Chapo Trap House - 322 - Second Dark Age feat. Alan Moore (6/10/19)

Episode Date: June 10, 2019

We're joined by legendary author Alan Moore to discuss evil architecture, magic & political power, fate & free will, and the enduring appeal of Lovecraft.

Hello, everybody. It's Will. I'm coming to you from Manchester, over here in the UK, but here's a special treat for you guys. On the phone with me right now, I'm joined by Alan Moore. Alan, how's it going? It's going great, Will, and hello, everybody. So, Alan, I guess I want to begin here. So, we're here in Manchester right now, but we came up here from London the other day. We did a couple shows the other night, and where we were staying in London was in Spitalfields. Oh, yeah. And we get there on the first night. We're kind of tired. We decide to go out and get

a bite to eat, and we walk probably a block out from the house we were staying at, turn the corner, and I'm immediately frozen in place because I'm looking smack at Christ Church. And I've got to say, you were not messing around from hell with just the overall just sinister geometry and general vibes coming off of that place. Absolutely. Although, you might be seeing it. It's been a long time since I've been down to Spitalfields. What I was working on from hell, I seem to be down there pretty much all the time. But since that time, they have massively cleaned up and gentrified the area. But I'm glad to know that Hawksmore's Church is still a horrifying noise.

No, it's hilarious. It is totally gentrified around there. There's like a uniclo across the street, but at the same time, the effect of that, its edifice is still very, very potent. And I think even in from hell, you describe how the geometry of it, it appears flat if you're looking at it straight on. But then if you approach from a different angle, like all the angles sort of change, and I was hoping you could talk a little bit about Hawksmore and also just sort of the unseen power of architecture holds over us, which I think you've discussed before in your work. Well, yeah. I mean, like it seems to me, I mean, the further I get away from from hell,

the more that that seems to be completely true, that the buildings that surround us, they completely dictate us, our colleges, that the landscapes that we exist in, we're going to internalize them, aren't we? So if you're living in a place that appears to you to be a kind of rat trap, then inevitably you're going to come to the conclusion that you're probably some kind of rat. Whereas, if you know anything about the place in which you're living, if you can invest all that bricks and mortar with some history, some mythology, whatever, then you can transform the place that you're living into somewhere out of the Arabian Noits into a fantastic magical wonderland. And if you're living in

that kind of environment, you might eventually come to the conclusion that you could be a wondrous creature. So, yeah, I think that, I mean, around Spittlefields, where all of the surrounding streets, this may have changed, but all of the surrounding streets were constantly in the shadow of that church. It was, it imposed its authority upon the entire place. And this, it wasn't just that church, it would seem that Nicholas Hawksmore had got some quite oppressive agendas that he was working out through architecture. I remember a brilliant book by, I believe, Jeffrey Fletcher called Down Amongst the Methsmen, which was just dealing with the alcoholics who were sleeping rough in the East End. And there was a brilliant

description of another Hawksmore church, St. George's in the East, where a lot of the vagrants were sleeping either around the church, sometimes in the crypts. And he said, what right did Hawksmore have to destroy all of our dreams and hopes and aspirations and leave us as dejected as the lowest methsman? I mean, I'm paraphrasing there, but it was a pretty stern endowment. I mean, I remember in From Hell, there's, you know, the church is almost a character itself. And there's a scene where Dr. Gull and his friend, he takes it around it and sort of talks about the church being built as a weapon of some kind and like this oppressive

quality to it. And like, you know, in London, certainly, like, is it sort of still filled with those kind of oppressive portents of, I don't know, occult symbols and things. So like, what were they trying to do with all that? Your guess is as good as mine. I would imagine sort of crush all of the life out of people. I mean, that's generally the agenda of authority, isn't it? Yeah. But although I think that Orcs more might have been doing it in some particularly subtle and creepy ways, I mean, I'm reminded of when I was about halfway through From Hell, there

was an incident that I heard about in the news concerning Christchurch Spitalfields. Because apparently, it had been decided that in modernizing the church, they were going to put in a central heating system, which would require a boiler room, which would require getting rid of what was in the crypts underneath Crosschurch Spitalfields. Now, when Christopher Wren had handed over a subcontracted, the design of the 50 new churches for London to his assistant Nicholas Hawksmore, he'd insisted that there were no dead bodies on the properties because their their humors would inform the building, they would sort of seep into the stone. Hawksmore completely ignored this. And so there were quite a lot of sarcophagi

in the crypts under Crosschurch Spitalfields. So they had to send in a team of kind of archaeologists to actually sort this stuff out. Now, most of the bodies had liquefied. So it would have been quite a dismal job. And then it turned out that they had a real scare because a lot of the people working on the site were all of a sudden phoning in sick to work, saying no, I can't come in today, I'm really ill. And for a horrifying moment, they thought, oh, my God, this is plague. We have accidentally unleashed plague upon London. Then they found out that no, actually, the people who were phoning in sick, they weren't actually ill. They were just really, really depressed. And the reason that they were depressed was because

of the acoustic qualities of the crypts. Apparently, this is just under the commercial road, which gets quite a lot of traffic. But you couldn't hear any of the traffic noise in those crypts. And apparently, even if there was somebody who was just less than a foot away from you, but perhaps around a corner, you couldn't hear them if they called to you. There was this sinister acoustic quality where it was completely dead. And now I'm reminded of the fact that Hawksmore was a big fan of the probably mythical Dionysiac architects who were alleged to be the architects of Atlantis who had traveled around the world and built all of the wonders of the ancient world. But the Dionysiac architects, one of the things that they prodded themselves

on was their skill with acoustics. And they said that they could construct a place so that your merest soy would be re-echoed a thousandfold and also so that they could construct it so that if someone was actually screaming a few feet away from you, you would not be able to hear them. And judging by the whispering gallery in St. Paul's, which, I mean, Hawksmore worked with, ran upon St. Paul's, and we don't really know which features were whose. It looks like he was doing a little bit of experimentation. So, yeah, I think it's a symbolic establishment of power, but he was probably pulling a lot of occult in the sense of secret or hidden tricks to actually emphasise and underline that power. But I mean, these are, back in

those days, people believed a lot of crazy shit, which they nevertheless imposed upon the landscapes that they were living in, upon the world that they were living in. There are, there are masonic alignments all over the world. I mean, growing up in America, like the sort of occult architecture, I was always told that Washington, D.C. was laid out, like the original street plans were laid out like a pentagram. That is very possible. I mean, this goes back a long way. I can remember my late friend Steve Moore, he was talking to somebody who was an enthusiast of delcing, and who said

that with a pendulum, he could delce any image that Steve cared to send him. So, Steve, as an experiment, found a map of the city of Peking. It was at the ancient city of Peking, which was completely laid out according to, to represent the body of a god. It was a god called Nocha, who is a strange small god with his hair in little bunches that look like Mickey Mouse ears, and he's riding around upon two flaming wheels. Now, this delsa, Steve took all of the, anything that could identify what this street plan of Beijing was. He removed all of that before sending it to this guy who wanted to try delcing it. He got a letter back from the guy saying, yeah, I'm afraid you've beaten me with this

one. He said, I've been delcing it, and it seems to be the same kind of pattern that I would expect from a human body in that there seem to be chakras running down this central dividing line in the, in the plan. And yet he says that there's these two big circles of energy down at the bottom. And I don't know what they are, which Steve found very convincing. I mean, neither of us were completely, we were probably agnostic about most things. So we were by no means necessarily convinced that delcing was a real thing. But we thought that that was pretty impressive. All right. So yeah, I mean, you mentioned, you talked a little bit about, you know,

the occult or whatever. I think people, you know, mostly know you as a writer, but you're you're also associated with magic. And I don't mean like, you know, street magic or performing at parties or anything like magical ritual practice and belief. And I was just wondering if you could talk about what like, what does magic mean to you? Like, how do you practice it? And like, like, what is it? Like, how does he apply it? Well, in terms of actual practice, back when I started out into magic, which would have been what the the mid 90s, I was doing a lot more actual ritual magic. Perhaps because back then I needed the spectacular effects of magic as a kind of reassurance that this

stuff was real, that there was something behind it, and that I wasn't just wasting my time on a load of fantastical nonsense. Whereas, as I've progressed through these last 20 or 25 years, whatever it is, I have come to the point where my understanding of magic is kind of internalized, where it just informs everything that I do. And where I have probably expanded my concept of what magic is pretty much to include most of the universe. I would say the definition of magic that I've arrived at, and I arrived at this with the light Steve Moore when we were working on our hopefully forthcoming moon and serpent bumper book of magic, we came up with a definition of magic, which said that magic was any any purposeful

engagement with the phenomena and possibilities of consciousness, which you will note probably includes most thinking, art, science, and all the rest, podcasts, you know, because yeah exactly because what we were trying to suggest with that was that magic was originally our it was a one stop worldview. It was the origins of consciousness. But originally, we would have had an awareness, which is what I assume that probably most animals have, but which is very different to this phenomena that we call modern consciousness. And it seems to me that the first time that we had voices in our heads, the first time that we had images in our heads, when we didn't have a theory of consciousness, where else could

they be coming from other than from the gods, other than from another world. And so I think our first apprehension of our own consciousness was what plunged us into magic. And it would seem to me that the first shamans would have been pretty much responsible for unpacking consciousness into what we now know as culture, that the shamans would have invented writing, they would have invented the creation of images, they would have invented dance and acting and performance and music and science, such as it was, the observation of the stars, the observation of the seasons. All of this would have been completely subsumed in magic. And at the center of that would have been a shamanic ecstasy, which the shaman would

be sharing with the entire of his or her community. They would be responsible for using things like dance and performance and costumes and images and sounds to create the state of ecstasy in the community in the tribe. Basically when we first started to form settled urban communities, what happened was for the first time people did not have to grow their own food, which allowed specialization. And so you had, say, a priest caste emerging. Priests were suddenly a thing, which meant that magic was kind of stripped of its spiritual function. Then you got those well known bastards, artists and writers becoming a thing. And so magic was stripped of its of its task as the as the dispenser of visions. Oh, and you also would

have got viziers, which would have taken away magic's political function in advising the tribal leader. But it still had natural philosophy and the natural sciences to, you know, healing and medicine, things like that. It still had some pretty useful quiver, you know, arrows in its quiver. But then when you get around to the Renaissance, you get science and medicine emerging out of alchemy, out of kind of the natural sciences. And from that point on, the only thing that the occult has got to offer is what its access to the inner world, then cause around about the turn of the 20th century, you've got Sigmund Freud turn up. And even that is gone, leaving pretty much only what empty ritual and some noise costumes

and some pretty ones. And so the function of magic throughout much of the 20th century and the 21st century has been, I think, largely theatrical. It certainly doesn't have the world changing power that it had as its origins. I remember seeing an interview with you where you talked about how advertising is one of the more potent forms of magic in the modern world because it involves getting large numbers of people to think the same thoughts or phrases together at the same time and imbued with an intent, which is like sort of a magical power. Well, yeah. And it's also a magical power that has been greatly amplified with, say,

the invention of television, which was a really powerful genie in a bottle that was conjured for economic reasons originally. I mean, nobody knew what to do with television in the 20s. But as we started to get towards the end of the Second World War, I think a lot of people were thinking the war has been very good for us financially. Are we going to just go straight back to the soup kitchens and the bread lines and the depression that we started the war in? And so as a way of getting around that, the idea of if you can get people to really, really want things, then they will buy them and the manufacturers will therefore have more money

and will be able to employ more people who will then have more money to buy things. And so the consumer society was invented, but it really needed something to get that wheel turning. And this was afforded by television that all of a sudden you could you could put the Lucy show on television and everybody will be watching it and they would be seeing what a nice place Lucy lived in and her furnishings, probably a lot better than theirs. And then in the ad breaks, of course, they would be told where they could buy all of these wonderful things that they'd coveted during the show itself. So yeah, it's sort of advertising is it is a form of magic. Anything magic only happens inside the mind. That's why it doesn't

have to bother about things like the laws of physics. It is purely a phenomenon of consciousness. And advertising is it's something that almost everybody that I know, including myself, says well, yeah, advertising doesn't work on me. So we assume that the people spending billions on advertising are doing it purely out of a state of delusion. No, no, it obviously it controls everything we think and everything that we do. I think that advertising is the work of Satan. That might be a little extreme, but no, I think that in effect that's a decent argument. Yeah, it has a it has a satanic influence over everything and everyone. And you know, earlier on, you mentioned how, you know, the prerogative of authority and those

in power is always to basically just crush everyone beneath them and sap them of their will to live. And they do it through, you know, subtle and not so subtle methods. So I guess I'm wondering, like, is there a political application to magic or consciousness, intent that is a way can we fight back against these people in any way? Is I guess what I'm wondering, like if within, you know, if it's a phenomenon only takes place within our mind, like, is there a way out of that? Or like, like, is there a practical application to this or is it a way of resisting? I would say that sort of we should use art. The art is the if you're talking about influencing people's minds and hearts and souls, then I mean, shouldn't

we be better at this than they are? But part of the problem there is that artists and writers I mean, yeah, by the term artist, I'm including all creative people that they have become devalued in their own eyes. Because we have all been told that sort of well, we've obviously got to make a living, which means that as artists, we have to enter the commercial arena, which is dominated by people who are not artists, but who are authoritarians. And we kind of come to the conclusion that we can't we're lucky to have a job, that we should therefore try to do the things that the audience likes, and that the audience wants, that once we've found a successful formula that is shifting a lot of units, then we should stick with

that formula. This neuters any actual power that our art might have had. And yet, it does seem to be a default position for an awful lot of artists. I suppose it always has been. They have always been at the whim of their patrons. But you do occasionally get a William Blake, you do occasionally get somebody whose power is evident right there in their words, in their images. And that is a power to shift people's feelings centuries after the death of William Blake. I think that artists need to woman up, that they need to take their role more seriously. They need to not sell it down the river at the first opportunity. They should commit themselves. I mean, artists, I think it's a term almost interchangeable

with magician. And I think that one of the most enormous copouts of the occult world is to pretend that the occult world should be beyond politics, which is the same as saying that the art world should be beyond politics. Nothing's beyond politics because of the way that we've got our world set up. You know, I think that people should commit to making statements even if those are obviously going to be wildly unpopular statements. If a thing needs saying, then you should say it. And you said earlier that artists have devalued their own power. So I guess the idea, coming back to that, if you can get someone to conjure an image from your own mind, and then it's

shared with another person, and now it's in their mind, or it's a joke, or make someone laugh, or think of the same thought that there is power in that. And that that is magic. And in each person's own mind is a universe, and that is where we begin to change the physical world that we live in. Yeah, I mean, it's like to say that, yeah, I mean, the Christian God, the gods of monotheism, to my mind, these things patently don't exist. They are imaginary beings. And I mean, things like the Bible are collections of stories that were often Egyptian myths from 2000 years before the Bible was written. So but and yet that the ontological reality of these gods

doesn't make a scrap of difference to how many people, how many real physically existing people have doied because of them, all of those religious wars. These may be things that don't exist, except to us. And those what exists to us, that kind of exists. Yeah, it's like saying like, I've, you know, magic or religious belief or anything like, I've heard it works even if you don't believe in it. Well, yeah, yeah, it's sort of, I mean, magic isn't a religious belief. And this is a distinction that I would make. Yeah, um, that the word religion, if you look at its origins, it's it shares the same route, it on relegare, it shares the same route as words like ligament

and ligature. And what it basically means is bound together in one belief. It doesn't even say that that belief has to be spiritual. On one level, Marxism is a religion. Because yeah, everything on that level becomes a religion. Now, the opposite of that would be anarchy, I guess. And to me, magic being a thing of the individual is it's an equivalent in political terms of anarchy. It's sort of religion and fascism seem to make good bedfellows. They are both about being bound together in one belief, the original symbol of fashion. Yeah. Yeah, the fashion. So sort of, it strikes me that religion sounds like it's always been about imposing authority, that it has no other real function, that all of the world's religions

have always found themselves propping up and supporting whatever regime happens to be in power. That seems to be mostly what they do. I'm sure that yet, I mean, of course, people draw comfort from these ideas. But at what cost that sort of religions are their things of the masses are there to do with the control of the masses. Magic is a thing of the individual. And so that is probably why I kind of insist that sort of this has to be seen as political all of it. Now, you mentioned you brought up William Blake earlier, and I wanted to talk to you about him, you know, the novel Jerusalem, that was the thing that we sort of worked together on, or I just I mean, I didn't I just published it in America. I didn't I didn't

I didn't edit you or anything. Yeah. But in that book, you talk about like basically or the last time I talked to you, you explained to me just generally this idea that you were reaching for in this book that if we take seriously the idea that time is the fourth dimension like time exists as space, like that there's no difference between the two that like the philosophical and artistic ramifications of that are quite profound. And how do you connect that like with Blake's eternal city? Well, I mean, it seemed to me that when Blake was talking about his four fold eternal city, he had to be talking about some kind of fourth dimensional concept right down to the number of folds that in my conception of things,

which I believe is the same as Einstein's. And thus, of most of the physicists following Einstein is that we live in what is called a block universe. This is a solid block of space time with those two things inextricably intertangled. They're the same thing. So I imagine this block of space timers may be shaped a bit like an American football, the egg shaped. So the one end, you've got the big bang. At one end, you've got the big crunch or however else the universe is supposed to end. And in between, you've got this solid object in which there are suspended all of these filaments of some filaments representing the lifespan of planets or galaxies and some tiny filaments that represent the span of

a human life, our 70 or 80 or 90 years, just all their suspended eternally in this unchanging block of space time, which would mean that if the block itself is unchanging and eternal, that goes for everything within it. This led to Einstein himself. A few months before his death, when he was consoling the widow of a fellow physicist, and he in his letter, he said something like, for physicists such as myself and your husband, death is not a big issue because we understand the persistent illusion of transience, which is a wonderful little phrase. And if I'd heard that before I started writing Jerusalem, I could have saved myself many hundreds of thousands of words. But I think it's a once a very reassuring

idea and a very frightening one. Yeah, this is the thing. When I was reading Jerusalem and I was talking to you about this, the idea that comes up is that, as you're explaining here, that essentially every single moment, every single second, every single thing in the universe is essentially inalterable. It already exists. It already has existed. It already will exist. And that includes every second, every moment, every thought and memory in your life. And that essentially upon death, there is nowhere for anything to go other than back to the beginning. So that we are essentially existing eternally, but like we do exist forever, but in our own same life

over and over and over again. And that is always seems like the first time. Yeah. And like you described it as sort of like if you can imagine every second in your life as just sort of like a celluloid film strip. And that time is like the light going through it that gives it the illusion of motion and forward progress. This is both terrifying in the one sense because it means that like you can't change anything. There's no escape really or end to any of this. But on the other hand, there's something profoundly, it always stuck with me that like you can exist forever in heaven or hell for eternity. But your essentially

choices or even you're just the illusion of the choices that we make, it means that it's up to you where you're going to spend eternity. And the moral ramifications of that are also quite intense because you think about the millions of human lives that are marked only by suffering and misery and oppression. And that if this is true, it means that we have all have a profound responsibility to change that. Yes. I mean, I would say that yes, it does come in more to be than being you who mentioned that it had reminded you of Rilke's poem about the damaged torso of Apollo, the last line, you must change your life, that that would seem to be the implication. It brings

up an awful lot of things that even I find disquieting. For one thing, if we're living in a predetermined universe, as most modern physicists, I think, although they would prefer it otherwise, they do kind of agree that that's what it looks like. Then if this is that kind of universe, then that causes problems for science to some degree in the cause and effect. I'm no longer quite so clear cut, but it also causes much bigger problems for religions and indeed for conventional morality. Then where is in a predetermined universe, where is voice, where is virtue? It does kind of suggest that basically, I remember me and Steve discussing this issue that, right, so you end up with nobody that you can blame

for anything and you end up with nobody who you can admire for anything because this is just the character parts that they happen to get. However, I mean, in Jerusalem, there is a moment where I think you've got the Northampton divine Philip Dodridge, who, or at least his afterlife specter, is talking to one of the big working class angels. I remember that scene, yeah. Yeah. And he's sort of saying, so did any of us really ever have free will? And the angel gives him a very sympathetic look and says, no, did you miss it? Then they both laugh. Because basically, as long as we have the illusion of free will, then everything will be fine. As long as nobody comes along and spoils that by writing a 1500 page novel

that sort of makes it un-debatable, then sort of, but we should be all right, you know. Or you know, publishes one in America. Or publishes one, yeah. I think Nietzsche said that such people, because he had a very similar theory, but he did point out that anybody who popularized that theory, presumably by writing it or publishing it, would become the most hated human beings in the history of the world. I'm trying, Alan. I'm doing my best here. Very well, you know, the days yet young. Yeah. But to continue with this idea, though, I mean, I don't want to like, you know, push

all our listeners into just pure nihilism of a totally predetermined universe. But I remember the last time we were talking about this, I was actually very heartened by this idea in a strange way, because it means that if our lives are literally all we have for eternity, like, this is it, this is what we're going to be doing, then essentially, if you believe that, then you'd want to live your life in a way that you would like to spend for eternity. And even if that's true or not, if you know, who the fuck knows, your life would be better if you believed in it. Well, this is what Nietzsche said when he was suggesting his similar idea. And yeah,

actually, my idea is a lot better than that. But there again, I did have Einstein to base mine on which Nietzsche didn't. But sort of, I mean, he says that this belief, the idea that we have our lives over and over again, this great recurrence as he phrased it, he said that even if this is not true, if you lived your life according to that belief, you would have a better life. I think that that would seem to be the case. You would also perhaps not be crippled and paralysed by the shadow of death. I got a wonderful letter from a reader who said that he'd been all of his life since the age of about seven or eight. He could remember sitting on a sofa chewing a wine gum when it suddenly occurred

to him that him and everybody that he knew was going to die. And he said, and this is a common enough thing, I'm sure that we can all remember a similar moment in our own childhoods when the fact of death suddenly crashed in upon us. He said that it had been enough to open up a kind of space inside him that had been become a welcome home for anxieties and depression. And this had shadowed his entire life, despite many excellent therapists and analysts because they couldn't get round the central fact of death. Whereas he said that actually he'd been feeling a lot better since reading Jerusalem because it gave him another way of looking at that. Whereas previously, it was a straight yes or no between a bleak

atheism and kind of deluded religion. If you couldn't believe that you were going to be living in a white marble city on a cloud somewhere with and singing the Lord's praises eternally with all the other angels, which does seem a bit farfetched, then your only other alternatives seem to be a belief in what reincarnation, which again, I don't really see how that works. That if somebody is if I die, and then a week later, somebody's born on the other side of the world that is of a different gender, a different race, a completely different set of cultural beliefs, who has none of my memories or thoughts or ideas, then that that is kind of that somebody else, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. That's somebody else.

It's sort of so, you know, like this gives an alternative that is also based in the here and now. I mean, one of my one of the things that urged me to write Jerusalem was my maternal grandmother, who was a deeply religious and deeply superstitious woman who had had a very, very hard life, a life of pretty much constant poverty, two or three children dying, things like that. But she had the faith that this was all going to be all right when she got to heaven, because, you know, the first shall be last and the last shall be first and all of that stuff, that poor people would be given their just reward when they got to heaven. Now, that was a belief that I can see why she clung

to it. And yet, if me and Einstein are right, then that is that is her only life and that is how she lived it. Because, and I wonder how many poor people have deferred uprising or revolution, because they wanted to get to heaven and get their reward, that they forfeited a decent life in this world for an imaginary afterlife. Well, I mean, again, this gets back to what we were talking about earlier, that the that you can't separate anything from politics. And like I said, like, you know, if we take this idea seriously, then that means it is all the more important to, like I said, stop the people who rule us and, you know, own everything and, you know, fucking control everything

and largely by through the exploitation and just destruction of millions and millions of lives who know nothing else. I mean, like, it's important to say, I think that the idea that we are in a predetermined universe doesn't let anybody off the hook. Yeah, you might sort of think that, oh, well, if everything's predetermined, then I don't have to bother about climate change or the political situation or anything like that, because everything's just going to work out the way is, yeah, that is true. But what that means is that you won't be one of the people. You are one of the people who was predetermined to do nothing about this. As opposed to one

of the people who was predetermined to actually try and change all of this stuff. And the only way to find out whether you're predetermined or not to is to do it yourself. Yeah, exactly. It puts all of the onus and the responsibility upon the individual, which is where I think it should be. This is, you know, in terms of anarchy, which I still believe to be the best political way of ordering the world, although it would obviously take a lot of work before we could get to such a point. But, you know, I mean, Darwin, when he died, he was saying that he thought that anarchy was the most scientific form of political belief. So, yeah, I mean, these things all tend to sort of, for me, at least, they all

tend to play into one agenda. And that is the agenda of the individual. This is not a libertarian idea. It took me a while to actually, to understand the concept of libertarianism. I thought at first that, oh, is this some kind of American version of anarchy? But then I realized, no, it's right wing. It's a form of egoist anarchy, which I think it was some French guy who came up with that. And he believed that we have the right to, everybody has the rights to everything, including killing another person, which that sounds a bit like the end result of libertarianism to me. So, no, yeah, I'm talking about a kind of anarcho-syndicalism here. And like I say, I'm talking about, we would need a lot of educating the world before

we were at that point. After, you know, several thousand years of leadership, you couldn't just kick those crutches away and expect everything not to fall down. You know, you would need, there would have to be changes made in society that could prepare us for that point, but it is doable. And I think it's preferable to the alternative, which is that we all become what, fuel units, just obedient fuel units that sort of can prop up the economy or the ruling class until some inevitable collapse, which really doesn't need to be inevitable, you know, but which most of our rulers seem to be preparing for. And thus, it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes, we need some strenuous thinking and some strenuous

action to get us out of this situation. But I remain optimistic, chiefly, because there's no point in being anything else. I mean, pessimism would seem to be, yes, it might protect you from the emotional pain of something that you'd had great hopes for not coming about. But on the other hand, it kind of prevents you from trying to make those great hopes come about. So, yeah, I think that I do feel kind of in some ways encouraged by this hellish situation that we're all in, if only because it seems to have brought home to people how serious the stakes are. And I think that the opposition that has been mobilized is very encouraging. I mean, we shall see. There'll perhaps come a point in the future when we

look back upon Donald Trump and Brexit as the unlikely saviours of humanity. I mean, that's a very slim chance. But, you know, just in terms of the way that they focus the debate and laid things out very clearly. And, you know, so that people realize that they had to make a choice and to stand up for something if they wanted any kind of future for themselves or their children. No, I think, yeah, I think that's that's pretty clear. I mean, I was like, yeah, if you can imagine a better life for yourself or your kids or your friends or loved ones and you want it, like, it's, you know, it's it's there. You can't ask for it, though,

because like I said, the people, you know, who are in charge are strenuously opposed to that. No, you have to take it. It's sort of you have to come up with some kind of strategy. You have to stand your ground. You have to learn the use of the word no. And you kind of have to keep doing that. This is not a one off struggle where you can put all of your effort into it and then the world will be all right again, and then you can relax. If you're going to commit yourself to actually doing something about the state of the world and the state of society, it's kind of something that you have to commit yourself to doing

every day, because this stuff, it's pretty much on ending. You know, I mean, it's it's an evolving situation of awfulness. And I mean, in Northampton, it's a pity that you couldn't have stopped off here because then we could have shown you what the the first town in Britain to collapse under the weight of austerity looks like. I think there was some something in the New York Times about it, probably much more than there has been over here. But yeah, Northampton is bankrupt. It has collapsed under austerity is being placed into some sort of special measures that there is no longer a budget to guarantee safety for old people, poor people, disabled people. We've got people sleeping in tents

in the doorways of our closed down closed down retailers. It's and yet at the same time, I mean, it's pretty much the situation that I wrote about in Jerusalem. Yeah, you know, I mean, I was more or less saying, yeah, the boroughs is the center of Northampton. If the boroughs is not repaired, Northampton will collapse. Northampton is the center of England. If England if Northampton is not repaired, then if there's an ugly burn hole in the middle of the social tapestry, then that will run all the way to the edges. And yeah, there are other towns, I believe East Sussex has just followed Northampton into the same economic abyss. And there will be others. So it's I suppose this gets back to your first

question about how do you use magic in today's political and social environment. This with the collapse of Northampton, it's opened up a lot of possibilities, by which I mean the council are absolutely desperate. And thus, when I recently worked with me and Mitch Jenkins, my director and photographer, pal, we, we recently, we did a few short films based in Northampton a few years ago, with the idea that these could lead up to a feature film and possibly a TV series. We shot the feature film, I think, November to December last year, we were given the council offices, which had been abandoned for a much, a much more expensive property that actually bankrupted the town. But the old style, it was like being what

I imagine like perhaps KGB headquarters during the 50s. It was that kind of architecture. And it was perfect for our kind of film crew and our film offices. And so we did this film. It's very unlikely. It's all set in Northampton. I wouldn't call it social realism. But in a way, for Northampton, it kind of is. And with a bit of luck, if we've done this well enough, this can actually do something for Northampton in the same way that say, I don't know, Game of Thrones has done for Ireland. There are a lot of places these days that seem to be mainly existing on the strength of, I mean, I suppose even Dublin with Joyce's Day, you know, Bloom's Day, places that have been informed by a work of fiction can become

tourist destinations. It can do an actual a lot for the town and can perhaps resolve some of the very real problems on the street level. This is a way of using art and magic to actually intervene. It's not the only way, but it is one way that you can rise to a problem. I mean, we are pretty much doing this in the hope of rescuing Northampton and also reinvesting Northampton with its rich mythology. So that sort of the people living here and people reading about the place or watching the film might actually get a sense of how important mythology is to the fabric of a culture, not just for Northampton, but for everywhere. Yeah, I mean, that's what you said earlier about, you know, the places that we live and

live in have an effect on us. And if you imbue those places with its own mythology, you place yourself within a story. And like that's the, if you can see yourself as part of a larger story, like then that, you know, that's that's like sort of a first step. Yeah. We've been talking a while now. But before I let you go, I really I got to ask you about Lovecraft because Lovecraft has been sort of like a running gag on our show. We do we do the Call of Cthulhu role playing games. We've done a couple episodes based on that. I mean, I obviously love his work. But you know, there's also a comedic quality to his kind of bizarre and hysterical racism and just generally a weird alienated worldview.

So just I got to ask you about Lovecraft. What do you think it is about Lovecraft, who was a kind of weirdo obscure writer in the 1920s? Like, what do you think about his work? Like that is actually seems to be gaining like it seems more and more relevant or like people keep sort of coming back to it in a way and it has a sort of this influence that that becomes this seems to be coming more and more potent. Well, I mean, when I was deeply involved in myself in Lovecraft scholarship, when I was actually creating for my book Providence, when I was kind of trying to come up with a take on Lovecraft, and I started to realize a lot of things about his writing, which had

been staring me in the face, but which I hadn't really thought through before. And one of these was sort of it was the basic idea that Lovecraft was a much more conscious and deliberate writer than I'd given him credit for. That I'd perhaps gone along with the idea that he was in some way a deficient writer who used too many adjectives, who I think as Michael Morcock said was was capable of over describing the indescribable. And and yeah, there is some truth in that. But I began to see it more as a kind of a series of modernist strategies that Lovecraft apparently hated modernism. I mean, he wrote a very, very funny parody of TS Eliot's The Weissland, which I think was just called Weisspaper. It's really

good. He loathed, you know, Joyce and sort of Gertrude Stein, all of them. And yet you look at his work, and it has got most of the tropes of modernism. He's got stream of consciousness stuff in there. He's got glossolalia. He's got an awful lot of modernist techniques. I think he was a closet modernist. And one of the ways that his stories achieve their power is by the that his over describing the indescribable, that wasn't a flaw. That was a strategy. What he was doing, I mean, in in one of the cake where he describes Cthulhu for the first time, I think in the call of Cthulhu. And he said, yes, it was perhaps a bit like an octopus and a dragon and a caricature of a man. But it was the overall outline.

That was the most terrible thing. And you think, what does that mean? The overall outline? So what he's saying is, I've just told you three things that Cthulhu who doesn't look like. And in his other works, I mean, like the color out of space. That's why I think that's my favorite story of his where he says that it was only a color by analogy. What so it was what a texture, a kind of a sound. What was it? I mean, he has said that entirely to alienate the reader, to put the reader psychologically in a very liminal state where you're not quite sure what the words that you're reading are employing. There's his description of the lequestant death of Wilbur Waitley, where Wilbur Waitley's had all of

his clothes ripped off by attack dogs and is turning to go on a library floor somewhere. And Lovecraft describes different parts of his body. And yet all of these parts are so incongruous with each other. The textures, the very forms, you can't the reader cannot fit them together into a coherent image, which is really disturbing. And I think it's techniques like that that were always there under the surface of Lovecraft's writings, but have been dismissed by people who thought of him as an over verbose pulp writer who had some strange ideas. Arguably some of this has been because of Augusturle, who without whom we probably wouldn't have Lovecraft around today, but who has kind of superimposed a lot of

his own ideas upon Lovecraft. Yeah, I think that as a writer, he probably still has an awful lot to offer. But what does he think about? Yeah, like as we're now here, you know, sort of at the, you know, not even at the dawn of the 21st century anymore, we're sort of, you know, we've hit the first leg of this race here. But what is it about the liminal qualities of his writing? Do you think like that we're sort of rediscovering now that that resonates with the way that people live and think now? Well, I mean, there is that the really famous quote, it might be from the call of Cthulhu

about how he thinks it's the greatest mercy that humankind has never been able to correlate its knowledge. But those times would soon be coming. And he was saying that all that the only question is whether this light of perfect knowledge, whether people will embrace that or whether they will flee from it into the shadows of a new dark age. And I think that that exactly nails what is going on at the moment. I mean, with the advent of the Internet, that would seem to be the beginnings, at least, of the current of state that Lovecraft envisaged, where we have all of this knowledge. We suddenly know what we're doing to the planet. We suddenly have much greater knowledge and information about what's been happening

in all of these other countries and in our own history. We are getting to a point where we are saturated with information. And I think that most people, I think that this explains fundamentalism, whether that be religious fundamentalism or the kind of political fundamentalism that we've seen so much lately. I think that both of these things are reactions to knowledge. I think that, I mean, climate change denies that they kind of, in order to deny something, you kind of have to know that it's true. Somewhere inside you, you have to be aware that it's true. And you can't deal with that. So you pretend it isn't true. It's that kind of retreat into the shadows of a new dark age that Lovecraft was talking about. We have

to, even though a lot of the information that we are uncovering and are being bombarded with is kind of frightening, we have to embrace that. We have to absorb it. We have to do something about it. We have to do anything other than to retreat into Lovecraft's shadowy new dark age. That would be the ultimate betrayal of our species. We have to be sufficient to our times, even though our times are spectacularly terrible, it must be said. Alan Moore, I think we should leave it there. A cautionary tale to the listener, do not retreat into the second dark age, but instead correlate all the contents of your mind and the knowledge that's available to you and do not flee. But Alan Moore, I want to thank

you so much for taking the time to talk with us. It's been an absolute pleasure. Alan Moore, everybody. Once again, thank you so much. Take care, everybody. Thank you very much. While the common in my birthplace Is now a peace college It's a sack of darkness

No Sunday for any day The city is grand, plus Most guys rise So take it I could join a brave beach group I'm spying away