A detail from In the Dark Woods, 2019, from my Acid Renaissance series. I recently read, and greatly enjoyed, Alan Moore’s latest novel I Hear a New World, the second instalment in Moore’s Long London series, following on from The Great When. I’m not here to review it, but I would highly recommend it and its predecessor. I picked my copy up from my local Waterstones, unaware that this chain of bookshops are apparently the sole stockists of an Exclusive Edition with painted edges, end papers, casefoil, and—the thing that prompted this post—some exclusive content. And it was this exclusive edition that I ended up buying. Part of the exclusive content is a short essay, barely more than five pages, written by Moore in 2025 called And What Are We Supposed To Do With All These Busted Myths? but it was one of those pieces that triggered resonances and new ideas. Unfortunately the essay doesn’t appear to have been published anywhere else apart from in these five pages of the exclusive edition of I Hear a New World, but I hope Moore is planning to publish it online once the exclusive edition is sold out because I think it deserves a much wider readership. If we are to reinvest the world with meaning, I suggest we use the fragments of our old, shattered mythologies to build ourselves a new one. And a poetic examination of place, sometimes called psychogeography, is an excellent tool for unearthing those legendary splinters. Alan Moore in And What Are We Supposed To Do With All These Busted Myths? The whole piece, but particularly the lines quoted above, particularly resonated with me because they partially describe one major aspect of my Acid Renaissance series. As I wrote back in 2019: I’ve been thinking lately about woods and meadows and the edges of lakes, places of importance in my own personal mythology that feed into my artwork. So far in my Acid Renaissance series these places have only manifested at a distance, distilled into human figures as genii locorum, spirits of places, emerging from, but isolated by, the darkness. So this “poetic examination of place”, a term that I personally find much better than ‘psychogeography’, with the aim of building a new re-enchanted future, has been an intrinsic part of my artwork for at least the past seven years, and probably a lot longer than that. Moore’s genius with words obviously far outweighs my own, so having Moore write about it so eloquently has helped me better express what this tangled web of artwork that I call my Acid Renaissance series is all about. You can email me at lazarus@lazaruscorporation.co.uk with a comment or response.