In the first place, it was never my decision to caste off my art entirely, but merely to give it a rest while I looked for a better way to earn my living.  I had just finished typing up the manuscript for my fourth novel, and my artistic vision was giving way to post-creative depression.  I had achieved such heights of creativity that I wondered if I would ever be able to match them, much less surpass them.  My fourth novel, I felt, was a shimmering delight of transcendent beauty.  But now that it was finished, I could find no audience with which to share it.  For lengthy reasons which I won’t go into here, I had lost contact with the artistic community which had previously supported my endeavors, and I did not look forward to the work of editing and submitting this novel for publication.  How many artists have lost their voices for lack of an audience?  The gates of creativity had seemed to close, and life was bombarding me with other concerns.

The economy was in the midst of a small recession, and I--as were many others--was having trouble finding employment.  I was working a dead end job as a short order cook at a concession stand, and the future appeared to be very bleak.  Perhaps I would have managed to write my way out of this mess, but that all of my attention was taken up by the fact that I was soon to be a father.

The responsibilities of impending fatherhood weighed heavily upon me, and I could not see how I might adequately provide for my child as an undiscovered artist.  I could find only two paths out of my dilemma: either enter the work force completely and
trade my life for a weekly paycheck and benefits, or go to college and train for a career.  Even had I been so inclined, my age and work history all but barred me from any job which might provide a living wage.  College held an appeal, and I quite simply decided
that if I would go to college, then I would study science.

There is another factor that I am forgetting here.  Faced with worldwide environmental destruction and internal social degradation, I harbored grave fears (and still do) for the future of civilization and of mankind in general.  I wanted a career which
would keep me in close contact with nature so that--should this apocalypse ever transpire--I could easily slip into the woods and there wait out the storm.  This, more than anything else, is the reason I chose to study geology.  And so I set myself upon the course which I have followed for the last four years, until now when I say: no more, this is not taking me where I want to go--where I need to go and must go.

I seek to expose the hypocrisy of our capitalist, authoritarian system.  My goal is a blending of waking and dreaming, conscious and subconscious, realism and fantasy, the
commonplace and the archetypal, imbued with mythology and drawn with an intensity which will drive the reader onward of itself.  And all of this will hopefully elicit a perspective which has vanished from mankind since the rampant spread of western
ignorance--or rather a new perspective which combines ignorance and tempers it with the wisdom and spirit of our forgotten past.

This blurring of the lines of distinction produces a prose which is, in and of itself, mind altering, drawing the writer (and hopefully the reader) into different states of consciousness, where the subconscious intrudes into the live-a-day world.  And this is precisely what our culture needs; our culture long ago cut itself off from the subconscious, the spiritual, the imagination.  And to feed those cravings for the absent depths, we are given an innocuous, commercial pap which rarely strives for anything more substantial than diversion.  And yet, without the reunion of conscious and subconscious, physical and spiritual, our culture is doomed to extinction and we are doomed to continue rending the fabric which supports us on this planet.  It is only through the wedding of waking and dreaming, conscious and unconscious, physical and spiritual that ignorance (ignorance being that which threatens our existence) can be defeated.  This is the task of the artist, and this the reason why the artist is shunned by our society.  Man is an alcoholic, drunk on ignorance, blinded by denial.  And it is for artists to bring to him the cure.  And, as any member of AA knows, you cannot help anyone until she is ready to be helped.  Would we truly rather face an apocalypse of our own design, as opposed to opening ourselves to the rest of creation?
 

                                                               Neutron Star