TB: Yeah well that’s a nightmare…(laughter)
AA: The nightmare scenario: “OK, if you want a woman, we’ll give you a woman. That’s where I say, yes, you have to hold the standards high. OK give me a level playing field, but then everybody has to be good, you can’t just get by on whatever you claim is your birthright.
TB: So that answers the question- “What did you ask him (Hobbs) not to do?”
AA: Or, what did we tussle over, what did we discuss over and over.
TB: Right, he doesn’t mention it in any kind of big way.
AA: No, he has a chapter, and we kept going over and over and over it.
TB: In his extensive effort to interpret your work, Hobbs returns several times to imagery from a story by the great Argentinean writer Borges titled The Aleph. You mention in an interview in 1990 you would be happy if you could find a tiny rip or tear in the universe such as Borges describes in his story. Will you talk a bit about your desire to find this?
AA: The Aleph has a lot of meanings for me. Whenever I am asked to lecture on my work, I always tell that story. There are a lot of things about the story. It’s about Borges comparing himself to Dante. You have all these historical figures who have come before you- how do you live up to them, or beat them at their game? It is also about being young and hot and then not hot anymore, because he gets done in by this other artist/writer. And it’s about being in love. I think the reason artists are so unstable in their relationships is that making love and making art are similar: there is this wonderful kind of flow you get between the two. It’s about the Muse or the new Muse- being in love with this woman who is his muse, as Dante was in love with Beatrice, and then losing her. About how unrequited love can make great art too (laughs)…all of that. The notion of that “tear” in the universe where he is really confronting the fact, in my mind that he will never be as brilliant as Dante (I’d have to ask Borges for sure, and I can’t anymore). Dante did make a quantum leap- he made that “tear” in the universe- that wasn’t there before- where there is a new worldview, and you are peeking in. Dante tears the curtain open, and says there is another world. I think Borges was saying to himself- “Am I ever going to be able to do that?” It is not just about the historical “filling in the blanks”, but also- “I’m just going somewhere else completely.” That finally is the thing about The Aleph that keeps bringing me back. It keeps bringing me back. The story has so many ramifications for me. The notion-“Can you do something that has “liftoff”, that doesn’t even need all of its historical buttresses?” It is just there and you go “Whoa!” This is a whole other thing. A new paradigm. I also think about this along with the notion of unstable, unrequited love and the way desire and art work together, and have throughout history. That whole myth of the “mad artist”. Probably artists are a little “out there”. Otherwise they would be accountants. When you just let your imagination go, it takes you all kinds of places. I’m not just talking about visual artists. I mean how can a really good writer construct…how could Dostoyevsky, or Norman Mailer, get inside the mind of a criminal or a murderer- unless they projected themselves into those states of mind? Not just in a superficial way. You have the capacity to project yourself in an imaginative way. You know that. And to cross boundaries, to cross moral boundaries in your imagination in the real free-floating way that Dada and Surrealism can totally make associations that are completely irrational.