Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“This will be very hard for you.”

He meant his child, his wife, himself, meant everyone who’d ever struggled from the womb to somewhere that was brighter, colder, dirtier and not so loving in its ways. This, THIS, this place, this eddy in the soup of history, this would be very hard for all of them. You didn’t need an angel to come down and tell you that. It would be hard for everybody else because they lived within a moving world of death, bereavement and impermanence, a world of constant seeming change that bubbled with machine-guns, with the motor-driven carriages that he’d heard talk of, with smudged paintings, smutty books, new things of all kinds all the time. It would be hard for Snowy because he lived in a world where everything was there forever, never ended, never altered. He lived in the world as the world truly was, as his late father had explained it to him. As a consequence of this he had become, despite his various acknowledged skills, both lunatic and unemployable. He had become the kind of man who stands about on rooftops with glass doorknobs in his pockets.

Even given this, on balance Snowy felt that he was blessed rather than blighted. There was no point feeling differently, not in a world where every instant, every feeling carried on forever. He would sooner live a life of endless blessing than one of undying curse, and after all, it was in how you chose to see things that the narrow border between Hell and Paradise was traced. Though his condition, part inherited and part acquired, had many drawbacks in material terms these were outnumbered by the almost unimaginable benefits. He was entirely without fear, able to scale sheer walls without regard for life or limb, simply because he knew that he was not destined to perish in a fall. His death would come in a long corridor of rooms, like the compartments on a railway train, and Snowy’s mouth would be crammed full of colours. He had no idea yet why this would be so, but only that it would be. Until then, he could take risks without anxiety. He could do anything he pleased.

This freedom was at once the aspect of his state that he valued most highly, and its greatest contradiction. He was free to do the most outrageous things only because these actions were already fixed in what to others was the future, and because he had to. When he looked at it objectively, he saw that the real measure of his freedom was that he was free of the illusion of free will. He was unburdened by the comforting mirage that other men took faith in, the delusion that allowed them to take walks or beat their wives or tie their shoes, apparently whenever they should wish, as if they had a choice. As if they and their lives were not the smallest and most abstract brushstroke, a pointillist dab fixed and unmoving in time’s varnish, there eternally on an immeasurable canvas, part of a design too vast for its component marks to ever glimpse or comprehend. The terror and the glory of John Vernall’s situation was that of a pigment smear made suddenly aware of its position at the corner of a masterpiece, a dot that knows that it is held in place forever on the painted surface, that it’s never going anywhere, and yet exults: “How dreadful and how fabulous!” He knew himself, knew what he was and knew that this advantaged him in certain ways above his fellow squiggles in the picture, who were not so conscious of their true predicament, its majesty, nor of its many possibilities.

Magical powers were his, besides the fearlessness that lifted him amongst the slate slopes of the skyline. He could easily accomplish an unbearably long walk, or any other lengthy undertaking for that matter, by the application of techniques learned from his father. Ernest had explained to him and Thursa how there was a way of folding our experience of space as easily as we might fold a map to join two distant points together, say the Boroughs of Northampton and the streets of Lambeth. These two places were in fact unusually easy to bring into close proximity, due to the numerous others who had made the trip before and, doing so, had worked the fold into a worn and whitened crease. Snowy exploited it whenever he was called upon to travel between Thursa in the Boroughs and his mum’s in Lambeth with young Messenger and Appelina. All he had to do was set off on his journey and then, as his dad had taught him, lift into a different sort of thinking that moved like the passage of events in dreams, outside the realm of minutes, hours and days. Time then would settle easily into this old, familiar wrinkle and the next thing Snowy knew he’d be arriving at his destination, having sore feet but without fatigue, without the memory of a moment’s boredom and, indeed, without a memory of any kind at all. As Ernest had expressed it to his children, it was easier when travelling to move one’s consciousness along the axis of duration rather than the one of distance, though your boot-heels would wear down as quickly either way.

Nor was this all of Snowy’s learned abilities. He knew the future, cloudily, not in a sense of prophecy but more in that he recognised the future when he saw it, knew how things would work out in the instant that he came upon them, as with scenes found written in a book embarked upon without recalling that it has been read before, in some forgotten summer, where there comes a tantalizing premonition of what waits beyond the next turned page.

He also had the trick of seeing ghosts. He saw the ordinary sort that were the spirits of past buildings and events embedded in the unseen temporal axis, spectral structures and scenarios which other people thought of as their memories. He furthermore had been a witness to the rarer but more famous kind of wraiths that were the restless dead: pained souls who shirked the repetition of their painful lives and yet who felt unready or unwilling to move on to any further state of being. He would sometimes apprehend them in the corner of his eye, smoke-coloured shapes endlessly circling their old neighbourhoods in search of ghostly conversations, ghostly ruts, in search of ghost-food. Just a year ago he’d seen the shade of Mr. Dadd, the fairy-painter who’d gone mad and murdered his own father. Dadd had died himself early in 1886 at Broadmoor Hospital, an institution for the criminally insane. On the occasion Snowy saw the artist’s phantom form it stood, looking regretful, at the gates of Bedlam wherein Dadd had previously been incarcerated. Snowy had observed the faint peripheral blur while it plucked something similarly indistinct from the asylum’s worn stone gatepost and proceeded, seemingly, to eat it. The dead painter, from the vague suggestion of his posture and demeanour, had appeared to be not so possessed nor so maniacal as when in life, but rather now clear-sighted and suffused by a profound remorse. The doleful apparition had persisted for some several seconds, glumly chewing its mysterious findings while it stared at the bleak edifice, then melted to a patch of damp discoloured brickwork on the madhouse wall.

The artist William Blake, who’d lived up Hercules Road getting on a century ago, had also seen and spoken with the creatures of the other world, with the deceased, with angels, devils, with the poet Milton who had entered like a current through the sole of Blake’s left foot. The Lambeth visionary’s notions of a fourfold and eternal city seemed at times so close to Snowy’s own view, right down to the exact number of its folds, that he had wondered if there were some quality in Lambeth that encouraged such perceptions. There may be, he’d often thought, some aspect of the district’s shape or placement when considered on more planes than three that made it most especially conducive to a certain attitude, to a unique perspective, though he knew that in his own case there had also been heredity as a prevailing influence. He was a Vernall, and his father Ern had taken pains that Snowy and his eldest sister should both know precisely what that meant.