alan moore continues to ruin my life
May. 10th, 2020 06:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
girderednerve(i stuck this on tumblr first but it's not really a very good tumblr post, so i took it down there & am keeping it here)
when i was fourteen or so i read from hell, the huge comic alan moore did with eddie campbell. i have no interest in trying to defend its artistic excesses or its putative appropriateness for a teenaged audience; it attempts to comment on tawdry depictions of misogynistic violence for shock value by providing some extremely gory depictions of misogynistic violence, has not one but two appendices, and features some extremely awkward engagement with various conspiracy theories and nationalist conceptions of british identity, for starters. i loved it a lot.
the main reason i loved it & indeed still love it, now in a more removed way, is that very early on, the future jack the ripper rides through london with his carriage driver and they make a map of the physical evidence of an enormous history that underlies the city. their project (ie, the horrifying misogynist violence) is posed deliberately as a symbolic effort to engage with that history and ensure patriarchal power persists into the twentieth century. this is, very mildly, kind of a goofball comic book idea, but at the same time it was incredibly powerful to me: the past not only takes concrete shape in the things, the buildings, the streets around us, but this architecture is comprehensible and mutable. learning to "read" london in this way is viscerally distressing to the driver, which is part of what makes the whole conceit run, i think; he's upset because something he felt but didn't know abruptly becomes legible and unavoidably present, even when he can hardly express it himself.
i used to pull that book out and reread just that section, or the second appendix, when i was eighteen and caught in a great downward swing, desperately convinced that i should die and that the world was cracking open around me. i would have abrupt and intense feelings of insight or epiphany, as though the entire universe were instantly within my understanding but still outside my power to express. the knowledge always hurt: the world always seemed sharp, cruel, terrible and great. it comforted me to read such a precise description of a feeling that terrified me.
there's now something weirdly & unavoidably frightening to me about any genuine effort to explain the world's history systematically, which has dramatically limited my ability to engage with certain kinds of marxist theory. it's a weird problem to have: the more apparent the explanatory power some analysis offers, the more i have to pause and pull away from it to make sure that the sense i have—epiphany, instinctive agreement, awareness of the suffering that preceded and surrounds my small life—doesn't overwhelm me. it's only gotten worse lately, and more painful; just one tiny inconvenience among millions of pressing injustices. maybe i'll get out my old trade paperback and sit there again, think about the shadow of nicholas hawksmoor's cathedral and the ashes of boadicea's revenge, the imperfect and overdetermined pieces that compose a massive, living whole. try to think my way out of a tangle that demands, and has always demanded, physical action to solve.
