The Official Clive Barker Resource - Revelations - Exclusive Interviews 17

Revelations : "Yeah, they were just four that kind of flowed and we wondered if you were in that sort of mode…"

Clive Barker : "Fantastic! Just fantastic questions, I feel like I’m not gong to do them justice. But I’ll have a quick fly at these, with the proviso that I might just want to pin them up and come back with some additional thoughts at a later point, because I really respect the sincerity and the depth of which all four questions have been approached... They’re not sort of, ‘When are you doing the next Hellraiser..?’"

Revelations : "And they actually go to the sorts of issues we’ve explored in the past about how we can use these sessions to get a little deeper and to scratch beneath the surface."

Clive Barker : "Let me say a couple of things now, and maybe we can come back to it - I almost feel that I want to do that, but let’s see how we go now…"

Robin Bernstein : "Hi Clive, how are things? I am going to become a mom to a daughter in November [2006], and I'm currently collecting bits of colourful things to decorate her room with. As a longtime fan of your work, when I initially set to this task, I of course thought of including a piece of yours. But I'm having a really hard time picking one. So my question to you is: if you were

to put one of your pieces of art in a nursery, which one would it be? (The question I really wanted to ask was, would you like to paint my daughter's nursery? but of course that's silly.) I plan on reading the Abarat books to her so of course something from them leapt to mind but I'd love to hear your thoughts..."

Clive Barker : "Congratulations to Robin! I think there’s lots of stuff from the Abarat books - you know there’s a picture of a simple red boat with a sail with stars in the first book, there’s a picture of a huge ship at the very end of the second book with a city on it. The reason I’m choosing ships is because as a kid I had a picture of a ship on the wall and it set my imagination going not just about the ship but where it was from, where it was going. I think children are blessed by time to have lots of possible destinations; it’s kind of wonderful from that point of view. There’s lots of other options: I mean, talk to Hans Rueffert and he will tell you how overwhelmed we are by people wanting the Tarrie cats, you know, I’ve signed hundreds - we bring out a different cat and that one goes just as well.
"But then there’s another place: I gave to my editor an Abarat painting, I gave her the picture towards the end of the first book of Malingo with the skull flowers in his hands? It’s a nice sort of Halloween picture because the colours are deliberately purple and orange and he’s got a big smile on his face; he’s very happy, this strange guy with these skull flowers in hand. I think there’s a lot of off-beat choices amongst the pages that would please a kid who doesn’t want something quite so sweet as is often offered up. But I would say, you know, don’t be too cautious, because I think you can be too cautious."

Clive Barker : "Exactly. I have been delighted: I mean, who is the favourite character in Abarat for everybody? Christopher Carrion. ‘How dare you kill Christopher Carrion,’ hundreds of pieces of mail assail me, ‘how dare you?’
"I would always start with Thief of Always in terms of reading to kids, I think it’s a good ‘reader’ book and the chapters are short. Abarat is tougher just because the words are longer. It’s nice to get the Thief of Always with the illustrations and I have been keeping the pressure on HarperCollins because immediately after our last two conversations I wrote a fierce letter to HarperCollins in England and said why can’t people get hold of Thief of Always and they apologised profusely but said they’re between printings and they should be back on the shelves in both the illustrated and non-illustrated editions before the end of 2006, so I’d like you to check one time to see if they are indeed available and if they aren’t I’ll write an even fiercer letter!"

John Thompson : "I've always appreciated the spiritual dimension of Clive's work, which was evident even in the Books of Blood. I wonder if he's familiar with J. Krishnamurti, a philosopher who stressed the need for self-observation and the journey within. I see parallels in many of Clive's works, especially Imajica and The Art."

Clive Barker : "To John, yes, of course I’m familiar with Krishnamurti, though I’ve never got on very well with his writing. Mainly because he hates artists! And he says very clearly one of the things we need for a perfect society is to remove all the artists. Now he’s a provocateur, obviously - and of course Plato says the same thing, if you want a safe and calm city the first thing you do is get rid of the poets, right? But, what John says, absolutely, what I did learn from Krishnamurti is this thing about the internal journey and he’s absolutely right to be saying that particularly true of Imajica and The Art, but it will turn out also to be true of Abarat in a very complex way, because the other half of Candy is a different person, so the travelling into her self is the travelling to be somebody ‘other’. Which may be the nature of all travelling, internal travelling, I don’t know, but it’s absolutely essential, I think, to the whole process of writing - I don’t know how one could write without doing some of that journey. I’ve always said, you know, the person who wrote Weaveworld no longer exists because he wrote Weaveworld, yes? The writing changes you, if you’re being honest with the piece, and with your audience and with your craft; in the process you are no longer who you were at the beginning because you’ve discharged into the words and into other people, to give to other people the narrative and the feeling - you’ve scratched the itch would be a very reductionist way to put it, but that’s what it is actually!"

Doug Wynne : "I would very much like to hear your thoughts on the connection between creativity and mysticism or spirituality. Having read a lot about methods for mind training and development of the imaginative faculties from Crowley to Sufism to Buddhist meditation, it seems to me that visionaries can to some extent be made, not born. I suspect that your prolific imagination is a talent that comes natural to you, but my question is have you enhanced or expanded your creativity by spiritual efforts of any kind, and if so what has worked for you?"

Clive Barker : "And then Doug: again goes to that point, it’s interesting, he goes to that point whether visionaries can be made or born... I think, they can be refined in the process of living: once you figure out, ‘Ah, that’s what I want to do - I want to be, in some measure, a visionary.’ And that’s certainly something that I figured out, that I wanted to do my art, I didn’t want it to be like anybody else’s, I wanted my vision, if you like Blake’s vision, to be. And if that meant I was laughed at or called pretentious or whatever else, that was a risk I was happily going to take because I was going to get a chance to journey where only I could go. I had no interest in warming over somebody else’s vision: that wasn’t illuminating - literally - to me. You know this is a business Untitled, 1995

which occupies me, it’s an obsession which occupies my every waking hour in some form or another and it needs to advance me, it needs to illuminate me otherwise why am I doing it? Some people would say, well, money and fame - well, celebrity is horrible and there are lots of other ways to make money! You know, a lot easier than writing four drafts of Scarlet Gospels..!
"I’m not so interested in the meditative part of this because I feel that my writing in a way takes me into that state. But I am interested in when you’re in that state, however you reach it - whether you reach it by the repetition of a word or whatever, every tradition has a different method - I feel that in a way, sat down at my desk, a little switch gets flicked in my head and, I can’t describe it better than that, I go into a different place. And it now happens so automatically that... it’s one of the reasons why I’m not very good at working away from my desk."

Revelations : "And do you think there’s something about the ritual? You’ve always observed a very tight ritual about what you do in the mornings, what you do at lunchtime, then back to your desk in the afternoon…"

Clive Barker : "Absolutely right, and knowing it... I came back to my desk and I saw that we were doing this at 1 o’clock and we normally do it at 11 o’clock and it completely threw me off –"

Clive Barker : "It was like umm, errr… I’m just being completely honest. I don’t look ahead, I concentrate on the work and I was having my lunch and Brandon came in with the questions and I said, well, this is for 11 o’clock, and he said 1 o’clock and I said euurggh, that’s very strange! My body responded - and then I thought OK... I don’t know, it was almost like being told in one hour you’re going to be playing the lead in Hedda Gabler!"

Vincent Frank : "What I'd like to ask Mr. Barker is, what is the extent of his religious upbringing, if anything? Based on reading his novels and short stories, I had always assumed (apparently incorrectly) that he was raised a Roman Catholic, as there is so much Roman Catholic imagery in his novels (particularly Weaveworld, Imajica, and the Books of the Art)."

Clive Barker : "To Vincent: I was not raised Roman Catholic, I was not raised in any religious tradition really, except that the Church of England was there and I was baptised in the Church of England but my religious interest is entirely self-generated. You know it comes out of actually not having those questions answered for me as a child and that sort of awareness that you have as a child or as you grow up that actually the language of those fundamental questions disappear from any discourse, in fact they’re an embarrassment almost. Now I used to think that was because they were childish; I don’t think it is at all, I just think we don’t know how to answer them and I think one of the things that our culture is going through is a reassessment of what the shamanic tradition can actually be for our culture: priests are not doing it, I personally don’t have any faith in the Catholic Church because The Vatican has made so many terrible anti-human decisions, you know, about homosexuality, certainly about birth control, those things make me mad. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still passionately interested in whatever anyone has to say about Christ, about God and in fact about any matter metaphysical and, if that person is a Roman Catholic, it doesn’t invalidate their opinion, I’ll get right into it; I love discussion about what let’s loosely call metaphysics."

We closed with some general discussion around the upcoming new series of Doctor Who (very exciting!) and the undertones of sexuality in 1950s radio shows in England (this part may very well re-surface in our "early years" project (click here for details).
An hour later the phone rang and Clive explained that he'd been sitting at his desk, distracted from Mister B. Gone by the depth of the subject matter he'd just been addressing and unable to leave the conversation where we had...

A Spiritual Retreat