Alan Moore cytaty

strona 9

„Dziennik Rorchacha 12 października 1985:
Ścierwo psa w alei dziś rano, odcisk opony na rozerwanym brzuchu. To miasto się mnie boi. Widziałem jego prawdziwą twarz. Ulice to przedłużenie rynsztoków, a rynsztoki są pełne krwi i kiedy studzienki pokryją się wreszcie strupami, całe robactwo się potopi. Nagromadzony brud seksu i morderstw spieni im się na wysokość pasa a wszystkie kurwy i politycy spojrzą w górę i zakrzykną: „Ocal nas!”, a ja spojrzę w dół i szepnę: „nie”. Mieli wybór, wszyscy. Mogli pójść w ślady dobrych ludzi, takich jak mój ojciec i prezydent Truman. Przyzwoitych ludzi, którzy wierzyli w uczciwą pracę za uczciwą płacę. Tymczasem poszli tropem odchodów, pozostawionych przez rozpustników i komunistów, nie rozumiejąc, że szlak prowadzi nad przepaścią. Aż było za późno. Nie mówcie, że nie mieli wyboru. Teraz cały świat stoi na krawędzi, patrząc na krwawe piekło na dole, wszyscy ci liberałowie, intelektualiści i mądrale… i nagle nikt nie wie, co powiedzieć.”

„Podczas każdego spółkowania między ludźmi, setki milionów plemników rywalizuje o jedną komórkę jajową. Przemnóż to przez niezliczone pokolenia i prawdopodobieństwo, że twoi przodkowie żyją, spotykają się. Płodzą tego określonego syna, tę konkretną córkę.(…) W wyniku tego połączenia z setek milionów dzieci konkurujących o zapłodnienie pojawiasz się ty i tylko ty. Wyłonienie tak specyficznego kształtu z tego chaosu niemożliwości jest niczym przemiana powietrza w złoto… To ukoronowanie nieprawdopodobieństwa. Termodynamiczny cud (…) Ale świat jest tak pełen ludzi, tak zapchany tymi cudami, że powszednieją i zapominamy o nich.”

„No cóż, Frank Miller jest kimś, do kogo prac prawie nie zaglądałem przez ostatnie dwadzieścia lat. Moim zdaniem „Sin City’ to niereformowalny mizoginizm, a ’300′ wygląda na bardzo niehistoryczne, homofobiczne i całkowicie fałszywe.”

„Morderstwo? Nie mów mi o morderstwie. Ja wynalazłem morderstwo!”

„Laurie: Nie wydaje mi się, żeby było zbyt wiele śmiechu wokół, ostatnimi czasy.
Dan: Cóż, czego oczekujesz? Komediant nie żyje.”

„Kultury seksualnie progresywne dały nam matematykę, literaturę, filozofię, cywilizację i resztę, podczas gdy kultury seksualnie recesywne dały nam Mroczne Wieki i Holokaust.”

„Niektórzy z nas zawsze żyli na krawędzi. Da się tam przetrwać, trzeba tylko stosować się do zasad. Trzymaj się paznokciami. I nigdy nie patrz w dół.”

„Płomienie wolności, piękne i sprawiedliwe. Ach moja kochana Anarchio… Piękności, aż dotąd nie znałem twego oblicza.”

„Chcesz mnie zabić? Nie ma ciała i krwi do zabicia pod tym płaszczem. Jest tylko idea. A idee są kuloodporne.”

„Starałem się udawać, że [plama] wygląda jak rosnące drzewo z cieniami zgromadzonymi pod nim, ale nie wyglądała. Wyglądała bardziej jak martwy kot, którego kiedyś znalazłem, grube lśniące czerwie biegające na ślepo, uderzające jeden o drugiego, szaleńczo wkopujące się głębiej, z dala od światła. Ale i to było tylko unikaniem prawdziwej grozy. Grozą jest to, że koniec końców to tylko obraz pustej, bezsensownej czerni. Jesteśmy sami. Nie ma nic innego.”

„Są ludzie i są opowieści. Ludzie wierzą, że nadają kształt opowieściom, ale przeciwna sytuacja jest często bliższa prawdzie.”

„Wojna to perwersja seksu.”

„Wszyscy jesteśmy marionetkami, Laurie. Ja jestem tylko marionetką, która widzi sznurki.”

„Unikam przemysłu komiksowego, ale zawsze będę kochał komiksowe medium.”

„Jest tylko jedna grupa, która w ogóle mogłaby wzywać do zakazania Dziennika Anny Frank, i nie obchodzi mnie, jak się aktualnie nazywają.”

“All our scientific observations of the universe and quanta can only, in the end, be observations of ourselves.”

“There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money.”

“I was talking earlier — about anarchy and fascism being the two poles of politics. On one hand you’ve got fascism, with the bound bundle of twigs, the idea that in unity and uniformity there is strength; on the other you have anarchy, which is completely determined by the individual, and where the individual determines his or her own life. Now if you move that into the spiritual domain, then in religion, I find very much the spiritual equivalent of fascism. The word “religion” comes from the root word ligare, which is the same root word as ligature, and ligament, and basically means “bound together in one belief.” It’s basically the same as the idea behind fascism; there’s not even necessarily a spiritual component it. Everything from the Republican Party to the Girl Guides could be seen as a religion, in that they are bound together in one belief. So to me, like I said, religion becomes very much the spiritual equivalent of fascism. And by the same token, magic becomes the spiritual equivalent of anarchy, in that it is purely about self-determination, with the magician simply a human being writ large, and in more dramatic terms, standing at the center of his or her own universe. Which I think is a kind of a spiritual statement of the basic anarchist position. I find an awful lot in common between anarchist politics and the pursuit of magic, that there’s a great sympathy there.”

“We are approaching a more fluid state. I have talked about cultural boiling. The idea of the phase-transition period which, in fractal mathematics, is the chaotic flux between one state and another. …Culturally, and as a species, we are approaching a phase-transition. I don’t know quite what that means, on a human level.”

“!-- What you have to do first is separate yourself from the world, most new-born 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.”

“Actually, art and magic are pretty much synonymous. I would imagine that this all goes back to the phenomenon of representation, when, in our primordial past, some genius or other actually flirted upon the winning formula of “This means that.” Whether “this” was a voice or “that” was a mark upon a dry wall or “that” was a guttural sound, it was that moment of representation. That actually transformed us from what we were into what we would be. It gave us the possibility, all of a sudden, of language. And when you have language, you can describe pictorially or verbally the strange and mystifying world that you see around you, and it’s probably not long before you also realize that, hey, you can just make stuff up. The central art of enchantment is weaving a web of words around somebody. And we would’ve noticed very early on that the words we are listening to alter our consciousness, and using the way they can transform it, take it to places we’ve never dreamed of, places that don’t exist.”

“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.”

“!-- I come from the Arts Lab. Most of the writing I used to do was used for performance, so consequently I learnt that when you are reading a poem it has to read properly, which is to do with syllables and stresses. What takes me the longest with my fine writing, like say Voice of the Fire, is reading it through and finding the bits where it clunks, where it’s one syllable too long, and once you find that rhythm – the reader probably won’t be aware of it, consciously, but there is a tidal wave embedded in the prose that the reader is responding to. In the last chapter of Voice in the Fire, where it is actually me talking in my own voice, I don’t use the word ‘I’ or ‘me’ or ‘mine’. I don’t know why – perhaps I had been reading that Private Eye column where it is all ‘I’ ‘I’ ‘I’ and started to feel a bit self-conscious about it – but --> I thought if I can still be the central voice but without having an ‘I’ there, and by not having it there, it makes it easier for the reader to slip into the consciousness of the narrator. If you remove the letter ‘I’ it becomes a universal I. Everybody is the author walking down those streets while they are in the prose.”

“I think that we are approaching a kind of event field – fifteen years, twenty years up the road. There is a big event in the future and because time is not what we think it is, that event radiates in all directions. We are entering its field and have been for hundreds of years. We are starting to approach the core of it.”

“!-- Most of the effects described in classical magical tradition I believe I can duplicate with art, possibly drugs – or some other means of integrating myself more deeply with that sort of reality, that sort of consciousness – I believe I could do most of the things that are described in traditional magic. This opens up wider possibilities. It also enables me to understand myself on a deeper level. -->By accepting the idea of endless pantheons of gods, I somehow accept these creatures as being distinct and separate from me, and not as being, to some degree, higher functions of me. Iain Sinclair was asking me about this: he asked me ‘do you think they are inside you, or outside you?’ The only answer I could come up with was, the more I think about it the inside is the outside. That the objective world and the non-objective world are the same thing, to some degree. Ideaspace and this space are the same space. Just different ends of the scale. That’s not a very good explanation, but the best I can come up with so far.”

“I'm not a millionaire but I'm very comfortable doing what I do, and I'm more productive now than I was in my mid-20s. It's all down to functionality eventually. If you're functional it doesn't matter if you're mad.”

“The more I look at most of the art movements, it’s all occultism, when you get down to it. The Surrealists were openly talking about being magicians.”

“I've no objection to the term 'graphic novel,' as long as what it is talking about is actually some sort of graphic work that could conceivably be described as a novel. My main objection to the term is that usually it means a collection of six issues of Spider-Man, or something that does not have the structure or any of the qualities of a novel, but is perhaps roughly the same size.”

“Consciousness is unquantifiable, a ghost in the machine, barely considered real at all, though in a sense this flickering mosaic of awareness is the only true reality that we can ever know.”

“It's a new world, Arcane…
It's full of shopping malls…
and striplights and software. The dark corners are being pushed back…
a little more every day.
We're things of the shadow, you and I…
And there isn't as much shadow…
as there used to be..”

“If I wanted a full-scale manifestation, one that was apparent to other people, then I would do a ritual. I have displayed the snake god to other people. Or I have consciously hypnotised them into accepting my psychotic belief system, given them drugs, and made them think they are having the experience I have. Whatever you want. I’m not fussed.”

“Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring. If you’re trying to conjure a character, then maybe you should treat that with the respect that you would if you were trying to conjure a demon. Because if an image of a god is a god, then in some sense the image of a demon is a demon. I’m thinking of people like Malcolm Lowry, the exquisite author of Under the Volcano. There are kabbalistic demons that are lurking all the way through Under the Volcano, and I assume they were probably similar forces to the ones that eventually overwhelmed Lowry’s life, such as the drinking and the madness. When I hear alcoholics talk about having their demons, I think that they’re probably absolutely literally correct.”

“If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning.
They're right. It does.
However much you beg it to stop.
It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember.
It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life…
All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom.
Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor.
Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks.
And then the world turns…
And somebody falls off…
And oh God it's such a long way down.
Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller…
Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible.
We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if for listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth.
Trying to measure how far we have to fall.
No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives…
Wrapping ourselves in comforting banalities to keep us warm against the cold.
"Time's a great healer."
"At least it was quick.”

“If I realised the power of magic to worry and terrify people before, then I certainly would have used it before. Everyone freezes before it for different reasons – perhaps because it means madness to them, or because it means opening the door to a whole lot of stuff that the Age of Reason should have firmly bolted the door upon. A lot of concepts that we got rid of a long time ago that would be a bit creepy to have them back.”

“I despise the comic industry, but I will always love the comic medium.”

“If time is an illusion, then all movement and change are also illusions. So the only thing that gives us the illusion of movement and change and events and time is the fact that our consciousness is moving through this mass along the time axis. If you imagine it as a strip of celluloid, each of those individual cells is motionless. If they each represent a moment, they’re unchanging. They’re not going anywhere, but as the projector beam of our consciousness passes across them, it provides the illusion of movement, and narrative and cause and effect and circumstances.”

“There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth.”

“Way back in the early 80s, when I was first kicking off writing V for Vendetta for the English magazine Warrior, the story was very much a result of me actually sitting down and thinking about what the real extreme poles of politics were. Because it struck me that simple capitalism and communism were not the two poles around which the whole of political thinking revolved. It struck me that two much more representative extremes were to be found in fascism and anarchy.”

“Originally I was content to just simply accept the money, that was offered when people had adapted my comic books into films. Eventually I decided to refuse to accept any of the money for the films, and to ask if my name could be taken off of them, so that I no longer had to endure the embarrasment of seeing my work travested in this manner. The first film that they made of my work was "From Hell" Which was an adaptation of my "Jack the Ripper" narrative … In which they replaced my gruff Dorset police constable with Johnny Depp's Absinthe-swigging dandy. The next film to be made from one of my books was the regrettable "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"… Where the only resemblence it had to my book was a similar title. The most recent film that they have made of mine is apparently this new "V for Vendetta" movie which was probably the final straw between me and Hollywood. They were written to be impossible to reproduce in terms of cinema, and so why not leave them simply as a comic in the way that they were intended to be. And if you are going to make them into films, please try to make them into better ones, than the ones I have been cursed with thus far.”

“I can remember my Dad, god bless him, and he was telling me – when I was growing up – that machines would do everything. It would be great. There wouldn’t be any need to go to work because the machines would do everything. He thought that the working class would then be given a holiday, to Yarmouth or somewhere, forever. He was right except about the holiday to Yarmouth. He hadn’t really thought it through. He still trusted the society he was in. That he would be looked after. It turns out to have been a much more pragmatic relationship all along. I think we should have taken the clue when Thatcher said there is no such thing as society. What she meant was – just like the London-Liverpool thing – “we don’t need there to be a society anymore”. “We are getting what we want anyway, therefore we do not need your support. Therefore we do not need to maintain the illusion of society anymore.” -->”

“There is a kind of synergy between the different forms of work, you’ll learn things from one sort of work that will have tremendous application in another. They all tend to pull each other forward.”

“Jordan Elliot: What's for dinner?
Lois Lane: Pizza. After that, if Jonathan's quiet, I thought maybe bed with a bottle of wine. And after that, I figure we just live happily ever after. Sound good to you?
Jordan: Lois, my love… [turns and winks to the reader as he closes the door] What do you think?”

“I can remember one of the last conversations I had with my very dear and much missed friend, the writer Kathy Acker. This was very soon after I had just become interested and involved with magic. I was saying to her how the way I was then seeing things was that basically magic was about the last and best bastion of revolution. The political revolution, the sexual revolution, these things had their part and had their limits, whereas the idea of a magical revolution would revolve around actually changing people’s consciousnesses, which is to say, actually changing the nature of perceived reality. Kathy agreed with that completely — it sort of followed on some of her own experiences — and I still think that that is true. In some ways, magic is the most political of all of the areas that I’m involved with.”

“Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored.”