by Susan Sontag
Biomorphism of [the twentieth-century Catalan painter Joan] Miró
New development: plastic-based paints
Changing the scale of the image ([Larry] Rivers, [Roy] Lichtenstein, Warhol)
[The nineteenth-century English art critic John] Ruskin: forms of art are moral …
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5/20/65 Edisto Beach [SS was visiting Jasper Johns at his house in South Carolina]
Subject: painting + écriture
For something to be “very strong”—what?
The object is unimportant; but the painting is an object (Johns)
Already it’s a great deal to see anything clearly, for we don’t see anything clearly
A painting is an object, music is a performance, the book is a code. It has to be transcribed into ideas + sentiments + images (?)—
Drawing > oil painting > lithograph (3 versions of same—)
“The arrogant object” (Johns)
One doesn’t learn from experience—because the substance of things is always changing
There is no neutral surface—something is only neutral with respect to something else (an interpretation? An expectation)—Robbe-Grillet
Rauschenberg’s use of newsprint, tires
Johns: broom, hanger
Somebody said, “[John] Cage showed me that there are no empty objects.”
The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation—however minute. I want the encounter with a person or a work of art to change everything.
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5/20/65—South Carolina—
green—oaks, pines, palmettoes—furry grey-green Spanish moss, huge ropes [of] it, hanging from the branches of every tree—dense
The ocean is calm, shallow, very warm—
Reading Schoenberg’s letters at midnight
Barefoot skinny Negroes walking along the road—small heads
Hollywood, So[uth] Carolina—the cabbage capital of the world
Mint juleps in frosted (iced) metal “glass”—need a napkin to hold it
A cardinal in the yard—cicadas, a crescendo, like a siren; quail (“bobwhite”)
Ants, gnats, horseflies, daddy longlegs, snakes, hornets (yellow + black)
White sheets, thin white bedspreads, white walls + ceilings (wide boards)
Okra cut up, fried in deep fat, steak (well done), salad
A marmoset (“Jenny”) in a large cage who sleeps in a soft wide-brimmed man’s hat
Shells: conch, scallop, clam, oyster
Muddy bank—dark brown velvet mud—thousands of little holes—+, if you look closely, scurrying in + out of them, thousands of fiddler crabs
Sandspurs: “sea tail” (edible) growing at edge of beach
Basil, tea, mint growing in the yard; poison oak
Antennas on TV with small aluminum foil flags
JJ [Jasper Johns] allowing himself, now, de Kooning’s white alongside of pink—a patch of it
Rauschenberg:
“As the paintings changed the printed material became as much of a subject as the paint (I began using newsprint in my work) causing changes of focus: A third palette. There is no poor subject (Any incentive to paint is as good as any other).”
“A canvas is never empty.”
“Duplication of images” (symmetry?)
A poetry of infinite possibilities
Combine-paintings, combine-drawings
“If you do not change your mind about something when you confront a picture you have not seen before, you are either a stubborn fool or the painting is not very good.”
“I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of a greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.”
5/22/65 Edisto Beach
Novel about thinking—
Not dreams this time (they were a metaphor for introspection, a pretext—not meant realistically, psychologically) [in The Benefactor]
An artist thinking about his work
A painter? A musician? (I’m slighty less ignorant about painting)
Not a writer—cf. [Vladimir Nabokov’s novel] Pale Fire—for then I’d have to give the text of the work, as Nabokov does.
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[In the margin:] A spiritual project—but tied to making an object (as consciousness is harnessed to flesh)
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Dante: idea that the punishment fits the crime
Cantos 21 + 22—the “gargoyle cantos”
Idea of distance in art
How “far away” can you be?
One way is through abstraction—discovery of structure in nature—like X-ray (cf. [Paul] Cézanne)
New way—Rauschenberg, Johns—is through literalness—extending vision to include intense look at things we look at but never see
Johns’ flag is not a flag—
Paul’s [Thek] meat is not meat
Another (?): chance (transcending “intention”)
In a painting, everything is present at once (not in music, fiction, film)
Difference between “going to be a painter” and “being a painter”
A painting is a certain kind of gesture—generous, terse, chaste, ironic, sentimental, etc.
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5/24/65
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Susan T. [Taubes]: rather give up sex
—otherwise can’t work, doesn’t want to move outside the eroticized sphere.
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6/5/65 Paris
… Kafka’s refusal of lyricism; it suffices to name the objects Chinese porngraphic novel (1660) translated by [the French writer and artist Pierre] Klossowski: La chair comme tapis de prière [Flesh as a Prayer Mat]. Pauvert, 1962
Restaurant on rue Beaumarchais (#21?): L’Enclos de Ninon [sic]
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6/8/65 7 a.m.
After 25 hours of work (dexamyl—uninterrupted except for an hour with [the American journalist Herbert] Lottman and, later, [Godard’s film] Alphaville) I think I’ve sorted things out.
There are at least two projects here:
A. A novella about Thomas Faulk (or Darnell) whose center is the breakdown sequence I wrote yesterday afternoon.
In it—stuff about grief, trauma, domination—getting scared. It’s he who has the dreary boarding house, California childhood, etc.
B. A novel, God willing, about a spiritual aristocrat, “R.” No breakdowns for him.
He is a painter. He has the fire(s).
Forget about his childhood, except references “in situ.” It demeans him.
He works with wax, etc. Is close to his older sister. Very laconic, gruff.
No one quite sure where he was born.
Sister claims she doesn’t know.
Parents were active Nazis? Or is it his sister, whom he forgives? (He was in Sweden during the war.)
The German thing: morbidity, perversity
He takes injections for something—a hypochondriac?
Insanity = a deficit in behavior (rather than liberation)
Archbishop of Naples (1920s) said the earthquake at Amalfi was caused by the anger of God at the shortness of women’s skirts
Baby Face—a film [directed by Alfred E. Green in 1933] with Barbara Stanwyck—she makes her way up, floor by floor, through a large corporation
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7/16/65 Paris
I haven’t learned to mobilize rage—(I perform militant actions, without militant feeling)
Never anger but either hurt (if I love) or aversion, distaste if I don’t
I never telephone anyone; I would ask someone leaving my apartment to mail a letter for me, if I could possibly help it—I don’t trust anyone to do anything for me—I want to do everything myself, or if I let anyone act as my agent in any matter, then I resign myself (in advance) to its not being done right or at all
The mornings are the worst.
People are cardboard, selfish—but it doesn’t matter, I can take it. “They don’t mean it personally.”
Am I dete
riorating these last two years—drying out, becoming stern, withdrawn?
Seething with resentment. But I don’t dare show it. When it mounts, I just absent myself (Annette, etc.)
No image of the future.
I wouldn’t want to day-dream. What! And get my hopes up?
My career is my life as something external to myself, + so I report it to others. What is inside is my grief.
If I expect as little as possible, I won’t be hurt.
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7/22/65
… Connection between sunlight and passivity “In the day the inward eye is blind” (Clytemnestra [in Aeschylus’s Oresteia])
8/1/65 Paris
In [SS’s projected] Borges essay, emphasize:
debt to Robert L[ouis] Stevenson (see B’s essays on)—e.g. [Borges’s story] “Pierre Menard[, Author of the Quixote”], fantastic stories
Idea of flat writing—transparency of the word—“degré zéro de l’écriture” [the reference is to Roland Barthes’s concept of a “zero degree of writing”]
Tradition of Kafka (in translation) vs. both Joyce + Robbe-Grillet
Read Blanchot, L’Attente, L’Oubli
[Jean] Reverzy
[Bataille] Histoire de l’Oeil
[Pierre Louÿs] Trois Filles de Leur Mère
French as anti-language, hence Blanchot’s novels …
Jansenist tradition of Robbe-Grillet …
Robbe-Grillet’s novels are about action
8/19/65 Corse [Corsica]
art = making concrete abstract and abstract concrete
music has the purest historicism (it’s been done—can’t do it again)—because it’s the most abstract art (in this respect, like math)
The frontality of Bastia [in Corsica]—straight streets, rectangles—6–8 story buildings of grey that seem a faded pastel color
[Stéphane] Mallarmé had no heirs (except a woman poet, Saint-Elme)—i.e. no obscure French poetry, When [Gerard Manley] Hopkins is translated into French, he becomes completely clear. Very French, the notion of Descartes that a true idea may be defined (!) as one that is clear and distinct—
Is literature one of the arts?
(read the Sartre essay)
[Eisenstein’s] Film Form “the parallel”
e.g.’s
> massacre of the strikers // slaughter house [Eisenstein’s] (Strike)
> liberation of prisoners // ice melting ([Pudovkin’s] Mother)
> eagle // Napoleon ([Abel Gance’s] Napoleon)
> slow train // snail ([Gance’s] La Roue, The Avenging Corsican)
The first works—is both consubstantiation and emotional reinforcement
[The] second, third and fourth don’t: are merely illustrative
Another e.g. father being blackmailed // shot of a vise (La Roue)
Just a technique of silent films?
“The ellipsis”
in time
in space this is what cutting is
“The flashback”
when does this come in?
“Establishing shot”
showing spatial relations of people, things
N.B. difference when it [entry trails off ]
8/22/65
… Noël [Burch, the American film critic and director, who had moved to France in 1951]
8/24/65
Corsica—
—People speaking 2 languages all the time, switching back from one to the other
—Cactus; eucalyptus + plane trees; thistles; palms
—Churches + other old buildings with regular pattern of square holes left by scaffolding (manner in which they were built: throw up wooden scaffolding the shape of the building first)
—Violent summer storms; frequent power failures
—Steady depopulation; recent repatriation of “Pieds-Noirs” [French settlers in Algeria, who in some cases chose to leave for France and in some cases were forced to in the wake of Algerian independence in 1962] who farm, run restaurants
—10 main names on the island (very inbred (Mattei …)
—The “maquis” [“dense brush” of the Corsican interior], the fires
—Eau d’Orezza (“pétillante” [“sparkling”], from natural spring in interior of the island) Sirop d’orgea (coconut plus water, very sweet)
—Charcuterie de Corse (4 kinds of ham)
—Casino: [In Corsican] U Casone
—Pale pinkish brown color of stone houses—faded red-tile roofs
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Bataille: connection between sex + death, pleasure + pain (Cf. Larmes d’Éros)
The point about a confidence-man is that he NEVER drops the mask. He always SEEMS reliable, attractive, friendly, etc. You can never square your EXPERIENCE of him with what you come to KNOW about him.
Irene: my EXPERIENCE of her for 41/2 years was of limitless lavish love. What I might force myself (via [Diana] Kemeny etc.) to think about her—her need to dominate, to subjugate, to undermine—my understanding, in brief, is always being short-circuited by my experience. Hence the: HOW CAN (COULD) SHE? Etc.
Can one overwhelm experience by understanding? Or only replace it by another experience?
Irene:
—her perfect assurance (no “I think” or “this is probably stupid, but” or “Maybe”—just constatation
[In the margin:] The auto-didact
—her freedom from guilt + regrets (no “I wish” or “I wish I hadn’t” or “Why did I?”)
[In the margin:] Cult of spontaneity
[Norman] Mailer ethic—Jane, Ricardo, Meg
—her consistency
—her generosity + willingness to put herself completely at another’s disposal
The perfect combination: I delivered myself into her hands—
She loves me
She knows better than I (about life, sex, etc.)
She is eager to put her knowledge + herself at my disposal
Result:
When I need something, I am served (in fact, I learn needs I didn’t know I had—through having them fulfilled without having to ask)
When we disagree, she is right
When I am wrong, she will teach me
When I try to help her—or take the sexual initiative—or correct her, I am wrong, clumsy, inapposite
When I improve, I will make her happy
So I take + take—both supremely nourished yet somehow undermined, restless, resentful.
