Russell Higgs

Alan Moore: Well, I think that we need mythology. We need a bedrock of story and legend in order to live our lives coherently. I think that in the past a lot of our monotheistic religions have provided that, but that has become increasingly problematic throughout the 20th and 21st century so far. There’s a lot of luggage that comes with those beliefs, and there has been a lot to erode them. And that has left people completely disconnected from any sense of place and history. And I think our personhood: We define ourselves by our surroundings and our situations. If you are brought up in a neighborhood that resembles a rat trap, pretty soon you are going to come to the conclusion that you are probably a rat. If on the other hand you have got to the tool of psychogeography — or poetry, to give it a less trendy and more accessible name — then you can look at the ordinary world around you with the eye of a poet. Finding events which rhyme with other events, what little coincidences or connections can be drawn to these places and people. You can put them into an arrangement that says something new about them.

Wired.com: Remixing reality, so to speak.

Alan Moore: Let’s stick with Einstein and Hawking: Time and space are pretty much space-time. They’re entangled. You can’t separate time and space. I don’t think you can separate time and place. I don’t think you can separate a place from its history. I think a place is much more than the bricks and mortar that go into its construction. I think it’s more than the accidental topography of the ground it stands on. These are important factors, but surely the most important factors about any place or person is what they have been. Their helps to tell you what they mean. If you have that kind of insight into the tawdry and debased streets in which most of us spend our lives, then instead of walking down a rat trap you are walking through cataclysmic history, from your personal memories to the local legends. Then the rat trap becomes a fable, a mythological landscape. And just as living in rat trap will give you the impression you live in a rat trap, then l suspect that living in a mythological landscape might after a while give you the subliminal impression that you are at least a mythological figure. A heroic character in your own narrative. I think it would be better if we felt like that rather than victims of our environment. That would empower us, and put some genuine energy back into the streets in which we live.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/08/alan-moore/all/