Vain is the image that should illustrate a heavenly sentiment, if the sentiment is yet unborn. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an En glish Opium Eater The All- Seeing Eye After my encounter with the bronze sculpture in Paris, whether I liked it or not, I would be forever pulled away from what I had hitherto considered to be reality. This split I would write about in my novel The Risen. Matthew is conducting his physics experiments with crystals in Cambridge, but at precisely the same moment, in Cornwall, John consumes a psychotropic drug and disappears on a shamanistic trip. During the story he may be absent on the real plane, but he continuously haunts Matthew. This experiment, which is the key event in the novel, around which the whole novel encircles in time and space to return at the end, after the triple experiments- there is also the robot in the great Giza pyramid going up the long shaft above the queen's chamber- the three simultaneous experiments a symbolic repre senta tion, on several planes, of what happened to me at that confrontation with my shaman in the Louvre. I was called, to be forever haunted, trying in what ever ways I could to understand how I had been drawn out of reality and ordinary linear time. The Risen is about the difficulties of having to permanently live out that split, that holographic vision, as I now call it. In the novel, apart from the experiments, there is also a mummified falcon which must eventually be brought back to life, back into the light, which is also a crucial theme of the novel. Eventually I received my degree in crystallography at Cambridge, though only by the skin of my teeth. My time there had been a harrowing struggle to survive the threats from those hauntings, by the talismanic images of the falcon and the beautiful daughter Meritaten. Meritaten was now clearly in charge of my unconscious. During the final four months at university I skived off- without permission, of course. I disappeared. I went AWOL, risking my degree, to spend time in much more valuable pursuits. I travelled to St. Ives in Cornwall, scene of my eventual novel, where many British paint ers had lived. I wanted to paint, not the real world, attempting most of all to paint the luminous, archaic, inner landscapes of my crystals. I was quite certain that I could never be any kind of scientist, and I was pretty sure I wasn't going to become an actor, either, after my exploits on the stage in Cambridge. I was too self- conscious ever to become an actor, although I was later to be offered a major part in a feature film in France. But I had also convinced myself that I wasn't going to become a writer. I didn't feel comfortable with words- I felt that my domain would be filled with images. I'd done a bit of writing as a journalist, in Cambridge, with some success, but I didn't think much of it. I knew its limitations. I couldn't write anything of depth, or length. Only fragments. I could never complete anything I wrote, never see it to its end, because I always knew the end beforehand. It would end with complete formal dissolution! I did, however, believe enough in my painting, and during that final year at Cambridge, 1962, after my illegal sojourn in St. Ives, I held my first exhibition. My paintings had become strange mixtures of Keith Vaughan and Francis Bacon bodies, suitably torn apart, with a few crystal landscapes thrown in. Soon after I applied for a scholarship to the Slade School of Art, and much to my surprise, I got it. I was invited to study painting at Britain's most prestigious art school. A fantastic opportunity. At which point I surrendered up my scientific career forever. Before going to the Slade I took a year off, staying on in a rented room in Cambridge, where I tried to improve my painting techniques, write my book on the El Amarna period of Ancient Egypt and come to terms with the awesome new kind of knowledge that I had been so ill- equipped by my education in science to deal with. …