Miracles And Me

In Alan Moore's Miracleman, the Qys inhabit vast structures from which they can look down through apertures at wardrobes of alternative bodies held in stasis in underspace.

In Moore's Jerusalem, builders and souls inhabit a vast structure from which they can look down through apertures at the static world lines of the three dimensional mortal realm.

I think that there is some parallelism between these two scenarios.

I would like to read a prose novel by Alan Moore in which Michael Moran/Marvelman/Miracleman flies down to converse with other characters. Moore certainly transformed MM into a character substantial enough for treatment in a purely verbal medium.

"Now. Here. Me."
-Alan Moore, Jerusalem (London, 2016), "CLOUDS UNFOLD," pp. 757-775 AT p. 757.

As Kant observed, every self-conscious being thinks:

"I see -,
"I think -,
"I know -,
"I am -."

Fill in the blanks.

The transcendental self is common whereas the empirical self, when the blanks have been filled in, is not. However, the transcendental self is a temporally enduring subject of consciousness spatially separated from temporally enduring objects of consciousness, including other subjects. That much at least is common.

Destructive And World-Changing Events

History has turning points like the agricultural revolution and the World Wars. Such world-changing events are reflected in mythology, e.g., by the Flood, the Ragnarok and Armageddon, and also in modern works of fantasy:

in DC Comics, the Crisis on Infinite Earths destroyed the multiverse where characters who were fictional on one Earth had been real on another;

in Black Easter and The Day After Judgment by James Blish, the demons win Armageddon, thus changing the theological regime;

in Jerusalem by Alan Moore, a chimney called the Destructor symbolizes the destruction of dreams and hopes and affects the way that people think so that their ghosts and memories smoulder and Heaven itself burns.

Events on these fantastic realms affect the everyday world:

"'If Mansoul itself wiz on fire up in this new century, then wiz it any wonder you've got living people doing stupid bloody things like that?'"
-Alan Moore, Jerusalem (London, 2016), p. 727.

The speaker nods towards a suicide bomber eternally exploding in the hereafter.

Upstairs

Upstairs is a place from which it is possible to look down on cross-sections of world lines in the mortal realm. It follows from this that the world lines of bodies Upstairs are at right angles to the world lines of bodies in the mortal realm.

However, is Upstairs also a place that changes along the same temporal dimension as the mortal realm so that it, Upstairs, is in a different state in the early twenty first century than it was in the late twentieth century? This latter proposition would entail that world lines Upstairs are parallel to those in the mortal realm.

It is also possible that, since I am blogging while reading, I am getting it all wrong. However, in that case, my errors will be way stations along the road towards completer comprehension.

Two Scenarios

Neither of these scenarios corresponds exactly to what is presented in Alan Moore's Jerusalem (London, 2016). However, I clarify simplified scenarios in order to approach an understanding of greater complexities.

(i) Two people, A and B, time travel. They meet in 2025, then, shortly afterwards from A's point of view, they meet in 2006. The meeting in 2006 is not necessarily shortly after the meeting in 2025 from B's point of view. It might be some time before or a long time after. While in, e.g., 2025, the time travelers live through that time in the same way as anyone else. Also, either A or B can meet his older, then younger, self while time traveling.

(ii) A and B do not time travel but move around in their three (or more) spatial dimensions like anyone else. However, our temporal dimension is one of their spatial dimensions. Some other dimension, possibly one of our spatial dimensions, is their temporal dimension. They meet in 2025, then, from both their points of view, meet again in 2006. While in, e.g., 2025, they see not a man walking along a street but the man's world line extending along the street's world line. They cannot meet themselves.

I clarify these scenarios because I wonder whether aspects of both are present in the text.

Completing Causal Circles II

See here.

The same logic, i.e., consistency between propositions, is applicable to any narrative whether or not the narrative involves time travel. Thus, if we know that E occurred and if we also know that E could have occurred only if deliberately caused by Bill, then we validly deduce that Bill deliberately caused E. If we ask, "What would have happened if Bill had decided not to cause E?," then the answer is that E would not have occurred.

If E occurred and if we think that it could only have been caused by Bill but are reliably informed that Bill did not cause it, then we can only conclude that we were mistaken to think that only Bill could have caused E. The only impossibility here is the following sequence:

E occurred;
only Bill could have caused E;
Bill did not cause E.

None of this is changed by the additional datum that Bill time traveled from after E to before E in order to cause E.

Two Perspectives

SPOILERS etc. I am discussing details in Alan Moore's Jerusalem (London, 2016) on the assumption that blog readers either have read the book or don't mind being told details.

It has been said that there is a lot of violence against women in Moore's works. There is more in Jerusalem. It is all perfectly valid. There is a lot of violence against women in life which fiction, however fantastic, reflects.

Here, a violent rape is perceived from two perspectives hundreds of pages apart. In the mortal realm, a policeman tells a published poet that a prostitute has been attacked. In the immortal realm, ghosts witness the rape and can see that a demon is driving the car. The novel seems to have rambled but is pulling itself back on course towards a major event in both realms.

Completing Causal Circles

This post on the circular causality paradox has been occasioned by reading Alan Moore's Jerusalem (London, 2016), BOOK TWO: MANSOUL, Forbidden Worlds, pp. 675-714, but the example has been simplified for discussion purposes.

Assume a single, continuous, immutable timeline:

at time t3, Bill learns of event E that had occurred at t2;

Bill time travels to t1;

between t1 and t2, Bill realizes that E will occur only if he deliberately causes it;

so what happens if Bill decides not to cause E?

The answer is that, if Bill were the kind of person who, in those circumstances, would decide not to cause E, then E would not have occurred and Bill would not, between t1 and t2, be deciding whether to cause it. There is a relevant event in Audrey Niffeneger's The Time Traveler's Wife. Knowing that a picture has been seen undated in the future, the artist decides to date it...but later trims the date off. But I think that I first encountered this aspect of circular causality in a short story by Brian Aldiss.