Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“It’s just the same with life. Why, every second of it is a paragraph you will revisit countless times and find new meanings in, although the wording is not changed. Each episode remains unaltered at its designated point within the text, and every moment thus endures forever. Moments of exquisite bliss and moments of profound despair, suspended in time’s endless amber, all the hell or heaven any brimstone preacher could conceivably desire. Each day and every deed’s eternal, little boy. Live them in such a way that you can bear to live with them eternally.”

The pair were floating in amongst the treetops of the darkened meadow, heading in the rough direction of the public lavatories that had once been a slipper-baths, at the far end. A plume of fading snapshots smouldered in their wake. The dangling child was silent for a while as he digested what the devil had just said, but only for a while.

“Well, if my life’s a story and when I get to the end I just go back and live it all again, then where wiz that Upstairs place that you found me in?”

The devil grimaced, by now starting to get bored with the responsibilities of parenthood.

“Upstairs is simply on a higher plane with more dimensions than the three or four that you’re familiar with down here. Think of it as a sort of library or reading room, a place where all of you can stand outside of time, re-reading your own marvellous adventures, or, if you should choose, move onward to explore your further possibilities in that remarkable and everlasting place. Speaking of which, the elm that we’re approaching is the one we can ascend into the Attics of the Breath. If you’d prefer I’ll go up slowly so that you can understand what’s happening.”

Hanging there in a breeze perfumed by coal and chlorophyll, suspended like the undercarriage of some gaudy pirate zeppelin, Michael Warren uttered a mistrustful murmur of assent. As they sailed closer to the designated elm the devil savoured the small boy’s bewilderment at the perceptual changes he was no doubt going through. The tree seemed to be getting larger as they neared it, just as one would usually expect, except that this was not accompanied by a sensation that the pair of them were truly getting any nearer to their destination. It felt more as if the further they progressed towards the tree, the smaller they themselves were getting. In an effort to pre-empt a flood of questions from his passenger, the fiend instead elected to explain the process to the lad.

“You’re probably wondering why we appear to be becoming smaller, or alternatively why that elm there seems to be becoming monstrously enlarged as we get closer to it. It’s all on account of a discrepancy between the way dimensions look to one another. We talked earlier about the notion of flat people who had only two dimensions, living hypothetically within the limits of a sheet of paper. Well, imagine that the sheet of paper they were living in had actually been folded up to form a paper cube. They would be living in a world of three dimensions, but with their perceptions limited to only two dimensions, they could never see or understand it to be so. That’s quite like human beings, things with three dimensions living in a universe of four dimensions that they cannot properly perceive.

“Now, you’ve been taken up onto a loftier plane yet, as if our little flat chap had been moved into a space where he could overlook not only his flat world of two dimensions, but could also see the cube that it in fact was part of. How would a shape with three dimensions translate in the thoughts and the perceptions of a being who had only two? Without the concept of a cube, might not our flattened fellow see it as much like the flat, square world he was familiar with, but bigger somehow, in some way that he could not define? That’s the effect that you’re experiencing now, that you experienced if you looked back into whichever portal you climbed up through to the Attics of the Breath. Didn’t the room in which you’d died look so much vaster than it had in life? In fact, I don’t know if you ever suffered from a fever or delirium when you were still alive, in which the bedroom walls seemed to be frighteningly far away? You did? That sometimes happens when a human’s wandering in the clammy territories between life and death. They get a glimpse of their environment’s true scale, as it will seem to them when they’ve moved up a plane or two. I mean, look at the elm now. It’s enormous.”

And indeed it was, as was the formerly small meadow that surrounded it. The devil tipped into a spiralling trajectory around the vertical and craggy landscape of the trunk, reprising the manoeuvre he’d adopted when he’d carried Michael Warren here into this world, except at greatly reduced speed and heading up instead of down. As they described their first slow circle round the tree and doubled back upon themselves, the phantom ribbon of stop-motion images that they were leaving in their wake became more evident, predominately red and green, winding across the grassy plot to wind itself around the now-gigantic elm. They spiralled up towards the hidden point at which shambolic Sam O’Day knew there to be a crook-door that would let them back into the Attics, but before they’d reached it his increasingly infuriating cargo had thought up another tiresome question.

“How do trees grow up into the Upstairs place, when they’ve got roots down here next to the public lavs? And what about the pigeons that wiz sitting in the branches higher up? How can they all go back and forth without them being dead like me?”

Anagram Sam was glad that his and Lil’s relationship had borne no offspring. Well, she’d given birth to a great ooze of monsters, obviously, things like dogs turned inside out and things like flattened yard-wide crabs that were the lurid pink of bubble gum. Such horrors, though, did little more than babble senselessly or howl until their mother got fed up and ate them during her post-natal blues. They barely had awareness of their own grotesque existence, much less the ability to formulate an irritating question, and were thus preferable to human kids like this one was, for all that he had two blue eyes and they had either none at all or several red ones clustered at the centres of their faces as is the arrangement with tarantulas. The devil tried to keep a civil tone as he replied.

“My, aren’t you the enquiring little scholar? Well, the answer is that in the case of trees and certain other forms of plant life, they already have a structure that expresses perfectly a timeless life in more than three dimensions. Being motionless, the only movement is that of their growth, which leaves a solid trail of wood behind in much the same way we ourselves are leaving a long stream of ghostly images. The tree’s shape is its history, each bough the curve of a magnificent time-statue which I can assure you that we folk Upstairs appreciate just as enthusiastically as do you humans.

“As for pigeons they are not at all as other birds, and different rules apply to them. For one thing, their perceptions are five times as fast as those of people or most other animals. This means they have a very different sense of time, with all things in the world save them slowed to a crawl in their quicksilver minds. More interesting still they are one of the only birds, in fact one of the only living creatures not a mammal, which can feed its young with milk. I don’t pretend to know exactly why the pigeon should be favoured over all the other beasts in its relation to the higher realm, but I imagine that the business with the milk has got a lot to do with it. It probably enhances their symbolic value in the eyes of management, so that they have a special dispensation to behave as psychopomps and flutter back and forth between the pastures of the living and the dead, something like that. I’m not sure what they’re for, but mark my words, there’s more to pigeons than most people think.”