Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

If things were no longer going on the way they should be, didn’t that mean anything could happen?

Dad had gradually stopped talking, saying that their conversations were all being overheard by “them up in the eaves”. Ern had enquired if Dad meant all the pigeons, or did he still think there might be Russian spies, but John had snorted and asked Ern just where he thought that the expression ‘eavesdropping’ had come from, after which he’d say no more.

Faith, to his mind, was a willed asserting of the sacred. If it were made more or less than this then it was mere belief, as children will believe the goblin tale they hear for just so long as it is being told. To hold belief in a material fact was only vanity, easily shattered, where the ideal was a truth eternal in whatever form expressed.

Benedict supposed that when events like that occurred with the alarming frequency that they appeared to do round here, it would be natural to assume concerted action by some gang or some conspiracy. Although a menacing idea it was more comforting than the alternative, which was that such things happened randomly and happened often.

The upset jigsaw pieces of May’s thoughts were strewn across her mental carpeting, a thousand coloured, slightly different shapes she was compelled to sort and pick among, establishing each corner, then each edge, distinguishing the blue bits that were sky from those that were the Easter-speckled ground.

As a result, May had been left cut off. It was her fault, along with all the rest, but she was stuck with nobody to tell about all that was going on inside, the frightening thoughts and ideas what she had, too bad to say out loud to anyone.

For instance, he knew “wizzle” was a term that had “was”, “is” and “will be” folded up inside it, as though to divide things up to present, past and future was thought an unnecessary complication in these parts.

west is future, east is past, all things linger, all things last.

All wars were holy wars, which was to say they were all ordinary bloody wars that someone had decided to call holy when it suited them, some king, some pope, some Cromwell who believed he knew what Heaven wanted.

Michael was beginning to get used to how the builders talked. First they would speak the gibberish that was their version of a word or sentence, then that nonsense would unroll itself inside the listener’s head into a long speech full of thunderous and ringing phrases.

It was as if something had collected up a thousand different family albums full of corner-mounted photographs, remembered moments that had been important to somebody once, and in a fit or misery or rage had thrown them all into a furnace.

King Solomon. What a colossal idiot.

Her Da, while living, sees her as a work in progress and perpetually unfinished, an abandoned masterpiece. Perhaps one day he’ll have another go at her, fiddle with her a bit and try to sort out the stalled plotlines, all the uncompleted sentences, but then he dies and leaves her stranded there in the excluded information, the ellipses …

You start to doubt your capabilities as reader, doubt in your ability to stick this mortal fable out to its conclusion without the attention wandering. And even if you finish it, you doubt that you’re astute enough to understand the saga’s message, if message there be.

Not until you’re more than halfway through the tome, near the two-thirds mark, do the earlier, seemingly random plot points start to make some kind of sense to you. The meanings and the metaphors begin to resonate; the ironies and the motifs reveal themselves.

Ideas of self, ideas of world and family and nation, articles of scientific or religious faith, your creeds and currencies: one by one, the beloved structures falling.

let’s make the underclass a glamorous and edgy place to be, then people won’t mind being stuck there quite so much and we can craft dramatically-lit and well-mastered versions of their struggle to sell back to them for the few quid they’ve not already spent on scratch cards. Everybody wins.

Her point is that despite the very real continuing abuses born of anti-Semitism, born of racism and sexism and homophobia, there are MPs and leaders who are female, Jewish, black or gay. There are none who are poor. There never have been, and there never will be.

After Alma’s gone, Bernard takes David to one side and soberly explains that while there’s nothing wrong with mixing with white people, Alma isn’t really the right sort of white person for Bernard’s son to be seen hanging round with. She’s failed the audition. Dave and Alma laugh about it and conclude that in the prejudice league tables, class beats race.

One way of looking at things, everybody’s dead and always has been. Like your woman here was saying, we’re all stuck. Perhaps we have it all, the good and bad, over and over. Wouldn’t that be all the Heaven and the Hell of it, how everyone was threatened by their pastors?

WIFE: It’s still one o’clock. How can it still be one o’clock? Why is it always one o’clock? HUSBAND: [Unsympathetically.] You said yourself, it’s too late from now on. It’s always half past nothing to be done.

And that’s the thing I’ve learned with goings on. They go on. They continue. Nothing’s ever done with.

“Are not the edges of the heavens and the brim of reason and the shunting-yards of time itself all boundaries requiring my inspection and therefore within my jurisdiction?

Everything, he reasons, has its length in time, its linger, whether that should be an individual, a species or a geologic era. Every life and every moment has its own location;

At last Mighty Mike turns to enquire, “Vernalimt whorey skung?” Vernall, what limit are you seeking? Unprepared, Snowy considers and replies, “The limit of my being.” Here the titan offers him a sympathetic look. “Tenyhuafindot.” Then you’ve found it. The time-vagrant nods.

Squirming in his mother Anne’s spasming birth canal, forgetting everything, he moves along the lightless channel carrying the infant with him and knows that, inevitably, he is going back to where he started.

That’s Methodists, Studs muses. They’re methodical.

But then, the world won’t scan as poetry.

The intelligence community’s perpetual shrill alerts begin to seem those of a broken smoke-detector, generally ignored but not without a gradually accreting residue of jitters.