A drug user's guide to not writing

You talk a bit about doing nothing in the book. Do you think you actually were doing nothing?

I'd have to refer you back to the Lawrence book where I really talk about this at great length. There's that nice passage from Rilke when he says something like, "On reflection, the work we did on this given day, maybe that was the product that came out of that phase some time in the past when we were ostensibly incredibly idle." I'm quite resistant to this industrial blend of novelist whereby you finish a book on Monday, have the weekend off and start another one two days later. I tend to prefer the idea of there being some kind of accumulation of experience in between.

And I have a great urge to do nothing. The problem is what to do once you've decided to do nothing. It's very difficult to actually do nothing. I think those periods of indolence for me have been quite useful. This is the great virtue of writing or any art, isn't it? That it can all be redeemed by the work that results from it.

I did waste quite a lot of time in Rome, but I think I'm a very inefficient writer in that I get very poor mileage out of experience. I use a lot of it for not many words. Those summers in Rome -- the piece on Rome is based on several summers -- was all redeemed by the fact that I did end up writing about it. I remember when my first book came out, I really felt that I'd wasted a good many years just living on the dole in Brixton when the people I graduated from university with spent those two years taking taxis to urgent meetings. At the end of that I ended up writing that book and suddenly it meant, oh, I hadn't wasted my time at all and in retrospect, nothing seems like more of a waste of time than taking taxis to urgent meetings. The meetings were probably pretty pointless.

That's the great attraction of the life of the artist, I think, in that everything can be turned to your advantage. The most extreme example of that is [jazz saxophonist] Art Pepper in "But Beautiful." He completely squanders what should have been his most creative years by becoming a junkie and ending up in San Quentin. He loses the '60s almost entirely. And then you get this incredible comeback in his last years when all of the stuff he's experienced, all the suffering he's undergone, is manifested in his playing, and he ends up being a much better player than he would have been if he'd just been a good boy.

And it's made all the more magical, probably, because you know it's fleeting. I was struck by the difference between your Burning Man essay, "The Zone," and the others in this book. It seems that there was despair, confusion, roiling anxiety in all the others, and then at Burning Man it seemed as if you'd found something.

The idea would be that ultimately Burning Man shouldn't be different to anywhere else on earth. It's that typical thing where people say, "I wish it could be Christmas every day." Why can't Burning Man be a year-round event? And the Burning Man people would say the crucial thing is that it's up to you to turn the whole world into Black Rock City, so that it's a question of opening your heart and all this.

People behave at their very, very best at Burning Man, so it's an ethical lesson as well: that this is how you should try to be in the rest of your life. It's just such an incredible, amazing summing up of where all your dreams come true. Not just because it's a great headbanging party and you can get sort of messed up and there's wild sex going on and all that, but because it's a dream come true in terms of what you hope people can be. People are so incredibly moved by it not just because they've had a wild time but because it's so uplifting in terms of what it reveals of people.

I remember reading your Burning Man piece when it first appeared and my co-worker, who goes every year, remarked that it was one of the few good pieces on the event that he's read. Why do you think it's so hard to write about Burning Man?

I would say for two years or so Burning Man ruined me as a writer. It so surpassed anything you could imagine. It's more far-out than one of Italo Calvino's invisible cities. It made me want to be making some really elaborate, crazy sculpture. Then, you're faced with the already ascetic labor of writing, which seems even more clerical and monkish and miserable by contrast because also it's so solitary, whereas the Burning Man thing is so much about interactive and communal creation.

It was absolutely catastrophic for me as a writer. And also I was aware that this thing that was the most important thing in my life was exactly the thing that I couldn't write about. A lot of the stuff that I've read about Burning Man I haven't thought was so great either. That's a tribute really to how awesomely fantastic it is as an event. One of the nicest ways in which its greatness is conveyed is that amazing look that people get in their eyes when they talk about it, which, to the outsider, looks like you're a cult member. But for those of you who were there, you just recognize that lovely thing: Often what people are remembering is that "I was at my best. I was everything that I might have become."

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