An Everlasting Solid

Alan Moore, Jerusalem (London, 2016), Book Three.

Walking down Kettering Road, Northampton (see image), Alma Warren contemplates:

"...a simultaneous eternity...time as an everlasting solid in which nothing changes, nothing dies." (p. 790)

(But "everlasting" means lasting forever through time...)

HG Wells and JW Dunne notwithstanding, I no longer accept Alma's view of time but let's consider its implications. The temporal solid contains within it the world line of every conscious organism. While life exists, a three-dimensional cross-section of the solid contains cross-sections of world lines. A three-dimensional cross-section of the world line of an organism is what we usually call just an organism. However, in the present context, we must differentiate between a four-dimensional organism and its three-dimensional cross-sections. Each such cross-section of a conscious organism is conscious of its three dimensional surroundings although not of the four dimensional totality. It follows that consciousness is not separate from the organism but, on the contrary, is a feature of each cross-section of the organism. It follows further that this account is invalid:

Alan Moore, Jerusalem (London, 2016)
"It was as though while people were still living they were really frozen motionless, immersed in the congealed blancmange of time, and simply thought that they were moving, when in truth it was just their awareness fluttering along the pre-existing tunnel of their lifetime as a ball of coloured light." (p. 363) (copied from here.)

Alma More

See Alma.

Alan Moore, Jerusalem (London, 2016), Book Three.

"Under all of this is Alma's soul, the Real of her that cannot be expressed, which is a lovely and ingeniously fashioned artefact..." (p. 780)

Is any part of a transient individual "Real" with a capital "R"?
It is here expressed as an "artefact."
Is there a contradiction between "artefact" and "Real"?

Near Alma's surface are rage and resentment whereas, five layers further down, are her "...feelings, her emotional component..." (p. 781)

We all reflect differently on our inner processes. Alma's are more complicated than mine.

Alma

Line of thought continued from here.

Jerusalem, A Cold And Frosty Morning.

OK. I am really getting into Alma Warren's seven layers of consciousness:

surface rage and resentment;
the efficient secretary-stratum;
the ceaseless creative process;
the basement of a super-villainess who sits in a swivel chair but does not stroke a cat;
Jungian catacombs;
feelings;
soul.

The swivel-chaired villain stroking a cat is an iconic cinema image from the twentieth century. For an image of the SPECTRE meeting in Thunderball, see here. When Ketlan was still running the Lancaster Unity anti-fascist blog but attending less demos, I told people that he sat behind a screen or in a darkened room, stroking a cat. It is good to see this image referenced in Alan Moore's novel.

Revisiting Jerusalem

Has anyone reread Alan Moore's behemothic Jerusalem? I am not ready to do that yet. In fact, I have not yet read the book in its entirety because I was defeated by its Joycean chapter. I have reread my previous posts on Jerusalem with interest. See here.

In Two Scenarios, I summarized two scenarios because I thought that, at one point, the text was ambiguous between these two accounts. However, I should have quoted some of the purportedly ambiguous passages. I am not going to search through the text right now to find them.

I am drawn back to the chapter where Alma reads Herbie (see here). I will possibly reread that chapter and find more details to post about. Having walked through (most of) the Historical Edifice from front to back, we can now reenter it from another angle.

Posts About Alan Moore's Jerusalem

On the Logic of Time Travel blog: Further Digging.
On the Religion and Philosophy blog: "Time Does Not Exist", "It was still there...", "Preliminary Thoughts On Eternalism."
On the Comics Appreciation blog: see here and Three Alan Moore Quiz Questions.
On the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog, Time And Length, Future Ice Ages and Temporal Perambulators.
On this blog: posts in December 2016 and January and February 2017.

More on this later.

James Bond's Opponents

SMERSH
Mr Big
Rosa Klebb
Auric Goldfinger

SPECTRE
Emilio Largo
Horst Uhlmann
Ernst Stavro Blofeld

Others
Le Chiffre
Sir Hugo Drax
The Spang brothers
Dr No
Mr Sanguinetti
Francisco Scaramanga

Piet Hein

Poul Anderson, Genesis (New York, 2001) is divided into Parts One and Two, each with an internal title page.

Part One, p. 1, has this appropriate quotation:

"To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
"Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

No surprises there. We recognize both the name Tennyson and the relevance of the verse.

Part Two, p. 99, has:

"Was it her I ought to have loved...?"
-Piet Hein.

Observations
I googled Piet Hein. See here.
When I googled the quotation, I found only copies of Anderson's text.
Hein refers to Niel Bohr who is also referenced in Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions. See here.
In Anderson's use of the quotation, does "her" refer to Earth?