story about a fascist police state and set it in the incredibly remote year of 1997. Now how do we make it look really fascist? I know, we'll put monitor cameras on every street corner. That'll scare people [outburst of laughter]. So they were working on a couple of levels, they were a comment on genre, the medium, the form of superhero comics and adventure comics themselves, but that was a side thing. To me it's always a bit of a disappointment that whenever you get the fan press talking about Watchmen, it's talked about entirely as this great revision of superheroes. "Alan Moore changed superheroes." Well, I made them a bit more violent, a bit more pretentious and I spawned...
So now, would you think you have more of a choice of media to work in? Would the idea dictate the medium?
To some degree. The two CDs that I've done, which I'm very proud of. It's not the same as the music I've done, I mean, I've been in bands and written some good pop songs, but at the end of the day they're good pop songs – the world's got enough good pop songs. But this new stuff, spoken word, where we're breaking into something which I feel is new, that really excites me. It's almost like the idea of, "Hey, let's do a CD", then that generates the content to some degree. That opens the idea up.
... And then Dave Gibbons said, "Do you want to do a CD ROM?" My first thought was no. I couldn't see anything interesting being done with them. Then I thought, that's actually a good reason for doing one. This looks very much like the landscape of superhero comics when we did Watchmen. There's a lot of stuff that hasn't been thought of, virgin territory. I realised what a good vehicle it would be for some of the magical thinking that currently obsesses me, an opportunity to do the kind of experience that, well, I don't think it's ever been predicated. Something right on the borderline of technology and more archaic thinking, in a sense of a book being a virtual reality. A tale told around a campfire is virtual reality. What we call virtual reality is just the most vulgar and obvious manifestation of the essential inner phenomena of moving into different realities through narrative.
It's like our original mythic landscape, all myths whether you're talking about Gilgamesh or Arthur or whatever, what they do is have this mythic landscape full of monsters, mythical places, gods. All of which mean something, they are all forms in the human psychosphere, they're all messages, and important ones. Then you invent your hero, your Gilgamesh, your Arthur, as a kind of Everyman, the projected astral body of the people listening to it, the point of identification. They travel round the world of the Odyssey with Ulysses as their astral body, their virtual body. That is the mythic landscape. We enter into the mythic landscape through the tales of heroes or gods or whatever. Strikes me with this CD ROM stuff you've got the potential to actually open a doorway to the real mythic landscape in a much more encompassing sense, and see what kind of experiences people have. My ideas are still formative but that's an example of how having a new form of technology opened up and created this rich web of possibilities.
I've never really defined myself as a comic book writer. I have out of a sense of bolshiness, but these days I think of myself as a writer and to encompass all of it, a magician, but more conventionally, something to put on my passport, a writer, which covers a multitude of sins. I work with words, sometimes with images, which are a different form of language. I don't really want to restrict any avenues of communication. They've all got something interesting about them. The CDs were purely out of magical experiences and I'm as proud of them as I think I am of any of my comic work. It's only a personal judgement but...
[Brought to Light]
The best compliment that I got was passed to me by a guy from Hollywood who phoned up. He might even end up doing some of the From Hell stuff, but he phoned mainly because he's involved in making a film about American covert activities based upon the writings and confessions of this spook who was in the Agency for 30 or 40 years, whatever, from the end of the second world war, and was in on all of this stuff. He ordered the executions, he trafficked the drugs, he made the cash payments to the opium warlords. This guy who phoned me had given this spook a copy of Brought to Light. The spook, well, first off he was stunned by some of the things we knew, but this is no reflection on me, it just means I've got very good sources of information. The thing that really impressed me was that he was haunted by the portrayal of the eagle. He said you need to have a covert intelligence agency. It's that kind of world. If we weren't doing it everyone would be doing it to us, we need these people, which is what the eagle says in Brought to Light. But there's also the undercurrents of what the eagle says, the illness, the constant coughing – the bit where the eagle, without even thinking about it, puts the gun to his head, spins the chamber: click. As if nothing's happened, you know? And that guy, it got him. And I thought, "Yeah, that's what I wanted. I wanted to hurt you. I don't know you, you're probably a penitent guy, but I wanted to know that I'd done a good enough satire." Eventually I knew that people like North would read it. They do it out of vanity, they really do: "Has this got me in it?" I knew, also, that they'd laugh it off, most forms of satire or attacks upon them, they can laugh off, but I wanted to do something so soul-curdlingly horrible that if anyone accused you of that, you couldn't laugh it off. And if it was true you'd know it was true. What I was saying about satire earlier, that's what I was trying to do. To hold up a mirror and say this is exactly who you are and you know that, and I know it too. That was the best review I got on Brought to Light, this ex-spook who'd been frightened by the accuracy of my portrayal. Somebody knows what you did. Not only that but somebody knows how you felt about it – that's the spooky power of writers and magicians, any artist. That they can reach into your head, or it feels as if they can. So you asked me today and it's Brought to Light, tomorrow Watchmen, From Hell or V for Vendetta. The thing biggest in my head at the moment is Voice of the Fire, mainly because of the novelty of doing a novel. It's not that I feel I'm writing grown-up books now, that I've graduated. To me the novel is no more distinguished than the graphic novel, but there are different possibilities.
Further reading
Notable:
Voice of the Fire
Gollancz,
paperback, £5.99
Comics, with principal illustrator's name:
The Lost Girls
Melinda Gebbie,
ongoing
From Hell a melodrama in 16 parts,
published
in 9 volumes; Eddie Campbell, now complete, all issues still available
Lost
Girls and From Hell began in Stephen Bissette's Taboo anthologies, and were
republished & continued by Kitchen Sink Press
Watchmen (Dave
Gibbons)
V for Vendetta (David Lloyd)
Titan Books collections, still in
print
V began in Warrior (British anthology comic, 26 issues)
Brought to
Light (Bill Sienkiewicz)
Miracleman Books 1, 2 & 3 (various)
Swamp
Thing (Stephen Bissette & others)
A Small Killing (Oscar Zarate)
The
Ballad of Halo Jones 3 volumes (Ian Gibson)
Skizz (Jim Baikie)
and other
works
All issues of From Hell are usually in stock at Murder One bookshop in London's Charing Cross Road (Tel 0171 734 3485)
Lost Girls should be available at your nearest comics shop
Any/all of the above may be obtained from The Book Gallery, at 11-17 Stockwell Street, Greenwich, London (0181 853 2151)