highbury

Alan Moore’s "The Highbury Working": A Review






by Adam Walter







"The Highbury Working: A Beat Séance" is the third of Alan Moore's mystical performance poetry monologues to be released on CD with a supporting soundscape designed by the talented Tim Perkins--this being perhaps the most musically opulent album so far. In the first of these monologues, "The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels," Moore investigated London as a phenomenological entity, a "city of the mind." For the present work he narrows his scope, focusing his unique method on the Highbury neighborhood, north of central London.



As psycho-spiritual detective, Moore's end goal is to perform "voodoo CPR" on Highbury. He begins by creating a working profile of his subject. He probes at Highbury from every possible angle: mystical, forensic, historical, and archeological. Moore, we quickly learn, is a specialist:



"This is where we come in. Think of us as Rosicrucian heating engineers. We check for pressure in the song lines, lag etheric channels, and rewire the glamour. Cowboy occultism. Cash-in-hand feng shui. First you diagnose the area in question, read the street plans' accidental creases, and decode the orbit maps left there by coffee cups. Then go to work. Slap up a wall of ectoplasm, standard Moon-and-Serpent contract, 'tables titled while you wait,' Manifestations-R-Us. Money for old brimstone. Obviously, this was all before we'd seen the patient. Highbury wasn't at Death's door; it was halfway down Death's passage hanging up it's coat, an anecdote freeze-up."



We follow Moore's associations and are encouraged to make our own. Highbury may not be our place; it may be completely unknown to us. But this is no real obstacle. We can simply abstract the place, associate it with a setting we know, people it with the characters of our imaginations. Perhaps we picture Moore as sidekick to Harry Tuttle, the vigilante heating engineer played by Robert De Niro in the Terry Gilliam film "Brazil." Here subjective inference and free association are everything.



Moore’s Dragnet-style intro, suffused with dazzling mystical camp, sets the stage for the séance, throwing wide the doors of perception and possibility. Just the speculations, Ma'am. First, we are briefly introduced to Highbury's beginnings as a Roman summer garrison, then another functional stint as "one of London's designated pleasure hills." However, the real tour begins at the start of the modern era in the heady, energy-thick depths below the city streets: "When we excavate the place, we excavate ourselves. The inside IS the outside. These steam-flooded tunnels rising up about us--Lady, that’s my skull!"



After eons of quite dark, a harsh clamor of frantic activity violates the cyclopean stillness beneath Highbury. The world above intrudes to tunnel out a sewage system. Then subway engineers push further in, rattling the London underworld, shaping the entrails of a modern digestive system in Highbury's guts. During one of many such civic projects--the construction of Highbury Stadium--inhabitants are asked to donate foundation backfill; "One, a coal-man, gives more than intended when his horse falls in, poleaxed and buried on the spot…." Moore envisions the animal transfigured into a ghostly skeleton horse, ridden through the new subterranean pathways by Epona, the "underworld horse goddess" who was once honored by Roman troops at the Highbury garrison.



From the dark earth we rise to another element, the more fluid and unpredictable ocean of street-level humanity with its fickle, tidal nature, its ebb and flow of passion. We are in the Victorian era, where a public devotion to strict order contrasts with a secret thirst for the macabre. Here a certain barn is built on the site of a ruined priory. The barn becomes a tavern, then enters another incarnation as the Alexandra Theatre, housing a freak show and carnival. The theatre becomes home to illusionists, acrobats, mutations, and conjurors. For a brief moment, the supernatural seems to walk among the crowds unveiled; "idea space" bleeds into reality. Eventually, however, the theatre is deemed a threat and closed down.



Decades later, Highbury’s strange powers flow to a more mundane channel, and the 20th century fills the empty tide pool with pop culture. Less imagination, more adrenaline. Football players high on "courage pills" haunt the neighborhood, energized and unpredictable. Underworld figures mix with celebrities; dangerous men move freely through the smiling party crowds. All that these people can extract from Highbury, though, is a "frazzled energy," an erratic source of tragic melodrama.



We leave the human sea and move on to "an astral Highbury of the air, the element of mind, a stratosphere in which rarified intellects might dance." This dimension of Highbury is accessible only to a sensitive few. The mystic Aleister Crowley knows this place, caught here in an altered state, floating between asthma and heroin. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge also lives near the area for a time, occasionally wandering the Highbury streets in his opium daze, fighting hallucinations and blackouts. The ghost of his lost love, Sara Hutchinson, haunts him, merciless.



At this point Moore offers an interlude, commenting on what we have witnessed thus far. The actual spirit of Highbury, he declares, is not to be found in the element of Air, in "Coleridge castles made of opium smoke," nor in the Water of human passion, or the Earth of the dark, subterranean unconscious. Highbury, Moore says, must be sought in Fire. And so the final scene we visit is that of a murder-suicide. In 1967 a musician, Joe Meek, attempts to create a new sound--with a shotgun. Somehow, for Moore, this grisly episode evokes the fire lying at the sad heart of Highbury.



As Joe Meek’s life fades away--with hope only that he might be reincarnated as a piece of music--something unforeseen begins to happen. The séance is a success! It erupts in a parade of resurrection: "Freed by remembering them, Highbury’s ghosts teem from its boulevards, a multitude of voices. And everyone’s forgiven." All the frauds, freaks, sinners, madmen, criminals, and victims dance together, emancipated from confusion and shame. Above them all looms the exalted Angel Highbury. Her wings spread in a canopy of joy over the spectacle as she ascends to take her place in the sky among the constellations for eternity.