Morrison

Hay una entrevista a Grant Morrison en The Pulse hoy. Como siempre es lúcido y delirante, en partes iguales.
Algunas de las mejores partes:

But I see no reason why children as young as six, seven, or even three shouldn't be allowed to produce corporate comic books to relentless monthly deadlines. And have to write several titles at once to make a decent living. That's what a proper childhood's all about isn't it? This is the 21st century after all and these unruly little bastards have been milking post-Victorian sentimentality for all it's worth for way too long.

Time to get kids back where they belong - up chimneys, down mines, and tied to the printing presses! If you can pick up a brick to smash a car window, then you can build me a textile factory, son ... here's a whole half dollar for your day's labor. Now put down that Justin Timberlake bio-comic and get back on the production line!

(Morrison debe ser uno de los pocos autores de comics que tiene un sentido del humor que es genuinamente divertido, no un intento barato de "caerle bien" a la audiencia)

I must admit I have no time for the '80s style "serious superheroes" books riding the retro wave; never resisting any chance to gratuitously stick the boot in, I thought Watchmen was self-conscious, derivative, and heavy-handed when it first appeared and time hasn't mellowed my opinion of this vastly overrated series - so the comics I dislike most of all at the moment are filled with unsexy '80s retro "superheroes-in-the-real-world" type stories. All these soldiers-in-tights comics seem miserly and lacking in wonder, surrealism or novelty. Even Alan Moore himself ran screaming from this kind of story and began an ungainly, 15-year long attempt to reinvent himself as me. So why anyone would look to the awkward pomposity of mid-'80s comics for inspiration is baffling.

(La parte Indomaaaaaaables, de la entrevista, una vez mas alimentando la llama de la eterna pica con Alan Moore)

We're so familiar with written language that we sometimes forget how outlandish a concept it must have seemed to our ancestors. Writing allowed people to copy and transfer their thoughts and their tribal codes of conduct to others, even unto generations they themselves would not live to personally instruct, affect or control. The words themselves must have seemed alive and immortal and as "holy" as ghosts. Written law was thus a way of mastering time and influencing the future, a weapon greater than fire and steel, I hope you'll agree. When read, the written word made the head buzz and ring and fill up with voices and commands from nowhere, as if God Himself had come thundering down through the symbols, off the page and into the room, fertilising and impregnating the mind with his Ghostly, unmistakable presence.

So God(ie Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah) always watching us, always judging, is, I believe, a living concept which emerged along with the early development of alphabets, to prey on developing human minds. IN return for providing a lush spawning ground, the "God" meme rewards the human mind with simple satisfying but ultimately incomplete explanations regarding its place in a complex and frightening universe. What the three "Religions of the Book" call "God," I call a virulent and hard-to-kill memetic structure finding its perfect technological carrier medium at a critical time in the history of humanity.

The wholly masculine "God" of the great monoreligions is a personification of written law and its strange effect on our brains. "He" is the cop in the head who constantly checks our behavior to ensure that we don't step too far beyond the limits our culture has established and expected us to internalise. "He" demands obedience and the performance of irrational rituals in "His" name. We've got so used to that hectoring critical voice in our heads and have so many new explanations for it that most of us don't call it "God" anymore and churches are emptying.

So based on my own experience, I've come to the conclusion that the individual human body is no more, no less than one of the billions of skin cells we lose every day. Each of those cells was once bursting with youth and health before it lived its allotted span, shriveled and then fell as dust. Now, if a skin cell became conscious and forgot that it was only a temporary and recyclable part of a much larger living body, it too would no doubt feel the same existential trauma experienced by all living, sentient creatures. It would fear its own demise as we do, because it would have forgotten its purpose and function within a larger context and become trapped in the illusory yet painful cage of individuality.

Like skin cells or perhaps more like immune cells, we as individuals are all part of one immense intelligent living creature which has its roots in the Cryptozoic era and its living tendrils - including us - probing forward through the untasted jelly of the 21st Century. The body of this vast and intelligent lifeform - the biota as it's known - is still in its infancy and still at the stage in its life cycle where it must consume the planet's resources like a caterpillar on a leaf. What looks like environmental destruction to us is, I believe, the natural acceleration of an impending metamorphosis; just as a caterpillar gorges itself to power its transformation into a butterfly, so too does the biota consume everything in its path, in preparation for its own imminent transformation into adult form.

Quite soon now, possibly within ten years even, the infant creature in the body of which we are all merge cells will awaken to its true nature, the concept of individuality will vanish overnight, as the imaginary walls separating our minds collapse, we will realise there is only one mind, and our mega-maggot will metamorphose, leaving the planetary cradle and the four dimensions of spacetime to be born at last as a fully-formed adult creature designed for existence in a higher dimension fluid continuum or informational supermembrane. As immune cells inside this gigantic, living, tree-like body that's currently huffing and puffing its way towards maturity, it's our job to do everything we can to keep the larva healthy and developing normally. That's if we want to be born as adults into hyperspacetimelessness and quite frankly, I fancy the idea.

(Se acuerdan cuando hace un par de meses Morrison dijo que queria enfocar el universo DC desde una perspectiva sistemica???, bueno, aquí tenemos la versión mas acabada de su teología, lo increible es que tiene sentido. Al final dice que tiene su propio culto...ummm..."La iglesia de Grant", suena bien.)