Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

You caught more flies with honey than you did with vinegar, and you caught more with bullshit than you did with either.

Bed-sheet creases print a river delta on Mick’s back and in his restlessness it strikes him that civilisation and its history are similarly bagatelles, deluded into thinking that their progress has the ordered logic of a chess match when it’s more the random ping of Tiddlywinks.

Perhaps modern scepticism and the consequent dieback of deities is what has made surveillance cameras necessary, to preserve a sense that our performances have the attention of invisible spectators now that God’s gone, to sustain the notion that our arbitrary acts are validated by unseen authorities sat at their screens or at unearthly gaming-tables, looking down upon the play.