"The historian must understand that visionaries are neither impostors nor lunatics. It is one thing to say that the figure Joan recognized as St Catherine was not really St Catherine, but the dramatization by Joan's imagination of that pressure upon her of the driving force that is behind evolution which I have just called the evolutionary appetite. It is quite another to class her visions with the vision of two moons seen by a drunken person, or with Brocken spectres, echoes and the like.
Saint Catherine's instructions were far too cogent for that; and the simplest French peasant who believes in apparitions of celestial personages to favored mortals is nearer to the scientific truth about Joan than the Rationalist and Materialist historians and essayists who feel obliged to set down a girl who saw saints and heard them talking to her as either crazy or mendacious. If Joan was mad, all Christendom was mad too; for people who believe devoutly in the existence of celestial personages are every whit as mad in that sense as the people who think they see them.
Luther, when he threw his inkhorn at the devil, was no more mad than any other Augustinian monk: he had a more vivid imagination, and had perhaps eaten and slept less: that was all.
THE MERE ICONOGRAPHY DOES NOT MATTER
All the popular religions in the world are made apprehensible by an array of legendary personages, with an Almighty Father, and sometimes a mother and divine child, as the central figures.
These are presented to the mind's eye in childhood; and the result is a hallucination which persists strongly throughout life when it has been well impressed.
Thus all the thinking of the hallucinated adult about the fountain of inspiration which is continually flowing in the universe, or about the promptings of virtue and the revulsions of shame: in short, about aspiration and conscience, both of which forces are matters of fact more obvious than electro-magnetism, is thinking in terms of the celestial vision.
And when in the case of exceptionally imaginative persons, especially those practising certain appropriate austerities, the hallucination extends from the mind's eye to the body's, the visionary sees Krishna or the Buddha or the Blessed Virgin or St Catherine as the case may be.
THE MODERN EDUCATION WHICH JOAN ESCAPED
It is important to everyone nowadays to understand this, because modern science is making short work of the hallucinations without regard to the vital importance of the things they symbolize.
If Joan were reborn today she would be sent, first to a convent school in which she would be mildly taught to connect inspiration and conscience with St Catherine and St Michael exactly as she was in the fifteenth century, and then finished up with a very energetic training in the gospel of Saints Louis Pasteur and Paul Bert, who would tell her (possibly in visions but more probably in pamphlets) not to be a superstitious little fool, and to empty out St Catherine and the rest of the Catholic hagiology as an obsolete iconography of exploded myths.
It would be rubbed into her that Galileo was a martyr, and his persecutors incorrigible ignoramuses, and that St Teresa's hormones had gone astray and left her incurably hyperpituitary or hyperadrenal or hysteroid or epileptoid or anything but asteroid.
She would have been convinced by precept and experiment that baptism and receiving the body of her Lord were contemptible superstitions, and that vaccination and vivisection were enlightened practices.
Behind her new Saints Louis and Paul there would be not only Science purifying Religion and being purified by it, but hypochondria, melancholia, cowardice, stupidity, cruelty, muckraking curiosity, knowledge without wisdom, and everything that the eternal soul in Nature loathes, instead of the virtues of which St Catherine was the figure head.
As to the new rites, which would be the saner Joan? the one who carried little children to be baptized of water and the spirit, or the one who sent the police to force their parents to have the most villainous racial poison we know thrust into their veins? the one who told them the story of the angel and Mary, or the one who questioned them as to their experiences of the Edipus complex? the one to whom the consecrated wafer was the very body of the virtue that was her salvation, or the one who looked forward to a precise and convenient regulation of her health and her desires by a nicely calculated diet of thyroid extract, adrenalin, thymin, pituitrin, and insulin, with pick-me-ups of hormone stimulants, the blood being first carefully fortified with antibodies against all possible infections by inoculations of infected bacteria and serum from infected animals, and against old age by surgical extirpation of the reproductive ducts or weekly doses of monkey gland?
and at the same time you're cultivating bacteria strong enough to
Kill EveryLivingThing!
D’you think you are ready for that much Power?
You lot? You lot?
Y’Cheeky bastards!
“Iain Spence published Sekhmet Hypothesis: The Signals of the Beginning of a New Identity as a book in 1995, but it wasn’t until two years later that I came across his ideas in an article he’d written for the magazine Towards 2012. As an illuminating way of reconsidering the familiar, I’m particularly fond of the Sekhmet Hypothesis, which never fails to get people talking at parties.
As usual, please remember that this is just a framework; a way of ordering information into meaningful patterns in the service of creative lateral thinking, if you like.
Nineteen eighty-eight saw ecstasy, or MDMA, as the favoured drug, accompanying long-form trance, ambient and dance music, Manchester “baggy” fitness wear as street wear, grunge beards, and a return to long hair.
In comic books, this was the time of Deadline, Doom Patrol, Shade, and Sandman.”
“I'm a bit upset with the art now that John Ridgway's not doing much and Tim Perkins is taking over. I like working with John but he's just too busy now to devote much of his time to Dr Who. I don't know if I'll do any more Dr Whos, but I quite enjoyed it.
I really liked Colin Baker's Doctor, but he was never given a decent storyline. The potential was wasted.
I'm nervously waiting for the reaction of the readers to my new comic story, because there's a lot of stuff about continuity and I'm afraid I screwed it up.
I based the story [The World Shapers] on a text piece I remembered from an old annual - I think it was 1966 - which I thought was set on the planet Marinus.
Recently I discovered the annual at a comic mart, and when I re-read the text story it wasn't set on Marinus at all and it wasn't anything like I'd remembered.
So, I've messed with the continuity and I've also brought back Jamie as an old man, which will probably bring in some flak from the die-hards.
Thing is, if you're going to do it, you might as well make the effort to try something different.
I think if I'd written for the T.V. series and brought back an old Jamie, it would have been hailed as a masterpiece; because it's the comic, they'll probably say 'You're messing with sacred stuff!'
There was a Dr Who story they wouldn't let me do last year.
I came up with this idea where the Doctor meets two future versions of himself, a sort of 'Three Doctors' thing.
I thought, 'I won't do two Doctors from the past, I'll do two from the future', to make it a bit different.
One of them was a woman and they wouldn't let me do that at all. They said the readership wouldn't accept it. There was some big controversy."
GM,
After-Image,
January 1988
“He turned to the computer and touched one of its graphics display keys. Instantly, Peri was replaced by another tortured figure. The Doctor recognised Dastari. It was a perfect holographic forgery, he thought.
He touched the key again and another figure appeared that he didn’t recognise. A rather scruffy person in an ill-fitting tailcoat and black string necktie.
The Doctor switched off the machine and sank back into the control chair with his mind racing. Although he would instantly recognise The Brigadier or Leela or any of his past companions, he scarcely had any recollection of how he himself had appeared in past forms.
Nonetheless, he thought, it was all Lombard Street to a China orange that the chap in the tailcoat was himself. In that case, not only had his sartorial taste improved, but at last it was all beginning to make sense."
— Robert Holmes,
The Two Doctors
“From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, making a Doctor Who record appears to be an obvious populist choice. It is, after all, one of the most successful and best-loved series on British TV.
This was not the case in 1988, when ‘Doctorin’ The TARDIS’ was released.
At that time, Doctor Who was largely considered an embarrassment, by both the BBC and the viewing public at home.
If Drummond and Cauty had been drawn to it for populist reasons, their timing was out.”
“If we take Alan Moore’s model of IdeaSpace seriously – if only for a moment – and look at the idea of Doctor Who, we see an extremely detailed fiction.
The Doctor is one of the great line of British folk heroes; a character in the tradition of Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. Whereas American folk heroes tend towards cowboys or gangsters who take what they want from the world and end up either rich or winners, British equivalents are very different.
They are anti-Establishment figures, even when they work with the Establishment, and they save the day not for personal gain, but because it is the right thing to do.
For generations of British school kids, Doctor Who was the myth they grew up with.
They had only the most superficial knowledge of the likes of Zeus, Odin or Jesus, but they knew all there was to know about Davros, The Master and Cybermen.
The Doctor is the first British folk hero of the TV age, and the nature of his TV origins make him unusual. There is no definitive creator standing behind him, no Arthur Conan Doyle, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ian Fleming or J. K. Rowling. Instead, he popped out from the space between many minds.
There was a succession of different actors, writers and producers who all invigorated the character for a short while before moving on or burning out.
The character is defined by his ability to regenerate and change his personality. He can change all his friends and companions. He can go anywhere, at any time. He is, essentially, the perfect, never-ending story. He will survive long after you, me or anyone currently involved in making the series has died.
He adapts, grows, mutates and endures. In this he fulfils much of the standard definitions for A Living Thing.
This is not bad going, for A Fiction.
Already, there are untold thousands of Doctor Who stories, which, for a character of fiction, is almost unheard of. There have been hundreds of stories on TV, and many, many more available as novels, audio CDs, comic books, films, stage plays, webcasts, fanfics and radio programmes.
The growth of the story, compared to any other fiction from the same period, is deeply unusual. Indeed, it has become arguably the most expansive and complex non-religious fictionever created.
According to Moore’s model of IdeaSpace, this fiction may be complicated enough to act like A Living Thing.
Note that this is not to say that Doctor Who is A Living Thing, for that would sound crazy.
It is to say that it behavesas if it were A Living Thing, which is a much more reasonable observation.
Of course, if you were to then go on to try to define the difference between Something That is Living and Something That Behaves Like it is Living, you would be a brave soul indeed.
The programme’s expansion through all possible media was begun by its first script editor, David Whitaker.
Although Doctor Who has no definitive ‘creator’, Whitaker can be said to be the man who nurtured the heart of the series, sculpting the peculiar mix of humour, morality and wide-eyed imagination that makes the series so unique.
He was involved in the creation of most of the iconography of the show, from introducing the Daleks, to making the TARDIS in some way alive and the Doctor able to regenerate into a different actor.
He also spread the life of the character beyond television, for he wrote the first novels and annuals and co-wrote the Peter Cushing Dr Who movies from the 1960s. Whitaker’s work on Doctor Who was particularly influenced by alchemy, a subject that he claimed to be ‘very fond of’.
The basic alchemical principle, that a physical object can be affected by the manipulation of a symbol of that object – the idea of it, if you prefer – is used explicitly in his 1967 story The Evil of the Daleks (which is also a strong contender for the story that invented steampunk.) The Evil of the Daleks is about a pair of Victorian scientists who accidentally build a time machine out of 144 mirrors (the number ‘144’, or 122, being alchemically significant).
This basic alchemical principle is still used in the programme today, for example in Steven Moffat’s claim about his monsters the Weeping Angels: ‘The image of an Angel is an Angel.’
In Whitaker’s Doctor Who, when the TARDIS broke down because of a problem with the ‘mercury in the fluid links’, there was specific alchemical symbolism in the choice of mercury.
When the first Doctor, William Hartnell, was replaced by the second, Patrick Troughton, Whitaker gave him a flute and an obsession with hats in order to echo the classical god Mercury (Hermes to the Greeks).
All this would have meant little to the children watching in the 1960s. Nevertheless, Whitaker seems to have been consciously shaping the character of the Doctor into a mercurial, Trickster figure.
When the current Doctor Who writers claim that they only became writers because of Doctor Who, they usually credit the series of novels which Whitaker started and which young boys devoured during the 1970s.
There is another explanation, however, which comes from the very format of the programme.
In the original series, episodes built towards a climax and ended on a cliff-hanger in which the Doctor or his friends appeared to be in inescapable danger.
Of course, the children watching knew that the Doctor would somehow survive. He always did. The Question, then, was not ‘Would he escape?’, but ‘How?’
What could possibly happen to get the Doctor out of that situation?
There would be much debate about this in school playgrounds after each episode.
And as the kids thought about the problem, their imaginations were being stoked.
They were thinking like writers.
Indeed, they were trying to write the next episode themselves.
What we have here, then, is a character of fiction, neither created nor ‘owned’ by any one imagination, who is actively creating the very environment – writers’ minds – that it needs to survive into the future.
Not only is Doctor Who a fictitious character who acts like a living thing by constantly evolving and surviving, it is also a self-sustaining living thing that creates the one thing that it needs to survive.
From an evolutionary point of view, that’s impressive.
There is no requirement for those affected by an idea to be aware of any of this.
When the media critic Philip Sandifer writes that ‘David Whitaker, at once the most important figure in Doctor Who’s development and the least understood, created a show that is genuinely magical and this influence cannot be erased from within the show’, he does not mean that any of the hundreds of actors and writers who went on to work on the programme saw it in those terms.
From Drummond and Cauty’s perspective, the story of Doctor Who is irrelevant. All that was happening was that they were exploring their mental landscape, and they were fulfilling their duty as artists by doing so more deeply than normal people.
This is a landscape with many unseen, unknown areas where who knows what might be found. The KLF explored further than most and, if we were to accept Moore’s model, it would perhaps not be surprising that a fiction as complex as Doctor Who could encounter them in Ideaspace and, being at its lowest point and in dire need of help, use them for its own ends.
For Moore, and other artists such as the film-maker David Lynch who use similar models, The Role of The Artist is like that of A Fisherman. It is his job to fish in the collective unconscious and use all his skill to best present his catch to an audience.
Drummond and Cauty, on the other hand, appear to have been caught by the fish. Lacking any clear sense of what they were doing, they dived in as deeply as Moore and Lynch. They did not have a specific purpose for doing so. They just needed to make something happen – anything really, such is the path of chaos.
‘It was supposed to be a proper dance record, but we couldn’t fit the four-four beat to it, so we ended up with the glitter beat, which was never really our intention but we had to go with it,’ Cauty has said. ‘It was like an out-of-control lorry, you know, you’re just trying to steer it, and that track took itself over, really, and did what it wanted to do.
We were just watching.’
This lack of intention is significant, from a magical point of view.
One of the most important aspects of magical practice is The Will.
Aleister Crowley defined magic as being changes in The World brought about by the exercise of The Will, hence his maxim ‘Do what thou Will shall be the whole of the Law’.
The will or intention of a magical act is important because the magician opens himself up to all sorts of strange powers and influences and he must avoid being controlled by them.
Drummond and Cauty were not exerting any control on the process, and so they made themselves vulnerable to the who knows whats that live out of sight in the depths of IdeaSpace.
For this reason, you could understand why Moore would think that Bill Drummond was ‘totally mad’.
All this only applies if you’re prepared to accept the notion of Magic.
Nevertheless, it is worth noting because there is another fiction that is important in Drummond and Cauty’s story. This one is more significant, because this is the fiction that they became, taking on its title and performing their actions in its name. It is also the source of our whirlwind of synchronicities.
We are talking, of course, about The Justified Ancients of Mummu. The question then becomes: did Cauty and Drummond choose The JAMs, or did The JAMs choose Cauty and Drummond? A possible clue will come later, when we look at what the founding purpose of The Justified Ancients of Mummu actually was.”
“Archie” is clearly evil - he’s advocating violence and intimidation of people who won’t use His Words.
“Zombies weren’t the only problem we had to deal with back then.
There were looters, not so much hardened criminals as just people who needed stuff to survive.
Same with squatters; both cases usually ended well. We’d just invite them home, give them what they needed, take care of them until the housing folks could step in.
There were some real looters, though, professional bad guys. That was the only time I got hurt.
[He pulls down his shirt, exposing a circular scar the size of a prewar dime.]
Nine millimeter, right through the shoulder.
My team chased him out of the house.
I ordered him to halt. That was the only time I ever killed someone, thank God.
When the new laws came in, conventional crime pretty much dried up altogether.
Then there were the ferals, you know, the homeless kids who’d lost their parents. We’d find them curled up in basements, in closets, under beds.
A lot of them had walked from as far away as back east. They were in bad shape, all malnourished and sickly. A lot of times they’d run.
Those were the only times I felt bad, you know, that I couldn’t chase them. Someone else would go, a lot of times they’d catch up, but not always.
The biggest problem were quislings.
Quislings?
Yeah, you know, the people that went nutballs and started acting like zombies.
Could you elaborate?
Well, I’m not a shrink, so I don’t know all the tech terms.
That’s all right.
Well, as I understand it, there’s a type of person who just can’t deal with a fight-or-die situation.
They’re always drawn to what they’re afraid of.
Instead of resisting it, they want to please it, join it, try to be like it.
I guess that happens in kidnap situations, you know, like a Patty Hearst/ Stockholm Syndrome–type, or, like in regular war, when people who are invaded sign up for the enemy’s army.
Collaborators, sometimes even more die-hard than the people they’re trying to mimic, like those French fascists who were some of Hitler’s last troops.
Maybe that’s why we call them quislings, like it’s a French word or something.2
But you couldn’t do it in this war. You couldn’t just throw up your hands and say, “Hey, don’t kill me, I’m on your side.”
There was no gray area in this fight, no in between.
I guess some people just couldn’t accept that. It put them right over the edge.
They started moving like zombies, sounding like them, even attacking and trying to eat other people.
That’s how we found our first one. He was a male adult, midthirties. Dirty, dazed, shuffling down the sidewalk. We thought he was just in Z-shock, until he bit one of our guys in the arm. That was a horrible few seconds.
I dropped the Q with a head shot then turned to check on my buddy. He was crumpled on the curb, swearing, crying, staring at the gash in his forearm.
This was a death sentence and he knew it.
He was ready to do himself until we discovered that the guy I shot had bright red blood pouring from his head. When we checked his flesh we found he was still warm!
You should have seen our buddy lose it. It’s not every day you get a reprieve from the big governor in the sky. Ironically, he almost died anyway. The bastard had so much bacteria in his mouth that it caused a near fatal staph infection.
We thought maybe we stumbled onto some new discovery but it turned out it’d been happening for a while.
The CDC was just about to go public. They even sent an expert up from Oakland to brief us on what to do if we encountered more of them. It blew our minds.
Did you know that quislings were the reason some people used to think they were immune? They were also the reason all those bullshit wonder drugs got so much hype. Think about it. Someone’s on Phalanx, gets bit but survives. What else is he going to think?
He probably wouldn’t know there was even such a thing as quislings. They’re just as hostile as regular zombies and in some cases even more dangerous.
How so?
Well, for one thing, they didn’t freeze. I mean, yeah, they would if they were exposed over time, but in moderate cold, if they’d gone under while wearing warm clothes, they’d be fine. They also got stronger from the people they ate. Not like zombies. They could maintain over time.
But you could kill them more easily.
Yes and no.
You didn’t have to hit them in head; you could take out the lungs, the heart, hit them anywhere, and eventually they’d bleed to death. But if you didn’t stop them with one shot, they’d just keep coming until they died.
They don’t feel pain?
Hell no. It’s that whole mind-over-matter thing, being so focused you’re able to suppress relays to the brain and all that. You should really talk to an expert.
Please continue.
Okay, well, that’s why we could never talk them down. There was nothing left to talk to. These people were zombies, maybe not physically, but mentally you could not tell the difference.
Even physically it might be hard, if they were dirty enough, bloody enough, diseased enough. Zombies don’t really smell that bad, not individually and not if they’re fresh.
How do you tell one of these from a mimic with a whopping dose of gangrene? You couldn’t. It’s not like the military would let us have sniffer dogs or anything.
You had to use the eye test. Ghouls don’t blink, I don’t know why. Maybe because they use their senses equally, their brains don’t value sight as much. Maybe because they don’t have as much bodily fluid they can’t keep using it to coat the eyes.
Who knows, but they don’t blink and quislings do. That’s how you spotted them; back up a few paces, and wait a few seconds.
Darkness was easier, you just shone a beam in their faces. If they didn’t blink, you took them down.
And if they did?
Well, our orders were to capture quislings if possible, and use deadly force only in self-defense. It sounded crazy, still does, but we rounded up a few, hog-tied them, turned them over to police or National Guard. I’m not sure what they did with them.
I’ve heard stories about Walla Walla, you know, the prison where hundreds of them were fed and clothed and even medically cared for.
[His eyes flick to the ceiling.]
You don’t agree.
Hey, I’m not going there. You want to open that can of worms, read the papers. Every year some lawyer or priest or politician tries to stoke that fire for whatever side best suits them.
Personally, I don’t care. I don’t have any feelings toward them one way or the other. I think the saddest thing about them is that they gave up so much and in the end lost anyway.
Why is that?
’Cause even though we can’t tell the difference between them, the real zombies can.
Remember early in the war, when everybody was trying to work on a way to turn the living dead against one another? There was all this “documented proof ” about infighting—eyewitness accounts and even footage of one zombie attacking another. Stupid. It was zombies attacking quislings, but you never would have known that to look at it.
Quislings don’t scream. They just lie there, not even trying to fight, writhing in that slow, robotic way, eaten alive by the very creatures they’re trying to be.
If we want to get out of here in one piece, we've got to get that cure, and we're got to get it fast.
PHLOX:
I could finish the antivirus in less time if I had a human host to replicate enough antibodies.
ARCHER:
I don't see any other humans around.
PHLOX:
Captain, I would have to expose you to the plague. I cannot predict what it might do to you.
ARCHER:
Will it give you the cure?
PHLOX:
Unquestionably.
ARCHER:
Let's get started.
Corona Doesn't Want to Kill You
“We Should Not Give-in to This Damn Virus.”
“As you might imagine, it was hard to sustain this level of controlled breakdown while running a business. My cometary rise was equaled by a fall; a plunge into dissolution. The more perverse and inhuman the enemies of the Invisibles became, the sicker I got. By the time I realized I’d become semifictional, it was too late to defend myself.
The downward spiral expressed itself in darker magic as the Invisibles faced bacterial gods from a diseased twin universe. After trying out a Voudon ritual in 1993, I found myself facing down an immense scorpion creature that tried to teach me how to psychically assassinate people by destroying their “auras.”
When the ritual was done, I switched on the TV to decompress and caught the last fifteen minutes of Howard the Duck, in which nightmarish extradimensional scorpion sorcerers attempted to clamber their way into eighties America.
These spooky coincidences were commonplace, but I had no idea what I was letting myself in for when I wrote King Mob into the hands of his “enemies. Tortured and drugged, he was made to believe his face was being disfigured by a necrotizing fasciitis bug.
Within three months, bacteria of a different kind had nibbled a hole in my cheek. My beautiful big house had degenerated into creepy, lightless squalor, with a duvet hung up in the bedroom window instead of curtains. I came out in boils, traditional signs of demon contact. Fortunately for me, I was physically fitter than I’d ever been, although it only delayed the inevitable for a few more months.
I’d been granted superpowers. I’d danced with monster gods and shaken souls with angels, but my end-of-act-2 reverse could no longer be denied. The Achilles’ heel revealed! The death trap sprung!
On the night before I was hustled into the hospital, with what I later found out was probably less than forty-eight hours to live, I hallucinated something I recognized immediately as “Christ.”
A column of light phased through the door, clear as day, then a powerful sermon seemed to download into my mind. I understood that this power I was facing was some kind of Gnostic Christ. A Christ of the Apocrypha. An almost pagan figure that I’d found at the bottom, at the last gasp. Here at the end, there was this light. Christ was with us, suffering right there with us and promising salvation. This living radiance was nothing like the morbid fever visions of hearses and twisted window frames I’d been having. This was what turned dead-end junkies into born-again Christians, but of the whole heart-melting experience, I remember only the first resonant words:
“I am not the god of your fathers, I am the hidden stone that breaks all hearts.
We have to break your heart to let the light out.”
These words sounded through my head, but they were bigger and more complete than any thoughts I was familiar with; more like a broadcast. The loving voice and its powerful words seemed not to be mine and offered me a stark choice there in the living room: I could die now of this disease or stay and “serve the light.”
I might as well have been recruited into the Green Lantern Corps, in what was for me a very genuine “cosmic” moment.
I did as most of us would and elected to live. Like Captain Marvel, I wanted to go back to Earth armed with Eon’s knowledge.
I felt I’d lived my own Arkham Asylum dark night of the soul, and without the understanding that I was on a well-trod and signposted “magical” path, I’m not sure if I could have handled my illness or recovery process quite as well.
I’d reached that point in the story where I’d survived the crisis and still had a chance to be reborn with a new costume and better powers, but it was touch and go; every passing second was the ticking clock to the ultimate life-and-death cliff-hanger.
How the fuck would I get out of this one?
As it happened, as in the best serials, it was some kind of dumb luck that saved me. The day after Jesus popped by, something odd occurred.
My sister was in London, and her boyfriend Gordon was on his way down for a visit. He’d just missed catching up with my mum, who’d been looking in on me, with increasing apprehension. She’d correctly diagnosed my appendicitis when I was twelve and now she was sure that the doctor’s flu remedy was not what my damaged lungs really needed.
She made it to her living room, looked out the window, and saw Gordon at the crossroads hailing a cab to take him to the station. She willed him to turn around, as she tells it, and he did.
Gordon came upstairs to collect a bundle of clothes for my sis. Mum told him about me, and he promised to mention it to his mate Graham, who had a good local doctor, apparently, a GP whose own bohemian temperament led him to specialize in the treatment of football stars, musicians, and artists.
When he got to London, Gordon was as good as his word. Graham immediately called his miracle doc, who agreed to visit me on short notice.
To my shame, I’m not sure that I would have acted so promptly (or at all) in the same circumstances.
Graham didn’t know me. He was five hundred miles away and had no idea how seriously ill I was.
The doctor checked my temperature and listened to my chest with growing alarm before contacting the hospital.
I felt safe at last, as if a true guardian angel had arrived to rescue me from the mire of disease where I could no longer function.
There were no beds at the Tropical Diseases Ward (my travel history made this the obvious first port of call), but with so many coincidences already flying around, another one was attracted to all the commotion: It just so happened that the receptionist had gone out with the doctor’s friend.
Charm and nepotism swung me a room. Within hours, I was in a private ward in Glasgow’s Ruchill Hospital with a drip in my arm, while frantic doctors held me down as if I were devil possessed. They had to get the needle in when the tremors were at their most intense, so I lay shuddering, freezing, barely able to breathe as my arm was secured and blood drawn.
I was quickly and efficiently diagnosed with a tempestuous Staphylococcus aureus infection that had settled in my lungs, collapsing one of them. I was septicemic and severely lacking in natural salts and minerals, but the good doctors pulled me back.
Two days later, I had a painful tube in my arm, the vein was hard as wood, but I was alive, and I could feel the venom of the scorpion loa succumbing to the mighty medicine of antibiotics.
Staph aureus, or golden staph, derives its distinctive color from carotene, and when the bugs had been flushed from my system, I succumbed to an epic lust for raw carrots that could be satisfied only by a daily three-pound bag from the greengrocer. Depleted, I had to consume my weight in the power elixir, the golden superfood.
Not even the junkies outside the window prowling the hospital grounds for used or discarded needles could intrude on my sense of having been rescued from the brink. I settled back to recuperate, imagining ocean sets, distant beaches, and health.
I counted the days between episodes of Father Ted and Fist of Fun, enduring a battery of painful tests to discover if the staph infection had spread to my heart, and reading comic books my friend Jim brought me from the Forbidden Planet store he owns on Buchanan Street. It was one of a growing chain of pop culture emporia that rewrote the comic shop idea for the High Street consumer.
For a few days, there was even an AIDS scare, followed by a test and then the obvious relief.
My dad visited every night and told me stories from the war, his presence a calm rock. He insisted that he was trying to bore me to sleep, but it never worked that way. I could have listened to him all night.
While the doctors got on with their work, I also decided to take matters into my own hands and elected to treat the living bacteria inside me as totem animals. If, I speculated, they had a physical existence and purpose, surely they could be endowed with a mythic or magical intent by a human intelligence.
In the wee small hours, with the alcoholic night nurse on duty, I spoke to the germs and promised them a starring role as the baddies in my current magnum opus, The Invisibles, if they left me alone.
This, I explained to them, would give them a far longer life and greater symbolic significance than any mere physical overthrow of my body could offer. I gave Staph aureus the chance to become fiction. It was a good deal, and they seemed to go for it.
As I waited nervously for test results, I wrote King Mob’s recovery into The Invisibles, spelling myself out of my own predicament by restoring the fiction suit to full health. If he could survive this and be stronger, so, naturally, would I.
I’d made a magical model of the world, and by tweaking the model, I could seem to be able to effect actual changes in the real world.”
“ I might as well have been recruited into the Green Lantern Corps.”
— Grant Morrison , Supergods
“ As you might imagine, it was hard to sustain this level of controlled breakdown while running a business. My cometary rise was equaled by a fall; a plunge into dissolution. The more perverse and inhuman the enemies of the Invisibles became, the sicker I got. By the time I realized I’d become semifictional, it was too late to defend myself.
The downward spiral expressed itself in darker magic as the Invisibles faced bacterial gods from a diseased twin universe. After trying out a Voudon ritual in 1993, I found myself facing down an immense scorpion creature that tried to teach me how to psychically assassinate people by destroying their “auras.”
When the ritual was done, I switched on the TV to decompress and caught the last fifteen minutes of Howard the Duck, in which nightmarish extradimensional scorpion sorcerers attempted to clamber their way into eighties America.
These spooky coincidences were commonplace, but I had no idea what I was letting myself in for when I wrote King Mob into the hands of his enemies. Tortured and drugged, he was made to believe his face was being disfigured by a necrotizing fasciitis bug.
Within three months, bacteria of a different kind had nibbled a hole in my cheek. My beautiful big house had degenerated into creepy, lightless squalor, with a duvet hung up in the bedroom window instead of curtains. I came out in boils, traditional signs of demon contact. Fortunately for me, I was physically fitter than I’d ever been, although it only delayed the inevitable for a few more months.
I’d been granted superpowers. I’d danced with monster gods and shaken souls with angels, but my end-of-act-2 reverse could no longer be denied. The Achilles’ heel revealed! The death trap sprung!
On the night before I was hustled into the hospital, with what I later found out was probably less than forty-eight hours to live, I hallucinated something I recognized immediately as “Christ.” A column of light phased through the door, clear as day, then a powerful sermon seemed to download into my mind. I understood that this power I was facing was some kind of Gnostic Christ. A Christ of the Apocrypha. An almost pagan figure that I’d found at the bottom, at the last gasp. Here at the end, there was this light. Christ was with us, suffering right there with us and promising salvation. This living radiance was nothing like the morbid fever visions of hearses and twisted window frames I’d been having. This was what turned dead-end junkies into born-again Christians, but of the whole heart-melting experience, I remember only the first resonant words:
“I am not the god of your fathers, I am the hidden stone that breaks all hearts.
We have to break your heart to let the light out.”
These words sounded through my head, but they were bigger and more complete than any thoughts I was familiar with; more like a broadcast.
The loving voice and its powerful words seemed not to be mine and offered me a stark choice there in the living room: I could die now of this disease or stay and “serve the light.” I might as well have been recruited into the Green Lantern Corps, in what was for me a very genuine “cosmic” moment.
I did as most of us would and elected to live. Like Captain Marvel, I wanted to go back to Earth armed with Eon’s knowledge. I felt I’d lived my own Arkham Asylum dark night of the soul, and without the understanding that I was on a well-trod and signposted “magical” path, I’m not sure if I could have handled my illness or recovery process quite as well. I’d reached that point in the story where I’d survived the crisis and still had a chance to be reborn with a new costume and better powers, but it was touch and go; every passing second was the ticking clock to the ultimate life-and-death cliff-hanger. How the fuck would I get out of this one?
As it happened, as in the best serials, it was some kind of dumb luck that saved me. The day after Jesus popped by, something odd occurred. My sister was in London, and her boyfriend Gordon was on his way down for a visit. He’d just missed catching up with my mum, who’d been looking in on me, with increasing apprehension. She’d correctly diagnosed my appendicitis when I was twelve and now she was sure that the doctor’s flu remedy was not what my damaged lungs really needed. She made it to her living room, looked out the window, and saw Gordon at the crossroads hailing a cab to take him to the station. She willed him to turn around, as she tells it, and he did. Gordon came upstairs to collect a bundle of clothes for my sis. Mum told him about me, and he promised to mention it to his mate Graham, who had a good local doctor, apparently, a GP whose own bohemian temperament led him to specialize in the treatment of football stars, musicians, and artists. When he got to London, Gordon was as good as his word. Graham immediately called his miracle doc, who agreed to visit me on short notice. To my shame, I’m not sure that I would have acted so promptly (or at all) in the same circumstances. Graham didn’t know me. He was five hundred miles away and had no idea how seriously ill I was. The doctor checked my temperature and listened to my chest with growing alarm before contacting the hospital. I felt safe at last, as if a true guardian angel had arrived to rescue me from the mire of disease where I could no longer function. There were no beds at the Tropical Diseases Ward (my travel history made this the obvious first port of call), but with so many coincidences already flying around, another one was attracted to all the commotion: It just so happened that the receptionist had gone out with the doctor’s friend. Charm and nepotism swung me a room. Within hours, I was in a private ward in Glasgow’s Ruchill Hospital with a drip in my arm, while frantic doctors held me down as if I were devil possessed. They had to get the needle in when the tremors were at their most intense, so I lay shuddering, freezing, barely able to breathe as my arm was secured and blood drawn. I was quickly and efficiently diagnosed with a tempestuous Staphylococcus aureus infection that had settled in my lungs, collapsing one of them. I was septicemic and severely lacking in natural salts and minerals, but the good doctors pulled me back. Two days later, I had a painful tube in my arm, the vein was hard as wood, but I was alive, and I could feel the venom of the scorpion loa succumbing to the mighty medicine of antibiotics. Staph aureus, or golden staph, derives its distinctive color from carotene, and when the bugs had been flushed from my system, I succumbed to an epic lust for raw carrots that could be satisfied only by a daily three-pound bag from the greengrocer. Depleted, I had to consume my weight in the power elixir, the golden superfood. Not even the junkies outside the window prowling the hospital grounds for used or discarded needles could intrude on my sense of having been rescued from the brink. I settled back to recuperate, imagining ocean sets, distant beaches, and health. I counted the days between episodes of Father Ted and Fist of Fun, enduring a battery of painful tests to discover if the staph infection had spread to my heart, and reading comic books my friend Jim brought me from the Forbidden Planet store he owns on Buchanan Street. It was one of a growing chain of pop culture emporia that rewrote the comic shop idea for the High Street consumer. For a few days, there was even an AIDS scare, followed by a test and then the obvious relief. My dad visited every night and told me stories from the war, his presence a calm rock. He insisted that he was trying to bore me to sleep, but it never worked that way. I could have listened to him all night. While the doctors got on with their work, I also decided to take matters into my own hands and elected to treat the living bacteria inside me as totem animals. If, I speculated, they had a physical existence and purpose, surely they could be endowed with a mythic or magical intent by a human intelligence. In the wee small hours, with the alcoholic night nurse on duty, I spoke to the germs and promised them a starring role as the baddies in my current magnum opus, The Invisibles, if they left me alone. This, I explained to them, would give them a far longer life and greater symbolic significance than any mere physical overthrow of my body could offer. I gave Staph aureus the chance to become fiction. It was a good deal, and they seemed to go for it.
As I waited nervously for test results, I wrote King Mob’s recovery into The Invisibles, spelling myself out of my own predicament by restoring the fiction suit to full health. If he could survive this and be stronger, so, naturally, would I. I’d made a magical model of the world, and by tweaking the model, I could seem to be able to effect actual changes in the real world.”
