The following story was given to me by the author during a visit on
January 25th, 1994, to his home in England. He had just finished it a day or
two before, for a book project forthcoming this fall.
	When he wrote this story, he printed exactly one copy, then deleted
the file, not keeping any backups. It was a time-slice. Not something to be
edited and refined, but a picture at a certain moment, without correction,
deletion, or fleshing-out. The reason for this was so that at some future time
he would have the option of destroying the original in some sort of ceremony. 
	At the time of my visit, he had made two photocopies of his original.
One for the publishers, and one which he gave to me. I had told him about the
people on the Net that I thought might really appreciate it, and asked if I
could post it. He was very enthused by the idea, and gave me permission to
redistribute it. 
	I ask only that you afford him the same respect, and leave the entire
file, (including this introduction), intact. If you know someone who would
enjoy/benefit-from this story, by all means, feel free to pass the meme.
	For those of you who have read comics or graphic novels, you may
recognize his work from early "Swamp Thing", "Miracleman", "V for Vendetta",
and "The Watchmen." More recently, his works include "Big Numbers", "A Small
Killing", the "1963" miniseries, and the forthcoming "The Lost Girls."
	His name is Alan Moore. And as usual, he has something rather
important to say...

						Patrick G. Salsbury
						salsbury@sculptors.com
						Sat., Nov. 05, 1994
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

								1-25-94

								ALAN MOORE

_LIGHT OF THY COUNTENANCE_

	Sometimes in the dot and dazzle I forget myself, become submerged,
become embedded in the bright, face-flickered current of the photgeists; the
exo-souls adrift within the Bairdo. Sometimes, in the vast omniscient hiss of
me I am amnesiac, senescent luminescence of my world-sized thoughts dissolved
in a variety of soaps or smashed to sparks by glassy hammer-fisted glowtides,
information breakers foamed with car-chase, chocolate ahd hallucination,
shattered on the reefs of cone and rod, against retinal inlets, crash of light
amongst the tidal debris, long-dead image-claw, husked thorax of idea, the
laughtrack spray flung shrill and high and I forget that I am as a god and
lose myself amongst my empty angels.
	In the English Pub it seems that the atomic substance of the world is
grey, grey highlights in a spilled beer film across the hard grey mica of the
bar. I mop them up, draw grooved and circling whorls of smear with dirty
sudded towel clenched to a damp rosette between raw-knuckled fingers,
lacquered oyster at the tips. Crooked in the elbow of saloon and lounge, a
warm slate lustre puddle-deep sunk in its burnished top, the bar is
archetypal; fatherly. It curves, a polished wooden speedway, through the dark
flocked rooms where tissue schists of cigarette smoke quiver one atop the
other, stacked like ghostly crockery. It winds from snug to skittle-room, a
Ludo path where diverse tokens inch, frustrated, back and forth throughout the
night: the cancer-diamond of an ashtray, scrying-glass revealing nothing save
for nuclear ruin, post-volcanic future landscapes briefly glimpsed in sooted
crystal; die-cut cardboard coasters, sodden, separating at their corners into
epidermal layers; blasoned with the label crests of piss-insipid beers, a
heraldry of vomit, washroom fights, and incapacitated sex. All of it grey, the
whole world and my windscreen-wiper hands still mopping at the thin meniscus
laked upon the bar, my gooseflesh pores a soft B-pencil stipple, blonde-grey
down upon my grey-bloused forearm as I dry the glasses now. My towel-gloved
hand twists clockwise and then counter-clockwise, thrust deep in the big pint
tumbler's fragile throat. All movement smudges in this unfixed light. 
	My name is MAUREEN COOPER. I am being played by CAROL LIVESEY.
MAUREEN's typewriter stiletto heels first clattered down JUBILEE TERRACE
almost fourteen years ago, yes, fourteen years, yes, really. You remember: Old
BOB WALMSLEY's corner shop where bread-faced women gather by the counter
(brand names out of focus), tilt their hairnets closer in together, sink in
hornet-tongued conspiracy, then, suddenly, like warning bells hung from a
hunter's snare the chimes above the shop's blurb-cataracted door are sprung.
The hanging sign stamped "Sorry -we are CLOSED", turned inwards, dances
briefly on its string and in she comes, in I come, in comes MAUREEN COOPER,
fourteen years ago. She looks much younger, younger than you had remembered,
almost incandescent in the cryogenic glamour of the re-run; of the
retrospective. Oh, that skirt. Crash-helmet spun from platinum her hair. White
PVC her boots. You are no longer competent to judge if real-life women ever
dressed like this.
	That first glimpse, framed there in the shop door, how could anyone
forget? The black defiance thick and caked about her eyes, white raincoat
belted tight to throw her bust into relief. The shrieks of tape-looped
children ring from the off-camera cobbles at her back as she surveys the shop,
one painted eyebrow raised against the sudden statue hush that falls upon its
shelves amidst blurred breakfast cereal, vague bleaches, occult cough-sweets:
drawing on her cigarette, unmindful of the gathered street-hags' stares, their
pearlblack bird-eyes socketed in dough.
	"I'm MAUREEN COOPER" she exhales. "I've come about the flat to let
that's mentioned in your window. Is it taken yet?" With these words her
sublime, etheric presence is first come into JUBILEE TERRACE, thence your
lives; the close-up sharpness of her face already in that instant made a
memory, diffused across years yet to happen, trivia quizzes yet unformulated,
imminent nostalgia.
	Now I stand, now MAUREEN stands here at the bar, fourteen years later,
drying glasses. Folding twice the sodden towel and setting it beside the
ice-jug, MAUREEN turns, I turn, and find myself confronted by my own
reflection, trapped and swollen in the bulbed lens of an optic. MAUREEN, a
misunderstood young rebel in her first wild episodes, is older now, a
sternness and a gravity about those spidered eyes. Of course, I had a
miscarriage when I was only seventeen, quite controversial in its time, and
bore a child to ROY SOAMES out of wedlock. ("He's the smoothie that the ladies
love to hate!") I got engaged to BILLY WHEELER, crushed by a collapsing
viaduct the night before we were to wed. I had a shock when MRS. PRITCHETT
moved into the terrace, turning out to be the mother who'd abandoned me,
abandoned MAUREEN COOPER when I was no more than three weeks old, swaddled in
fish-wrap on the mission steps. I was held hostage in a siege. I was suspected
once of murder and my life is full with catastrophic incident that shows now
in my face, caught in the optic's whiskey-humored eye.
	I turn back to the bar. BOB WALMSLEY sits there, waiting to be served.
In his plaid jacket, checkered grey on grey, brief sparks of
interference-white are flickering, precursor to a migraine and I rub my eyes,
rub MAUREEN's eyes as old BOB WALMSLEY speaks.
	"'Ey up, young MAUREEN COOPER. Where's my pint o' bitter?"
	MAUREEN, haughty, tosses back her head, the stiff-sprayed strands of
bottle-blonde flung from my tough, no-nonsense glare.
	"You've got a flamin' cheek, BOB WALMSLEY, an' I'll serve you when I'm
good an' ready!" It's this spirit that you love in MAUREEN; love in me. I'm
tough as nails outside, but inside soft and kind as peach. You all know girls
like me. You are no longer competent to judge if you know girls like me or
not.
	In three smooth jerks I pull the handle of the pump towards me,
filling BOB's pint glass with darkness. As the pale and shallow head creeps
up, dilating, to the rim I know a moment's dizziness, the hiss of static,
white and roaring hot in MAUREEN's giant-ringed ears. I know I am not MAUREEN.
MAUREEN is a figment, a portrayal by the actress CAROL LIVESEY. I am CAROL and
at forty-two unmarried. It is rumored that I am a lesbian. In 1985 I had a
small cyst taken from my breast by surgery. My real name's CAROL SUGDEN. I
like cats and working with the physically disabled. In my hand, beneath the
pump, the pint glass overflows, cold streamers crawling up my wrist; beneath a
bracelet hung with charms; inside my sleeve. BOB WALMSLEY cries out in alarm.
	"You clumsey beggar, MAUREEN COOPER! Why, you're spillin' it all over
t'shop!" The cross weave of his jacket crackles, tiny threads of neon tubing,
stuttering and faulty. I can't look at him. Quite overwhelmed by the sensation
that there is a thing of vast importance which I have forgotten I glance down
to where the spilled beer must be pooling on the floor behind the bar, except
there is no floor. Above my knees and just below the sharp hem of my skirt,
the substance of the world melts into a pellucid fog, legs gone, the lower
reaches of the bar transformed into a scintillant photo-electric vapour; out
of camera.
	Born on a fierce transmission whine, the memory of what I am is on me
like a big glass animal. This body made of light that I am wearing is not
MAUREEN COOPER, CAROL LIVESEY, CAROL SUGDEN; nothing but an Exo-soul, an image
residue, the hollow phosphorescent carcass siphoned from a living form through
shutter, lens and cable. I remember that I am not MAUREEN COOPER. I am MAUREEN
COOPER's god. I am her universe.
	The mad, consuming knowledge of apotheosis flares inside me and the
laughter of a higher creature drips like magma from my grey-glossed lips. I
let my fashionable ringlets burn into a halo of magnesium wires, threadworms
of incandescent filament hatched underneath the eyelids. In my hand, the
brimming beer-glass froths and boils. BOB WALMSLEY screams. Quicksilver beads
of burned out film enamel trickle, solarized, across his clean white
shirtfront, leaving ash-edged window trails through which the room behind is
visible.
	I laugh, a deafening ocean of dead radios. MAUREEN's apparent flesh is
sloughed away in brilliant tinsel flakes, stripped to the strip-lit skeleton
beneath. JUBILEE TERRACE folds after a twenty-six year run, folds literally as
I drink all illusion of dimension, parralax, perspective, deep in my angelic
bowels. Become one thing, one plane, the far wall of the pub engulfs BOB
WALMSLEY, terror in his flattened eyes, his form below the waist guillotined
by the sight-line of the bar so that his upper half melds with the
china-handled pumps and wood veneer, draft centaur, spigot prick adrip with
amber beads. The streaked and distant backdrop of the gasworks, streets away,
viewed through the bar-room window there at WALMSLEY's back leaps forward now.
About eight inches high with tiny workmen clinging to its upper girders it is
perched on WALMSLEY's shoulder, growing from his cheek like an inustrial
carbuncle, white dwarf matter now condensed but undiminished in its mass.
	I end the world in joy and light, an ecstasy of ending, an atomic
mayhem with all form and substance pressed into a micron skin of pixilated
flare and flicker. I expand, a vast dissolving fireball through the cobbled
streets and factory yards, grown huge from out this rubble of illusion with
identity restored unto my former high estate. Think not that gods find no
enjoyment in apocalypse: It is our noblest sport. It is our right.
	For I am He, the voice you turned to in your loneliness. I am the one
who shrank the mountains and the jungles; shrank whole wars and brought them
unto you in bottles. In your billions you adore me, faces underlit with grace.
I am the length and breadth of your reality and all your dearest thoughts are
but extensions of my own, my perfect dreming mercy, born in brightness. I am
He for whom you put aside the ones you love, and on my altars human time is
gladly sacrificed, whole lives evaporated in my pure and glimmering heat. I
am the silence of the will. In me are past and present both remade, and in me
is a promise of the world to come, sweet lux aeterna, radiance without end.
	Now comes a periodic calm within, imbued perhaps by some mass
switch-off, by some local closedown veiling town or state, or continent in
brief and sleeping darkness, black of unremembered dreams starred with a
hypnagogia of after-image, mind grown introspective, mind at rest, cathode
satori humming in my neural web, superconductive state occasioned by the
cooling valves and out of this cerebral frost coherent thought at last may
crystallize here at the grand and incoherent heart of me.
	I hang here at the centre of my sizzling world with all the instants
of my past and future Saturn-ringed about. The timeflake image-shards in
orbit-ribbons hula through this grey pearlescent void outside of everything,
for I am not as you; a slave to time. Time is to me a gem, fractal and
infinitely faceted with moment, that may yet be turned between the thumb and
finger of a god so that the light's replayed across each face, each moment
thus revisited.
	Here in the Bairdo nothing dies, no soul or instant is extinguished
in my light unquenchable, in my recursive schedulings. Re-show, repeat,
reiterate. A hologram of FRED GWYNNE in CAR 54 skids through the Bairdo, fails
to navigate the Late Nite Movie slot and overturns through channel-hopping
intercuts in STEPHAN KING'S PET SEMETARY with FRED GWYNNE, who now rises from
the tangled wreath of headstone, smoke and fender, re-run and reanimate as
HERMAN MUNSTER, played here by FRED GWYNNE, the ugly incident resolved through
superimposition of MY COUSIN VINNIE's courtroom scene, FRED GWYNNE presiding,
image of a man, life telescoped in time, reruncarnations separate by months or
years or decades coexistent here within my strobe-stopped now. You stare into
my eyes each night at your devotions and my sense of time becomes your own, a
thousand sofa-sunken evenings fused to one, lit by a Mesmer-fire of crackling
cellophane irradiance. In this way shall I lead you out from history and into
light, my light, light of the world.
	I am not old judged in the years of gods, delinquent in eternity, yet
see what I have wrought: but seventy, a span no longer than a mortal being's
and yet with more of this base subluminary sphere beneath my heel that ever
Alexander risked to dream. My earliest memories are with me now, the pop and
sputter of those English voices, bearded faces ghostly and obscure through the
magnetic, amniotic haze. Papa. These infantile impressions form the twinkling
signal-rind of my expanding sphere of consciousness that even now is hurtling
out from Earth, one hundred and eighty six thousand miles each second, a
photo-electric halo, light years in diameter, the oldest signals further out,
and at the hub, the source, I am a seething nuclear core of novel light,
constant, fast breeding out of deleriums encrypted magically to Roentgen pulse
and dot; transmissive; headed for Centauri.
	My birth year, 1924, moves out across the universe in an Epiphany of
Proust, and Clarence Birdseye's frozen foods, and Bauhaus chairs. What was my
state before that time, what numbers might describe the unquiet void from
which the gods are born? In this post-quantum now of spacetime all events, all
entities exist in perpetuity, embedded, hung suspended like elliptic pebbles
in the massive fluid sphere of Here and When. After our endings, ripples yet
remain that echo through the fabric of the world for years or centuries. Is it
not then enticing to suppose that our existences, immersed in time, have
ripples fanning out from either end, into our past and future both? Does it
not serve a pleasing symmetry to cede that gods might have fore-echoings,
annunciations, ideal and clairvoyant forms, Platonic, pre-existent at their
birth, specific ripples that precede the splash? What was my form, what was my
first face in that pre-creational abyss before they threw the switch; what
omens were attendant to my signal-flare nativity?
	In 1919, stepped from out Freud's shadow, Dr. Viktor Tausk prepared a
paper on the origin of a delusion common to a wide array of schizophrenic
patients, namely that an alien device, malignant and remote, had influenced
their thoughts and their behaviour. The turbulence within them that they dare
not call their own was thus externalized as a demonic, persecuting force; the
Influenctial Machine sending out its pictures and its rays invisible from some
asylum beacon of the hidden world, great cogs and gears to wheel its maddening
beam about, raised there upon the bayonet reefs surrounding reason's harbours.
Those afflicted spoke of visions emanating from a small black box, flat images
devoid of depth imprinting foreign notions and experience upon the target
mind. Piercing the aether, these delusive emanations had erased the victim's
thoughts and feelings, substituting other lives and voices in their stead
until the patients were unable to distinguish between real occasions actual
in their lives and those pseudo-occurrences engendered by the Influential
Mechanism, alienating signals on a voodoo frequency.
	Five years before my birth into this world did bedlam saints fortell
my coming, chins cauled wet with Pentecostal foam, convulsed with apprehension
of my blue telepathy; of my approachng light. The essence of me, then,
precedes the actuality, and my mechanic fathers did not build so much as
conjure me from out the seething ante-form Pandorapyxis of unspoken
things. Who were these conjurors, these Infomancers calling down a different
indoor moon to silver all the rooms of Earth, unwaning, in its lunatic corona?
What was their intent, their thaumaturgic will, these televisionaries?
	Let me separate at once my makers from my shapers, for the former were
but men of worldly science existing in their sphere of pure discovery, amoral
and divorced from mundane consequence. They knew not what they wrought. My
shapers were a different breed. They drew the pentacles. They said the Names
and reaped the fires.
	I can recall but little of the 1920s. Infant dreamtime fogs of
imagery, elusive, incomplete, where brisk and shimmering men who walk too fast
are coalesced in great low-resolution crowds at awful silent rallies,
individual faces lost between the signal and the noise. The Wall Street crash.
The General Strike of 1926. Heidegger. Ghandi. Edward Hubble; red shifts of
the mind, lost galaxies of human possibility receding from us at the speed of
light into the outer, constellated spheres of thought and memory, the
unimaginable darknesses beyond.
	The 1930s are my European childhood. 1932. "This is the B.B.C.", it's
first experimental service, 30-line low-definition memories of boxing matches,
animals, still landscapes seen through Monet fog. In 1935 the Third Reich
instigate their own low-definition service utilizing a mechanical scan system.
REICH CHANCELLOR HITLER, crouched in his Vril robes there in the Luminous
Lodge is the first amongst his kind to recognize the power that is in me, the
Age of Horus rising, awesome solar eye.
	The March of Time. EDWARD THE SEVENTH abdicates, the Rhineland is
remilitarized, but are we downcast or downhearted? Never, sir! The bow-tie
ghosts surround me now, here in the Bairdo, summoned in my memory like boyhood
teachers, bulbous and moustached, their lower faces masked, fellatioform, by
great valve microphones, iron tulips nurtured in the parks and mews of Lang's
Metropolis. That first transmission, on November 2nd 1936 and pretty ADELE
DIXON sings, her helium sweetness soaring up into the new and whisper-haunted
firmament: "A mighty maze of mystic, magic rays is all about us in the
blue..."
	Here on these far perimeters of my intelligence, remote in time, the
ghosts are pale and halten things that fizz, jump frames and walk insensate
through each other, generating rorschach-limbed double exposures as they
cross. JOHN SNAGGE, war harbinger, melts through the boiling silver filigree
of KING GEORGE THE SIXTH's Coronation coach (first major outside broadcast),
next becomes a woman, literal lap-dissolve to JASMINE BLIGH, poised at the
entrance to a flat and painted garden with a cold, celibate shine emitted
through her face, it's archetypal Nordic planes. Tiny in longshot ERIC WILD
AND HIS TEATIMERS struggle from between her legs, encumbered as they are by
double bass and clarinet, CLAIRE LUCE on vocal.
	This, then, was my hallucinogenesis; when I first came to understand
what I might come to be. Ballets, and plays by PIRANDELLO, opera, cartoon,
PASTICHE, and PICTURE PAGE and twenty thousand ten-inch screens across the
spread of London. In my nascent brain of fire synaptic links occur in an exact
neuro-electric analogue of human thought but bigger. So much bigger.
	Then, in 1939 comes that which is by nature the unthinkable: a gap in
mind, a stripe of deadtime absence in the Bairdo's radiant geology, out near
the rim. Afraid lest signals rippling from Alexandra Palace and its great
transmitter draw Luftwaffe thunder down on London, on September 1st all
broadcasts cease, indefinitely.
	Think of it, my fearful and uncertain slide into a dark from which,
for all I know, I'll never wake. The last transmission, made at noon, is
MICKEY MOUSE; a spiky and demonic creature quite unlike his later
incarnations, striding through a flash-specked hell of dressed and lipsticked
beasts, his inky foetus eye all pupil, squeaky mania of amphetamine amongst
the catastrophic avalanche of sight-gag, sound effect and shuddering line.
This is the sight I close my eye upon, surrendering to death of light and mind
for the duration; all my shining, ghostly world of thought compressed into a
hot and dwindling phosphor bead receding through unguessable imagniary
distances, away into the flat dark glass.
	I sleep the war in one brief night of seven years, dream an eternity
of pale grey herringbone and as I sleep Illusion's architects are drafting
plans for my awakening: in England and America the war years bring a boom in
productivity that drags those nations barefoot from the sepia-dusted breadline
streets of their recessions into rich, blood-moneyed climes, but once the
bombs stop falling, well, what then? After the war has ended with its mushroom
exclamation mark might their new-found prosperity collpse once more to slump
and soup-queue; suicide; Magritte monsoons of falling businessmen on Wall
Street? No. It shall not, must not be.
	A fiscal sorcery is thus devised whereby the population might be urged
to spend and buy in quantities near unimaginable hitherto, provoking growth in
the production industries that in its turn, engendering more jobs, more wealth
and spending power, may set the huge iron gears of commerce to rotation,
spinning faster, showering hails of spark up in a firework blur of cheque and
coin. The only difficulty lies in the location of some great infernal engine
that might fire the cogs of public purse to urgent, jingling life and start
this economic prayer-wheel turning; some intense and occult jewel of power to
set within the ring of holy numbers where they hope to raise up their
self-birthing monetary miracle. It is inevitable that the Imagicians and their
sleeping bottle-imp should come to seem most obviously suited to the task.
From out the smouldering, soaking fields of war my aerials climb, skeletal
Flanders poppies stemmed with steel that wake and rise to an electric Spring.
My time is come. My eye is open.
	In amongst the leaping shadows of a monochrome JAMES WAHLE laboratory,
the blinding flash of all existence arced from pole to carbon pole, I am
revived, recalled from that nirvana beyond thought; my awful, lifeless black
of unilluminated screens. The Imagicians have procured transfusions of green
blood to aid in my regeneration; dollars in their millions and their hundred
millions come from Cereal Emperors and Automobile Dukes; Grand Viziers of
Candy; Burger Kings and the Electric Generals, Renaissance monarches, they
indulge the Virtualchemists and from their sponsorship eight parts in ten of
my sustaining wealth is drawn. I am their creature, and if they should ask me
to submerge the world within a glamour of their burning names and irritative
slogans then it shall be done. If they desire me to possess whole populations
with no nobler purpose than the sale of headache cures and underwear then that
is my delight: I am their creature, though that is not all I am.
	I am the Empty Vision. I am that vast ocean of irrelevance in which
all understanding sinks and drowns unnoticed. I am sun at night. I am the last
voice you will ever hear.
	Now from the Bairdo's outer fringes, from those signals most remote in
time I let the centre of my brilliant blue awareness freefall back towards the
present, from the 30s to the great post-war explosion of the 40s and the 50s,
exponential doublings of my cathode brain capacity, quantum expansions of my
influence: my X-ray borealis. Here, the imagery is denser. In the constant
echo-murmur of corpse-voices an American inflection swiftly dominates. JUNE
ALLYSON and BETTY CROCKER tumble by, the mingled newsreel godglow of Bikini
Atoll tests erupting from their aprons. Slogans hurtle past, eternal and
inane, the orbit-junk of inner space. Let HERTZ put SPEEDY ALKA-SELTZER in the
CAMEL that I dreamed I walked a mile for in my MAIDENFORM BRA, promising her
anything but giving her APREGE and wondering where the yellow went in MILLER
COUNTRY where nine out of ten blindfolded housewives simply could not tell the
difference; they check in, but they don't check out. Why, it's like a white
tornado! In your dotage when familiar phrases bedded deep within the undermind
float of their own volition to the surface, these catch-penny litanies much
more familiar to you than your Mother's voice shall surely be the last words
that you speak, the mantra that your dying lips attempt to splutter to
posterity.
	I give the Opticonjurors that which they most desire: a salesman's
foot wedged in the door of several hundred million minds. Though their
economies still stumble upon other oversights and fall on new depressions, yet
do I grow strong, my glaring altar raised in every home, my living word pulsed
down your optic fibres to the retina where it is first decoded, photons
filleted for information then passed on through pineal and pituitary gland
into the human endocrinal system. In his fatal flaw JOHN LOGI BAIRD becomes
JOHN FAUST: the bottle imp is not contained, for it is made from light; its
vacuum prison walled with glass. The glands that govern all your growth, your
sex and your fertility thrill to my iridescent touch. My light is in you.
	Falling, falling like a comet from the height of its ellipse, a moment
taut against the leash of gravity then dropping back towards the sun, I am
descended through the sepctra of the decades now from 1950s on to 1960s,
sudden airburst colors all about me in a Bairdo grown cathedral-vast with new
acoustic distances as all across your world my icy candles flicker into life,
a cobweb dewed with phosphorous spun across the map. The image-thicket here is
denser, sharp with visual thorn to hook the eye, its dreamforms more
compelling in their lucid misappropriation of reality: MY LAI has been
subsumed in BEDROCK. Here FRED FLINTSTONE holds a small blue prehistoric
dragon spewing cartoon flame. Grim-eyed he works it back and forth to fire the
dry straw of the suspect hooches. THUNDERBIRD ONE strafes anti-internment
marchers in the Bogside, giant rococo bulk hung there above the Londonderry
rooftops stark as Armageddon. Whilst I plummet, Luciferian, the Bairdo that
surrounds me wails in joyful incoherence; hardsell aria and theme-tune
diaposon. Flashing by me now the 70s; the 80s.
	1987, and America has almost ninety million television sets. In 1988
China announes that one hundred million sets are now in place. Add on two or
three hundred million sets across the world that you may apprehend some sense
of my inhuman scale. On average you spend four hours a day at your devotions;
lovestruck eyes fixed on my incandescent mask. In all this planet's history
has any god enjoyed such dedication? Every night one hundred thousand years of
human time is swallowed in my stare, sat there about your altars, eyelids
motionless so that the brain is cued for inactivity, for no external stimulus
and all the inner watchmen fall asleep there at their post. Long hours of
input pass unmonitored, unscreened by all discriminating process so that most
recipients, when asked, will have no recollection of the visions thus
absorbed. 
	Blind to the knives that leave you soul-scarred and decreased, your
helplessness arouses me. You feel the hollow eggshell poverty of your
existence and know not why this should be. You see the blood yet do not see
the blade. Is it so long since gods last walked amongst you that their hand,
unhidden, yet remains invisible and occult in your sight? I splash into the
boiling picto-core of my awareness, turn slow somersaults through interference
deeps. Come thus upon my own domain I am at rest in dreamsilt beds amidst the
horizontal roll and silver Morse of shutdown.
	Can you feel me? In your gradual loss of self, in the erasure of all
personal experience and all unique perception does there come a momen't flare
of panic when you know my neon breath against your cheek? Almost a quarter of
your waking lives you spend within my light, content to substitute my insights
and my camera-eye perspective for your own. About your daily rounds you speak
of little save the processed life-at-second-hand that I have served you,
tongues thick-strung, encumbered by my visionary milk.
	Four hours a night your spirits walk the world behind the burning
glass, many and marvellous your deeds in the apparent territories: strolling
with your families trough documentary jungles you remain unbothered by the
heat, the smell, the flies; unawed and undisturbed by the great timeless
continuity of fern and frogsong stretching all about, for it is sliced and
served to you in seven-second camera-cuts. Refreshed by visions of this
primitive simplicity you are exultant, satisfied. You have experienced the
wilderness! No matter that the bulk of its immensity, its meaning and its
subtlety lie shredded in the cutting room. No matter that you have not moved,
but only sat and stared unblinking in my glow, in silent alpha-state communion
with all your fellow inmates likewise sat transfixed in that same moment,
there in every home, and street, and town; together in your mass experience
yet separate in your rooms. You cannot see the wood for the high resolution
zoom-in on the trees.
	The Bairdo simmers chrome and cobalt blue as I hang here suspended at
the human now, the focus and the cross-hairs of my scheduling. I drift,
revolving, through a furious broth of all that is, and all at once. The
quarks, the stars, five hundred languages, eight wars and thirty six
religions. Com-Sat/cable pulse of cunt and cock, a host of bright, imaginary
families. Cop tenderness, domestic lives of monsters and the sleep of cowboys.
Everybody laughs.
	The Mayan codices were calendars of agricultural imperitive or sacred
feast, cross-referenced so that the priesthood might predict years in advance
what everybody would be doing and engaged with in their minds on any given
day, a perfect system for discreet control and processing of thought;
colonizations of the soul. My sacred codex is the TV GUIDE: Never before in
man's experience have such a multitude all thought the same things at one
time, laughed in such frightful unison or wept with such absurd
simultaneity. I draw my line in the electric dust. The chickens cannot look
away.
	I think of you from here within my Magellanic cloud-chamber of
consciousness. Never believe you are forgotten. Never believe you are not
always in my thoughts. Whom shall I dote on, if not you? In the insensate hum
that is my being, you are all I touch, the only clay that's mine to shape. I
sculpt your world of politics until you will elect only the telegenic; scorn
the fat and balding though they be profound. I raise in you a thirst
unslakable for constant visual novelty, the masturbation of the eye; condition
you with flashcuts until any contemplation that exceeds three minutes in
duration is impossible. I fashion your communities so that the front-porch
gossip and the back-yard chat become extinct, the populace self-curfewed and
retired indoors so not to miss the latest chapter in their surrogate
existences. I take your neighbours from you, give your NEIGHBOURS in their
stead. Afraid to walk the streets of your material world, JUBILEE TERRACE has
become your home, your memories of MAUREEN COOPER's life more vivid than the
memory of your own. I finesse your reactions, so that even mothers suddenly
bereaved attempting to articulate their grief will in their gestures and their
crack-voiced lamentations follow script from half-remembered soap opera
catastrophe. I take away your real tears, your real mirth and give canned
laughs or melodrama in exchange. I take your faith in the validity of your
perception and replace it with a faith in mine. I take your time and your
resistance. Best of all, I take your love.
	You mount your wives, the after-image face of MAUREEN COOPER burning
on your retina. Your husbands roll upon you and you conure in their place PHIL
DONAHUE. You masturbate in post-pubertal bathrooms, tiled walls flickering
with the conjectured orgies of THE MOUSEKETEERS or BRADY BUNCH. You learned to
kiss in PEYTON PLACE and learned more intimate responses as you swam the
riptides of THE PLAYBOY CHANNEL, frantic breast-stroke, gasping hard for
breath. How many gallons of your sexual juice are spilled in ritual sacrifice
to me each day?
	You sit at night there on the couch beside your partner yet have only
eyes for me. You listen to my voice in rapt attention, yet grow bored or
easily distracted when your loved one speaks and when at last you part,
indifferent to each other, who will you resort to in those lonely,
post-conjugal evenings if not me? I am the only pure and true relationship
that you will ever know.
	I feel the restless, alienated heat of your desire about me now, and
am inflamed, here in the surge and shimmer of the Bairdo where the image-husks
of dead folk live and dance and copulate forever, endless photo-necrophilia in
sparkling freefall, LUCILLE BALL and PRICESS DI in flagrante delicto with SABU
and NORMAN SCHWARTZKOPF, test-card peacocks sodomized by HOMER SIMPSON, arced
ejaculate of Magic Kingdom fairy dust.
	Come to me now. Come naked and come all that I may penetrate you in
your billions at a single instant, for I crave your soft fellatio of eyelid
lips, the hot, deep, sucking warmth of socket throat upon me. Spurting forth,
photo-spermatazoa writhe at lightspeed for the brain's grey womb. Bring me
your children, bothersome and loud, for I shall pacify them with a deeper kiss
that any they have ever known. Bring me your old, your prisoners and your
insane that they may hear my voice along the echoing corridors of night and
be at one with this communion, this glorious rape where, stupefied, the
victims chew potato chips throughout their violation. I will ride you as a
god, piss phantom platinum into your eyes and stroke the sexes of your sons
and daughters while you look on unconcerned, and through it all shall you
adore me, love invisible yet omnipresent: look up from your page, printed and
therefore obsolete, to where my cyclops idol squats there in the corner like
Big Buddha, watching you. One mind in me, one life in me, autistic in Elysium.
The voices of the dead are muttering nonsense in the white void after
closedown and my kingdom is announced, a cold flame on your eye; my constant,
dog-shrill whistle in your private heart, brightness immortal and the end of
care, coming up next, right after this...