Alan Moore: Childhood Was Weird

Just read Alan Moore's THE BIRTH CAUL this morning, originally a spoken word performance piece subsequently published in illustrated form in the collection A DISEASE OF LANGUAGE thanks to Eddie Campbell's scratchmanship. Looks like it's available in its spoken word form here. Look forward to listening to it.

Alan Moore's semi-stream-of-consciousness, T.S. Eliot WASTELAND-style autobiographical reflection upon the immensity of having been born out of nothingness via... something (woman/mother/goddess in our case) and the painful, awkward fumbling towards individuality that follows as we come to terms with subjective existence, the death of those we love, and inevitably, someday, our own self. All pulled off with incredible prose/poetry dipping in and out of differing voices for each self-mythologized lifestage of his maturation over the course of decades. Probably an entire life's work, actually, as I'm sure Moore is still ruminating over all of this day by day.

Moore's own summary from the back of the CD case:

"The caul is the ancient English name for the residual membrane from the amniotic sac that envelops the head of some newborn babies. A traditional belief holds that if the caul is kept (usually by peeling it away onto paper) it can be used as a talisman that will protect the child from death by drowning for a lifetime.

The birth caul is a bell-flower membrane blossomed from the amnion that masks the newborn head. Its presence is occasional. Its purpose is obscure, a vestment signaling involvement in some silent and unfathomable elite; some sect of Trappist embryos that dream the Absolute beneath these wan, translucent hoods.

THE BIRTH CAUL is an evocation, both in a poetic and a ritual sense, of our first landscape and the forces that inform it. Alloying spoken human text with landscaped sound and ritual enactments, it attempts a vortex; winds an inspiral dream from the site and date of its unique performance back towards the drowned, pellucid territory of our origins.

The birth caul, gradually unfolded, is a fragile tatter, a lost map to be restored with these faint tracings, lines as thin and tentative as veins. The flaking membrane charts a monstrous and forgotten continent, each vivid splash of motherblood an archipelago. It is a crumpled and mismanaged postcard from a vanished state, its message in an antique hand not readily deciphered.

The birth caul documents a personal Atlantis, a pre-verbal dreamtime, a naive shamanic state rich with abandoned totems; unremembered dance and fire; the florid signatures of medieval demons half-apparent through the strange-attractor loops of scribbled chalk upon a playground wall. A dark without a doll."

To quote Mr. Jeff Mangum: "Can't believe how strange it is to be any thing at all."