by Susan Sontag
I did not wish to deny an obvious erotic sense to all the dreams. But in this dream, the sexual was joined with more abstract longings for union and penetration. The sexual was acted out with scenes of death and with palpable images of excrement—for how else could I interpret that hidden smell, and that repulsive substance which enveloped me at the close of the dream? A distasteful conjunction, I admit! But while I shall try to put the matter decorously in order to spare the reader any undue embarrassment, it is necessary to write unsparingly and truthfully.
The widening thematic range of my dreams plunged me into a new melancholy. The enterprise which I had undertaken was, I now saw, enormous. You understand, my dismay did not arise from the fact that I barely recognized the oppressed principal actor in the dreams as myself. I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams. But I now saw this was a more formidable undertaking than I had anticipated. I had acted on my dreams, well and good. But the mere execution of the dream images, the process whereby I inscribed them on my life, was not enough. Perhaps, I thought, the dreams not only instructed me to do something—like seduce a woman; but also to do nothing—except concentrate on purging myself of some impurity, which might be the dreams themselves. I could no longer single out the erotic in my interpretation and acting-out of the dreams.
Here I took my cue from the setting of this latest dream. After all, where throughout history have the indescribable longings and anxieties of man been invested? Surely not in the communion of bodies, but in the exaltations of the spirit. No doubt the first religious men were as perplexed as I, since they knew no name for what they experienced.
It was in this manner that I conquered the sentiment that my dreams had marked and defiled my daytime life. I concluded that my dreams, being susceptible to many interpretations, were no less susceptible to the religious one: namely, that something which one might, for want of a better name, call religious had erupted within me. This did not in itself afford me pleasure, for I am not a credulous person nor given to postponing my happiness to another world. Neither do I crave the dubious prestige of the name “religion” to make my spiritual efforts respectable in my own eyes. Nevertheless I know that I am a person capable of devoutness. Yes, definitely, I would say that, in certain circumstances, I enjoy nothing better than being devout.
I have said that my first reaction to the dream was melancholy. Further reflections promptly turned my melancholy to thoughtfulness, and I experienced a marvellous calm. One of my reflections was about thoughtfulness itself: I realized that I had never really thought except when I wrote or talked. Now I resolved to become more silent, without becoming morose. This was easier without Frau Anders about; she had the habit of interrupting my silences to ask me what I was thinking. Being at times a sociable person, however, I continued to frequent my café and attended some parties, but certain friends, heirs to the solicitousness of Frau Anders, remarked the difference and judged that I was again unhappy.
One of my friends, the priest who conducted the radio program, undertook to cure my melancholy by taking me on long walks in the famous woods which lie on the outskirts of the city. He was a kindly alert man whose conversation I esteemed, for the clergy in my country is better educated than it used to be. (There is always something touching in the tardy efforts toward self-improvement of an institution or a feeling in decline.) I accepted his ministrations with interest, because of the recent turning of my thoughts toward religious schemes. What he told me, after a series of talks, was that my dreams represented the revolt of my conscience against a religious vocation which I had suppressed.
“I do not mean,” said the good Father Trissotin, “that I believe you should aspire toward the priesthood.” I blushed and assured him that I would not take his words other than as he meant them.
“What I mean,” he continued, obviously relieved, “is that you should go to confession. Our talks are only a preparation for that step, for which you already yearn in your dreams. It is there that you will find yourself purged.”
I must explain that I have always respected the church which baptized me and which only a million and a half citizens of my country disavow to the extent of belonging to another religious community. There is no doubt that the church has performed much good, and even today when I see the little priests hurrying through the city on motorcycles, their black cassocks trailing in the wind, I generally pause to watch them. They cannot harm those souls in distress to whom they minister: the dying; the pious housemaids; the pregnant girls, abandoned and remorseful; the criminal, the insane, the intolerant. I have a congenital susceptibility, some might call it a weakness, for those who profess the cure of souls.
Also I enjoy religion aesthetically. As my dream indicates, I am attracted by the slow ceremonies of the cathedral. I respond to incense, stained glass, genuflection. I like the way the Spanish kiss their thumbs after making the sign of the cross. In short, I welcome gestures which are repeated. I suppose that part of the reason my dreams intrigued me was that every dream was a recurrent dream. Thus, every gesture in the dream gained the status of a ritual.
But I do not see how one gesture can suppress another. And I did not want to be appeased.
“Confess rather than express, my son.” Father Trissotin’s rosy face was set in a look of concern.
I have already said that I was prepared to admit that something religious had erupted within me. But I did not like Father Trissotin’s well-meaning assumption that my dreams were something of which I would necessarily want to rid myself. However, I thought it best to keep this objection to myself, and decided to challenge my friend on the appropriateness and efficacy of the confessional.
“Do you really think,” I said finally, “that a confession would rid me of my dreams?”
I did not intend to take up with him the question of the value of my dreams. But he seemed to anticipate my inward reservation. “I believe,” he said, not at all portentously, “that you are possessed, if not by God, then by the devil. You have freely admitted to me the perverse and arbitrary impulses by which you have lately been governed, and you attribute these to your dreams. But you cannot simply hold your dreams responsible. What if they are sent by the devil? It is your duty to combat them, not yield to them.”
When I did not reply immediately, I could see that he took my silence as a good omen for the success of his counsel. “All dreams,” he added gently, “are spiritual messages.”
“Perhaps these dreams are a message,” I said. “I have often thought so myself. But I believe they are a message from one part of myself to another.” Father Trissotin shook his head disapprovingly. I continued: “How dare I not answer the sender of these messages with my own body? I say my body, since the dreams are grossly, indecently preoccupied with the fate of my body. How dare I employ an intermediary instead? Especially the one you propose, a priest, someone trained in the arts of neglecting the body.”
“Don’t trust your own clarity,” he said. “The body is more mysterious than you think.”
I was silent again. It would have been ungracious of me to challenge Father Trissotin on these grounds, his vocational disavowal of his own body giving him immunity from embarrassing rejoinders. Though he might proselytize in intimate libertine circles, like Frau Anders’, as well as over the radio to the mass of his countrymen, most of whom cared far more for the outcome of the annual bicycle race than for the salvation of their souls, he risked nothing. He always spoke across the unbesiegeable moat of his own chastity.
“You have been given a message which you cannot read,” he continued with marvellous confidence. “If you were illiterate, you would not hesitate to appoint a scribe to conduct your correspondence.”
“Ah,” I answered, “in such a case it would be I still who dictated the letters. But when I accept the advice of priests, I accept a form letter. And while I admit my dreams may not be as original as they seem to me, I cannot yet give up the idea that an a
nswer that is different, that is mine alone, is expected of me.”
With that Father Trissotin looked at me with pity, and said: “You are being naive. The illiterate peasant never knows if the scribe really puts down his words exactly as he dictates them. It must often happen that the scribe thinks he knows better than his client. He has, after all, more experience in anticipating the reactions of those who read letters.” He went on: “You are just such an illiterate in spiritual transactions, and the priest an experienced scribe. All letters are form letters, are they not? Letters of hope, of love, of spite, of hypocritical solicitude…. Why not seek out the most expert form your message can take, since your purpose is not just to be understood but to have a certain effect on the person receiving your letter?”
“Perhaps,” I replied, “I do not want to have any effect at all.” I could not restrain myself from explaining to him. “You assume, Father, that I wish to rid myself of the dreams, and you recommend to me the agency of the confessional for this purpose. But, no! What I want, if anything, is to rid my dreams of me.”
He seemed almost defeated by my obstinacy for he delivered, in a troubled tone, a most impersonal answer. “God gave you your soul to be saved.”
I would not permit this evasion. “Father, let me continue my explanation,” I said, directing my steps to a bench by the fountain. We sat in a gloomy truce-like silence for a moment and watched the children playing. Then I roused myself and said, “What I mean is this. I see the confessional as a devious means to answer a message which comes from myself. It is the long way around, like stepping out of one’s front door onto the highway to reach the back door. Or going to the airport to hire a plane to travel from the attic to the basement.” He stared with displeasure. I went on: “It’s not the distance, you understand, which I object to in these maneuvers. For in an oddly designed house, it could indeed be very far from the front door to the back door, from the attic to the basement. But why go out of the house?”
Hearing my own words I doubted my ability to convince Father Trissotin, for I have observed that the most direct path for one person appears intolerably roundabout to another.
“To choose a priest to answer my own message, seems to me….” I paused, not wishing to be indelicate, “it reminds me—if you will permit my frankness, Father—of the not entirely rational conventions of sexuality. I mean,” I concluded, somewhat anti-climactically, “that I cannot altogether see the reason for coupling when anyone can procure for himself an equally intense and purer pleasure alone.”
With that he was, after all, shocked, and recalled an appointment with his bishop or with someone at the radio station, I do not remember. The afternoon was almost over, but I sat for a while in the park, thinking of what we had said.
Perhaps I should have recounted some of my earlier meetings in the park with Father Trissotin; but this to me is the most interesting because it was the least doctrinal. In earlier sessions, Father Trissotin had assumed I needed theological instruction, and had expounded the claims and glories of the Church. He had even given me a rosary, which I always took with me when we had an appointment, but otherwise kept in a drawer with my cuff links. For all my good will, however, I had not listened too patiently to Father Trissotin. I did not believe in his form letter, nor understand how he could believe in it. Which form? The proliferation of religions throughout the world irritates me. How can one worship the divine in so many postures? While Buddha reclines on his side on one elbow, Christ strains at the cross. They cancel out each other.
While these thoughts were wrestling in my mind, I was watching a little girl playing with a large rubber ball. Ever since I have been myself no longer a child, I have enjoyed the company of children. I felt it would relieve me to talk with a child, and since this one was nearest to hand, I began to watch her movements more attentively. When the child’s ball rolled down the pathway a good distance away from her nurse and she toddled after it, I got up and followed her.
I shall not insult my reader’s character by reassuring him as to the purity of my motives. For the fact was that I did not know what I would say to the child or do with her.
She was a pretty child in a pink frock, about four years old. I walked behind her in order to watch her run. When she reached her ball, she hugged and talked to it. But again it slipped out of the grasp of her short plump arms and rolled away. This time I went ahead of her and picked up the ball.
“It’s mine!”
“I know,” I replied. “What do you think I’m going to do with it?”
“Give it back to me?” she said doubtfully.
“Don’t cry, little one. Of course I shall give it back to you. But what do you suppose I shall do with it first?”
“Eat it.”
“And then?”
She giggled. I was delighted. I longed to toss my fantasies at her, like the ball, and hear them bounce back at me in her childish accents. But I did not want her to take the ball from me, as she was at that moment trying to do.
“No, no. Not yet.” I held it out of her reach. “Tell me, little one, what is the first thing you remember?”
“I want my ball.”
“Do you remember anything?”
“Once I went to the zoo.”
“Anything else?”
“I remember my name. Do you want to know what it is?”
“No.”
“I remember where I live, too. Do you want to know that?”
“Do you remember your mother?”
She laughed heartily. “Silly! How can I? She’s at home!”
“I don’t remember my mother, either,” I said.
“Is she at home?”
“No, she’s dead.”
“I know lots of dead people,” the child replied. “Millions. Millions and millions. Millions of them.”
“Where are they?”
“My father keeps them in his office. He goes every day to talk to them.”
“Is he a doctor, your father?”
“No, he makes money. That’s what he does.”
“Does your mother often scold you?”
“No. Only my nurse. She scolds me when I go away from the bench.”
“Would you like your ball back?”
“Aren’t you going to eat it? Is it too big?”
I wanted to please the child, so I said, “No, I breakfast on bigger things than this every day. I eat tigers and acrobats and doorknobs. This morning I ate a black chair.”
It was better than any confessional to see her laugh. “Did you? I don’t believe it. You’re pretending.”
“No, I swear. It’s true. Would you really like me to eat your ball?”
“Can I have it back then?”
“Perhaps. Look.” I took out my pocketknife and made a small incision in the fleshy rubber of the ball. The ball crumpled in my hand. Then I crammed the rubber in my mouth and made the motions of chewing.
“Oh, you did! You did! Let’s tell the nurse.”
“No, you must go now.” I turned so she could not see me, and spit the rubber into my hand.
“I want to eat the ball, too.”
“No, you must get another one.”
“Is the ball dead? Did you kill it with your knife?”
“No, the ball is inside me. It will take a long time for it to come out, so you must get another in the meantime. But I have a present for you.” I saw the nurse looking anxiously up and down an adjacent path.
“A present!”
“Yes, it’s a rosary. A good priest gave it to me. And now you can pray for your ball.” I put it into her hands. She took it hesitantly, and then smiled when she looked at it more closely.
“I think I would like to have my ball, too.”
“Good-bye, little one.”
“The rosary is black,” she said in a puzzled tone.
“Good-bye, little one.” And I left her, in the middle of the path, peering between the beads.
FIVE
I came to spend m
ore time with Jean-Jacques. He seemed to understand better than others what preoccupied me. But I did not encourage him to interpret my dreams. He had his life, which I assumed to be suitable for him; I had mine. To keep myself alert to his influence, I began a notebook in which I recorded some of our meetings and conversations. Here are several entries.
“May 21. It is Jean-Jacques’ cheerfulness that attracts me most to him. He tells me, ‘I hate plots that illustrate the death of love, the failure of talent, the mediocrity of society.’ This refusal to be dreary is admirable. Why, for instance, are there so many novels about parents—the giants of our childhood who cut off our feet and shove us, limping, into the world? He is right: the writer may celebrate or mock, he must not stare or whine. I am rereading his first two novels, and I find them very good, although a little over-written. The one about the boxer is especially fine. He has made something sublime out of the agonies of the arena.”
“May 23. No wonder Jean-Jacques is so prolific; he writes five or six hours a day, and rewrites very little; that baroque style of his dictates itself to him in the first draft, he tells me. But why does he never draw upon his exploits of the night as the subject for a novel? Not out of prudence. I have never known anyone so careless of his reputation…. I think I understand this seemingly uncharacteristic reticence. By keeping the day and night separate, his acts are not hectic. His life is not dismembered, because he has found the seams in a piece of whole cloth and calmly unstitched them. Thus I find all his acts mysterious and graceful…. I, too, want my life not to be dismembered. But I am not willing to separate the day from the night. ‘You wish to unify,’ Jean-Jacques says to me. ‘I practice the arts of dissociation.’ ”
“July 13. I am methodical, secretive, honest. Jean-Jacques is lavish, indiscreet, dishonest. This contrast is the basis of our friendship.”
“August 4. I am annoyed with Jean-Jacques for bothering to tell me I am not a writer, and inform him that I have never thought that I was. But his reasons for thinking this of me are not the obvious ones. You can’t write, he says, because you are a born specialist, the sort of person who can do only one thing. Writing is not that thing, he concludes. Is it dreaming? I ask, somewhat facetiously. He does not reply, he only smiles.”
