Alan Moore : The Past And The Future
"...My Own Individual Biological Past is extremely entangled with The Past of The Town -- to the best of my knowledge My Family has pretty much always lived here.
There have been people coming in from outside blood marrying into the family so that we're perhaps not quite as inbred as some of our neighbors but for example I understand that at some time during the 1700s that a Belgian you you know ribbon maker married into the family and at this point apparently the family suddenly decided that ribbon making was the future until eventually both my paternal and maternal grandparents end up at the green in the borough's an area of Northampton generally understood to be its oldest quarter it's the area surrounding the original castle built by Solomon to song Li and the town has radiated out from this point much is reported upon more idea out from the point at which a pad was been dropped it's almost like this this culture just spreading out in rings from this central point of impact out to the the far eastern reaches of the county to the new developments appear at the process taking hundreds of years the inhabitants of the borough's were a peculiar mix of people in general it was the poorest area of the town the same to my infant Oy to be a fair mix of Romani blood amongst the people of the district there were criminals there were chances con men but con men who were almost conning themselves who were following some completely unrealistic dream of escape of breaking out of the fairly narrow terrorist confines of this fairly growing the working-class world in which they found themselves there were other people who were completely resigned to their lot who would be satisfied to be local legends that these belonged to a different category and a lot of my forebears seemed to fall into that particular niche ginger Vernon a paternal great-grandfather was apparently a craftsman who specialized in fresco painting in the the Michelangelo tradition of hanging in a palette a couple of feet under a roof while touching up the cherubs and the angels you know painting in a few celestial clouds he was also quite a hard-drinking man a compulsive staple Jack who would chin up sheer walls in the middle of town because he spotted a particularly nice chimney breast that he wanted to give closer inspection to he was offered by a friend of his who was just setting up what would become a very large very successful company he was offered a share in the directorship if he would stay out of pubs for a which then he would have been made a director of the company this seemed to him to be artificial behavior this seemed to him to be a pretense pretending if only for a week to be something other than what he was so he politely declined the offer and presumably for the rest of his life had to put up with his wife pointing out the fine three-story house that his former friend now lived in which of course could have been theirs but on a point of principle he had passed that up it was said that the madness in the family came from the Vernon's my great-aunt Bertha who I believe would perhaps have been gingers sister was notable for using The Blitz and The Blackout as an impromptu stage for her accordion recital --
She would wander out into the night with the Bombers going overhead and play these strange hideous wheezing dirges upon the accordion presumably despite the protests of the various air raid wardens that would no doubt be trying to get her back indoors these stories they tend to they filter down they perhaps get exaggerated you know there's no telling how many of them are completely true there's enough truth there to give a sense of what your family's previous life has been like the richness of it these incredible people who whose stories will never be told
Because from our earliest times from our earliest educational we very quickly get the idea that the only the lineages and lives worth recording others of the artists Chakra see if two aristocrats get married or have a falling out or the start of war then this is of immense value and we forever examine the lives the psychology is the personalities of these bygone era static men and women as if that was the only history that was of any importance, as if the movements of The State and of our Royal Families were the only movements, the only families that had contributed to the ongoing human adventure the lives of the ordinary people who made up much of the meat of that adventure are overlooked they are reduced historically to a huge faceless crowd of extras who don't get a speaking part in history whereas in fact the stories the rumors the family legends the family secrets these tell a rich incredibly deep incredibly colorful story and this is true of my family of anyone's family one of the things that are like people to remember when I
One of the comments that I received most frequently upon the publication of the book Voice of The Fire that I wrote about Northampton was an accusation of exaggeration; placing too much importance upon a town whose only real relevance would seem to be to Me -- I had people who were saying, "Yes, but you could say this about any town --" which is actually rather The Point....
what I'd intended to demonstrate by dredging up all of the rich myth and history of a completely nondescript little town Lord Northampton a town that I'm sure to most people is seen as an anonymous industrial running sore in the middle of the country if you can look beneath the surface beneath the flagstones of Northampton and find something magical something wonderful then yes of course that means that wherever you are you could do the same excavation you could find the meaning of the place in which you will probably be spending a great deal of your life this is not difficult this is not something that needs exceptional training all it needs is a willing boy a willing intelligence a receptiveness a willingness to visit these places see what they look like now see what they feel like now try and decipher all of the signals that they are giving you whether that is a clump of moss a crack in a paving stone the way that the lettering has faded upon the shop across the street this is all information soak it up check out the library check out the records of local societies do some work do a little bit of research and I'm sure that everybody wherever they happen to exist could make the townships around them suddenly flare with meaning they could if they so chose live not in degraded dull strips of industrial English potato print landscape people do not have to live in the world view that has been imposed upon them from above they do not have to live in the degraded view of the streets that surround them that they have been handed if they are prepared to simply look they can live in fantastic legendary landscapes filled with gods and monsters and heroes I mean the area in which I live now within a quarter of a mile yes Francis Crick dreaming up the day and I while sitting there on his hard Sunday school bench Buffalo Bill and his Indians riding around the rice course which is a quarter of a mile in the opposite direction Samuel Beckett playing cricket at the County Ground -- no doubt a very long, protracted and ambiguous Cricket Game.
Everywhere that we live is surrounded by these fascinating fragments of History they are embedded in it these fantastic vanished personalities these legends these romances these things although they are embedded in the past are very much a part of the fabric of all of our lives and if we wish to live in that world of legend rather than in this somewhat sorry and fallen tabloid world which we've had dished up to us then we have to be prepared to excavate we have to be prepared to look below the surface of our lives and find that rich coal seam of gleaming in History that underlies our entire experience."
