AD: Tell me about your real life involvement with the Umbanda spirit cults I know you are a part of there in Brazil .

FOR BACKGROUND INFO ON UMBANDA CLICK HERE

JS: Well, that’s sort of related to your last question in a lot of ways, I think. Because once the channels started to open up for me from studying first the Twelve Steps that led me to The Artist’s Way, and then all of a sudden it was just really on, rolling like a snowball picking up more and more momentum, ya know? And then all these crazy mysterious little things started happening more and more. One thing lead to another and they’re still happening today. Big time…

In that book she (Julia Cameron) talks a lot about synchronicity, synchronicity… And suddenly I started to really experience that firsthand in all these weird, mystical happenings taking place in my life that sort of let me know I was really on to something and it was slowly coming together, like some higher destiny unfolding as I moved forward with my recovery and my writing. The two things are pretty much inseparable to me now. Writing is my primary spiritual practice, my closest contact to God or whatever you wanna call it…

As far as the Umbanda, I don’t really know as much about it as some people think I do. A lot of my Umbanda practice is by way of a sort of intuitive blind faith, rather than any specific knowlege of the secret arts. I’ve always had a certain fascination with that kinda stuff and I’m always willing to learn as much as I can about it. But when it comes to secret sciences and specific metaphysical doctrines, I’ve always been sort of a spiritual nomad, just kinda going with the flow and following my heart and intuition wherever it leads me.

Iemanja. Goddess of the Ocean

Now I’d already lived on and off in Brazil for over 30 years by the time I ended up consciously seeking the Umbanda as a spiritual path… And being basically  Brazilian at heart, I’d always been marginally exposed to the Umbanda, Macumba, Candomblé and all that sort of voodoo stuff, mostly just because it’s just so much a part of the day to day culture here, it’s pretty hard not to have some sort of casual exposure to it… But until then I’d never really gotten into any of it, not consciously anyway, even though it was always around, like a sort of invisible network of invisible spirits you just sort of feel in the air if you’re in any way sensitive to that kinda stuff…

São Jorge slaying the dragon

to be continued

AD: I’ve heard you talking about that book for years. Is that like your literary bible or something?

JS: Ok, well I’m not gonna go into a whole infomercial about The Artist’s Way right here then (Laughs)... but I will repeat that old saying again, how when the student is ready, a teacher will appear, cuz I think it’s just so relevent to what I’m trying to convey here. For me it was that book in particular and the teachings in it, which at the end of the day are simply basic Twelve Step spiritual principals applied to the creative process. I found the help I needed when that particular teacher appeared for me. Somebody else might find it in a totally different book or teacher or course of study along their own path, cuz after all, all these different individual paths are all the same fucking path anyway, right? It’s always about finding your own special way back into that deep well of creative power that lives right there in your own heart, your own intuition, and getting free from all that ego-powered left brain stuff.

These are very powerful spiritual disciplines and meditation practices used by all sorts of great artists throughout history… Art and spirituality are the two most powerful tools for the evolution of the human spirit, I believe… Put ‘em together and then ya really got something. As a matter of fact, I don’t think you really can seperate them. At the end of the day, art and the quest for spiritual growth are one and the same thing, I think. It’s what seperates man from the so called lower species…

to be continued

AD: How have your spiritual practices helped your writing?

JS: Well, in the first place, I don’t think I’d even be able to write anything with any degree of honesty or authenticity if I didn’t have some sort of spiritual life as top priority in my work today… I don’t wanna come off all holy roller and new-agey and shit like that, but for me the spirit world is what most informs my writing and guides my hand through the whole confusing, mysterious process. It’s the basic foundation of everything I’ve been able to achieve of any value through my work, the principal that “Of myself I am nothing, it’s the father in me which doeth the works… “

It’s a direct application of the spiritual principals of the Twelve Steps as they apply to just about anything, but in my case it was about seeking relief from all sorts of neurotic shit through creative meditation practices that could give me personal access to a healing spiritual power greater than any human power. And through those practices I’ve been able to get a lot closer to finding my real purpose as an artist and a human being than ever before…

Pretty early in the game though, right after I got sober, I hit some serious bottoms with writer’s block. That’s how I sort of relate to torture, the bondage of self, being cut off from one’s higher creative purpose in life. It’s true hell… Well, it finally got so bad it really brought me to my knees before I was willing to ask for help and follow some outside direction, any direction cuz I was really just so desperate for some sort of relief from that insidious curse. There’s nothing like hitting a good solid rock bottom for provoking a spiritual awakening in a man’s life. Oh shit! God help my ass now! (laughs)…

Well one thing led to another and I was led in a certain direction where I started to find my own voice… I began to study this course on spiritual recovery of the creative self called The Artist’s Way… That book was really an important milestone for me as a writer. It was written by a fantastic woman, Julia Cameron, she was the wife of Martin Scorsese. So I got ahold of this book while I was going through that really terrible time. I was just a year or so sober and just couldn’t seem to find my way anymore and I was totally consumed with this horrible fucking case of writer’s block and it was just tearing me a new asshole every fucking day. Now I know why writers stick shotguns in their mouths and shit like that… Writer’s block is the worst, most malevolent fucking curse to the human spirit I’ve ever experienced. It’s right up there with heroin addiction. Talk about powerless… impotence. It’s like you’re locked up in a room with the most beautiful girl in the universe and you haven’t been laid in years… and suddenly your shit just goes limp as a jellyfish!! Talk about torment!! It is true hell! Like your soul has just been snatched away…

They say that when the student is ready, a teacher will appear… Well, I was ready cuz i was so thoroughly miserable and depressed with this writer’s block, just wandering around like a lost soul in this horrible limbo fog in post 9-11 New York City. Then The Artist’s Way book appeared as my teacher and it totally saved my life as an artist. Cuz I was really ready to study it hard and put all the teachings in it into practice… And I have been trying to put those teachings into practice in my work ever since…

to be continued

“A generally unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.” – George Orwell

AD: Besides Bukowski, who are some other writers you would call influences on your work?

JS: I think it would be a bit presumptuous, to say the least, for me to attempt to make any sort of objective comparison between my own work and that of other writers… That being said, I guess some of my early influences were writers like Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft, Kerouac, Celíne, Henry Miller, Bukowski, of course….  lemme think, well, Jorge Amado, Garcia Marquez, Jerzy Kozinski and so on. I read a lot of different shit, so many different books, it’s really hard to remember, but I guess it all ends up going into the computer (taps the side of his head)...

As to some of my contemporaries, I really love Lydia Lunch’s writing (The legendary punk rock Spoken Word author and performer who wrote the introduction to the first edition of NARCISA. CLICK HERE TO READ). I wish she’d get off her ass and write some more books. She’s brilliant and I’m always jonesing for more from her… I love Jerry’s writing too. (Jerry Stahl, the author of PERMANENT MIDNIGHT. Read his blurb on Narcisa here) Wish he’d write more books too. He is a true master of black humor, rivaled by only the likes of Celíne. I wish I could write as funny and ironic as him…

As far as influences though, I dunno, it’s kinda a mixed bag… I used to read a lot of biographies coming up, things like that big, thick Lenny Bruce book and so on. There was this old Charlie Parker bio I read when I was a kid, it was called Bird and it was like a bunch of interviews with people who knew him and told all sorts of wild, legendary stories about the Bird. I always really liked reading stuff like that, biographies, reading about actual people in a sort of mythological context… I guess there’s a little of that in Narcisa, even though she’s a fictional character, I really feel as though I totally know her. And maybe I do, since she really represents a big part of me… my own struggles with alcoholism and drug addiction, violence, rage, disillusion and self-destructive tendencies, family abuse, all that shit…

In the last decade or so before actually starting writing this book, I was mostly writing alot of random stuff, stream of consciousness poetry and short stories and journaling and sorta reading and studying a lot of real heavy non-fiction material. Alot of recovery oriented literature, the kinda stuff some narrow-minded idiots like to dub “Self-Help books”… and the like, studying books of a more metaphysical or spiritual nature for my own personal edification… quantum physics, the works of David Icke, especially… What else? Well, Daniel Pinchbeck (realitysandwich.com) , A Course in Miracles, and all this kinda deep, practical philosophical stuff mixed in with bits and pieces of psychology, science, history, anthropology… But at the end of the day, it’s really hard to speculate rationally exactly where and how all those vague, random influences eventually decided to invade my own work as I went along through the wierd process of midwifing this book in particular.

For me, I think it’s a completely unconscious process. I guess it always is for a writer. It’s not like you sit there and go, “ok, now I’m gonna try and write like Bukowski, now I’ll throw in a little bit of Lovecraft here or take a pinch of Miller and throw it in there” or whatever… it just kinda comes about organically as you go through the process…

I know I’m kinda drifting a bit from your original question, but I think the literature that makes that sort of a subliminal impression on a writer is bound to eventually come out in his own work one way or another as it all unfolds. But it’s still a real mysterious process, at least to me it is… I find that it’s usually other people, readers and critics and editors and friends like you who end up making those sort of observations and comparisons… Maybe because they’re so much better qualified to do so — since they’re looking at the work from a strictly objective point of perspective, something that’s probably pretty much impossible for a writer to to…

As a writer I was so completely caught up just writing this thing, living in that strange gonzo-journalistic limbo reality that just sort of takes over your soul, there’s really no conscious thoughts whatsoever about such considerations anyway… It’s kinda like a spirit medium when they’re channeling other spirits or something like that, like an out of body experience, I guess… While they’re in that sort of altered state, they really have no conscious awareness of most of the things that are going on around them while all these weird entities are coming and going, chanelling through them. Usually they don’t even have any recollection of what they said or did while they were possessed by these other beings. It’s a very strange process…

AD: How would you classify Narcisa in terms of modern literature or compare it with other books? Where does this novel stand and what shelf would you ultimately want it displayed on?

JS: That’s a tricky question for me. I guess if I was gonna try and make a quick, objective comparison with other well known works of  ‘modern literature’ I guess I’d have to put this book somewhere between Lolita, Requiem For a Dream, Clockwork Orange and, I dunno, maybe Bukowski’s The Most Beautiful Girl in Town, with maybe a touch of Henry Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichey... Maybe On The Road, with Keroac’s obsession with the whole mystique of his Dean Moriarty character and all… I dunno, maybe a bit of Jorge Amado lurking around in there somewhere… sometimes I sorta think of Narcisa as a kinda Jorge Amado girl, whatever… At least those are some of the comments and comparisons I’ve heard from other writers and people who’ve read it so far…

As to what shelf I would like to see it on in a bookstore, I guess I’d wanna see it right up front on the fucking New York Times Best Seller shelf, right? (laughs)… but seriously, it’s just garden variety fiction or modern literature, whatever ya wanna call it, so I guess that’s where it’d wind up being stacked. As long as it don’t wind up in the Bargain Bin, I’m happy (laughs)...

to be continued

AD: What lifestyle are you referring to? You mean traveling around and drinking your way across South America?

Postcard to Mom- from Mexico

JS: Well, yeh, sorta… I mean back in the day tattooing was like a real sorta underground thing, nothing like it is today where you got books and even fucking TV shows about it and the whole tattoo thing’s sort of a commonplace, recognized thing that’s in the public eye all the time, celebrities strutting around on stage flaunting all their fancy colorful tattoos and shit like that (laughs)…. It was more like a real lowlife thing then still back when I got into it, and a certain lowlife lifestyle was about the only way you ever really got exposed to it, by being a real lowlife and going out and fucking getting tattooed. Even having a tattoo back then sorta just marked you as being sort of a creepy criminal outsider. So for someone to get tattooed you had to be sort of part of this sort of outlaw segment of society.

It wasn’t like now when you got all these boutique tattoo shops on every street corner and shit. You just didn’t see it at all in polite society. And tattooers were a real secretive bunch too, kinda like criminals. Tattooers used to make a lot of cash, because there weren’t too many of them competing for business. They were kinda like drug dealers or something. It was a completely underground practice back then and those old guys were really paranoid back then too, cuz they really protected their craft from prying eyes and kept it to themselves a lot. You couldn’t just go online or open up a tattoo magazine or walk into a tattoo place and get ahold of tattoo supplies and stuff the way you do now either. They mostly had to make their own equipment. Very mysterious stuff. It was a real secretive, underground craft and somebody could really only get into it through a certain underground sort of lifestyle, by being around it, being exposed to it, ya know? These old time tattoo guys were making pretty good money for a bunch of unschooled, mostly illiterate craftsmen whose only steady customers were criminals and lowlifes and sailors.

So that’s were I first got exposed to tattooing… I was a sailor too, ya know, working on ships and hanging out in whorehouses and sleazy bars in port towns and shit like that all around Latin America for years, and l always got to see alot of tattoos and tattooing going on, people getting tattooed, cuz it was more of a commonplace thing in that particular lifestyle, so I just sorta fell into it…

JS and friend. Veracruz, Mexico 1973

Once again, I’m not gonna talk too much about all that here cuz it’s all covered in massive detail in the other book I’m working on… Don’t wanna kill the impact of that shit or nobody’s wanna read the fucking thing (laughs)…

But I guess what I’m really getting at is how it’s kinda ironic that years later, because of all the tattoo magazine gigs and so on, it was actually the fucking tattooing that wound up finally bringing me back to writing… at least at first…

It’s very weird, it’s like you run long enough and you just end up bumping into your calling right on the very road you took to try and get away from it in the first place…

to be continued