LAURA ADAMS
207
To the degree you lived a life that destroyed the time of others and dredged
up all the swamp muds , so you are a creature of the swamp in your next life.
The beauty of this may be that there is now good purpose to the swamp.
(This isn ' t Jones's talk any longer, just a more general explanation of
karma .) At any rate,]ones went on about it and I said, "You
believe
in
that ?" Because I was an atheist and a rock rib socialist in those days . He
said, " Oh, sure. That's the only thing that makes sense ." Well, the line
rang in my head for years. "The only thing that makes sense." I thought
about it over and over and over and in the last three or four years I began to
think , " yes , that does make sense . Jones was right."
In! :
Let's move from metaphysics into your views of your work . In
Advertisements for Myself
you stated that you were " imprisoned with a
perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the
consciousness of our time." In terms of that ambition to alter the
consciousness ofour time , how would you evaluate the relative effectiveness
of the various forms of your work for that purpose: the novel, the
novel-history , the novel-biography, film , politics, the Fifth Estate?
Mazier:
I ' m not the sort to look back . So long as you keep working it doesn't
make much sense to rate your own past performance. None of my work may
have influence for all I know . How can you measure it? Some of the ideas I
had on how to make movies, for instance, might seem important in
1)
or 20
years- maybe they' ll make a few movies that way. The ideas I had when
Breslin and I were trying to take New York in the mayoralty-some of those
ideas have come in . More will. People may yet say, "Oh, those guys-that
was an interesting campaign, intellectually speaking." It may even prove a
fruitful campaign. Or I might have influence through some of.the ideas I
had in things nobody ever read . Or if we go off into the most religious and
extravagant kind of existentialism, the ideas in "The Metaphysics of the
Belly" may have the most future interest to people. I would say one place I
have not had influence , up to this point at any rate, is in the novel.
Obviously my novels have been conservative in terms of form . . .
In! :
Not
Why Are We in Vietnam ?
Mazier:
No ,
Why Are We in Vietnam?
has nuggets . There are formal ideas
buried in
Why Are We in Vietnam ?-I
suppose I trusted metaphor in that
novel to a degree I've never trusted it before . I worked on the assumption
that if! had a metaphor where I might, for example, mix electromagnetism
and pine sap in a tree that there was something there. Something scientific
yet to be discovered . But I don't know if I'm interested in the question .
Where do
you
think my influence will be?
In! :
I think it will be in works like
The Armies ofthe Night , Maidstone,
and
Why Are We in Vietnam?
which pushed back the existing limits of genre,
