I’m in taxi to HK airport right now about to fly home back to the UK, and just because it passed through my head as something of a brainwave, I’m going to write this down under the very annoying title What I Would Say If Interviewed About The Book I'm Supposedly Writing
I was imagining myself in an interview, being asked to explain the book. I said: “it’s a shitty Bildungsroman about quitting porn.” Then the interviewer, à la that guy Charlie Rose who interviewed all the dudes in the nineties and early 2000s, asks me another question, something about who I was writing for, or whatever. I answer something along the lines of the following:
“Well, I think at first I wanted to write for the median of myself, which is to say, that there are many versions of ‘me’ and I know they vary strongly on several things, so I wanted to write as if I would have to read to them all, as a crowd, together — not to placate or appease them, just with all of them in mind, that they might act as a chorus to echo my own words with the textures, sentiments of their respective voices and such. But you know, when I said that, I thought of how so many artists offer the advice that one must create for themselves, and for themselves only. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is good advice, but in general I think it reduces something mortally complex — what is this ‘themselves’, or ‘yourself’ or ‘myself’, that these artists speak of? None of them really seem to clarify.
"Now, I’m predisposed, for various reasons treated in the book and elsewhere, to believe that these ‘several versions’ of me are either infinite, or at least equal to the sum of every moment I’ve ever experienced across my life, including the ‘me’, right now, and — Oh, that’s me from just a moment ago that said that and now we have a new one, do you see? — and yes, it sounds a little bonkers because here is my body as physical form and there’s only one of it and it’s the only [NAME REDACTED] you’ll ever meet, but it’s just material, or at least a marker across space time, this body in its states and whatnot, versus the essence of what, of who I am. And if we are to scrutinise that, to shine a white light through the prism so to speak, we are revealed to be infinitely split, and thus it is this infinite self for whom we ought to write, or create for, when we say we are creating ‘for ourselves and ourselves only’. This of course includes every version of us there has ever been, and ever will be, including our embryonic state and us as little neonates and equally the same body at the close of its life, whatever that will be — and it is all these individual moments of existence that sit expectantly, waiting to be created for by us in the present, and truly all of them — the innocent youth and the jaded or wise or hilarious old man — are there like a host of angels, to be considered as each word is written, most of the time unconsciously, but still it’s safe to say the stakes are high — you have to try to inspire and delight them all, appeal to them all.
"And then if you are to consider these individual rays of light, or rays of whatever, consider them all brilliant across time, connected to one another with hands adjoined, you can begin to see that this dazzling array is not so dissimilar in size to that of the entire human population at large, across history as a whole. Thus it is the case that as we write as ‘individuals’ apparently for ourselves, with that self being considered in such a way, containing within it the diversity of our existed and to-exist states in their unnameable multitude, we begin to reach towards writing for mankind across all its own infinite states instead. Accordingly, it can be said that when trying to write for this ‘self’, we are indeed being as ambitious and dramatic as to be hoping to write for everyone that ever lived — and therefore that in choosing to write for ourselves, for us alone, we go through ourselves and arrive at all of humanity as a result. And this is what the artist refers to when they say to ‘do it for oneself’ and whatnot.
"Thus, the real issue, and I know things have gotten a bit abstract in this little aside, is when an artist chooses not to make things for themselves (and thus, indirectly, everyone else), but rather a specific group, with an aim to appease a single, self-determined category of humans. By doing so, and choosing to ignore some other outgroup, they isolate their work before its very creation, and indirectly contribute to depriving the work of the very essence needed to satisfy the many versions of themselves not included in the ingroup to which they desperately try to appeal.
"And so yeah, in short, the advice to do it for oneself is good, and I’m only reiterating that with some protracted logic that rests on unfounded claims of what a self is or isn’t, but that’s fine, since all religion since time immanentised — merely through the act of having used or using language — has tried to achieve this, claim a ‘self’ I mean, or at least religion has been used as a way for those after inception to attempt to pin down ‘selfhood’, in spite of it being thoroughly unknowable. To know it would be God, and well. We’re not that. Yet? Does that make sense?”
And that’s the answer I’d give, though I’d hope the reviewer might interrupt.