As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh
Page 10
Moroccan whose throat was cut lying on his back at dawn in the back of a tea-shop in the Medina: someone had put fig leaves on his neck to cover the wound
The infinite sadness of the Villa de France dining room—“Moroccan” décor, Hungarian 3-man combo (piano, violin, man who doubles on bass + xylophone). “French cuisine,” stiff lower-middle class English tourists plus freaks (the mad, red-faced German woman with glasses who eats alone + complains about the food; the two American men, one about 4’8” with a huge head, the other tall, crew-cut + glasses, prematurely middle-aged like an ass[istan]t prof. at some cow college) —the whole scene like a 2nd class dining room on the Carpathia mid-1930’s. The slim Moroccan waiters wearing fez who speak to you in bad French—
An old lady of 70: One of the Alexandria crowd who came here when Egypt went modern 10 years ago—
One of the reasons I couldn’t not have a job + just write (as Alfred did in NY) is that I can’t stand to ask, to become indebted to people—as one does, when one begs, borrows, + steals to live. Need to be independent, i.e. not to trust. Not just middle-class timidity—
Verbs: ducked, spreading, bolted, humored, shoved, flopping, shook, shimmied, trailed behind, shooting out, heaving, splurting, clattering, sparked off, clutching, hissed, clicked his tongue (Sp[anish]), his breast swelled, sparkle, charge, sniffed, slithered, gnawed, seeped …
…
Puvis de Chavannes painting in the Panthéon (Paris)
How much sh[oul]d artist know? (with Noël in Corsica)
Self-consciousness vs. tabula rasa—Wittgenstein, etc.
Dostoyevsky thought Eugène Sue was a great writer—can one now?
Films of George Cukor … [A complete list follows.]
Rhyming slang (Cockney): Hamsteads = Hampstead Heath = teeth, fire alarms + charms, arms, German bands + hands, loaf of bread + dead
…
Tangier—People looking for an experience of radical dépaysement [“disorientation”], in which context they can give full vent to forbidden addictions (boys, drugs, liquor)
If you flip, everyone is sympathetic but basically indifferent. It’s your responsibility—Isn’t that what you came for? Every man for himself—
I felt I had wandered into Charenton [the insane asylum on the outskirts of Paris where de Sade was held]. Never felt as alien, astonished, revolted, fascinated—completely “dépaysé” [“disoriented” ]—since that first weekend with Harriet in S[an] F[rancisco] when I was 16
Communism—by definition—rules out the possibility of “dépaysement.” No strangeness. (No alienation—it’s explained away, something to be overcome.) All men are alike, brothers.
Never realized how much conceptualization I take for granted in ordinary conversation, until I talked to Driss. “How long has Alfred been this way?” involves “how long” and “this way”
Under majoring + pot, everything happens twice. You say something, then you hear yourself say it.
…
Send Noël:
[Erich Auerbach] Mimesis
Eliade, Yoga
Thomas gospel
Stations
[Wittgenstein] Philosophical Investigations
…
Novels about erotic obsession: Balzac, La Fille aux Yeux d’Or, Louÿs, La Femme et le Pantin, Rachilde, Monsieur Venus (Raoule the demented successor of Mathilde in [Stendhal’s] Le Rouge et le Noir)
Where to place [Théophile Gautier’s] Mlle. de Maupin?
9/16/65 Paris
The main techniques for refuting an argument:
Find the inconsistency
Find the counter-example
Find a wider context
Instance of (3):
I am against censorship. In all forms. Not just for the right of masterpieces—high art—to be scandalous.
But what about pornography (commercial)?
Find the wider context:
notion of voluptuousness à la Bataille?
But what about children? Not even for them? Horror comics, etc.
Why forbid them comics when they can read worse things in the newspapers any day. Napalm bombing in Vietnam, etc.
A just/discriminating censorship is impossible.
9/9/65 Tangier
[This notebook has a photo of Virginia Woolf taped on the first page, with Webern quoting Friedrich Hölderlin’s phrase “to live is to defend a form” on the second, and on the third a photo of the dancer Rudolf Nureyev, with the words “lived by a bridge, a tunnel” written under it.]
Guaon, Jellalah, Ishiwa, Hamacha >>> Trance-groups (cults, each with their separate santo)
Jellalah (or Djellalah): 12 in all, 9 men + 3 women
At the height of the dance (sometimes), they embrace cactus trees, pick up (eat?) hot coals, drink blood, tear apart live chickens + eat them, whip themselves or cut themselves with knives
One of the women put a gag in her mouth
One retched, had spasms after, another sobbed.—In severe cases, a massage; if that doesn’t work, artificial respiration—and a glass of water
One woman, after, saluted everyone in the room with a smile and a kiss. (Grateful?)
The first woman to “go in” was embraced—(women take care of women, and men …)—then people got gradually less affectionate and solicitous with each other
Man (Negro) who shaves his head, who took off his white turban + kept wiping his head. (Sitting on the floor.)
Long grey garment on women
She undressed her from behind w[ith]o[ut] impeding her movements.
3 possibilities:
an independent story or novella—“The Dance”—about an event + someone watching it + trying to interpret it (like in [Kafka’s] “The Penal Colony”)*
Part II of “The Organization”—the antithesis to the Jews of Part I (i.e. a substitute for or alternative to the Org) [SS wrote a story called “The Organization” and during the mid-1960s considered making it the foundation of a novel based in some degree at least on the Gurdjieffian circles she encountered in London through the British theater director Peter Brook and the American actress Irene Worth.]
An interpolation—someone tells a story—in the novel about T[homas] F[aulk]
*an onlooker who wonders:
1. Is it art?
2. No, it’s psychotherapy
3. No, it’s sex
4. No, it’s religion
5. No, it’s commerce, entertainment
6. Or is it a game?
12 players
Each has his own rhythm (all the rhythms are very similar, have the same root—: can tease—who’s It?
It’s your turn. They push her forward.
Why does she go back a second time?
not enough—needs more (like medicine)
the group is punishing her—makes her go through it a second time (can’t escape)
showing-off, competition as to who’s toughest gluttony
Can do several things with this:
Once told from the outside—another time (“The Dance”) from the inside
What hero of “Org” sees in Part II is one of the many interpretations raised by spectator in “The Dance”
[Here, SS returns to the dance she saw in Tangier, though it is not clear where the description of what she witnessed ends and the sketch of a work of fiction begins.]
Dancer may “turn down” one instrument (e.g. hand cymbals) and move in close—bury her head between the flutes.
They’re playing for her; they exchange knowing glances—they feel their power—they “have” her.
Sometimes they seem to take to take pity and a less violent interlude for a moment—
Her eyes are closed—her mouth hung open.
She wore no brassiere—
Under the handsome grey djellabah was a red-striped Rif wraparound. Was she ashamed?
I thought she was going to kiss her and she did—
They’re pleased with themselves—
They burn i
ncense (jawi) + hold the pot under the dancer’s nostrils. Actually, there are two types of incense—one stronger, + more expensive, than the other. Does it or does it not intoxicate?
They’re talking about groceries—while he “goes in”; it’s not their rhythm. A moment ago …
At many points the spectator feels sexually excited.
They’re praising the saint, someone tells him
9/17/65 Paris
[Bataille’s] Mme Edwarda not just a récit [the word “work” is crossed out in the entry] with a preface but a two-part work: essay and récit.
Barthes, Michelet
Honor. Honor. Honor. To be at one’s best all the time (like Léon Morin [in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1961 film, Léon Morin, Prêtre]).
The American bitch
The woman whose higher ethical standards the man must eventually accede to, to be “worthy” of her love. (As in Fritz Lang’s Fury, Spencer Tracy + Sylvia Sidney)
Two types of women, uniquely American myths
9/17/65 (on plane to NY)
Ideal, for Hemingway: “grace under pressure”
Sartre: “When people’s opinions are so different, how can they even go to a film together?”
[Simone de] Beauvoir: “To smile at opponents and friends alike is to abase one’s commitments to the status of mere opinions, and all intellectuals, whether of the Right or Left, to their common bourgeois condition.”
Compare:
Grief cannot be converted into any other currency
There is no currency with which personal grief may be converted
9/22/65 NY
How to end chapter I:
T[homas] F[aulk] has vision of sister as a mannequin or dummy
…
Baroque style: the conceit
[Richard] Crashaw (poetry)
[Gian Lorenzo] Bernini (sculpture)—cf. St. Theresa
10/4/65
Go from black + white to color (films):
[Michael Powell,] Stairway to Heaven
[Akira Kurosawa,] High and Low—yellow smoke
[Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker,] Jack the Ripper—blood
[Samuel Fuller,] Shock Corridor
[Joris] Ivens, A Valparaiso 2/3 [in black and white] > blood > 1/3 [in color]
[Sergei Eisenstein,] Ivan the Terrible, Part II
[Alain Resnais,] Night and Fog
[Michael Powell,] Peeping Tom (color film; memory [black-and-white] shots are in the past)
[The next film entry is prefaced by SS’s annotation “added, June, 1966”:]
[Sergei] Paradjanov, The Horses of Fire [aka Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors]
Work out principle in each case
Conversation with Paul [Thek] at Ratner’s [an all-night delicatessen in New York’s East Village that was popular in the 1960s]
T[homas] F[aulk]’s work:
The inside + the outside
—a caterpillar
—the form of a caterpillar, but the skin not organic (like a case, a box) + bright, polychrome
Metamorphosis
—faces, made of wax—verisimilitude?
Sprouting hair, in the process of turning into the Wolf-Man —serpent forms—huge—yet mechanized
An art which is sadistic toward the object (imprisoning it) rather than the audience
Putting the subject behind bars—connection with voyeurism, repressed sexual sadism
[Here, SS returns to the Thomas Faulk project:]
T.F. likes to look at freaks, atrocity photos, etc.
[In passing, SS notes:] Every art incarnates a sexual fantasy—
T.F. is not acting in the gap between art + life, but adding to “life”—taking up the possible unfulfilled options on an imaginary scale or gamut—like a man with a chromium collar + gills from his shoulders (cf. Burroughs’ space men, The Ticket That Exploded)
“It doesn’t exist, therefore I make it”
Legalism of American society:
Final appeal: “It’s the law,” and it works. Appeal to law substitutes for appeal to tradition, authority of a social class, etc. And in no other country do the courts—Esp[ecially] a Supreme Court—have so much power.
There is no message in this novel [“Thomas Faulk”], but rather (as Valéry said of certain of certain of Glück’s operas) a perfect “mechanism to move the emotions.”
Dist[inguish] sensation + emotion
[Next to this entry, SS wrote two question marks.] “new novels are Humean, atomistic in the wrong way”
…
Camus (Notebooks, Vol. II): “Is there a tragic dillettante-ism?”
What moves me most in art (in life): nobility. This is what I love most in [the films of the French director Robert] Bresson—his concern with man as noble being.
For “T.F.”: The elevation + equanimity of Sartre’s essay on [Paul] Nizan
I realize, rereading that essay, how important Sartre has been for me. He is the model—that abundance, that lucidity, that knowingness. And the bad taste.
…
10/13/65
Two arguments against discussing formal nature of art + against “art” concept itself (as taken for granted in my Style essay)
…
10/15/65
Get Poe stories!
Attrition of success: dispersion of energies
The catastrophe (for an artist) of having a retrospective; all his subsequent works become posthumous
work of art as a game
conceptual paradoxes in modern painting
Critic: using up his sensibility
The critic + the Creative Artist—two different stances. One cultivates his objectivity (knowledge), the other his subjectivity (ignorance?). The critic subjects himself, allows himself to be bombarded by contradictory stimuli. He has to remain open, yet one w-o-a [work of art] may cancel another out
Try to see [1964’s Tomb of] Ligeia ([Roger] Corman) + [1933’s Mystery of] the Wax Museum (original version + remake [André de Toth’s 1953 House of Wax] w[ith] Vincent Price):
Wax w[ith]o[ut] armature melts man w[ith] a handsome face—tries to rape a girl—she claws at his face—it peels off—underneath, a monster
10/17/65
The energy of [the twentieth-century Italian writer Carlo Emilio] Gadda—+ the sexuality of his response to people
Have I done all the living I’m going to do? A spectator now, calming down. Going to bed with the New York Times. Yet I thank God for this relative peace—resignation. Meanwhile the terror underneath grows, consolidates itself. How does anyone love?