| What connexion can there be? |
[Jul. 23rd, 2004|04:09 pm] |
Dave Fiore writes in my response to my last post to essentially agree with me that we have returned to a state of what he calls a position of Socratic skepticism.
It's interesting to remember how Socrates got Platonized and turned from the freewheeling skeptic of the Apology into the myth-wielding fascist intellectual of the Republic. Leaving aside a Marxist instinct to examine the historical and material contingencies that lead Plato to this shift and focusing just on the story plane itself, do we not see a meaningful story emerging? A society puts to death the playful skeptic precisely because such people--people who claim to know and to profess nothing--are all too susceptible to becoming people will believe anything, including that there are only three kinds of people fit to do three kinds of things and that they must be kept to those things with all means of physical and pyschological coercion available. Now this is reductive, I know, and I don't want to get too deep in Plato/Socrates because I'm no expert and it's been a few years since I read some of this stuff, but a question emerges in this story I'm telling about how we respond to people whose playfulness is such that everything is up for grabs, people who claim that there's nothing to see. Don't you eventually have to account for just who and what and where you believe you are?
Alan Moore, a very funny, very playful writer, believes you do. In his defense, I will note that he always speaks of the need for a personal worldview that does not come from anyone or anything other than the self and its needs. Here's an extract from his interview in Egomania #2 with Eddie Campbell:
Basically, the word religion comes from root word religare, like ligature or ligament, and refers to 'being bound together in one belief'. This religion isn't even necessarily spiritual, and by the above definition Marxism, Republicanism, belief in superstring theory, the Golden Dawn or the Campaign for Real Ale are all religions. To me, and I must stress this is probably just me, this feels kind of wrong. I feel that it's better for each living entity to come to terms with its unique and personal universe of information in its own way.
But how does this square with his avowed desire to refresh our myths? I haven't read Voice of the Fire in full since I was sixteen and too callow to understand a word of it, but I have browsed through it, including the last autobiographical chapter, in the intervening years between then and now and I was occasionally struck by the scariness of this passage:
The Dreamtime of each town or city is an essence that precedes the form. The web of joke, remembrance and story is a vital infrastructure on which the solid and material plane is standing. A town of pure idea, erected only in the mind's eye of the population, yet this is our only true foundation. Let the vision fade or starve or fall into decay and the real bricks and mortar crumble swiftly after, this the cold abiding lesson of these fifteen years; the Iron Virgin's [i.e., Thatcher's] legacy. Only restory the songline and the fabric of the world shall mend about it.
I really wish Moore had found more felicitous terms in which to express himself here. This looks like Platonism of an extreme kind, untempered by any Socratic skepticism (which can certainly be salubrious in many cases). The rest of the chapter, if not the rest of the novel, does make clear that Moore feels Northampton's essence to inhere in part in a kind of anarcho-socialism in which everyone looks out for each other and takes care of themselves and the community unburdened by any oppressive structures, a kind of standard left-anarchism for which I personally have nothing but sympathy as a political value system. But what is this essence that precedes the form, this pure vision of the community that must be maintained? Can Dave Fiore be right? Can one of my very favorite writers be inherently authoritarian?? (A separate speculation may be in order as to why people who read comic books are seemingly so much more worried about manifestations of fascism than other people.)
Well, let's back up before this turns into a proxy debate wherein two fanboys stand in for Moore and Morrison to fight out their low-key cold war of a feud. Let's focus on a different British writer of connectivity, a favorite Dave and I both share, Mr. Charles Dickens. Now Dickens was presented to me in school as a kind of Victorian Pynchon or DeLillo, writing of the politics and perils (and metaphysics) of connectedness in urban capitalist modernity. Here is a pertinent extract, then, from Bleak House. Lady Dedlock has just come from her house in town, where she and her husband Sir Leicester stay when they visit London from their home in Lincolnshire; curiously--this is early in the novel--the scene shifts from Lady Dedlock to the unspeakably poor street-sweeper Jo, whom we have last seen at an inquest into the mysterious death of a law-writer. Dickens's voluble narrator wonders:
What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder [the messenger/attendant at the Dedlock household], and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!
This passage will undoubtedly remind Moore's readers of the memorable sequence in chapter five of From Hell which alternates between the scratchy pen-lines and grotesque misery of Polly Nichols's morning with the gentle, opulent, inkwashed morning of Gull. Dickens's point and Moore's is, quite simply: Yes, there is a connection between these disparate people; there are connections between them that ensure that one suffers while the other does not, and also connections of irresistible attraction, that brings one into the orbit of the other because desire and love know no material boundaries, and finally connections of social and physical disease wherein the dire circumstances in which one lives comes to infect the other who lives well just a ghost may visit its murderer. In other words, Moore and Dickens come together with a little rudimentary dialectical materialism to demonstrate how the denial of connection between all members of a society, between information about what goes on in the underworld and information about what goes in the world of fashion, is really just the denial that allows the cycle of separation and oppression to continue. In this case, drawing lines between the dots is not an authoritarian act but an anti-authoritarian one, one that unmasks our own complicity in the violence visited upon people cordoned off in ghettoes to be poor out of our sight. Making the connections is an act that forcibly reminds us that we are able to do something to change this, that we all have a primary responsibilty to each other to do better.
That's my little proof that joining up the dots can be a progressive, radical, anti-authoritarian act, but where does this leave us with the dream-time of each town and city that must not be interfered with? Note Moore's use of foundation: the essence that precedes the form is our foundation, not the structure itself. Moreover, this essence is a web of joke, remembrance and story, thus a spontaneous series of connections arising from the populace; a bottom-up essentialism, if you will. Moore's talking about being disconnected from our history, from where we are and where we came from. This is not because our history consists of a pleasant past that we ought to be sorry to leave, but because our history tells us where we are and lets us make an informed decision about where to go. Myths are like stars you can navigate by. Those who come in and tear up our myths, cynical politicians like Thatcher and Reagan who utter platitudes and nonsense that have nothing to do with the material circumstances in which people live and the ideas they knowlingly or unknowingly live by, destroy not only the past but the future and leave a present where there is no history and so no analysis, no analysis and so no meaning, no meaning and so no value, no value and so only what the market will bear. The point is not to save the sheep from their lack of understanding, but to remind everyone--including, I should think, oneself--that they are not in fact sheep.
In closing, I'll give Moore at his interview-giving best, from the Comic Book Artist interview:
We are not exactly innocent. We are ignorant. The world--by which I don't mean the planet, don't mean the ecosphere, don't mean the people on the planet; I mean the world--is a construct we have built out of our minds. Everything in this room, everything that we are wearing, everything that we can see that is not organic is something that has come out of a human mind at some point. The ideas of houses, of plots, of carpets; everything has come out of a human mind. We live inside our own mind. The world that we put around us, our economic system, our political system, our philosophical systems, it's all stupid harmful bullshit we have made up. We made it up because we felt we had to. We needed some system so we put on together as best we could. We didn't do a bad job considering how we're just a little above monkeys and we don't have a clue as to what we're doing. Look at the world and look where these systems have got us. Look at the Taliban blowing up those Buddhist statues. Look at all of the violence every country in the world is inflicting on other countries. It's hate. This is not right.
If we could overcome our ignorance--if we could interpret the complexity of the world we've made--we could make a better world. And he does say we. Thus concludes my apology for Alan Moore, which is really long considering that it's my day off and I ought to be writing a novel. |
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