Jerusalem Commands by Michael Moorcock

Jerusalem Commands by Michael Moorcock

Author:Michael Moorcock
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2013-10-10T16:00:00+00:00


NINETEEN

WHAT I EXPRESS IN SADNESS, she expresses in anger; but the pain is the same, the pain of watching people destroy themselves, destroying any hope for their children. ‘Yer carn’t save ev’rybody, Ive,’ says Mrs Cornelius. Yet I thought I had found a way. ‘They ‘ave ter make their own mistakes,’ she says. Sometimes she falls prey to that careless tolerance which is her caste’s bane but which the middle-class idealise as its greatest virtue. Their myth of the British sense of fair play is their most effective means of maintaining a status quo favouring an élite. If there was anything wrong with what they were doing, they say, the people would complain. Everyone knows the British will only complain about the weather to which their combined creative intellects have failed to make a jot of difference. And yet they are always surprised by it. They have a myth of snowy winters and hot summers, imprinted from childhood Annuals. What is more they have been conditioned so thoroughly to a Stoic conceit, wherein suffering is morally superior to pleasure, that they are now the chief guardians of their own confinement. I see this clearly. Anyone could. Observing the truth does not make me a Communist! It is easy enough to identify the disease but far harder to agree on a cure. This is what neither side will ever understand. I am not a fool. I know what it means to take an independent position in life. People do not appreciate the consequent pain and the loneliness of that position, the contempt and insulting threats one frequently endures. I do not think this is ‘amoral’, as those women say. Nor is it immoral. I am a man of profound and subtle conscience. Only a moron would disagree that it is not always possible to be sure of the best course of action. Why make politics confrontational? One cannot solve every moral dilemma in an instant. Am I the only man on earth who is naturally tolerant and unbiased? Who likes to weigh all arguments?

Why should I feel guilt because I refuse to march through the streets of Paris side by side with some semi-literate student? Does it make me a monster because I have actually seen the red flag flying over vanquished courts and parliaments and understood its immediate meaning? Why are the agents of Terror such figures of romance to the young? Bonnie and Clyde? I saw the movie. During their hey-day, ask anyone, it was no fun to step in their path.

Though lighting problems made it impossible to film just then in the tombs, our photoplay progressed fairly well during that first fortnight and the basic story was soon ‘in the can’. Sir Ranalf assured us that we should eventually receive a generator or, failing that, he would seek permission to shoot what we needed in the complexes of Karnak. The rest, he said, could be reconstructed in the studio. I still had my chief love scene to enact with Mrs Cornelius in the tomb.



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