Alan Moore on Magic

In the same tone, I might have said "Oscar Wilde on Socialism" or "Charles Foucault on cultural analysis".  

Those who already know why they should read this lengthy hitherto unpublished article by Mr. Moore may feel free to merely do so, and skip the rest of this article, which is less of a reaction than a justification for people who might be confused by someone advocating discussion about magic at all.

When I feel the need to explain who Alan Moore is to people who have never heard of him at all, I have to stop and collect my thoughts, both on him and on the people I need to explain him to.  "What will they have the patience to hear?" I wonder.  "What do I have the confidence to describe?"

I didn't use to be so hesitant.  "A very hairy man," I told my mother once, "who writes very hairy comic books."

When I was between colleges, I worked at a comic book store.  I had already read Watchmen and V for Vendetta, of course, and heard the oral history of the Swamp Thing relaunch.  While I was working there, the collected From Hell came out, which remains a sadly unvisited monument in the landscape of historical fiction, despite being a fucking masonic key to its landscape.  As well, his venture into having his own publishing line had just started: the perfectly titled "Americas Best Comics" line was dedicated to channeling comics from an alternate universe where superheroes had never been invented, and all comics were culturally sensitive and scientifically thoughtful re-launches of the Jungle Man, the Science Hero, the Strong Man, or all three, in the case of square-jawed flagship, Tom Strong.

Americas Best Comics also published Promethea, which is nothing less (perhaps nothing more) than a digestible primer of magic for the modern comics fan, which ends, in fact, with the eponymous heroine addressing the reader directly, asking them to pay attention, because life will be a test.  

All these helped me understand him better, and more importantly, to sell him better.  But what really swayed me was something we did not sell: a spoken word album.  Alan Moore sounds like he looks, and he looks like a Nazorean Piltdown Man, who happened to go to a very rigorous but obscure college.  Alan Moore is what you get when Aleister Crowley gives up shocking people, has an open marriage, and (oh yes right there was something else what was it) takes up writing comic books.

But he isn’t a comic book author.  Or a writer of graphic novels.  If you look on his business card, it says right there, clear as day: magician.  And I knew this was not a joke, because that spoken word CD was, even to my doubting neo-masonic ears, a magic fucking spell.

If I say that some people believe in magic, it is like saying some people believe in Communism: the issue remains debatable, the claim adds nothing to your understanding.  But to say Alan Moore believes in magic is more like saying that Joseph Stalin believes in the Soviet Union: when you hear him talk, it takes shape behind your eyes, and you realize the iron inevitability of its existence.  In Alan Moore’s mind, the existence of magic is no more (or less!) controversial than the existence of the NASA space program: he feels no need to defend it, no need to advance it’s cause.  People who don’t believe in it are being pointlessly silly, and will either come around in the end, or won’t, no loss, to each their own, it’s a funny old world.

Alan Moore treats magic as if it continues to exist if you stop believing in it.  

But why?

If you’d like to know the answer, you should read this article.  If you want to know why I, a reasonably intelligent person, think that he, an unreasonably intelligent one, is worth listening to on the subject, you should read this article.

It's an movingly impassioned and dizzingly erudite plea for reuniting magic with art, and art with magic.  The two disciplines (if they really are two) are repeatedly held up as distinct from religion and science, fields born from magic in their own way.

Moore claims that magic is an art of individual subjective experience, which remains inexplicable to science.  And claims it artfully enough to be worth reading, but there is a sadness to this kind of talk.  “Science can do many things, but it cannot account for X, which is my field’s particular domain!”  Well, you have named your terms, and bounded your achievements: your field’s irrelevance will begin on that day when science achieves a better understanding of X.

X has been many things over the years.  Celestial cycles.  The motions of life.  Ethics.  It is a few things today, most notably the full accounting of consciousness, which Moore seems to have seized on.  He has placed his bet: scientific inquiry will never manage it!  Magic will live forever, a king of infinite space bound in a cranial nutshell!

Forgive me if I bet on science in the long run, but for the time being, we're stuck with more than a bit of magic, and it’s still a ripping yarn.

(It’s also a long one, but be sure to read the whole thing, including part II, where you may hear Alan Moore say: “Jean Cocteau be all over D.W. Griffiths’ scrawny Imperial Cyclops ass like a motherfucker!”)