4/7/07

Now that the entire undertaking has become possible, even, so to speak, inevitable, you are assailed by doubts and self-recriminations regarding its whole purpose and value. Since you're now used to this, the experience is not as disagreeable as it might once have been; but the doubts, or rather the arguments behind them, remain real enough. Only two, immediate ones need be touched on here: why an interview, and why an article of such great length? The answer to both is hardly defensible: because the magazine required them of you (in effect). Other, wider questions cluster round the central one of why you are according your subject this attention and making him the subject of 'free' (albeit 'bad') publicity to begin with - which leads on to a second, namely; what is being enacted here? Why this need to approach in this way people who disgust and appall you? For undoubtedly you have had it for some time. It amounts to a kind of playing with 'evil', perhaps with death, that seems in some way fundamentally dishonest - or perhaps, even worse, just dull (certainly 'narcissistic'). But connected with it somehow is a kind masochism whose nature you've never really been able to properly determine, but which manifests itself, at least in this case, as a need somehow to morally compromise yourself. This interview offers several opportunities for this: obvious, but also the more refined one of shaking someone's hand only to pull him flat on his face: a kind of passive aggressiveness, or even a schoolboy aggressiveness, that seems capable only of reflecting badly upon you, and of making the whole undertaking suspect.