As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

by Susan Sontag

  She doesn’t draw conclusions—in a general way—from her actions, though they do, of course, tell her the state of particular feelings and capacities at a specific time. This produces her belief in the openness (and unpredictability) of the future.

  I know the future is open and unpredictable. My style, though, is to want to close it—to make it predictable—at least the immediate future (3 months, 6 months, a year) or the longer future with respect to my most intimate relations. A completely open, unpredictable future makes me horribly anxious. I can’t imagine how I will function (because I assume functioning in an effective, creative—not blundering—way entails making plans). Of course, I’m fairly confident that I could function somehow—but on a lower level—even if I have no certainties before me. But it has never really occurred to me, I now realize, that this is anything but an undesirable (and, in the case of love, extremely painful and destructive) limitation. It’s as if I’m supposed to walk through a forest without being allowed to inform myself whether or not it’s full of wolves. Sure, I’ll cross the forest anyway—but it seems just stupid, a pointless risk, that I wasn’t allowed to inform myself first, when I know the information is available.

  [There are two vertical lines next to this sentence in the margin. ] Only now do I see the limits of my view of life—how carefully I limit surprise, risk-taking, unanticipated sources of change.

  The fact is that I have been unusually loose and open to risk-taking in matters of work—tolerant and relatively anxiety-free in work situations that seem to arouse intolerable amounts of anxiety and insecurity in most other people. But I have been so damned cautious, self-protective, uninventive, anxiety-prone, and needful of reassurance in matters of love. I am so very much more cool, loose, adventurous in work than in love. So much more inventive. So easily convinced that if “this” doesn’t work out, something else will—that there’s always “more.” Just what I don’t feel about people—whether friends or lovers.

  [In the margin:] “scarcity economy of love.”

  I relate my actions to each other. (I’m doing it now.) I draw conclusions from my actions, not just retrospectively, but at the time I perform them. I generalize from them easily. Of course, I often change my opinion—and revise my generalizations—but that form of thought remains habitual (I won’t say “natural”) with me.

  Carlotta tends to particularize. Her generalizations are weak, vague (being “weak,” “decadent,” “dependent”) and don’t truly adhere to—or flow from a considered estimate of—her actions. Her generalizations aren’t really thoughts as much as abstract words used as tokens of states of feeling. The abstract words are, notably, almost all put-downs of herself. (They are symptoms of when she’s not feeling “well.”) And when her state of feeling shifts—her feelings are very mobile—the use of the words (and the conviction) behind them shifts, fades.

  I’ve operated with the unconscious aim of trying to lock my feelings into place. The goal of banishing or subduing bad feelings, promoting good feelings which—once installed—I could count on as remaining there, always available to me (to my will) to be used in an action. This is one of the things I mean when I assure C. my love for her is “serious”—that it’s locked into place, that it isn’t going to change (I guarantee myself). No wonder she reacts to that with uneasiness, as well as incomprehension. It must seem to her like such a mad thing to do.

  I want to “promise” myself. One reason is anxiety (wanting to find a safe harbor, to be free of the debilitating fear of abandonment).

  [In the margin:] Residue of childhood

  That’s the neurotic side. Another, healthy reason is my (unconscious, life-long) idea of a life of multiple projects, many levels of activity. If something—ideally, my most important private relations—are nailed down, reliable, I’m free to turn my attention to other things: mainly work, but also friends. If I’m not safe in the deepest relationship, I can’t really give my attention to other things too. I’m always turning my head back, to look anxiously if the other person is still there.

  Carlotta doesn’t want to promise herself. The very thought of that arouses thoughts of being trapped with another person, becoming dependent, losing her liberty. Of course, she also wants to be safe somewhere. But she can only accept safety in a situation with a person where she can often test it, challenge it, refuse it.—C.’s problem is that she can’t imagine safety as liberating, strengthening. Am I right in thinking that it can be—at least for me?

  And C. doesn’t have any notion of being safe with someone one loves in order to be freer (from anxiety, from love-starvation) to do something else specifically, to fulfill one’s projects. (I’m sure Beatrice knows about this.) Once again, she doesn’t have any projects. There is no activity of a public nature—except perhaps the creation of her personal appearance: her clothes, etc.—in which she feels herself competent, or even imagines that she typically, self-indulgently, irresponsibly becomes competent. Her lack of self-love, of self-esteem is so great that she probably wouldn’t consider valuable any activity in which she was competent—and, certainly, it prevents her from trying responsibly to gain competence in any activity she does admire.

  Back to the earlier point: for Carlotta, knowing her own feelings is not, at any given moment, an essential problem. It can become a problem, though, if she’s asked to put her feelings into words—quite rightly, in a way—she feels when she talks about her feelings she is violating herself, because extended talk about or description of states of feelings always carries the taint, or temptation, of generalization. Talk about feelings itself locks feelings into place (at least it appears to do that). Her problem is not the identification of—or contact with—her feelings, but what to do about them—which of the several actions they could prompt she could take. She usually sees several possibilities of action, because she experiences her feelings as multiple, divided. The problem is easier only when action is experienced as a demand from outside her private life—Ken [the fashion designer Ken Scott, whom Carlotta worked for intermittently] expected her to do the show on Jan. 20—or from a sphere of her private life when she has explicitly placed responsibility over feeling—her mother wants her to come to Ischia for 10 days in August.

  Since the problem is the selection among several feelings for the performance of an action, every action she performs is, au fond, tentative. She often hesitates before she does it—and while she’s doing it she experiences waves of doubt as to whether it’s right or whether she can go on with it (thereby increasing her sense of herself as weak, psychologically frail, vulnerable). Actions don’t easily seem real—at least not until she’s been doing them for a long time. Which is why, as she told me, she doesn’t really love someone—fully believe in the reality of a love relationship—until at least a year of being “with” the person (in some form) has passed. She de-realizes her behavior by this sense of tentativeness, reversibility, contingency, arbitrariness of everything she does—and since situations only become real to her after a long time (perhaps never fully so) she has the space—of incomplete commitment, so to speak—to behave destructively, unreliably, erratically, self-indulgently, irresponsibly.

  [In the margin:] None of these her words

  Thereby she tests her own commitments to the action or the situation with the person—if it survives these tests, it deserves to (survival of the fittest); if it doesn’t, it wasn’t right. But thereby also she increases her burden of self-hatred, because somewhere she does know she behaves destructively with people she loves.

  It must be partly because this burden of self-reproach and self-condemnation is so great that she views the events of her life mainly as “free-standing.” The causal tissue between events, in C.’s view, is very thin. As much as possible, she minimizes it. It would probably be intolerable for her, as she is now, to see how many connections there are between the things she does. Bearing the whole (could she apprehend herself as a whole—intuitively or through the exercise of discursive intell
igence)—herself as the sum of her parts—would be even more painful than bearing herself as a collection of disparaging epithets, loosely used, plus the separate parts.

  Carlotta has a problem “bearing” herself at all. Therefore, she has an investment in a certain degree of inaccuracy—what she’s doing when, her word, she “exaggerates” (e.g. “I’m desperate,” “I wish I could disappear”)—her feelings. Also a big investment in the ability to tune out—pleasures of the convivium, dolce vita, even the kind of chatter Beatrice provides which carefully skirts all real questions of feeling. (Those gay twice-daily phone calls to Milan in July + August.) Exaggeration—inaccuracy—obscure the exact contours of the burden of the self. Distraction temporarily suppresses the awareness of it.

  How different from my procedures! I have found lucidity—and accuracy to the point of pedantry—offer me the only possibility I know of making some contact with my feelings. C.’s exaggerations always upset and confuse me. I can’t understand why she would want to say something that isn’t strictly true, when the subject is an important (“serious!”) one. She finds that I lack a sense of humor, that I’m too literal-minded. I’ve agreed about that with her—and yet I know it’s not true, or at least it’s much more complicated. The explanation, of course, is that different problems—different anxieties—are at stake when I talk than when she talks. She’s not hooked on talk as a creative dialogue, as I am.

  [In the margin:] She isn’t helped to know her feelings better by verbalizing them. It’s a more purely creatural, convivial activity for her than for me. (For me, it’s the principal medium of my salvation!)

  The other procedure—finding distractions, tuning out—is also foreign to me. Of course, I can and do do it sometimes, but never without feeling I’m violating myself. If my health depends on my knowing—experiencing—my full intimate self, escaping into a “social” self feels simply bad. What I want is not to tune out, because the bad situation I started from was feeling tuned out.

  I’m chasing myself (I have been for years). Now I’m chasing Carlotta, too. She’s running away from confronting herself. She’s running away from me.—This is, of course, the gloomiest way I can summarize the situation. It’s much more than this.

  2/18/70

  I’ve told C. she can help me—being connected with her makes me grow, makes me more alive. These 4 pages I’ve written in the past few days are the concrete proof. I wish she could read them. But that’s probably self-indulgent, my wish: I’m treating her—by that wish—as if she were like me. As if she needs words, thoughts, analysis, dialogue. She can’t take it in this form.

  Do I want to show what I’ve written because I think it would be good for her (help her feel better in herself) or because I want to force upon her the evidence of the fruitfulness and value (to me) of my love for her. Both, of course. But mainly the latter—which is why I must be very suspicious of this wish. It’s self-serving: I imagine if she knew how much I’d gained from loving her, she would love herself more. Of course, I want that. But [in] the end don’t I want her to love herself more than she can love me?

  A lot of what I’ve written in criticism of my lust for virtue—my discovery that I’ve committed idolatry, making of the good an idol—is open to the charge of being still caught within the dialectic of idolatry. I’ve made a moral criticism of my moral consciousness. Meta-idolatry.

  A similar charge could be made about my ideas of comparative consciousness re: Carlotta and me. I feel as if I’ve discovered the limits of my own unspontaneous, will-driven, decision-craving, anticipatory, linear, discourse-dependent style of feeling and acting. I profess to see the advantages (spiritual, psychological, practical) and validity of Carlotta’s consciousness. (Stripped of its neurotic motivations and backlash of self-destructiveness, it offers an equally complete way of seeing things and of functioning in the world.) I profess to have detected the ravages of reason in myself. But am I not over-powering with the labor of reason the glimpse I’ve had of a more organic, less problematic, less consciousness-laden view of the world? The elements of Carlotta’s view of the world I’ve sounded out exist in these pages only as packaged by my reason. It sounds as if I were not just proposing one more project for myself.

  This entry seems to be devoted to self-criticism—I mean, meta-self-criticism.

  I don’t want to make my wisdom a product I’m packaging for my own use, and that of those I love. But how do I break free, let go?

  I know I’m afraid of passivity (and dependence). Using my mind, something makes me feel active (autonomous). That’s good.

  What I want to fall away from the activity are my procedures of self-manipulation. I want to stop “aiming” myself, just aim. (There must be a lot of this in the Zen book on archery by [the twentieth-century German philosopher and writer Eugen] Herrigel.) But I can’t do it yet. I’m too scared. [There’s a vertical line in the margin next to the last two sentences.]

  I think I must fear somewhere that spontaneity—following the lead of feelings much more than I do—will lead, at least in me, to passivity. This can’t be so, but I won’t really know until I have the experiences.

  It’s all a question of really feeling inside myself, so I don’t always worry that I should get out, go behind, and push. And I must abandon the standards of efficiency (efficacity) in action. It’s not necessary that an action necessarily leads to what one understands as a “result.” If I were more inside my feelings—a whole range of feelings, not just my love for Carlotta—I wouldn’t be so interested in results anyway. I wouldn’t have the psychic room, at least not as much. I’d experience my feelings in a more imperative form, and satisfying them by acting on them would be a bigger, more gratifying experience—so that I wouldn’t think so much about “what’s going to happen after” (or “next”) and I wouldn’t even care so much if later consequences were, indeed, displeasing or frustrating to me.

  I would be more loyal to myself, less loyal to my “life.” I would stop treating my life as if its dimensions were already determined (or determinable) a vessel whose responsibility it’s mine to fill with high-class goodies.

  2/20/70

  Conversation with Eva:

  All pain enrages. Why am I not in contact with my anger? What do I feel? Depression. But that means I am “depressing” another emotion. Despair, then. But despair is a conclusion one draws from a history of pain (it’s happening again).

  Everyone who has had a bad childhood is angry. I must have felt angry at first (early). Then I “did” something with it. Turned it into—what? Self-hatred > Fear (of my own anger, of the retaliation of others). Despair. The ability to be just and fair—and to dissociate.

  Eva says I talk about anger like someone who has never been psychoanalyzed.

  Is Carlotta angry? Certainly, she must have had an awful childhood—though she knows consciously NOTHING about it—otherwise she wouldn’t be as she is, wouldn’t have started taking heroin at 18, etc. Only clue she has given me is when she said, “I feel about my mother as if she were my daughter”—she who is every lover’s child! No wonder she fears separation from her mother—needs to visit her often (though only briefly): it’s the one relationship in which she feels more adult. (To a lesser degree, she feels more adult than Giovanella [Zannoni, a film producer and friend of Carlotta’s and SS’s] + Robertino—is fond of, and very sensitive to, the childlike element in them.)

  2/21/70

  From a letter from Whittaker Chambers to William F. Buckley, Jr.—speaking of a man murdered meaninglessly: “This reality cuts across my mind like a wound whose edges crave to heal, but cannot. Thus, one of the great sins, perhaps the great sin, is to say: It will heal, it has healed, there is no wound, there is something more important than this wound.”

  …

  2/22/70

  My early childhood decision, “By God, they won’t get me!” (absolute decision to survive, not to be done in) was executed principally [next to this word, in the margin: “No??”]
in terms of my talent for emotional dissociation, for turning off feelings before they made me intolerably unhappy or confused—through doing things, being interested in other things. There’s more to the world than just me, etc. Thus, one of the healthiest things about me—my capacity to “take it,” to survive, to bounce back, to do, to prosper—is intimately connected with my biggest neurotic liability: my facility in disconnecting from my feelings. How to preserve the first while diminishing the second? It’s hard. A risk. Did Diana know this?