ORA-01704: string literal too long AND PHP/PEAR

Ok all of you Oracle experts out there, I've had one heck of a day wrestling with this oracle stuff. My experience with Oracle is turning into a greek tragedy..... I'm using PHP/PEAR to execute my queries on an oracle table. I'm trying to store very long pieces of text into a CLOB field. Currently I'm getting a string too long error. I've googled to find that there are certain limits when inserting into a table. The CLOB datafield may hold 4 gigs of text, but you may only insert 4000 bytes at a time. Or at least that's how I understand it. Anyone got a work around for this? I've tried: OCIBindByName($sql,":fieldName",&$myVariable, -1); But I'm not sure I'm using it correctly with PEAR. In my code, I have my sql statement, then I do the OCIBindByName() call, then I do my insert. But, this gets me: ocibindbyname(): supplied argument is not a valid OCI8-Statement resource Which is an actual PHP/PEAR error....I think... Anyone out there have any work around suggestions? I really dont want to parse the insert statement into pieces each being less then 4000 bytes. Thanks, R