On Spirituality (continued)
"There is a sense to me that something similar has happened in an area that is my primary area of reading interest, which is the general area of metaphysics. Which will range for the purposes of this conversation from sort of the driest German philosophical tome to the moistest Catholicism. And my sense is there is more open discussion and volumes being written about this material in the sort of sense that the mystery of religion... the veil has been lifted in a way. In some ways, and I'll go after this one moment longer if I may, may be analogous to this. You're not going to be able to turn a corner and discover a voice from a rock any longer. The details of every religious order and sub-order and practice and ritual seems to be ... to being laid out. We're finding revisionist versions of voodoo being written right now. Revisionist histories, for instance, giving us all kinds of details in something that particularly interests me right now. And I'm looking at this stuff and saying, "Boy, the mystery is gone." And now how do we put the mystery back? It seems to me now the mystery is in the personal choice. By which I mean, maybe now it becomes the rich lady's problem not to be able to buy things, but to choose the things she really wants. So maybe now the mystery becomes the mystery of personal decision. If I know all religious possibilities, let's say, that seems in some senses to be rather a reductionist place to be. It's all laid out like a deli counter, you know? But then what becomes important, significant, which one really speaks to me. Where my heart really is. And so instead of the mystery becoming finding, the mystery becomes choosing."
Burning Chrome Live
Clive Barker interviews William Gibson, 13 December 1997
"Is it not possible that our experience of the flesh - the tingle in our nerve endings, the profound feelings that sexual excitement arouses in us - should not be mostly connected with our spiritual selves? Whatever divinity made us - and I believe we were made for a great and perhaps unknowable purpose - that divinity gave us the potential for physical and sensual bliss, which, when we are moved most deeply, leads us on to profound spiritual feelings. In other words… when I am at my most physical I am reaching for the divine. "
AOL Appearance
Transcript of on-line appearance, 18 August 1997
"The world is stranger than we knew and our present intellectual structures do not allow us to comprehend readily the paradoxes which seem to underlie being. The question is: 'Is it the structure of consciousness or the structure of cultured consciousness,' if you see what I mean, 'that makes it difficult to understand these paradoxes? Is Einstein difficult for mere mortals like you and I to comprehend or, is relativity difficult because consciousness, primate consciousness, has difficulty with it or is it because we've been brought up with a certain way of looking at the world that is about serial time?' I'm fascinated by that. I feel as though the interdisciplinary concerns I've always had are about seeing where the connections lie, believing that the map we have of consciousness is like a map where the ley lines are in place but we just can't see them - like all ley lines, assuming ley lines exist - and that the connections between places of power are invisible to us.
"I think one of the things that fantastic writing does is that it joins up the places of power. It actually says to the reader: 'This thing that you remember from your childhood, this moment of epiphany you know from your childhood, is actually connected up with this piece of physics, and this piece of physics is actually connected with the theory of magic, and the theory of magic is actually connected to your ideas about sex and your ideas about sex are actually connected to your ideas about love, which, in turn, are connected to your ideas about death which are, in turn, connected with higher physics'.
"When Kaprov in the Tao of Physics wrote, "When Shiva dances she is describing the shape of the universe and now 2,500 years later science has caught up with Shiva," it was like a lightning bolt, I couldn't understand the whole book but I understood he'd made a connection for me which I really needed. I'd always been interested in physics, in theory, and I was always interested in dance, and I'd been interested in theology, and, whoa, here he was saying 'Of course, you're interested, they're all connected.' We live in such strictly decompartmentalised times, when it's all about specialisation. I mean, I've just been in a bookstore and there all the fucking books are divided up from each other. I know why that is, but I would also love a bookstore where they deliberately confused you and they made you move and browse and search from one scene to another. You know what I mean? Wouldn't that be kind of cool?
I think a book should be like a great conversation, and the great conversations are the mellow ones, the ones when you really come away thinking, 'That was amazing. I had a time there'. Very seldom are they like debates, they're not debates, they're feelings out of each other's complexities, yeah? You think stuff through and instead of coming at him or her like a speeding bullet, you let that particular idea advance in your own head and it's a very complex moment - intellectual, emotional, philosophical, many-levelled, historical. If you're having a conversation with friends it often refers to earlier conversations, earlier feelings. A Hollywood movie relates to that kind of conversation by employing a slap in the face. That's the Hollywood experience. Pow! Pick yourself up, go have a pizza.
Here we are using Jaws as a wheel to break a butterfly on when it's just a piece of popular movie-making but nevertheless my point is that in its desire to tell a story very simply and do it very well, the movie is vicious at a level I don't think it even understands it's being vicious at. It doesn't have any other way of looking at the world except in a simple dynamic, the dynamic being that the thing with the teeth, even though it's in its own environment, going about its own business, being an eating machine, which is essentially what it is, means you - us - harm, that the natural world means us harm, whereas the natural world couldn't give a fuck about us. That's what's so wonderful about it, and so natural. I care about the lies the world has told us about the natural world."
World Weaver
By John M Farrell, Hot Press, No 13951, 1995
"One side of the family was Catholic, the other was Protestant, so it cancelled itself out! I think that was good for me in the long run because, when I discovered religion, I discovered it on my own terms. I wasn't given a strict religious upbringing of any kind. I was taken to church two or three times as a child only. So when I came to the Bible, when I came to the stories within it, I came to them because I wanted to, not because they were forced upon me. And these stories are very important to me now in my fiction, because very often there are biblical, religious roots to the stories I'm telling - images of Eden, images of the Apocalypse, images of seduction, and temptation and damnation and redemption. When I discovered the poet William Blake, that was revelation to me because he was a man who was essentially self-taught, who had discovered the Christ story on his own terms. He once said about one of his great enemies, "We both read the Bible day and night, but he reads black where I read white", which is wonderful, you know, this whole idea that the religious stories in the Bible are personal, that they belong to each person who reads them.
"I would find it hard to subscribe to any of the major religions now. It's almost as if no-one needs to. God is everywhere, holiness is everywhere. It's possible to get up early in the morning and brush your teeth and be thinking about God."
Addicted To Creativity (Part 1)
By Bill Babouris, Samhain, No 70, November 1998
"I consider myself a man of faith but the conventional Christian structures of belief - which value a male and judgmental god above a more protean vision of the divine, is for me, too simple, too crude, and frankly, too suspiciously like a notion whipped up by a male priest-class obsessed with keeping itself in power. So...I critique the God of Israel at the same time as conceding His extraordinary power over our imaginations."
AOL Appearance
Transcript of on-line appearance 16 July 1996, (online at the Midian site - see links)
"It's very important to me that the spiritual content of the book finds its way into people's hearts. In practical terms, I have a very strict working routine which keeps me at my desk writing or in my studio painting seven days a week. I consider myself just about the luckiest man in the world. I get to express my deepest feelings about life, death and everything that happens in between (and indeed afterwards!) and then I'm allowed to pass the stories and images which I've created to other people."
People Online
By Laura Kay Smith, [27] July 1998
"Even though we may never know the number of the people there are in the Amazon, we were, in my belief, made stewards of the planet. We have a responsibility as sentient conscious beings to do what we can to be good gardeners. And, being good gardeners means that we let every variety of things grow as possible. And, if we fail to do that, not only are we bad gardeners, and maybe you don't have that metaphysical perspective and that's fine, but we're also probably doing ourselves, as a species, a terrible terrible damage in the long-term. If you want to look at it completely selfishly, we're screwing up the only place that we can know as home. And, I think that, despite the fact that there may have been three forms on algae on Mars, there is no certainty that there is anything out there. All we know is there's this beautiful blue place where we were made... which may be the only place we will ever have. And we screw it up, big time, daily. We screwed-up political difference. We screwed it up, and this is my biggest bug, mainly because of corporate stupidity and corporate monstrousness. The system that is much more concerned with its management structure than it is with the richness of the planet on which we live. And that, in form, is what I write. It's actually, in some sense... is always a book that I wrote. I've always had agendas. But, this time the agenda is more visible."
Interview
By Amber Black and Tim Trautmann, Review(?), 1996
"Jung called this pool of common images and ideas 'archetypes', or a collective unconscious which transcends all human cultures and unites us. I am not a strict Jungian, but I believe these 'archetypes' exist and that they exist because they meet basic human needs. As a writer, I feel that I'm constantly accessing this shared pool of images and ideas. I may not even comprehend it as I do this. It very well may be subconscious."
Pinhead And The Human Condition
By Dan Clarke, Inklings, Vol 3 No 4, Winter 1997-98
"In America they go for quick-fix answers. American culture encourages cultism; either that or the touchy - feely Shirley Maclaine approach, which I don't find very persuasive. In Britain it's just as bad: the answers are set in stone. The priest class have had the answers in the pulpit too long. British people don't see religion as religion any more, they see boring old farts in dresses.
[re. God disapproving of his work] "Good God! Why would He have put imagination there in the first place if He was going to disapprove of what it produces? I believe that the imagination is inexorably linked to the religious impulse. Wherever imagination is involved, there's something spiritual, something outside ourselves, coming into being. [re. God disapproving of his lifestyle] Who would put my sexuality into me and then disapprove? I was born that way. David and I have exchanged rings but we didn't go through with an actual marriage ceremony. I find these ceremonies a little kitsch. The marriage has not been formally blessed except by the two of us, and God.
"Tolkein once said to C.S.Lewis that Santa Claus couldn't be in Narnia because he's pagan: 'How can Santa be in a Christian heaven?' Lewis' reply was that Santa brought joy to kids: how could he not be the compatriot of Christ? I guess Tolkein wasn't having any part of the big fat man.
"This Bible [given to him by his grandmother when he was eight] has been loved and pored over to within an inch of its life…I was brought up with nothing apart from the Jesus-take-care-of-me doggerel: 'Gentle Jesus, meek and mild'. But I think that was good; I came to religion through study and need. As far as I'm concerned, the Christian Right is shot through with hypocrisy: we love our fellow man - but we still send him to jail. I saw Billy Graham on the TV the other day: 'If you come to Jesus you will live in Paradise for ever; if you don't, you will burn in Hell for ever.'
The divine means me no harm. Love is at the root of the divine, isn't it? [and if it doesn't always seem so…] I blame the men in skirts!"
Horror Stories With A Walk-On Part For Jesus
By Frances Welch, Sunday Telegraph, 13 December 1998
"Actually the older I get, the more attractive the idea of a Sunday ritual like that becomes. And I'm serious about that. I actually wish I had more belief in the Church. There's a wonderful book by John Betjeman, who did Summoned by Bells. The first poem is about Sunday morning in England, expressing a kind of passion for a very English, and very safe vision of the world. Summoned by Bells expresses the passion for getting up on a Sunday morning and being summoned by that most reassuring of sounds to go and worship. I have a little portion of my perverse soul that has found that profoundly attractive. Doug Winter and I have spoken a lot on this and it has been almost a theme of this convention, a sort of middle-age. I was talking also to Doug Bradley about it and one of the things that I think has happened as I get older, some of the images that I found kind of repulsive as a child or a young man are coming back to me with a fresh power to seduce me. Out of England, where I haven't been in two years, those images come with particular power because I haven't been there for awhile. In Los Angeles if someone were to burn leaves, which is very unusual because it just doesn't happen, if you were to smell that sort of bitter sweet smell of burning dry vegetation I am suddenly a child again in that time of autumn and I feel a sense of longing for that again. When I was a kid, Sunday morning was a very religious time. The sound of church bells on Sunday was always very reassuring. The fact that I only ever went to church a few times in my childhood, and one of them was for a baptism of which I didn't have any choice, it doesn't mean that there wasn't an incredible power with the association. I know that even the Christmas carols and the hymns that I sang as a child, when I think about the very repugnant sentiment of them, had an extraordinary power to move me. It's an association with a feeling of childhood and feelings of security. As I get older I feel them falling away from me. I feel less and less certain of the world and I think I go back to the things that I did feel certain about as a child. Curiously some of the things are things that I believe if I had actually answered the Summons of the Bells and sat and listened to the sermons, I wouldn't be sitting here rhapsodizing about it because I would be bored witless by the experience. But the fact is that I didn't answer. So the answer is; give me another five years and I probably wouldn't be here, I would be at Mass or maybe even serving it, who knows...?
"The more that I try to express, the more I feel that the essential things that I try to express are inexpressible. Which means that the deeper into my life that I get, the more I feel that the things that really move me are the word, painting and music even can only come some tiny way to express what they are trying. It's the heroic nature of failure that I find so moving and so inspiring. It's not achievement and it's not success. When you say successful and all the kind things that you say, a little part of me flips because I don't think that is true nor want to believe it's true. I've written for a character in the book that I am writing now, 'If I die a success, that's because I didn't aim high enough.' That's a recipe for self-contentment if there ever was one. It sets out that the idea that failure is the most that you can aim for because that means you've aimed just beyond the limits of your capabilities. I realized what a disastrously, self-destructive philosophy that is, and yet I couldn't help but believe the character when he spoke that to me. And I believed him! I think you push yourself a bit harder when you're reaching a little bit further than you think you can.
"I tend to believe that Jesus was running some kind of mushroom cult with masturbation as a side issue, and I'm not entirely kidding. There's a book called something like 'Jesus and the Mushroom Cult' or something like that. It claimed that Jesus was a pan-sexual, mushroom chewing shaman. I remember reading this around the time that I was really getting into Blake. Blake had said about Joshua Reynolds, who was his enemy, 'we both read the bible day and night, but he reads black where I read white.' Basically it claimed that the bible's open to an infinite number of interpretations. And I read this along with the 'mushroom cult' and began to think that maybe it might also be a legitimate interpretation. Maybe in our sentimental eyes of what the Christ figure was up to, he has been desexualized and deliriously diminished. Maybe it's kind of healthy to put back that Jesus is a sexualized or eroticized figure. When you go to Europe, particularly in Spain and Portugal, you see Christ as a very eroticized figure and very often a sadomasochistically eroticized figure. I think it's also true in some other places, South America, where Catholicism took a very lush, sexualized interpretation to the path that allowed Christ to be rendered very realistically. Very often the wounds were realistically rendered, and very beautifully. So my answer is, to take the question far more seriously than you probably thought I might, the eroticized Christ is a hugely forbidden subject in our culture, but I think a very interesting one and one worthy of serious study."
Confessions - An Artistic Escape
By Stephen Dressler, transcript of a interview by Douglas E. Winter at DragonCon, Atlanta, 29 June 1997, Lost Souls, Issue 8, July 1997
"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."
A Spiritual Retreat
By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 26 March 2007 (note - full text here)
"Barker's editor at HarperCollins, John Silbersack, believes Barker uses the horror genre to celebrate what is really good about the human spirit 'He's driven to write about what is godlike in man,' says Silbersack, 'and he dissects that problem by looking at what is satanic in man as well.'"...other comments
Lord Of Illusion
By Charles Isherwood, The Advocate, 21 February 1995
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