All Quiet On The Western Front

April 4th, 2014

..After the buzz and spectacle of the book launch, my world has turned very quiet. I suppose it is the nature of the beast at this point; I was just talking to another recently published author who was experiencing this same lull. And yet it isn't something I had anticipated. So much of this publishing experience has been that way. The book launch was like the publisher throwing me into a pool, where I made a big splash and people noticed, and now I am under the water waiting to see if I will come up again.  But it is quiet down here. I ought to like it, and I think I do. This is my domain, the stillness that is the creative touchstone, the thing you keep going back to when you start a new piece of work. I know Stephen King plays raucous rock and roll while he works, but I suspect that it is just a circuitous route to the still centre. Most writers like to shut out the world, so they can hear nothing and then hear everything. I am giving a talk about this in Boston next month - about how the writer or any artist needs to be a good listener, how the creative process is about tapping into the still collective and not a teasing out of images from our own stock.
I really miss writing. My creative space has been too noisy for too long. But it is a self-imposed exile. I've been up front of the shop listening to the cha-ching cha-ching, worrying about numbers and abandoning what I do best, which is listening to nothing.
To compensate I am filling my head with thoughts that split open my horizons in another way. I am reading Anthony Peake's book "The Infinite Mindfield," and Bernard Haisch's book "The God Theory." I think it is very difficult for a creative person to be a no-God ("God" in the broadest understanding) materialist believing that nothing exists outside the mechanical workings of the mind-machine, that consciousness is simply an epiphenomenon of evolution.  Because the creative process is a shamanistic ritual, isn't it? You're already in no-man's land when you put paint to a canvas or ink to paper (or finger to keypad.) You've gone beyond the material and you'd have to believe in materialism to a religious degree to think of what you are about as the mere workings of mechanical parts. The creative act is already drowning out the noise of turning cogs and is instead whispering to the ghost in the machine.

                                              Robert Price

But only like this picture if the ghost is a bearded lady. We don't need any more men in the works. The ghost in the machine is definitely feminine. Right, Dan Brown?