Interview with author Paul Green

I had a chat with Paul Green, a playright, poet, and bluesman. A former radio broadcaster, Paul has worked with the BBC and performed at venues such as Treadwell’s Bookshop, the Southbank Centre, and the Oxford Poetry Festival. Paul was also a lecturer in media at the Royal College for the Blind from 1995-2011.

The Custodian: When did you first fall in love with the art of writing?

Paul Green: When I was about seventeen I discovered the American Beats, the European surrealists and science fiction. And I  read Colin Wilson, Nietzsche and  the biography of [Aleister] Crowley – a heady mixture which I ingested without fully understanding. I was also becoming obsessed by jazz and blues, with vain hopes of being the next Charlie Parker – and I also fancied the idea of going to art school. But I came from a bookish family,  and using language was one thing – maybe the only thing – I had a flair for. In any case the discovery of all those liberating possibilities, in the context  of the early sixties  (nuclear threat, political upheaval – and the esoteric revival coming over the horizon) was a  revelation.

I think it was so explosive because I’d had  a very strict Catholic education  with the Jesuits – ironically a very effective training for some kinds of magical visualisation and ritual  – and  all those avant cultural  influences were on a collision course with my Catholic upbringing and Oxford BA English Literature education, which was based on the assumption that literature had stopped  in 1914.  Initially I wrote poetry – most of it pretty dire –  but  by the time I was 22/23  I was beginning to find my own voice in science-fiction poems like The Time Ship  and Directions to the Dead End.

As for the ‘art of writing’  – I began to engage with this  more objectively  on the Creative Writing MA  at the U of British Columbia in Vancouver – quite an unexpected place  for a Brit grad student to end up  in 1968.  This drove me to expand into short fiction  and radio plays  like my parapsychological drama The Dream Laboratory.

When I was at UBC, married with a young family, I branched out into freelance broadcasting as a survival strategy.  I was DJ Little Brother Saul – 50,000 watts of  Black Vibrations across the Nation  – but I also embarked  on a series of programmes for CBC Ideas on the occult, witchcraft, the mystical and the paranormal, which reawakened my fascination with these zones of experience.

C: Poets like Samuel-Taylor Coleridge and William Blake have described the imagination as a kind of divinity. Do you feel the same way?

P: Yes, but with qualifications, despite my respect and love for those great poets.  My cultural context is different. The imagination accesses  an intensified reality, a gnosis if you like, but that isn’t necessarily a divinity  in a dualistic way.  Or only in these sense that we are all brief divine sparklers.  As [Aleister] Crowley said, ‘ nothingness with twinkles – but what twinkles…’

C: You’re also an accomplished musician and educator. Was it always easy to merge those other sides of you with the lifestyle of being a writer?

In the 70s I was a very basic blues-punk honker and shouter. But several of my friends  were very accomplished, especially  the late Vincent Crane,  with whom I  had a long association as a performer.  I also did video projects with artist Jeremy Welsh. One of our projects – The Slow Learning actually arose out of my day job, as a supply teacher in inner-city London schools in the 1980s. Being a supply teacher is a very post-modern condition – you have no status, no authority, your authorship of yourself is fragmented, it’s an epistemological nightmare descending into the Chaosphere – a status also explored in one of the strands in my occult novel The Qliphoth.  If you can cross the Abyss of being a supply teacher, then you can be initiated  as an educator – eventually…

So there is a feedback between the imaginative life and the consensus-world  of  paying the bills. But in my experience writing  has not paid many bills.  As well as freelance radio and arts journalism I‘ve worked in various kinds of teaching – secondary, tertiary and special education, notably at Royal National College for the Blind, which renewed my interest in radio drama – and in the strange twilight zones of second hand book dealing in Hay-Wye, an experience  that may have something to do with the creation of a weird neo-pagan community  in Beneath the Pleasure Zones…

C: In your essay Confessions of a Scribe of Thoth you speak of yourself in relation to the Ancient Egyptian God Thoth. Who was Thoth and what exactly does he mean to you?

Thoth was the ancient Egyptian god of scribes, teacher of language & writing, instructor of magic and maths and astronomy and music.  He keeps the cosmic archives with his consort Maat and his librarian Seshat, and tries to  balance the tensions between the other deities  in the Egyptian pantheon.  In Graeco-Egyptian magical lore he becomes Hermes Trismegistus, the Thrice-Greatest Hermes, avatar of arts and sciences.  The objective existence of Thoth as a discrete entity is – to say the least – open to debate and multiple interpretation, but as an archetype he’s something to aspire to.  I may be a scribbler but I could become a scribe.

C: Many of your books, such as Qliphoth and Beneath the Pleasure Zones make use of extensive occult imagery and symbolism, such as the Sephiroth from the Kabbalah and the system of Thelema. Have you had any first-hand experiences with any of these traditions?

 I’m not a joiner of hierarchies by nature – maybe a reaction to  my Jesuit training – so I have never been a formal member of a group like the OTO but I’ve experimented with various Thelemic and Qabalistic techniques in the course of my writing, which I view as ultimately as a magical activity.  I’ve used automatic writing, cut-ups in the Burrovian mode, which WSB saw as a channel of synchronicity, as well as divinatory techniques and correspondences, as in Crowley’s 777, to  reveal narrative and character possibilities. Dreams are an important  source of locales and imagery. My character Lucas, the long-suffering protagonist of both The Qliphoth and Beneath the Pleasures Zones  uses  sigils and sexual ritual to seek his lovers and tunnel into the dark side of the Tree of Life.

For me the most interesting re-invention of the occult  in recent years has been the development  of Chaos Magick  in the work of Peter Carroll.  He has integrated magickal practice with modern physics, positing a continuum of existence rather than a dualistic split between ‘body’ and ‘spirit’  – each is an aspect of the other.  Belief structures are not absolute  but a kind of psychic scaffolding  from which the magician can suspend himself swinging over the Void.  I subscribed for a while to his excellent Arcanorium College site and learned much thereby. I guess most of my writing keeps spiralling back to these basic existential enigmas – in different ways.

C: The last time we met, you mentioned a creepy experience during a radio broadcast. Could you speak more about that?

In 1977 I wrote a curious play called Ritual of the Stifling Air.  It was a highly stylised condensed drama -almost a piece  of ritual audio theatre – in which a small group of neo-Nazi occultists attempt to contact the spirit of the Führer. It was based on the various myths and half-truths that have floated around for decades about esoteric Nazism.  The fact that  I was compelled to write it perhaps says something about my state of mind at the time – the mid-70s weren’t a great period for me.  It was ‘ very powerful and concentrated’ according to one critic. BBC Radio 3 hired some good actors and my friend Vincent Crane was commissioned to do the music.

I wasn’t there for the rehearsals  or recording of the dialogue at the BBC in Birmingham.  But I was told that a very powerful atmosphere had developed in the studio and that the equipment kept malfunctioning, freaking out the cast and technicians with weird and sinister noises coming through the speakers in the control room.  Now having worked in recording studios myself I know that mixing desks and microphones can do odd things – so one can take it or leave it as a paranormal happening – or good copy for the BBC publicity department.

But something analogous happened when in 1979  I interviewed the psychogeographical writer Iain Sinclair  in the crypt of St Anne’s Limehouse, an East London church with a sinister reputation.  Despite  the best efforts of the highly experienced BBC sound man and using state-of-the-art recorders we found very difficult to get a recording that wasn’t disrupted  by odd static and distortion.  Another minor enigma…

C: What’s next? Are there any projects that you’re currently working on?

P: Beneath the Pleasure Zones  came out earlier this year  and a sequel has been written which  hopefully Mandrake of Oxford will publish at some point.

I’ve also written a more commercial novel Space Virgins of the Third Reich which is currently seeking publication.  It’s quite erotic, with elements of satire and black comedy.  A naive film studies student  tries to write a dissertation about a long-forgotten 1950s sci-fi B-movie Space Virgins of the Third Reich. Her quest takes her (and her voluptuous friends) on a voyage  of dark sensuality and libidinous adventure…

I’ve completed another poetry collection – Shadow Times , following publication of The Gestaltbunker by Shearsman Books in 2012.  Some of  the texts can be found on on-line at International Times, Morphrog, Manifold Black Box, e-Ratio  and other zines. I’d like to re-stage  my play Babalon about the Thelemic rocket scientist Jack Parsons and there are other new plays – one about Crowley and witchcraft scholar Father Monty Summers – which I’d like to get out there.

There will be more Radial City short stories – hopeful enough eventually for a book.  And since I’ve moved to Hastings I seem to be doing more readings – recently  with jazz saxist Lynda Murray – as well as recordings with  electronic soundscape.  The important thing is to keeping on keeping on, as the Chicago bluesmen say…

For more about Paul, follow the link below:

Paul’s personal page