As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

by Susan Sontag

  Walked around the 16ème [arrondissement in Paris] with David, Elliott [Stein], [and] Louis looking at buildings by [Hector] Guimard, [Jules] Lavirotte, + [Charles] Klein.

  … Also Balzac’s house, apt. building by Mallet-Stevens, etc.

  …

  Novel: about paranoia + process of demystification: the scared, the social, the group, what binds

  …

  9/2/66

  Antibes > Monaco > Roquebrune-Cap-Martin (10th c. château / fort) > La Turbie (The Trophy of the Alps) > Antibes

  …

  9/10/66 Venice

  The Italian “gentilezza,” “civiltà” …

  The Ghetto: The tallest buildings in Venice (6, 7, 8 stories)—five synagogues—the plaque, its noble inscription to the victims of the Nazis on the wall of the main synagogue

  The two great living writers, Borges and Beckett

  Valéry: In the state of ineffability, “words fail.” Literature tries by “words” to create “the state of the failure of words.” (Instants, p. 162)

  La Bussière, “le mangeur de dossiers” [literally, “the eater of dossiers”]—clerk who saved Joséphine de Beauharnais, among others from the guillotine. (Shown in Gance’s Napoleon)

  [Undated, 1966]

  8000

  6085

  ____

  1915

  6085 copies of Against Interpretation have been sold 1915 copies of the first printing are left

  1967

  [In a number of SS’s journals, there are entries written on loose sheets of paper tucked into the notebooks. SS herself was often unclear as to the correct date of these sheets. The following entry is marked in SS’s hand “old note—1967?” On that basis I have reproduced it here.]

  Art is the general 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—poignancy.

  Their historicity?

  Their decay?

  Their veiled, mysterious, partly (and forever) inaccessible aspect?

  The fact that no one would (could?) ever do that again?

  Perhaps, then, works only become art. They are not art.

  And they become art when they are part of the past.

  (creating the past)

  Therefore, a contemporary work of art is a contradiction.

  We assimilate the present to the past. (Or is it something else? A gesture, a research, a cultural souvenir?)

  The poignancy of creating the past

  So much in life that can be enjoyed, once one gets over the nausea of the replicate.

  Duchamp: Readymades not as art but as a philosophical point about allowing “accidents,” about a work as “object.”

  4/11/67

  … Cocteau says: Primitives make beautiful things because they’ve never seen any others. Analogous to what I did as a child. I started thinking using my mind, because I’d never seen anyone do it. I didn’t think anyone had a mind except in the Pantheon (mostly dead, foreign)—Mme. Curie, Shakespeare, Mann, etc. Everyone else was like my mother, Rosie, Judith. If I’d known about the middle ground—all the intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive people, who knows? I might never have gone on + on + on with my mind. For partly I did that because I thought no one was taking care of that at all. The mind needed my help to survive.

  4/18/67

  Rosie: Like having an elephant in your living room. From the time I was born until the age of fourteen. And to think, at nineteen, I did that to David! (Just like Susan T[aubes]: what’s good for me is good enough for my children. Really: Should my children have it any better than I did?

  Rosie talking: like an endless stream of lava, like fallout. Imprinted on my head—the defilement of language, spoken and written.

  “nother,” etc.

  That’s what upset me about Irene’s not being able to spell.

  8/3/67 Fort de France [Martinique]

  Body images.

  A defended body, full of violence.

  A body defined by its constant struggle to cope with the pull of gravity. Struggling against the desire to sink down, lie down, fold up. Having to “will” being erect. (Spine, neck, etc.)

  Treating the “back” (of you) as if it’s not part of you: Sallie [Sears]. Like the back (rear wall) of a bookcase.

  8/6/67 Fort de France

  Future of fiction (prose narrative) to more + more say every-thing (suppressing the anecdotal, the particular?)

  Emphasizing art as an instrument of analysis (rather than of expression, statement, etc.)

  8/9/67

  … It’s all this that I’ve always been bent on—an accomplice in lies about myself, assenting to convenient self-reductions (to guard my secret of secrets). And scavenging—being cannibalistic in all my relations. Think of it! I’ll get this from [childhood friend] Merrill, this from Philip, this from Harriet, this from Irene, this from Annette, this from Joe, this from Barbara, etc. Gathering my treasure, I learn what they know, or I develop something through my connection with them (some talent in myself that they inspire)—then I take off. I know I haven’t taken anything from them (they have as much of it after I’m gone), but still I was feeding. I knew I knew more—was fitting it into a larger system to which they had no access.

  [In the margin:] as in [Henry James’s] The Sacred Fount

  Would I have wanted a companion? Yes. I did try with each in good faith, but then when I gave up I didn’t tell what I was doing.

  I tried hardest with Irene. But I found out it was hopeless: what I thought of (code) as her incapacity for “nobility.” Then the relationship became a lie. I had to reduce myself to just the psychological (the case-history) me to get what she had to give. The case-history me was absolutely authentic—what a relief, a blessing it was to express it—I had kept up so many lies on that front for so long. But it wasn’t all of me. I knew all the time there was a transcendental ego that had survived alongside the damaged ego of my childhood that became enslaved to Irene’s ministrations—and that ego Irene couldn’t understand, or join, or love.

  I had to become dumb (with Irene) to become smart. I wanted her wisdom—to ingest it, to make it mine—as part of a larger sum. But I knew I had access to it only as an idiot, a client, a suppliant, a dependent. All of which I knew I was anyway—so what was the harm or the lie? But there was harm, of course. And a lie too. For I wasn’t strong enough for my own game, almost did collapse when she withdrew her tyrannical support. I was always acting in bad faith. (But could I have done otherwise? Ah, I don’t think so.)

  Case-history stuff:

  For Eva [Berliner], the world is over-populated things + people plus their hallucinatory doubles (the object is both a tie and a garden hose). Things and people (especially parts of the body) always fraught with the possibility of metamorphosis into demonic creatures.

  Some results:

  The tilted, wary walk—as if she’s always looking behind her—and / or can’t put her weight fully on the ground

  The tilt of the head—looking at you sideways (“What am I going to see?”)

  Perpetual blanking-out—not seeing a lot that passes before her field of vision. Being “unobservant” (as Gert [Berliner, Eva’s former husband; a painter and photographer] apparently used to call it) or only intermittently or unsystematically observant.

  Reading-block—fear of reading as stimulus to fantasy, fear of making a “mistake” about what she’s read.

  Hence, too, slowness in reading—having to vocalize internally as she takes in words with her eyes, double checking that it is what it is.

  [In the margin:] Resistance to absorbing information, knowledge—because this is felt to be to “general”—knowing = knowing something particular, a part (?)

  Trouble sometimes in following movies—because she looks away or blanks out fairly often (when images threaten to metamorphose)

  Complex systems of mistrust of people: never confident that t
heir essence is stable, even perceptually. (What she thought was Uri [her son] coming in the door might be a dragon; [her friend] Joan’s face might turn into a disembodied, obscene mouth)

  Physical clumsiness. Because of not feeling at home with “things,” being able to take them for granted + therefore handle them casually, probingly, authoritatively. (Again, because of their subliminal hallucinatory aura.) Inevitably sexual clumsiness, too.

  Her gifts for observing + sensing of other people’s feelings compromised by 1) anxiety about their reality (solipsistic universe—they’re all actors in a play I wrote) and 2) anxiety about reliability of her own perceptual apparatus (requiring a supplementary move: If I were she, what I would be feeling is …)

  Feeling of discontinuity as a person. My various selves—woman, mother, teacher, lover, etc.—how do they all come together? And anxiety at moments of transition from one “role” to another. Will I make it fifteen minutes from now? Be able to step into, inhabit that person I’m supposed to be? This is felt as an infinitely hazardous leap, no matter how often it’s successfully executed.

  More general form of this: mistrust (partly “well-founded”) of her ability to make a “commitment” to another person

  From all this (there’s much more) one can infer:

  Brutal assault on her ego, her self-esteem, as a young child. Her mother’s insecurity, competitiveness with a bright daughter—

  The “contract” Eva made with her mother—she was the earthy, sensitive, creative one; while Eva had more brains, cleverness. But then her father cut her down there. She wanted to be good in school—to please her mother by fulfilling that role set out for her—but also not to do well—because she rightly hated her mother for this limiting definition of her, wanted to frustrate her mother.

  If a child feels the parent wants to do him in, he gets news of a hostile persecuting universe from which he must defend himself—also must placate the parent—also must deal with his own rage and sense of impotence. Ultimately the child has no ego but what is confirmed by the parents; if they don’t love you it must be because they think you’re bad, you must be—they can’t be wrong. So you think you’re bad but you hate them anyway for not loving you—which produces guilt, because they’re good. So you start to punish yourself, which reduces the feeling of hate (some of it is now turned against yourself, siding with them) + makes it possible to love them more—personal love.

  In Eva’s case, the hallucinatory “other world” always breaking in on this one (in fantasies, flash hallucinations) is:

  A symbolic statement, an iconography, of her hostile judgments of people around her (originally the parents)

  A form of self-punishment—she “haunts” herself or has herself haunted—for these bad feelings

  A symbolic imagining of the retaliation of the others, if they knew her true feelings

  The hallucinatory images must have originated from an experience of her parents as persecutory, demonic—she “caricatures” them; these images are a form of wit—but then was extended or generalized to the whole world, so that a tree or a shadow or a chair can become a monster. But one couldn’t have a primary experience of the whole world (the perceptual field) as demonic. First persons. Indeed, first of a part of a person—the mother’s breast.

  (The perception of the world begins synecdochally—seeing parts for wholes. The structure of true learning would be finding truer + truer wholes, w[ith]o[ut] losing the concrete perception of parts.)

  Seeing parts of a body (a form of flash-hallucination, the Brobdingnagian vision) is a form of aggression, as Vera [Eva’s psychotherapist] said to her. She caricatures the person by dismembering him, reducing him, putting him in his place; also scaring herself, giving herself license for anxiety, self-contempt, withdrawal. Simultaneously she disarms the person and makes him more threatening than before. A microcosm of the vision she must have turned on her parents—

  The generalization of hallucinations about persons to the whole world of things also serves a double purpose:

  It dilutes the accusation against her parents—it’s not just them, it’s the whole world

  It steps up the self-punishment, the cost to her in sense of wholeness.

  Thereby, reducing guilt. She is less guilty because she doesn’t accuse them that much, or single them out. (She does it other people, to things, etc.) And because she suffers more.

  But the generalized need to suffer remains. The price of that original hatred of them never seems to be paid off. Hence, masochistic fantasies—which also fit into a more specifically sexual pattern whereby one needs to feel forced—to feel one has no choice—in order to allow sexual sensation.

  Earlier, she told me, the principal weapon of self defense was mockery. Could never say anything “straight.” Fear of rejection, “betrayal.” If I show you my true feelings, you won’t love me [there’s a question mark in the margin]—you’ll mock me—reject my gift. So I’ll beat you to it. I’ll mock you.

  A kind of braininess—but at the same time, one that she would mistrust. Experiencing her mind mainly as a means of aggression, as a weapon turned against other people, she w[oul]d want to get rid of her mind. Becoming mindless becomes equated with the ability (the freedom) to love. Hence, Gert. (Becoming a “real woman,” etc.)

  Joan gave Eva enough love to permit her to dare to speak “straight”—w[ith]o[ut] mockery.

  Hence, Joan told Eva she’d make a human being out of her. And Eva acknowledged that to be true. And still somewhere fears to break with Joan, as if the license to be human might be revoked then. (Magical thinking which plays only a part in her tie to Joan, but shouldn’t be discounted.)

  (Some analogues to this in my tie to Irene.)

  …

  To transcend the “bad” seeing that I’ve always been aware of, that’s always made me feel guilty.

  I’ve always been “hiding behind my eyes.” (Lillian Kesler saw this last year at Richard + Sandy’s. [SS’s friends, the poet and translator Richard Howard, to whom she remained close throughout her life, and his then partner, the novelist Sanford Friedman.]) Because I wanted to see but for it not to be known how much I see—the others will hold it against me—and not to tell what I see, at least only part of it.

  But why will they hold it against me? Because they’d know I’m seeing past them—at my most benevolent, still locating them in a scheme I believe I can (or do) transcend; and, often, seeing their failures, their weaknesses. Shriveling them up—to a dried out piece of bacon (my dream about my mother) or a tiny well-done meatball.

  But this isn’t all—or I do myself (the self I’ve been up to now) an injustice. I also see, I have an awful gift for seeing people’s unhappiness. A talent I developed as a child with my mother. She invited it, of course. It was a way of getting my love, which probably wasn’t, in the circumstances, readily forthcoming. She showed me her misery + weakness. I pitied her—and it gave me a reason to love her (a means, the imperative I sought) to transcend and suppress my hatred of and resentment toward her. But it also made me—underneath—despise her, and despise myself. It created an unbridgeable distance between us. I would adore her and pity her and exercise my empathic powers upon her and forbear to burden such a weak vessel with my needs and my anger. I would be kind, I would be generous. But I also became her superior. I was the stronger. I had needs, but was strong enough not to ask or expect her (or anyone else) to satisfy them. And, with my own needs unsatisfied, except by myself, I could even try to satisfy hers. So I also was patronizing her—much as I feared her anger (living in constant terror that she would withdraw suddenly + arbitrarily from this bargain, calling in even the shoddy semblance of reliable affection for me it guaranteed). I also scorned her. And so, in a perverse way, I was the willing accomplice in a relation with her in which she was satisfying a subsequent need of mine. What became a very powerful need—to become strong; to feel, to know myself (whatever the outward appearance, the cringing, the thralldoms) stronger than �
�the others.”