As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

by Susan Sontag

  So, destroying her—cutting her down—would defeat my purpose, which was to build her up.

  And hadn’t I pledged to be a grown-up—she said she didn’t like children—which meant that I forfeited the right to express “childish” needs or reproach her for “letting me down” in the mother-role.

  I feared her—I patronized her—she was afraid of me—I cringed to become “smaller,” to hide more of myself so I wouldn’t appear threatening to her—doing that, I despised her and I despised myself (for my cowardice, my neediness, my lies)—she came closer to me—then I backed away, into my private pleasures (the mind, my fantasies, books, my projects)—then she reproached me for being old + hardhearted + selfish—then I was overcome with guilt + remorse for having forgotten myself (!), for having let her down—then an orgy of fearful criticism of me + my vows to improve—she forgives me, I’m happy, I feel good, I start my program of “being good” (being more attentive to her, producing a me she can like)—but the rewards for this aren’t as great as I’d hoped, or I get tired of them—my attention wanes or I get distracted or I become cocky and get “fresh”—then she gets fiercely angry, slaps me, shuts the door against me, won’t talk to me for days—I’m in agony, usually not understanding exactly what it is I’ve done, i.e. what she’s mad about, but she often makes me wait in torment + suspense for hours or days—then, often quite arbitrarily, it seems to be over—I never felt I could change my mother’s mind when she was angry, when she truly set her mind to being angry nothing could move her (which is why I gave up tantrums at such an early age—they got me nowhere). Only she could call her anger off, when she mysteriously pleased. So anger was the one emotion I could affect by my ruses and manipulations of myself + her. Anger had a life of its own. Therefore, her anger was at all times to be headed off. (My anger I knew in advance to be totally lacking in efficacity!) Anything but anger—any substitute, any dishonesty. But still, I remained terribly afraid of her—of those mostly unaccountable rages. (I knew I must have provoked them, but I never meant to—I felt I’d been careless, inattentive, stupid for a moment, I slipped, it was like a mistake; I would be more careful next time.)

  Also, I despised myself for my fear of my mother’s anger. For my uncontrollable cringing + crying when she raised her hand to strike me. (My fantasies during the war of being captured by the Nazis or Japs and remaining steadfast + stoical under torture. The stoicism I cultivated for the weekly injections + when I was in bed with the asthma—balm to my crippled self-esteem. I was brave, I could take it.)

  I didn’t feel, deep down, my mother ever liked me. How could she? She didn’t “see” me. She believed what I showed her of myself (that carefully doctored version). I felt she needed me, that’s all. Faced with her repeated absences and trips, I encouraged that; I strove to make a “me” for her she could need, someone she could rely on more and more. Some of the time, that is. Other times, she didn’t seem to need me at all + I was cast down with shame, with a sense of humiliation at my own presumption. And other times, when she needed me without my having tried to elicit anything from her, I felt oppressed; tried to edge away, pretending I didn’t notice her appeal.

  One of the things I felt pleased my mother was an erotic admiration. She played at flirting with me, turning me on; I played at being turned on (+ was turned on by her, too). Thereby, I pleased her—and I somehow triumphed over the boyfriends in the background who claimed her time, if not her deep feeling (as she repeatedly told me). She was “feminine” with me; I played the shy adoring boy with her. I was delicate; the boyfriends were gross. I also played at being in love with her (as when I copied things from Little Lord Fauntleroy, which I read when I was 8 or 9, like calling her “Darling.”)

  Since, in some sense, I was also my mother’s mother (and my sister) I had from an early age—10 or so—a strong compensatory fantasy; my own future motherhood

  [In the margin:] Wasn’t it later?

  I would have a boy-child—David. I would be a real mother. And no more female children. This was a fantasy about getting out of childhood, attaining a real adulthood; freedom, Also a fantasy about giving birth to myself—I was both myself as the mother (a good mother) and the beautiful gratified child.

  The old puzzle: I “see” someone. But then how can that person “see” me?

  If I see someone, I’m stronger (wiser) than he? Seeing him, I must be “more” than he is. Then how can he, at the same time, being weaker (dumber) ever see me? He might think he can, but he’s wrong. He sees only a part of me.

  This was the problem with Irene, + with Diana. Since I thought they could see me, I’d ruled out the possibility of my seeing (dissecting, appraising, interpreting, figuring out, judging) them.

  Is my “look” always aggressive, act of hostility against the other? No. But it is never “less” than an act of self-affirmation, an active experience of my own strength.

  But I’ve experienced my strength (my mind, my eyes, my intellectual passions) as condemning me to perpetual isolation, separation from others. I must become “weak” to get close to them (so they’ll let me get close to them). Or I must pump them up, fill them with substance, make them “stronger.”

  [In the margin:] Either way, closing the gap. My long series of pedagogic relationships—not to perpetuate the master–pupil relationship but to create a company of peers for myself.

  Always the frustrating sense of the disparity between my energies, my ambitions, and those of other people. The others setting such low goals for themselves, so easily tired, so lacking in vitality.

  In my primal landscape, there are other people besides myself. I’m not a solipsist, like Eva; I’ve never been tempted by the fantasy that the world is something I make up in my head, that other people aren’t really real as I am, that they’re all reading from a script that I wrote. No, the people are there—and real. But that’s all. They’re all minimal people, almost inert, barely alive or feeling or thinking. I have to teach them how to think + how to live so I’ll have someone to talk to, someone to like, someone to admire. I have to pump them up—like blowing air into balloons. No, not really. The substance, to be convincing, must be dense, heavy, tightly packed. They’re too lazy to do it for themselves. I’m sure they could if they would, if they really tried. But they don’t seem impelled by the kind of vision + energy that impels me.

  8/12/67

  My fascination (almost obsession) with the theme of psychological vampirism. Exchanges of energy. Good + bad vibrations and emanations.

  Eva’s proposal for a telegram to be sent to Irene. Guilt production called off. Last delivery made yesterday. Factory bought out by munitions cartel.

  My feeling of being “seconds.” That was too radical a conversion of my being; I violated myself; it wasn’t organic, it was too much an act of will (me leaping ahead, hoping the rest of me with all the baggage would in good time follow after, catch up). It still feels “inauthentic” somewhere to me. It wasn’t my destiny, my native language. I expatriated myself. My choice, of course; but somewhere I know I’m speaking a foreign language.

  Irene the author, sponsor, + therefore guarantor of my new being. My panic when she withdrew her sponsorship. My deep conviction that she must continue to sponsor me, to certify me.

  But I must grasp that she didn’t invent the system, though she’s a very able exponent of it.

  And the mystery of her giving most of it up in the last four years. Calling the system into question? But how can one (she) give it up? She’s fishing; she’s doing that to punish me, to make me feel guilty—an act of revenge. So I feel I’ve vampirized her. The gift is poisoned. I become immobilized. I start manufacturing + delivering my buckets of guilt—as penance, as restitution, as a way of placating her. But she won’t be appeased. (For a while, the lure that she might come back to me if I was guilty “enough,” proving that I took all the responsibility on myself, that I had gained “nothing” by our exchange in the way of self-confidence, self-affirmatio
n.)

  [In the margin:] until 2 summers ago

  I had been my mother’s iron lung. I wanted someone to be an iron lung to me. (Therefore, the project of building Irene up—her ego, her mind—so she could assume this role.) An end to the covert feeling from other people’s energies + gifts, all that while making sure I “gave” more than I “took.” Instead, an open + avowed apprenticeship in which I was not entitled to a “just” return, to anything reciprocal; because the terms of the situation were that my gifts were useless, stupid. My gifts were all potential; my return was all in the future.

  What I have to see is not just Irene’s natural gifts (her being a native-born citizen in the country to whose citizenship I aspired) but the fact that those gifts had become corrupted—and that this must have happened long before Irene + I met. From the time she got involved with the Village Voice ([Ed] Fancher, Dan Wolf [co-founders of the paper with Norman Mailer] then Mailer, Alfred [Chester], [the American artist] Barbara Bank, Harriet [Sohmers], etc. Being the Cuban sex-pot to the neurotic desexualized Jewish intellectuals. Mrs D. H. Lawrence bringing the enlightenment of carnality + true feeling to the urban casualties. Irene learned she could exploit her gifts, that they were a property, that they had a “value,” a high value, in the human marketplace.

  Irene falling down from our fine flights of intellectual fantasy with a paranoid thud whenever a hint of ethical demand entered (as it naturally did for me).

  The project of demythologizing Irene. Alongside the project of resolving her hold on me in the mythic terms in which it’s also, truly, posed.

  Irene demanding to be described as “innocent”—refusing to be described as “good” (my offer). She wanted to be absolved of any ultimate responsibility for her acts. In a way, she insults herself … At that time, of course, I didn’t understand any of that, any of what was at stake. I only knew (felt), dimly, dumbly, that it was so much better (bigger) to be thought “good” than “innocent.” Good means you have knowledge, and yet “still” are good. I couldn’t understand why she was refusing to be praised more than she wished to be praised, why she was refusing my greater tribute, what she wanted from me when she insisted that I find her innocent instead. (For me, “good” had everything good in being innocent and more.)

  [In the margin:] in a taxi coming home from a 10 am Saturday screening at MoMA

  When Irene + I came together, I promised always to find her “marvelous.” That was one of the terms of our contract, and any violation of that was a betrayal, an assault, a rejection. But think what one would have to be (what condition of one’s ego, etc.) to make that a condition of a relation. Limiting the free exercise of the other person’s mind.

  And how it fitted into my neurotic set. How I’d always wanted, longed to find someone marvelous! All my life. And no one had ever helped me enough (made me) do it. No one had ever explicitly denied me the right to “see” them, to stand at a distance from them, to understand them, to find fault with them. Everyone (I knew) always wanted, somewhere to be seen, to be understood. (Even my mother, even Philip.) Now, I longed for that interdiction! (Don’t see me. I’ll see you.) For someone with the arrogance, the certitude, the talent to enforce it.

  All dreams are model self-analyses. Poor dreams are the simple-minded statements or analyses of one’s “problem.” The good dream is the more complex, the least reductive statement or dramatization. (Versus the common idea that a good dream is one in which you triumph, behave well, wake up … feeling happy etc.) The important part of the dream is the analytic statement, not the narrative resolution.

  My two model landscapes: the desert (dry, harsh, empty, hot) and the tropics (wet, full, even over-full, hot). A polarity but with one thing in common—a uniform year-round single hot climate. My “surprise” at the round of seasons (feeling it’s something contingent, almost a “mistake” each time winter comes round in New York). My fear of (refusal of) the cold being more profound, more absolute than my anxiety over the empty, “le vide.”

  This is a major ingredient in my swimming phobia. Fear of immersion in the ocean as something cold. My mother’s model interior landscape—hardly anything at all of nature, except that it should be warm (to be in a light dress, or get in a bathing suit). It’s a Grand Hotel. Bedroom, large bathroom, bar with dance floor, restaurant, terrace, swimming pool, maybe a golf course. Going back + forth between these places, which are close together. The continual guaranteed presence of “service,” the situation of being served. Absolving her of the pressure of the demand to be more energetic, autonomous; to do for herself—+ others (like me). What is laziness or indolence at home doesn’t count as that in a resort hotel. Also, the bland neutralized genteel kinds of contacts you have in a hotel. The system of decorum which is “given”; she doesn’t have to ask for it, to create it, to be continually anxious about its being violated. She knows how to behave; presumably the others know how to behave, too, or they wouldn’t (wouldn’t dare) be here; they’ve signed a contract to behave, as it were, before they checked in. A process of self-selection; elimination of riffraff.

  As Eva pointed out, if I hadn’t made the grand switch from “Kant” to “Mrs. D. H. Lawrence,” I would never have been able to write fiction.

  The first, and absolutely essential step was—of course—to end my marriage. My life with Philip was chosen + designed to be the context in which I would go further + further along the “Kant” road. The right kind of gratifications + the right kind of deprivations. It was really, in its own terms, an immense success + showed great judgment on my part.

  The trial run for the “new being” was Harriet. To get through some of the “objective” blocks (my social inhibitions + snobberies, my worldy ignorance + lack of sophistication).

  Then came the true initiation—by Irene. The transformation of my subjectivity.

  If the outside corresponded to the inner life in people, we couldn’t have “bodies” as we do. The inner life is too complex, too various, too fluid. Our bodies incarnate only a fraction of our inner lives. (The legitimate basis for the paranoid endless anxiety about what’s “behind” the appearances.) Given that they would still have inner lives of the energy + complexity that they have now, the bodies of people would have to be more like gas—something gaseous yet tangible-looking like clouds. Then our bodies could metamorphose rapidly, expand, contract—a part could break off, we could fragment, fuse, collide, accumulate, vanish, rematerialize, swell up, thin out, thicken, etc. etc. As it is, we’re stuck with a soft but still largely determinate (especially determinate with regard to size + dimension + shape) material presence in the world—almost wholly inadequate to these processes which then become “inner” processes. (i.e., far from wholly manifested, needing to be discovered, inferred; capable of being hidden, etc.) Our bodies become vessels, then—and masks. Since we can’t expand + contract (our bodies), we stiffen them a lot—inscribe tension on them. Which becomes a habit—becomes installed, to then re-influence the “inner life.” The phenomenon of character armor that [the Austrian psychologist Wilhelm] Reich focused on.

  An imperfect design! An imperfect being!

  Of course, maybe we wouldn’t have so much subjectivity if the “outer” were better designed to register the interior life. Maybe subjectivity as we experience it (all the pressure, the force, the energy, the passion of it) is precisely the result of this “confinement” inside our being. (Like the pressure build up when a gas is heated up inside a sealed metal container.)

  (Is this the purpose of the disparity—the good of it? But that’s too Panglossian a thought.)

  Of course, it is. That’s what all the sages have known—+ when the demand of a reconciliation of “inner” and “outer,” they always posit a subjectivity which seems (compared with what we have at its best) radically depleted, bland, monotonous, empty. Plato, the Gnostic vision, Hesse’s bead game community, etc.

  That’s why the angels have no bodies (or they have “angelic” bodies)—not, mainly o
ut of (Christian-)neurotic aversion to the flesh.

  The source (on my side) of the guilt I feel in relation to Irene: that I acted, from the beginning, in bad faith—I never “really” gave up everything, never really abased myself, never really thought I was stupid (as she demanded).

  Over-arching the whole question of the “first self” versus the “second self” (my new being, into which Irene initiated me) was the larger framework: the visionary self was never questioned. The issue on which I involved myself with Irene was “only” that of what concrete style of consciousness. Somewhere, partly knowing it and partly not, I was cheating. I was going to, I intended to “use” her knowledge as she could never use it (absence of “nobility,” etc.) as she could never put it to use. I had a (larger—) framework in which to situate her wisdom. So I apprenticed myself to her—wholeheartedly, true. Even when I came to realize it meant humiliating myself, rendering up my mind, pronouncing it incompetent + shallow + death-ridden + no instrument for proper life—I did all that, not without struggle but in the end, I did it. Yet all the while I knew there was “more.” More to “me.” More would come after—when I had her wisdom, when I had ingested it + made it mine.