Schlemiel

Here, I quoted and googled "schmendrick" and learned that one meaning is "apprentice schlemiel." Then I read:

"...such a schlemiel..."
-Alan Moore, Jerusalem (London, 2016), p. 1066.

Coincidentally, 1066 is an important date in British history. Since that year, an absolute monarchy has gradually become a constitutional monarchy with a republican interregnum thanks in part to Naseby.

Am I on the same mental wavelength as Alan Moore? I am Marxist, not anarchist, practice meditation, not magic, and invoke "whatever gods may be," not Glycon. However, we are comrades in the Brotherhood of Being.

Roaming The Universe

(The Boroughs, Northampton, 1965.)

Are dead souls free to roam the universe? I doubt their existence, let alone their mobility. However, speculative fiction about the hereafter can both delight and enlighten.

In CS Lewis' The Great Divorce, the dead can:

remain in the grey town that will turn out to have been Hell;
take the bus to the foothills of Heaven, then climb into the mountains;
haunt libraries to see if their books are still being read;
bother those women we call mediums.

Hell, Heaven or Earth: fairly comprehensive.

In Alan Moore's Jerusalem, the Dead Dead Gang:

have amazing adventures, adding time to their directions of movement;
give each adventure a title like an episode of a series;
in 1645, watch Cromwell writing a letter to his wife on the eve of the Battle of Naseby;
in 2025, eavesdrop on a black woman berating a Council Department on her mobile -

- the supernatural, the historical, the mundane and everything between. We join them in imagination and reflect on life along the way.

Planes Of Reality

When the angle walks upon the mortal world (see here), he wades through the ghost seam which comes as high as his thighs. (p. 548) Watching from Upstairs, Michael sees "...the stacked-up planes below." (p. 550) "...underneath the ghost-seam..." are "...the twining spark-lit fronds of coral that were living people..." (p. 551)

I think that the mortal world should comprise the world-lines not only of human beings but also of every material object and particle? Michael thinks that the angelic fight is affecting the lower planes. This would mean that, in the temporal dimension of Upstairs, the history of the mortal world was different before the angelic fight than it was during the fight.

When the Dead Dead Gang watched Parliamentarians before the Battle of Naseby, I thought that they were time traveling in the mortal world. However, the text sometimes implies that they are in the ghost-seam, e.g.: "...the ghost-seam's murk..." (p. 577) Is the ghost-seam both a plane above the mortal world and the mortal world as seen by ghosts? This is the sort of uncertainty that we have on first reading a complex text. I remember, with Watchmen, not knowing how many super-powered beings there were and not realizing that Rorschach had been in our faces from page 1.

I have only just passed the half way point of Jerusalem.

A Naseby And A Sadness

In Alan Moore's Jerusalem, a ghost gang discusses what would be an appropriate collective noun for a group of ghosts. They consider "a persistence" and "an embarrassment" before agreeing on "a Naseby" because of the large number of ghosts lingering at the site of the Battle of Naseby. In Lancaster, when half a dozen of us attended the Watchmen film, Andy Diggle asked what was the collective noun for a group of nerds and coined the term, "a sadness."

This chain of association has connected Jerusalem, the English Civil War, the Watchmen film and another comics writer, Andy Diggle. I sometimes worry about running out of material to blog about but it is endless. At this point in Jerusalem, an important and mysterious event is about to occur and more than half of the text still lies ahead of us.