Disinformation readers should be familiar with Grant Morrison--after all, Richard Metzger has called him "the rightful heir to William Burroughs," and he may be right. Morrison, on the other hand, is a lot more fun than Uncle Bill ever was. I've been reading his comics since the age of nine, when I picked up Arkham Asylum, his tale of Batman and psychoanalysis. I've stuck with him since that early trauma: his epic work The Invisibles, which boils down a century's worth of paranoia, magic, and cultural theory, was a point of obsession during my high school years.
Morrison attended the annual Comic Convention in San Diego (where I live) this year, promoting his current work on New X-Men and Fantastic Four: 1234 for Marvel Comics. Made a bit wobbly-kneed by the close proximity of my hero, I clutched my shiny green press badge and set about trying to arrange an interview with him after a panel discussion on the X-Men which he was a participant in, wearing a black T-shirt that read "Think Punk" and bore the outline of the Apple logo pierced with two dozen nails.
After the panel, Morrison stood outside with his lovely girlfriend Kristan and politely spoke to a minor herd of characters who kept telling Morrison he was "appearing in their dreams" and other such Lone Nut-isms. I hoped that my suit and tie would set me apart, but it didn't: Morrison was just as polite to me as he was to his other fans. Amazingly, he seemed interested and agreed to an interview on the last day of the convention.
The day came, and astoundingly, Grant had actually remembered me and showed up at the time we picked. The sheer graciousness of it had me floored for a few moments, until we decided to find somewhere to sit and spent about fifteen minutes combing the convention center for a seat; eventually we found a sunny spot outside overlooking the San Diego harbor and the Coronado Bay Bridge, where Grant told me in a soft-spoken Glaswegian accent that I could interview him "until his bald head started to burn."
It turned out that it only took an hour of conversation for his head to burn and my mind to blow.
Jason Louv: You're obviously a very talented guy, you do art, you do music, and you're a very talented writer. I wonder what exactly it was about comics that attracted you to them, when it's a very unrespected medium, especially when you went into it.
Grant Morrison: Just because of the freedom, really; and of course I've always loved comics, I always did comics as a kid. In the seventies if you read comic books all the good stuff came from America and there was nothing happening in Britain. Then Warrior came out with Alan Moore's stuff. I was trying to write novels at that time; then Warrior came out and I looked at what the guy was doing, showing that a comic can actually do something else, could be something better, with a creative honesty to it, could be about anarchy and things like that. I thought, you know, I can do this, maybe I can start doing this stuff--the thing about wanting to do comics was the feeling that you could do anything. But there was no market, there's no money in it, it's just a kind of underground mode of expression, and suddenly I saw the mainstream potential in Warrior, and I got into it, I started sending stuff in. Like I said, I'd been doing comics before, and I'd also been doing a lot of sci-fi for DC Thomson which was kind of a kid's paper publisher in Scotland; they're very powerful in Scotland but I don't know if anyone knows them anywhere else. I'd just been doing apprentice work for awhile, doing this kind of weird avant-garde, sci-fi pornography stuff. I got in on the ground and learned how to write comic books and write plots. So it was really good that I came through doing mainstream comic books, and I've always thought that's the way to do it, man, you should always be coming through the underground up into the mainstream…
JL: That was your intention from the beginning, to work in the mainstream?
GM: Yeah, yeah, I wanted visibility, I don't want those ideas to be buried in small publications, and I thought that you could take them and put them out there, and it's great that the audience has finally caught up with them.
JL: I know you have several projects coming out, you're working on New X-Men right now, you've got a new Marvel Boy series coming out, The Filth and LeSexy which are very mysterious, and I wondered maybe if you can't talk about exactly what they're going to be, then maybe you can talk about the themes you're going to be addressing in them?
GM: I've kind of learned recently that's it's better to not talk about it and let the work speak for itself. In the period when I was writing The Invisibles I involved myself so deeply in the text--it was about me, the comic was about me, it impacted me so heavily, and in the letters page it was me actually responding to people who were reading it, I was creating this concrete atmosphere. But I did that, that experiment's over, so I really want to drop out. I've asked to not have my name on comics but they won't let me do it. I feel I just want to have no credit, that's not what it's about. I kind of feel like it's not important anymore. The work should speak for itself, and I like to see people's interpretations of the work, even when they're completely bizarre and wrong, they give it their own individual personality, so I'd rather see that then give someone the key or the secret or even the big hype, no. The thing's going to be fantastic, it's gonna be like nothing anyone's ever read.
JL: The Invisibles seems to me like the largest scale work anybody could attempt; I was wondering if you're going to try anything that big again?
GM: Not for awhile. Obviously other people did, during the nineties Neil Gaiman did a similar kind of thing with Sandman and obviously Garth [Ennis] did a similar kind of thing with Preacher; really huge, sprawling things which lasted six, seven years. I just don't know if the market can support it anymore. It was a strange time . . . I don't know, maybe. Right now what I want to do is just do quicker comic books, The Filth is twelve issues, a couple of one-offs, and just see what happens. It may well be that I get involved in something big and new and can go on that way. But I can't imagine ever working on that scale again.
JL: Thematically, I mean, a comic book about everything . . .
GM: I think that everything I do now is The Invisibles. And once The Invisibles became a huge thing it just exploded and now the X-Men just seems like The Invisibles to me. JL: You talked about putting out your work and letting it speak for itself and letting people interpret it back and forth in the letters column. I wonder if you see your audience as being a particular group, or if you're talking to a specific audience?
GM: I always thought I was writing for these fabulous, sexy anarchists. [Laughs] I really did, and it's been kind of disappointing seeing some of them, but the fact of the matter is that I'm putting out work for people like me. I don't have an audience that likes to slavishly follow me, or who wants to worship me or have me be their guru, and I don't, I just want people to think about these things and I just want an exchange of ideas. I'm telling people I've been there, I've been to strange, abstruse spaces of the mind, and the world, and I just want people to talk about it. I don't want to hear people telling me there's no such thing as magic because I know there is, I don't need to be told otherwise. So there are some people who know what I'm saying is true, they've had experiences, and I know that there are people who don't believe me or who think that they don't have to do the work to believe what I say, and I don't want people to just blindly believe it. I'm telling you there's magic in the world and that it actually works, and that if we all do it it'll be brilliant and we'll just see what happens.
JL: It's interesting there definitely seems to be a contingent of people, on the bulletin boards or whatever, kind of a follower contingent . . .
GM: Yeah, and it's sad because they really want the thing to be explained, and they're so angry when I don't, and these guys… you know, I've seen the boards, I've been on there a couple of times, and I just think it's kind of sad. I mean, there are people on there who get everything I'm doing, it's quite obvious to them, and those are the people that I want to talk to, those are the guys who were in the same space. And other people just don't grasp it, they think it's something else, who missed the point, and that's fine, but they shouldn't be looking to me to provide an explanation to their dilemma.
JL: The Invisibles and most of your current work is about pop culture and the culture we live in, the Spectacle, all that. It's been about a year since The Invisibles ended, and there's been a gap where we've been getting different kind of work from you, and not much of your heavy commentary. I was wondering right now, as of 2001--a momentous kind of year--where do you see the culture going?
GM: It's interesting because usually I'm thinking three years ahead. When I was doing The Invisibles, like you said, those ideas were really unusual and now they're everywhere, The Matrix popularized that kind of thing, even Gnostic ideas that were completely unheard of outside of readers of Philip K. Dick or Gnostic texts; and in 1995 I was playing with the idea of video games, understanding that this is a simulated world and that there are higher realities. So I just think it's really weird, but I knew it would happen, it was all the success of The Invisibles. Again it's the market, it's using divination by culture, you can spot cultural trends. You don't have to be tapped in to things to know exactly what's going to be big. I said to Mark Millar, go do The Authority for 1999 because that's when there's going to be another solar surge of punk energy, I told him it would be big and of course it was. People had been looking for big, fascistic, funny people who would come and sort out the problems of the world; and I did
JL: Are you sick of those ideas you were doing in The Invisibles? The Gnostic thing . . .
GM: Well, I like seeing a deeper exploration of them, but obviously those are themes that are important to me, I've been there, I've done it. I'm kind of interested in other aspects of life now. I've seen a lot of stuff in the interim, a lot of people doing Invisibles-type stuff, again missing the point, saying let's put some magic into it, let's put some action, let's put some big breasts and we've got a comic like The Invisibles. The Invisibles was really my diary, I mean that's what it was about, it's about the books I was reading, the people I was seeing, the places I was going, and me trying to earn some money from making the comic. What I want to see is people doing their own experience and their own life without trying to be clever or trying to be hip or fashionable. If you do what's in your own head it'll always be cool because no one else will have thought of it. JL: You introduced a lot of ideas during the last issue of The Invisibles--your vision of the future, with the idea of the world as an endless game and people developing multiple personalities to further participate, the whole Horus thing--I was wondering if those are ideas that you're still… some of those ideas were only introduced in the last issue, so I'm wondering if those are things you're still developing or have thought further into.
GM: Oh yeah, you know, the last issue of The Invisibles is actually written as a comic from 2012, and it's supposed to be, it's written for kids who are now about nine or so, who are actually part of the next sunspot cycle, the ones that are going to be taking us into 2012, and they'll be like hippies, or their version of whatever hippie is. That current'll be back in again, and I wrote that issue for them because they'll completely understand it, but their bigger brothers might not completely understand it. The stuff in the last issue, there's a lot of ideas that I'm pursuing through all the new work and it's really about what we can actually do to change things. Personality is at its limit, personality as in the individual self belonged to the seventeenth century, it's a thing that rational culture made. The Enlightenment developed the individual self as part of its particular agenda, and it had to because we'd just been differentiated from the mythic cultures that went before scientific enlightenment, and we needed that, but again it's all developmental stages, that's what I'm talking about in the last issue of The Invisibles, about recognizing what stage we're at. Everything comes in cycles, from a baby growing in the womb to the entire history of evolution, and I think civilizations go through the same developmental stages that a child growing up goes through. So you have adolescence times, you have mythic magic times; when you're a child you're completely absorbed in the world, you're undefined, you're a part of the world until you suddenly split off, and it's the same way with cultures; you had agriculture, where people worked, where they were part of their environment, and then suddenly what they do is they put a king up, they look to another person to give them law, and that's the opposite . . . obviously, kids do the same thing, they look up at their parents and then they question their parents, and then they become parents, and culture has to go through the same thing. And Western culture's just at the point where it has to grow up, it's the feeling of adolescence, and that's that boiling feeling, it's adolescence, that's why everything's going crazy, it's the culture's hormones rushing. We're growing up, I think it's great, and I just want to think about what it's like to be growing up, and what does growing up mean. And I think in place of the individual self, which we've been offered since the Enlightenment, I'm offering multiple selves. The individual self breaks at the edges, it causes boundaries. If you're a "self," like I said in The Invisibles, self means not-self, self implies not-self. So instantly you've got a boundary there. Something that you are not, and either you treat that as an adversary, or you want to have sex with it, but it's still the Other all the time. And what I'm talking about is instead of having the Other, why don't we just upgrade our own personalities to take on the other person? I want to know what that person feels like, I want to upgrade my personality so that know what it feels like to be that person, and let that perspective in to deal with the proper problem. Some people need to be angry, so let Mr. Angry come in, and he does the job, that's what he's there for. But he's not there for when you want to make love to someone, so then you got to recruit Mr. Lover. [laughs] And there's other ones, there's Mr. Lazy . . . And actually just letting them be their things, knowing that you can add another Mr. Somebody, knowing you can be Mr. Martial Arts or whatever, you can be Mr. Mudra if you feel like it, you can be all these things, but the whole thing is understanding that personality is not a discrete thing, and to stop thinking of it as a thing with boundaries that other people bump off of. So I think these ideas will become more defined and refined and people will become aware of them. I think multiple personality sufferers, as I said in the book, they're the purest forerunners of what we're all going to become. We'll become something like an operating system.
JL: A lot of The Invisibles, you were talking about theories of culture, of cultural progression, Terence McKenna's ideas, the sunspot cycle idea, the Thelemic Aeons; and it seems like even though The Invisibles was addressed to the idea of free will, by the end of The Invisibles you almost refute the idea of free will. You say, well, the culture, or the way the world is progressing as a mass entity, you're insignificant compared to that. It seems like the ultimate message by the end, or one of the messages, is just to sit back and watch the show.
GM: In a certain sense, but no, it's not as easy as that. What you actually have to do is participate with the show, the show demands your participation, it doesn't want you to sit back and watch, nothing will happen. So, what we're actually doing is collaborating with the universe, if you want to call it that, or the process, the huge process that is time and space. It's a collaboration, we have to dance with it. And magic is a technique for dancing, it's a long-established practice for aligning ourselves with what the universe wants. And in the end of The Invisibles, what I'm saying is--and this was my vision that I had when I was in Kathmandu in 1994, before I started the book, I'm sure you've read enough to know it--and what I saw was that the universe is a single process, it's a living entity. And it's the larval form of a higher dimensional entity that exists in what I thought was maybe the fifth dimension, something higher than our space, which incorporates space and time but is a much bigger system. And the universe is actually an entity, and we're not a mistake. It's the individual ego again, it's this thing of free will, we live in terror of having our free will taken away but there's no such thing at all. We made that concept up, to stroke our own sense of the individual ego, and really we're all just part of this process. If I die tomorrow there'll be another guy who writes stuff like The Invisibles, in the same way that William Burroughs was writing the same stuff I'm writing fifty years ago. William Burroughs is dead, I will be dead, someone else will write the same stuff, will keep telling everybody to remind themselves to do this. There's always a policeman born. You know, if I'd been born right now, I'd grow up to be a policeman because the world will need them until the time comes when he's not needed and he'll be streamed out in the same way that we streamed out Thatcher, or castle-builders. It's a horrible thing for the individual ego to suddenly see "well, maybe I'm not a big fuckin' deal, maybe I'm not Mr. Big," but in that is the freedom to just be anything you want. Don't give up, if you want to be something than why not? If I want to do that thing, then why not? Who's going to stop me? JL: What do you see as the duties of the individual then? Is the duty of the individual to then recognize that you're not an individual, and then what from that point?
GM: It is the duty of the individual to realize that we're not an individual at all, and that the space between me and you is as much a defining of me and you as the body is. If you move away from me there's still that gap between us that connects us, I mean obviously we could move anywhere in the world and it's just like two electrons meeting. And the gap between us is still a definition of the fact that we sat here once. So imagine you could work it, if you reverse that, if you come back, it's the same gap between us. So that's The Invisibles #2 cover as well, it's the Holy Grail, the thing between two people, that's the Holy Grail, that's where all the communication and interaction is. And what we should be doing is looking in the spaces, because we're so obsessed about self, in the spaces, that's where everything is, that's where all the connections are. And what I'm saying is look at the spaces, and if we're all one thing then say we’re all just antibodies inside this universe? Like again, that was The Invisibles, that was kind of the conceit in it, that what we see as gray aliens or elves or spirits, all these weird little creatures that have been appearing for mankind for our entire time on Earth are antibodies, that have been put into the universal entity to make sure that it grows properly. And what we've been seeing as evil is actually an inoculation against that feeling; we re-conceptualize it as evil and as a threat but it's an inoculation, the same way you'd shoot a kid full of Polio, to protect them from Polio. The body will experience all of those antibodies as an invasion--but then they'll learn how to defeat Polio! I think that evil and what we experience as evil is just an inoculation against darkness, so that we'll learn how to deal with it, so that when we grow up and wake up and have true selves, we'll know it. So the idea is that we think of ourselves as this huge thing and what we have to do is help the thing grow, and it's really important for us to do it because it's a loving universe and we are it. And we've all got to do it. It's not about me fighting some guy who doesn't agree with me, or blowing things up, it's all, fuck, we're all the same thing, we're all drawn on the same paper. Why are we settin' fire to the paper? [Laughs]
JL: It seems like in a lot of occult theory, though, there are two paths recognized--one is where you defeat the ego, the Right Hand Path where you destroy the ego, and the Left Hand Path where the ego is supreme, your self is supreme--do you just see yourself as being on the Right Hand Path?
GM: No, because I think that, again, that's a dualistic notion, that works really well because this universe is constructed in binary principles, it's really simple, it's all in order, it's so fuckin' simple this thing we live in. Because everything works in binary, we can conceptualize anything in our universe, we can actually break everything down into a one and a zero, and re-create it, that's how simple this universe is, which strikes me as so obviously a larval thing or a constructed thing. But beyond that duality, again like I said in the comic, imagine the Left Hand Path is over here [pointing to a spot on bench] and on the same spectrum is the Right Hand Path [pointing to a second nearby spot, forming a line], there's not a big difference, they're not two different things, it's just a spectrum. So what is over here? [Pointing to a spot nowhere near either point, laughing] What is on the other side of that? So think about that, those are just human conceits. Someone who wants to do magic to surround themselves with wealth, women, or whatever, fair enough; but if that's all he wants to do then he'll be trapped in it. If material is all that matters than he'll never really wake up to anything else. I'm always wary of people calling themselves Satanists; they'll probably live and die just like the rest of us and then they'll have to deal with it, but there's no real judgement in that. For me I'd rather just go with the universe as a thing; I mean, I've been working to accrue wealth, wealth is great because it helps me travel and do more things but there's also a higher agenda behind that. I don't see why you shouldn't accrue wealth, but I think that the black magicians are the ones who can't realize that there's more to life than that. Black magicians are like scientists, because they're stuck in this materialistic trap, and they're really afraid of death, they're always looking to prolong their lives, they're interested in immortality, they're just hopeless characters trapped in math and afraid of everything else.
JL: Which occult figures of the twentieth century do you respect? From your definition right there, that leaves most of them out.
GM: Yeah, Crowley obviously was a touting, ridiculous, bombastic, amazing figure, he just did the stuff and then wrote it down, you have to admire that. The guy was full of it, but so's everybody, why shouldn't he be? His work is so amazing. Austin Spare is interesting, and then there's the Chaos people who influenced me in the Eighties, Phil Hine and Ray Sherwin and Peter Carroll. The biggest influence on me was my Uncle Billy, who was this big black magician . . . [Laughs]
JL: You were saying that you think three years down the line. You've been giving us updates through the website, but I'm wondering what you're thinking right now, what's on the Morrison radar? What do you see three years down the line?
GM: Well I don't only want to think in terms of three years . . . obviously the next big thing that's going to happen is there's going to be a big pastoral vibe coming in. I think the guys doing Lord of the Rings, they know it's coming subconsciously, they're tapping into that current. Pop culture always picks up on these things if you watch it. If you're watching the skies you can see how the thing starts filtering through. Everywhere I look I'm seeing people starting to slide backwards, because they're afraid of the twenty-first century; instead of being into it and really gung ho, they're saying "Oh fuck, what do we do now . . ." So I think we're going to get a slight retreat but then the retreat's going to become something really cool, because the creative people are going to take the pastoral vibe and then unite it with the forward vibe, and something really interesting's going to come out of that.
JL: Kind of a return to the early Nineties rave culture, you think?
GM: It's not even that, it's going to be something completely different again. All this stuff we're getting right now, it's punk, you know, The Matrix, it's all punk coming back, it's those Horus energies, it's that kind of, you know, Linkin Park, Slipknot, it's all back as predicted. They didn't give it a name this time, the last thing they called it was punk, then they called it rave. It's weird this generation didn't name themselves, but they're there. You know, even in Glasgow, there are all these little kids in black, and I think it's great, because they're spontaneously immersing themselves, there's this huge mass of them in the city center, and more of them keep coming as they tell more kids to buy the albums they think are cool. They're all in the city center, and there's like hundreds of them, I'm meeting them in the library, and you can feel the energy, they keep building on this thing. They don't quite know what it is, and they haven't given it a name. I'm actually looking to the next kids. I think this generation got kind of fucked, I don't know what happened, where the energy went. The next bunch are really the ones who are going to carry this thing, and they're going to combine this with a kind of hippie thing, that pastoral vibe, it'll be something, you'll start to see this vibe as a low thing, you won't know who they are, they'll be really low down on the radar because utopia is a recessive cultural trait rather than a dominant one, but they'll emerge huge, full-blown into the mainstream by 2010.
JL: You definitely seem to see things in terms of cycles.
GM: It's just a model, and it works, you can apply models because they fit and they make people think. Yeah, obviously the whole thing's just a process, it's like water running down a drain, there's as much chaos in it anything. But because it's such a simple system, it's easy to see the currents. Like I said in the comic, it's like Scooby and Shaggy running down the hall, the same door keeps going by, the same thing keeps getting repeated, because it's easy to use over and over.
JL: You almost seem to see things in a 19th century way, in kind of a
GM: Well I know it can be reduced to that, and everyone can keep reducing it to that. But I know that the highest aspect of our thinking, you know, Buddhist meditation, Zen meditation, stuff like that can take you beyond duality, so those things actually collapse into unity. I know that place exists. But really I don't read Hegel or any of that, I don't know what the fuck he's talking about to be honest. I'm just talking about my own experience, and framing it into the education that I've got, the language I've got. That's how the world was presented to me, how people present the world to me. And I'm sure that there's another way of thinking beyond that, but there seems to be endless Malkuth, you know, the lowest level of the Tree of Life, everything can be reduced to binary.
JL: Do you think that that's maybe only a current trend, that people are just acting on whatever ideas were brought about in the 19th century?
GM: Oh, I'm sure we all are. We're all embedded in our times. I always talk about Aboriginal culture, because that's a culture that's been around for forty thousand years. People think they're primitive, but I don't believe that any culture that's been around for forty thousand years is primitive at all. And I spoke to somebody who's been with the Aborigines and he said this amazing thing to me which I've never forgot. He said, "You don't understand these people, they've dispensed with technology." [Laughs] He said that these are the most sophisticated people on the planet, but unfortunately they've come up against a racist government that's mastered much cruder methods and that's fucked with them. He said, "What do you think, we've gone six thousand years and made all this, what do you think they made and then dismissed?" And I was just like, "Fuck . . ." [Laughs] And they have a totally different thing, their thinking's like fifth dimensional thinking. And if you talk to an Aboriginal, he'll go "Yeah, we've been to the moon, we fly around up there, we did that ages ago." So what I mean is that they're actually working in full-scale technology, but we got more drunk! 'Cause that's how we do it, that's how our culture destroys its insight.
JL: With alcohol?
GM: Yeah.
JL: You definitely talk a lot about caffeine and nicotine cutting us off from a lot of things.
GM: Well, it cuts us off from some things and ties us into others. For a culture like ours, I can understand why we're so obsessed with speed and why there's a Starbucks on every corner, it's to get people working, to get people in a state of paranoia where they think they're losing themselves, they're losing their lives, they're losing their status. And it works for this culture, but it only works in that it cuts off certain parts of us, and we're starting to see those things. And the fact that more people are just into smoking dope… I mean, back home in Scotland they've practically decriminalized it, it's only months away from being made legal. And that, to me, is interesting. Because if we switched it to at least a dope-based culture, I don't think it's going to fix anything, but I wonder what kind of changes would we get. People would start coming to work at ten o'clock, things would become more fluid… I don't think basing a culture on any drug is a good idea. I think there's some drugs that might help people, that might loosen the tightened sphincters of the culture we find ourselves in, you know what I mean? It'd be good, you know, it's time we dropped some of the 19th century rules of labor, we don't work that way anymore, those rules aren't essential because we don't live in an industrialized age, you don't need to get up at eight in the morning to do your job anymore. And yet people are still locked into that kind of thing. JL: On that note, about the industrial 9-to-5 society, you were talking yesterday in the X-Men panel about your idea of the new Xavier school, and defeating the old idea of high school. I just got out of high school myself, a year ago . . . [Laughs]. I'm wondering what you think the future of education is?
GM: Again, I think it just applies to a different kind of world. What I'd like to see, the next thing I'd like to see is kids given votes. Let's give children a vote and then see what happens. [Laughs] Because they get no rights and because they have no rights they get preyed on by all kinds of people. And our culture fetishizes them so much because they have no rights, they're all little animals, which is the Victorian idea. I just think give the kids rights and see what happens. It's Horus, it's the next thing, we should be asking kids how they want to run their schools. We should ask them what they want to be taught, and if they want to be taught how to make bombs, then tell them how to make bombs, but then say I'll tell you why you shouldn't make bombs. That's the trade-off. And slowly but surely we might be able to teach kids real stuff. You know kids in the ghetto, you think they really want to learn math? No they don't, not unless they can learn to count their drugs. Tie it in to what the fuck they're doing and then try to ease them out of what they're doing.
JL: I know there are teachers who have been fired for relating math problems to situations like that.
GM: Yeah, and those teachers are out there, and slowly but surely . . . because the system isn't working, you know, and teachers know it isn't working, because they're under threat and under pressure every day, the kids just want to kill them, because the kids feel as if they’re in prison, and the teacher then becomes the warden. Everybody wants to be taught, everybody needs to know shit. And kids are learning machines, it's just the system that just makes such an absolute mockery of that. Especially when kids are watching TV, and they’re seeing other kids flying around, you know, "Powerpuff Girls" . . . everyone wants to learn stuff like that. They'd be sent to jail if they did.
JL: I wonder if you've read a writer--well, he's not really a writer, but a teacher--named John Taylor Gatto?
GM: Yeah. That was the inspiration for all this stuff.
JL: I was just reading him recently, and his idea that school bells destroy the attention span. I've been thinking a lot about what ADD is, what hyperactivity disorder is. We give children huge doses of caffeine from an early age, we subject them to school bells . . .
GM: We subject them to sitting in front of television families, watching the set flicker . . . you're actually not supposed to sit a kid in front of a television until he's six years old. So you don't fuck up his perceptions, you know? And you have people just sticking them there . . .
JL: What do you think of--I don't know what the situation in Europe is, but in America so many kids are on Ritalin now . . .
GM: They're paying for those addictions, as kids always seem to do.
JL: Do you think that maybe hyperactivity disorder is a good thing, that it's kids maybe perceiving information in a new way?
GM: Well I think it's that, but also I think that if you just take all the sugar out of their diet . . . but you know, maybe it's in the system, I have to trust the system, maybe it's part of getting them to think in a certain way or to speed them up, and not to switch to another mode of thinking . . . so I dunno. If it's fuckin' 'em up, then it's bad. [Laughs] Some of these kids work at superconducting brain speeds, and that's fine.
JL: A lot of your work, since maybe Kill Your Boyfriend, has been really focused on kids, and youth culture, and the idea of always finding what's new. Why that focus?
GM: Just because I'm an Aquarius, I'm a classic Aquarius, I'm obsessed with everything that's new. This is all personal crap. So you know, it all enriches me. I don't like the music I used to listen to, I prefer the new stuff coming out, that's my personality.
JL: Do you really think that things are going to change?
GM: Things are changing all the time. Of course they're going to change.
JL: But I mean, at the base level?
GM: Yeah! Things already have. Look at history, everything's changed. Once upon a time we had slavery, we had all these things. We still have problems, every stage has problems, but we keep getting rid of problems as well, and we're getting better. We're getting better all the time.
JL: It seems to me, though, that a lot of pop culture is fixated on the idea of the occult in terms of what's hidden, what product you don't have, what's coming next, what are we going to give you, what's the future. And all spiritual systems going back however many thousands of years have the basic message--you know, The Beatles had the basic message--Be Here Now. Don't think about the future, nothing's coming around the corner--I mean, it's a beautiful day, we're here, why worry about what's coming tomorrow?
GM: You don't have to worry about it. Just speculating about it is a lot of fun. [Laughs] Yeah, just imagine it, because it's fun to imagine, and if you imagine it hard enough you live in it. You know, I've done this magic and it's just a kind of force of life--you wonder why would I want to engage with the world, but you do it until you find yourself living in what was once only a fantasy. I think there's too much emphasis placed on fear of this stuff, and I was always engaged with the Situationist fear of the Spectacle. And I think it's the same as the Gnostic fear of the flesh. It's a denial, you know, it's a denial of an entire part of existence. It's also a snob thing, an intellectual snob thing. The Situationist thing gets me as saying "We're better than you" because "We're better than the Spectacle," you know "You pros live in the Spectacle," and I just see through that straight away, and some of their ideas are great, but they're snobs. And I feel the same about the Gnostics, they were flesh snobs. [Laughs] But like I said, they also had great ideas. And their ideas are good because they jolt you out of your complacency. JL: In a lot of your recent work you've been talking about moving into different worlds, putting on a suit and going into the corporate world, and I was wondering if maybe you're thinking about going in the direction of intellectual snobbery, or doing things other than comics, playing in different arenas if you will.
GM: Yeah, I just want to do everything. I've been doing a lot of music again recently, I've done tons of comics, I've been doing X-Men for the mainstream, I've done underground stuff, I'm just trying to attend to everything that I'm interested in. And I've suddenly got this huge creative pulse, so I'm doing all this stuff. But the whole idea of the suits, that's just . . . somebody's got to do it. Somebody's got to be a tramp, you know? Somebody's got to be a business man. And I've been obsessed with the corporate world--and the whole magic thing, I've been fed up with the occult, as you say, that whole aspect of it, and I just looked and I said, who's actually using magic? It's the corporations, they're doing it all the time--the NLP seminars, all that, if you listen to those management training tapes, they're fucking weird! And they’re using logos, they're using these incredibly powerful sigils to colonize imaginary space and media space. These guys are actually using magic in plain sight, and no-one knows what they're doing! They're using big-scale, world-changing magic, so I thought, well I'll get into some of that. And I've been doing rituals for two corporate entities now, and trying to do things with that, seeing how you can contact them and deal with them and what kind of bargains you can make with them . . .
JL: I see, dealing with them as an idea.
GM: Mmm-hmm. But approaching them the same way a medieval magician would approach, you know, whatever particular demon… Emulsifax or whatever. [Laughs] And make your circle, but your circle can be different, it can be whatever, like the circle could be televisions, or the Wall Street Journal, or whatever works for you. And I've had some success contacting these entities.
JL: You've said in a couple columns recently that you have a very DIY approach to magic, that you don't use banishing rituals, that you just use whatever… and I was wondering does that really work for you? Because that doesn't work for me . . .
GM: Oh no, it's good to just do what you feel like. I'm always too lazy for banishing, so I'd end up like possessed for a week! [Laughs] And that's okay, you know, you have to see it as just another part of reality, and I just kind of got used to it. But I'll tell you, man, the nineties were a very weird time for me because I was doing a lot of that stuff, just allowing myself to be completely absorbed in the thing. But there's no lasting effects, because I feel much, much better.
JL: So you think there's no value in separating out above and below, whatever you want to call it, separating the subjective from the objective?
GM: There's conceptual value, because if you're doing magic you always come up against things that are really powerful, dark, inimical forces, and sometimes those forces even seem like they're universal, because I think we do tap into dark archetypal forces. But really it's all about surrender. Give up. Stop being such a prick, stop thinking you're so great and you shouldn't be absorbed in that guy or thing, whether it seems evil or not. And these evil things are always cocky, so engage them. And if it's something like the Choronzon entity, where the rational mind disintegrates, and it's just question after question after question, then silence it. All these entities can be dealt with. I know people who've had really bad experiences, but maybe I'm just too arrogant to let any demonic thing affect me. I'd advise everyone just to be careful when you do this kind of stuff, and if you feel your mind's a little fragile, then watch for it. If you don't mind your mind going sometimes, then, you know, do it!
JL: You've been a big proponent of "just do it."
GM: Yeah. [Laughs] It's just a way of engaging with things, it's not such a big deal. The universe wants to play, so dance with it, but watch yourself.
JL: You've been interested in magic as a theme in almost all of your work, going back I don't know how long and culminating in The Invisibles. You've said you've been a magician for twenty years; what have your personal experiences with that been? How did you start out?
GM: I started by just reading a lot of books. My Uncle Billy had a fabulous library, he was really into it, and I was just always interested in it. My mum always told fortunes, and there was a kind of witchy ambiance in the family. So I always craved it, you know, I wanted the weird when I was a kid. I always read books about mysteries and flying saucers, I was obsessed with it. So I just got to the point where I'd read, you know, my uncle gave me a book by Aleister Crowley on magic and I read it and I said "Yeah right." So this guy says go and do this and so I went and did it and it actually worked. And I was twenty-one when I had this incredible, terrifying experience, and I realized it worked, and then I kept doing it, because I was pretty depressed at that age and I found it was a way of making things happen, and making things change in my head, and I got pretty proficient at it. Then I discovered the Chaos stuff which just gave me a model for action. And then I started developing the stuff on my own. Chaos cut through all the crap. I used to read stuff that told you to go cutting virgin ash wands and all that, and there's really no need for all that. There's no way I'm going to be involved in cutting up some poor tree at midnight, you know, midnight on Halloween or something… that has nothing to do with it, that's just stuff to subdue your mind, and you can subdue your mind with anything. And so I just got in to doing all my own stuff. I made my own tarot cards out of some polaroids that showed things that were meaningful to me, houses I'd lived in, or a key, stuff like that. I made all my own stuff up, and then I remembered that when I was a kid I had been in a fever and I used to hallucinate foxes all the time, so I just assumed that foxes were my totem and I asked them to do things for me. I used that in Animal Man. And so then when I started to combine it with the comics I really started to develop this system where it was all about comics. You've got the Kirby gods, and I thought instead of contacting Hermes I'll contact Metron! And whoosh, Metron appeared! It was amazing! [Laughs] And I realized, it's the magic that's real, the forms in which things appear are just the archetypal cloak that they happen to wear. I thought I'd just I'd jack it up a bit, make it more fun and personal for myself. I wasn't really frightened of Satan, because I could just conjure up Diabolus, and I would get the same guy! JL: In a lot of your recent work you've been talking about moving into different worlds, putting on a suit and going into the corporate world, and I was wondering if maybe you're thinking about going in the direction of intellectual snobbery, or doing things other than comics, playing in different arenas if you will.
GM: Yeah, I just want to do everything. I've been doing a lot of music again recently, I've done tons of comics, I've been doing X-Men for the mainstream, I've done underground stuff, I'm just trying to attend to everything that I'm interested in. And I've suddenly got this huge creative pulse, so I'm doing all this stuff. But the whole idea of the suits, that's just . . . somebody's got to do it. Somebody's got to be a tramp, you know? Somebody's got to be a business man. And I've been obsessed with the corporate world--and the whole magic thing, I've been fed up with the occult, as you say, that whole aspect of it, and I just looked and I said, who's actually using magic? It's the corporations, they're doing it all the time--the NLP seminars, all that, if you listen to those management training tapes, they're fucking weird! And they’re using logos, they're using these incredibly powerful sigils to colonize imaginary space and media space. These guys are actually using magic in plain sight, and no-one knows what they're doing! They're using big-scale, world-changing magic, so I thought, well I'll get into some of that. And I've been doing rituals for two corporate entities now, and trying to do things with that, seeing how you can contact them and deal with them and what kind of bargains you can make with them . . .
JL: I see, dealing with them as an idea.
GM: Mmm-hmm. But approaching them the same way a medieval magician would approach, you know, whatever particular demon… Emulsifax or whatever. [Laughs] And make your circle, but your circle can be different, it can be whatever, like the circle could be televisions, or the Wall Street Journal, or whatever works for you. And I've had some success contacting these entities.
JL: You've said in a couple columns recently that you have a very DIY approach to magic, that you don't use banishing rituals, that you just use whatever… and I was wondering does that really work for you? Because that doesn't work for me . . .
GM: Oh no, it's good to just do what you feel like. I'm always too lazy for banishing, so I'd end up like possessed for a week! [Laughs] And that's okay, you know, you have to see it as just another part of reality, and I just kind of got used to it. But I'll tell you, man, the nineties were a very weird time for me because I was doing a lot of that stuff, just allowing myself to be completely absorbed in the thing. But there's no lasting effects, because I feel much, much better.
JL: So you think there's no value in separating out above and below, whatever you want to call it, separating the subjective from the objective?
GM: There's conceptual value, because if you're doing magic you always come up against things that are really powerful, dark, inimical forces, and sometimes those forces even seem like they're universal, because I think we do tap into dark archetypal forces. But really it's all about surrender. Give up. Stop being such a prick, stop thinking you're so great and you shouldn't be absorbed in that guy or thing, whether it seems evil or not. And these evil things are always cocky, so engage them. And if it's something like the Choronzon entity, where the rational mind disintegrates, and it's just question after question after question, then silence it. All these entities can be dealt with. I know people who've had really bad experiences, but maybe I'm just too arrogant to let any demonic thing affect me. I'd advise everyone just to be careful when you do this kind of stuff, and if you feel your mind's a little fragile, then watch for it. If you don't mind your mind going sometimes, then, you know, do it!
JL: You've been a big proponent of "just do it."
GM: Yeah. [Laughs] It's just a way of engaging with things, it's not such a big deal. The universe wants to play, so dance with it, but watch yourself.
JL: You've been interested in magic as a theme in almost all of your work, going back I don't know how long and culminating in The Invisibles. You've said you've been a magician for twenty years; what have your personal experiences with that been? How did you start out?
GM: I started by just reading a lot of books. My Uncle Billy had a fabulous library, he was really into it, and I was just always interested in it. My mum always told fortunes, and there was a kind of witchy ambiance in the family. So I always craved it, you know, I wanted the weird when I was a kid. I always read books about mysteries and flying saucers, I was obsessed with it. So I just got to the point where I'd read, you know, my uncle gave me a book by Aleister Crowley on magic and I read it and I said "Yeah right." So this guy says go and do this and so I went and did it and it actually worked. And I was twenty-one when I had this incredible, terrifying experience, and I realized it worked, and then I kept doing it, because I was pretty depressed at that age and I found it was a way of making things happen, and making things change in my head, and I got pretty proficient at it. Then I discovered the Chaos stuff which just gave me a model for action. And then I started developing the stuff on my own. Chaos cut through all the crap. I used to read stuff that told you to go cutting virgin ash wands and all that, and there's really no need for all that. There's no way I'm going to be involved in cutting up some poor tree at midnight, you know, midnight on Halloween or something… that has nothing to do with it, that's just stuff to subdue your mind, and you can subdue your mind with anything. And so I just got in to doing all my own stuff. I made my own tarot cards out of some polaroids that showed things that were meaningful to me, houses I'd lived in, or a key, stuff like that. I made all my own stuff up, and then I remembered that when I was a kid I had been in a fever and I used to hallucinate foxes all the time, so I just assumed that foxes were my totem and I asked them to do things for me. I used that in Animal Man. And so then when I started to combine it with the comics I really started to develop this system where it was all about comics. You've got the Kirby gods, and I thought instead of contacting Hermes I'll contact Metron! And whoosh, Metron appeared! It was amazing! [Laughs] And I realized, it's the magic that's real, the forms in which things appear are just the archetypal cloak that they happen to wear. I thought I'd just I'd jack it up a bit, make it more fun and personal for myself. I wasn't really frightened of Satan, because I could just conjure up Diabolus, and I would get the same guy! JL: I've experienced a lot of things like that, but for me it's like, at least those kinds of experiences are really about just turning the glass slightly, so that you look at things a different way and you make new connections in your mind, and you're able to resolve whatever is there, in kind of a Jungian sense, right? And for me it's always been a different way of approaching psychology.
GM: But even if you just wanted to assume that's all it is, that's pretty good in itself. But I think there's more to it. You know, I've tried healing stuff, I thought if you're going to be a magician at all it's not about wanting to be scary and wearing a robe or something, what you have to do is you have to do things for people. A magician or a shaman or whatever you want to call it is someone who has been pulled out a little, shown something really bizarre, managed to hold on to enough and then thrown back in, and the point is, once you're back in what do you do? You've got to tell other people, you've got to get other people involved. So I thought you've got to do this stuff. I've tried healing magic, and I did it with my cat when it was dying of cancer, and I was taught this technique by this woman and I didn't believe it, but she said, "No, you've got to do it." And I said "I can't do it, please come and help my cat," and she said, "No, you've got to do it, the spirits that talk to me"--and I didn't believe in spirits, but she said there were spirits talking to her, so I figured I had to trust her--she said "No, they tell me that you have to do it, it's really important that you do this thing." So she taught me the technique, I went to the cat, the cat had been diagnosed with cancer all through his belly, cancer through his jaw and so on out. We had taken him up to the vet hospital . . . [Sniffles] I went home and I was really upset, so I did this whole deal of the laying on of hands, and just asked for these spirits to help, I just did what she told me to do whether I believed it or not, did the thing over a photograph of the cat, and I saw white mist coming off me, real white mist, with light coming off the palm and everything. The next day I took the cat up to the vet to get a biopsy to find out what kind of cancer he had, did it to him on the way up to the hospital. They called me that afternoon and said "What the hell's going on, this cat's got no cancer! We can't find any cancer." I taught the method to Jill Thompson [artist on The Invisibles, Sandman, and Scary Godmother] because she called me up six months later and her cat had cancer in his leg. I said, "Well try this, it worked for me!" [Laughs] Called back, the cancer was gone. I tried it with another cat and the cat died. It wasn't cancer, it was a different thing, but I knew that this cat had to die, it was just its time. I never really knew what it was, but I could definitely feel it click when it worked, I knew, I knew it was going to work. And I've done things like, a friend's guitar got stolen, and he came to me and asked if I could bring it back with magic, and I thought "No, what the hell am I supposed to do?" and then I said "Yep, no problem, I'll have it back in two days," I just said the first thing that came to my head, and then I went away and did this ritual, said, you know, "Please get this guy's guitar back," you know, I have no idea how it's going to happen. Two days later he's walking by a junk store [pawn shop] right next to the apartment he's living in, looks in the window and the guitar's there! [Laughs]
JL: Have you been involved in any organized groups?
GM: No, I've always just done it my own way. I don't have use for groups, I just do it myself. I always thought there was a danger in that kind of guru thing. Of course, Phil Hine's always worked in groups and he seems to have done well for it, but I don't have an interest in things with a lot of different hierarchy, maybe I'm a bit more solitary. I like to shut the door and have nobody see me so I can really lose control.
JL: You've definitely referenced the IOT in your early work, in your Hellblazer issues and in The Invisibles also, in the King Mob story--is that a group you were connected to?
GM: Not really, it's just because I was reading all their books then and buying everything, but I never made it to Leeds. I was kind of vaguely corresponding with those people, but that was it. I think a lot of people join those things for the glamour of being a wicked magician, which is just bullshit.
JL: Do you think that there should be more high-profile organizations? Maybe a real version of the Harry Potter school or the Charles Xavier school? [Laughs]
GM: I think it'll happen. Obviously, that will happen, as more people are taught about magic, and more scientists are going crazy trying to explain this stuff and they'll find they're not alone. This stuff works. I know because I've done it, to me it's just as simple as I've done this and I've proved to my ultimate satisfaction that we can actually make things happen and change our lives, change the actual world physically around us, take ourselves places we'd never thought we'd be using these techniques. So I feel desperate, I want to tell everyone to do it, because like I said, what if everyone starts doing it, everyone? Kids in the ghettoes; oh, even the dangerous people, what might bubble up then? We might just get some interesting stuff happening.
JL: Do you think that's--not necessarily irresponsible, but . . . this is something that's been kept under wraps for thousands of years, so do you think it's smart to let it out?
GM: I think it's forcing itself out. The current demands to be heard, and I can't not talk about it, I've seen it happen, so . . . it's not like I'm trying to prosthelytize for magic but I find myself doing it. Because when people say ridiculous blind statements about their experience, and deny it, or refuse to even attempt it--why don't they fuckin' do the experiments? This is what drives me insane, so many people keep telling me "I refuse to do this, I'm sorry, why should I do this?" I feel as if we're sitting in a dark room and I keep pointing to the light switch and saying "Why don't you just touch that, why not just turn the light on?" and they're saying "Ahhh, don't be ridiculous." [Laughs] "We'll never touch that, that's ridiculous." And it's just mad to me, I just don't get it, because it seems like, why not? Because if it does work, doesn't that mean something, and isn't that very interesting? I think it's a certain way of thinking, it's that Enlightenment thing, it's reached its limit and it's quite fearful of newness, because it's afraid that the whole structure will collapse, and if it does then civilization will go with it, but it's not, these things will join together and make something better. We'll be able to make something out of both the spirit and the material. Because we know spirit exists. Recently what I was reading which I thought was really bizarre, which shows the way this culture thinks, which you might have read, was that they've basically discovered the seat of religion in the brain, they've found the neurological component that feeds the sense of oneness with the universe . . . JL: I did read that, yeah.
GM: Right, so we've found this thing--and they're having this pathetic debate with a bunch of clerics saying "This is terrible, they will never find God" and other people saying "Yeah, God's just a neurological spasm, we've debunked everything." And in a this, why has no-one said, "OK, we've just found the God switch! Why don't we press it!" But nobody's said it, the whole argument's about "Religion's been debunked" and "Hah hah, we've debunked you" and "You'll never debunk us!" and nobody realizes the actual implications of what they've just done. What if we go round every prison and turn it on, every child molester?
JL: OK, magic--I have to ask, why bother? I mean, we can do anything already. Like I said, it's a beautiful day, why not go to the beach, live your life, why not go fall in love? Why concern yourself with the metaphor? Why sit in a room conjuring shit? Why bother with doing those things?
GM: Because it's fun! You could just as easily say why bother with falling in love? 'Cause it's nothing but trouble! Why bother with making cars? They're nothing but pollution. It's just about playing, creating, you can join in with the universe in creating, because the universe is a creative thing. And if you don't want to join in something then fuck off and go do something on your own. If you don't want to do it then don't do it. For me it just got me out of my miserable adolescence, that was my excuse.
JL: How would you define magic, though? The Chaos people and Crowley seem to define it as getting what you want, you always have to get what you want . . .
GM: You know what I think it is, it's the bleedin' obvious. That's what magic is, it's just becoming aware of the absolute obvious. And suddenly it all becomes magic, it's just like when you take acid, everything becomes significant. Magic makes everything significant. And it gives meaning to everything, it enriches everything, so I want to work with that. It's like a drug, it's better than that, it enriches the world, we can peer into the rest of our lives. Our bodies make huge armies of antibodies that never really do anything. And we don't even think about what we're doing, these huge machines that we move around in, that we operate in, and my god, that's nothing but real magic. And once you become aware of it, you pay for the Understanding, you make the Understanding applicable. Like I said, I've gone away from the occult and gotten really interested in seeing the world in new ways--like look at that tree behind you [points to the tree], that's a living thing that we barely even notice. [Laughs] And how's it engaging in its environment, and what's it's sense of me, what kind of chemical messages is it getting from the sweat that comes off our bodies, what is going on with that tree?
JL: Would you say that the ultimate message of your work, then, would it all boil down to "flick the switch"?
GM: Yeah . . . thank you for thinking of that. If you hadn't said that I never would have thought of it. [Laughs]
JL: Well, thanks for talking.
GM: No, it was great. It's always good to find someone who gets it.
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