Alan Moore Interview @ Salon

Decent, if overly fawning, Alan Moore interview.

With reference to my interest over the last 10 years in magic, one of the most useful formulas in alchemy, specifically, is solvae et coagula, where "solvae" is the act of dissolving something, where we take something apart and study how it works -- what in our modern terms would be called analysis. In a scientific framework, it would be called reductionism. The other part of the formula is "coagula," which is synthesis rather than analysis, holism rather than reductionism, the act of putting something back together in a hopefully improved form. Once you take the watch to pieces and see what was making it run slow, you put it back together and hopefully it works better.

I'd say that we've had an awful lot of "solvae" in our culture, but far too little "coagula." There are people who seem daunted by the complexity of our culture to the point that they'll shy away from it rather than try to put those thousands of jigsaw pieces together into some sort of useful, coherent picture