Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

asked why they both called each other Warry, Mick would usually reply that coming as they did from an insolvent background in the Boroughs, Mum and Dad had been unable to afford a nickname for each child, so that they’d had to make do with just one between them. “Not like posh kids”,

halfway houses with their portals that went nowhere, that led only into a suggestive nothing.

was how life seemed sometimes like a skit that had been written out beforehand, with a punch line that was set up in advance. All you could do was try and keep up with its twists and turns while the momentum of the story dragged you through it, one scene following another. You were born, your father ran away, you sang and danced on stage

Things didn’t rest so much in the gods’ laps as in how many laps they could entice into the Gods.

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; Even the dearest that I loved the best Are strange – nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

Life was the trial, the test, the thing you had to figure out what you should do with before it was over.

This, THIS, this place, this eddy in the soup of history, this would be very hard for all of them. You didn’t need an angel to come down and tell you that. It would be hard for everybody else because they lived within a moving world of death, bereavement and impermanence, a world of constant seeming change that bubbled with

machine-guns, with the motor-driven carriages that he’d heard talk of, with smudged paintings, smutty books, new things of all kinds all the time.

Surely all parents knew that in their child’s birth was its death also contained, but made inside themselves, perhaps unwitting, a decision not to look too deep into the marvellous and tragic well that Snowy was now gazing down.

extemporising,

“There’s really only life.

Each day and every deed’s eternal, little boy. Live them in such a way that you can bear to live with them eternally.”

That’s Thompson the Leveller and, yes, he wiz on Cromwell’s side at first, but it wiz Cromwell in the end who laid him low, as surely as he did that cavalier what Thompson’s talking to. Old Cromwell, when he needed everybody he could get for taking on the King, he promised the idealists and the revolutionaries like the Levellers that if they helped him they could make England the place they’d dreamed about, where everyone wiz equal. Once the Civil War wiz won, of course, it wiz a different story. Cromwell had the Levellers done away with, so they wouldn’t cause him any trouble when he backed down on the promises he’d made ’em. Thompson – you can yourself see what a fierce-looking sod he wiz – he made his last stand

in Northampton, and it looks as though he’s hung around here ever since. No, him and the old laughing cavalier there, they’ve both got a lot in common, I expect. You very seldom see him as high up as this, old Thompson.

this quiet nook where the most seditious of the ‘Martin Marprelate’ broadsides had been pseudonymously writ and published in the previous century.