by Susan Sontag
I frustrate her—but she is so good, a martyr to me, patient—I feel at turns guilty and complacent + anxious.
I want to make her happy, but this has become a kind of presumption on my part. I’m not good enough—YET—to make her happy.
Yet she loves me. Why? Because she believes my apprenticeship will work out—or just because she can’t help herself?
It doesn’t seem as if I make her happy—or make love to her. Only that she allows it; it’s all she. When she is passive sexually, it’s not that I take her (or ever seduce her); she has consented to let me play the active role + then I do it.
Useless to reason that this subtle, supple, ingenious form of domination—reducing me to a panicky, hostile, dependent child—is Irene’s way of procuring for herself love. The only way she knows. (First the lavish tenderness, the superabundance of caresses + bathing + feeding + sex + going over one’s problems > etc. etc.) And also her means of becoming powerful (through giving, she triumphs + emasculates!) + of over-coming her sense of her weakness.
Useless—because I experienced it as love.
Irene, the first person to act to me in a loving manner, + the only person from whom I gratefully accepted love.
I am left with a complete paralysis of my sexual life—she rejected me because I was no good in bed, I am no good in bed—and a terrible anxiety about taking from people (even cups of coffee) except when it appears to be totally impersonal.
Irene was jealous of David because that was the one part of my life she couldn’t completely take over.
If I hadn’t had David, would she have stayed as long as she did?
If I hadn’t had David, would I have survived the 41/2 years?
One thing I know: If I hadn’t had David, I would have killed myself last year.
I was terrorized (but didn’t know it). I am, still, terrorized. (Irene has quality; I don’t. Irene doesn’t love me because her standards are high. She won’t settle for what I, or most people, would settle for.) And I would be in a continued state of mortal terror—of her anger; of her leaving me; of her finding me stupid, inconsiderate, selfish, sexually inadequate—if she ever came back.
Does she get a kick out of my groveling in the last two years? That’s what Kemeny (+ Noël [Burch]) says. I can’t believe it—of someone I love(d). She’d be a monster then—
I’ve always thought (at worst) that she felt nothing—that she’d had to harden + blind herself, fantastically, so as to break free—so as not to feel guilty.
But what if she actually got pleasure from it?
I can’t make myself imagine that—which everyone finds obvious.
Can I say: I am disappointed in Irene. She is not what I thought, believed she was (is)?
No?
Why not?
Because she got there first—she is disappointed in me.
My “masochism”—caricatured in the exchange of letters with Irene this summer—reflects not the desire to suffer, but the hope of appeasing anger and making a dent in indifference through demonstrating that I suffer (and am “good,” i.e. harmless).
What Kemeny means by always citing the “I’m so good that it hurts” story.
If Mommy sees she’s really hurt me, she’ll stop hitting me. But Irene isn’t my mommy.
8/25/65
[The twentieth-century French writer André Pieyre de] Man-diargues says the two best erotic books ever written are: Histoire de l’Oeil + Trois Filles de Leur Mère. They are the two poles: the first, reserved—each word counts—chaste language—laconic, lean; the second, obscene—décontracté, ba-vardé [“relaxed, chatty”]—endless.
N.B. last part of the Louÿs [Trois Filles]—petites scènes de théâtre (like [Jean Genet’s] Le Balcon)
Picaresque form of the Bataille [Histoire de l’Oeil] (an adventure) vs. two-room set of the Louÿs: the door, the bed, the stairway
Thomas Faulk making dummies in wax in So. Carolina, but they get blurred
Prefigures Prof.———’s dummy of him
Why can’t (don’t) I say: I’m going to be a sexual champion? Ha!
8/27/65 Avignon
Art is the grand condition of the past in the present. (cf. architecture). To become “past” is to become “art”—cf. photographs, too
Works of art have a certain pathos
Their historicity?
Their decay?
Their veiled, mysterious, partly (+ forever) inaccessible aspect?
The fact that no one would (could) ever do that again?
Perhaps, then, works only become art—they are not art
+ they become art when they are a part of the past
a contemporary work of art is a contradiction
we assimilate present to the past? (or is it something else? a gesture, a research, a cultural souvenir?)
Wittgenstein // [Arthur] Rimbaud
Renunciation of the vocation:
W.—schoolteaching, being a hospital orderly
R.—Abyssinia
Description of their work as trifling—
School of Fontainebleau painting.
Erotic painting
“Mannerist”
(all converging on a breast, e.g.)
Avignon (Musée Calvet):
> > [Jacques-Louis] David, Mort de Joseph Bara
[Jean-Baptiste] Greuze
[Jean-Honoré] Fragonard
[Jean-Baptiste-Siméon] Chardin (cf. in Louvre)
[François] Boucher
[Antoine] Watteau
[A. J. T.] Monticelli + [J. M. W.] Turner—precursors of impressionism
“0 Degree” writing: see through to the matter, which is “dé-paysant” [“disorienting”]
e.g. sci-fi novels
“0 Degree” films
e.g. B-films—no formal elaboration; instead, the violence of the subject
Medium is transparent
Novel, narrative, text (two viable traditions or possibilities now)
(1) 0 Degree: Kafka, Borges, Blanchot, sci-fi, [Camus’s] L’Étranger (“récit”)
2) Unfinished legacy of Joyce—novel as language, texture, materiality of discourse—[Djuna] Barnes, Beckett, early [John] Hawkes, Burroughs
Music
Get complete works of Webern
Hodeir, Adorno books
[Claude] Debussy—Jeux, La Mer
…
Two traditions
Music to be heard (with increasingly complex formal structures)
Conceptual music—composer not interested in how it sounds, but in the concepts or math relations it expresses
Cage, Varèse are something else again, because they are interested not in music but in sound (def[inition]: music = organized sound)
For [the French experimental composer Jean] Barraqué, e.g. final test is how it sounds—not for [the Ukrainian-American mathematical biophysicist Nicolas] Rashevsky, where intervals which dist[ribute] one sequence from the next may be 29 seconds, 30 seconds, + 31 seconds—imperceptible to the ear
New resources opened by electronic (taped) music
…
To rehear: [Henry] Purcell, [Jean-Philippe] Rameau, [Ludwig von] Beethoven’s Fifth, La Mer, [Frédéric] Chopin, late [Franz] Liszt, [Franz] Schubert’s Eighth
19th C. full of retrograde work (i.e. post-Beethoven, but which doesn’t move on from late Beethoven) which nevertheless develops something—e.g. Schubert—who in his life-time practically exhausts the possibilities of melody (pure tonal melody). His heirs: [Johannes] Brahms, [Pyotr Ilyich] Tchaikovsky, [Gustav] Mahler, [Richard] Strauss (?) e.g. trio of Rosenkavalier, Act III, arias in Ariadne [auf Naxos]
Dist[inguish] melody from lyricism
The Rosenkavalier trio is perhaps the climax of lyricism in music (surpasses the “Liebestod”)—But its greatness is in the play of the voices against each other—the harmonies, the orchestration—the exalted emotionalism of the melodic line: things which are much more complex (and decadent?) compared with pure melody in the
Schubert sense
Philosophy is an art form—art of thought or thought as art
Comparing Plato + Aristotle is like comparing Tolstoy + Dostoyevsky [or] Rubens + Rembrandt
Not a question of right or wrong, true or false—like diff[erent] “styles”
Last good novels in English:
[Ford Madox Ford,] The Good Soldier
[F. Scott Fitzgerald,] The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night
[E. M. Forster,] Passage to India
[William Faulkner,] Light in August
Transitional “novels”:
[Virginia Woolf,] Mrs. Dalloway
[Djuna Barnes,] Nightwood
[Jean-Paul Sartre,] Nausea
[Italo Svevo,] Confessions of Zeno
[Ernest Hemingway,] The Sun Also Rises
[Hermann Hesse,] Steppenwolf
Nathanael West
New “novels”:
[Blanchot,] Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas
[Burroughs,] Naked Lunch
[Joyce,] Ulysses + F[innegans] W[ake]
Early Hawkes
[Robbe-Grillet,] Dans le labyrinthe
[Burt Blechman,] Stations
8/28/65 Marseilles
…
Two Canadian doctors report making a skin graft on a woman patient of skin donated by one of the doctors—after several sessions of hypnosis in which the woman was told the graft would definitely take.
My fascination with:
Disembowellment
Stripping down
Minimum conditions (from Robinson Crusoe to concentration camps)
Silence, muteness
My voyeuristic attraction to:
Cripples (Trip to Lourdes—they arrive from Germany in sealed trains)
Freaks
Mutants
Can use A as an idea of form in art, not just “subject matter”—form as a gesture of the will—: if I will it strongly enough, it will work “for” a literary text, if it’s organic enough …
Are A and B connected? Parallel? (as I have thought, for the first time, to arrange them here)
Is B the sadistic element in my sensibility which compensates for all the blessing of people? (as Kemeny has often said).
A sadistic vision carefully detached, unhinged from any sadistic acting-out?
Compare [X] who discovered he liked to play a sadistic role in sex by noting that he liked the same things—looking in medical books, at cripples, etc.
Or is there something more? Such as:
Identifying myself with the cripple?
Testing myself to see if I flinch? (reacting against my mother’s squeamishness, as with food)
A fascination with minimum conditions—obstacles, handicaps—of which the mutilated person is a metaphor?
A systematic research into myself:
I note, this summer, a mild claustrophobia: feeling oppressed in small rooms, needing the window open, + to sit either by window or door in restaurants
Do I show my contempt for other people’s weaknesses? (Noël said I did—when he was being “sea-sick” + hypochondriacal—but then he feels contempt for himself.)
Has my uncultivated (“California”) manner outlived its usefulness? (I lack dignity.) It has become an accomplice to my tendency to defer to authoritative self-confident people, + it perpetuates my strategy of deceiving people as to the extent of my aggressiveness, pretending that I’m not aggressive or competitive at all.
It’s time I stopped reassuring people—and leading them on (this spring + summer:
George [Lichtheim, the German refugee critic and historian of Marxism, who was in love with SS], [then literary editor of the British radio magazine, The Listener, May] Derwent, Noël!)
8/29/65 Tangier
[SS spent the last days of August and the first half of September 1965 visiting Paul and Jane Bowles in Tangier, Morocco. By then, Alfred Chester, from whom she was already somewhat estranged, was living in the city and was involved with a young Moroccan man, Driss Ben Hussein El Kasri.]
…
Ravi Shankar
The reason I’m not paranoid (but counter-paranoid, even) trusting, eternally surprised at the malice (Alfred, “Edward [Field]–Nadia [Gould]”) of people I haven’t harmed: I was (felt) profoundly neglected, ignored, unperceived as a child—perhaps always, until or with the exception of Irene—
Even persecution, hostility, envy seem to me, “au fond” [“at bottom”], more attention than I feel myself likely to receive. I trust the good intentions of strangers, acquaintances, and friends whom I have treated courteously because I can’t believe I matter that much to them—that they’re paying that much attention to me—to behave “back” otherwise than courteously. To be the subject of envious fantasy … who am I?!
Remember—how surprised I was that Irene even mentioned my existence to “Kate” last summer; that Alfred (just now) found me “important” enough in a letter to Edward to mention that I was coming to Tangier.
Alfred’s novel:
No time sequence, yet the narrative is sequential
No protagonist or central character, but an ensemble
…
Alfred:
Underneath the bully, the charmer, the wit, the sage, the betrayer—Tiresias, Oscar Wilde, Isidore—was this hysterical, ill-tempered child who cannot finish a sentence or answer a question or listen to what anyone else is saying.
Yet Alfred always was looking for an oracle (St. Stanislaus, Irene, Edward, Paul Bowles).
Now he has burnt his wig [Chester was entirely hairless] + talks about having a small cock + no pubic hair. He has always felt hideous, + now he talks about it, wants to talk of nothing else.
Was he ever wise? Or has he lost his wisdom? (It being a “number,” like his charm.) And he looks for “meaning” (“symbols,” romance) where there is none.—Pseudo-problems!
Like Susan T[aubes, who committed suicide in 1969 by drowning herself off Long Island; SS identified the body] not being able to concentrate on what someone is saying because she wants to understand what the connection is between that + the leaf at her feet—and she can’t.
Pseudo-problems!
Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
I couldn’t fall for Alfred as I am today—even if he were still what he was (+ no longer is). Because I respect myself now.
I always fell for the bullies—thinking, if they don’t find me so hot they must be great. Their rejection of me showed their superior qualities, their good taste. (Harriet, Alfred, Irene)
I didn’t respect myself. (Did I love myself?)
Now I have really known suffering. And I have survived. I am alone—unloved + w[ith]o[ut] someone to love—the thing I feared most in the world. I have touched bottom. And I survive.
Of course, I don’t love myself. (If I ever did!) How can I, when the one person I ever trusted has rejected me—the person I made the arbiter, + the creator, of my loveableness. I feel profoundly alone, cut off, unattractive—as I never did before. (How cocky + superficial I was!) I feel unloveable. But I respect that unloveable soldier—struggling to survive, struggling to be honest, just, honorable. I respect myself. I’ll never fall for the bullies again.
…
The Benefactor: “portrait of a prophet”!
