by Susan Sontag
I cry all the time—my chest, throat, eyes, the skin of my face are thick with tears, I have asthma: I want oxygen, I want the air to nourish me—and it doesn’t.
I don’t feel the big pain yet, That will come when I leave on Friday (the 9th). Now I rage at my own weakness. I can’t believe in this situation which finds me so entirely impotent. I struggle to make some contact with C.—to instruct her or seduce her to make some affectionate contact with me—and everything fails. Whatever I do or say makes her more bitter or vague or remote or insensitive or unyielding or simply rude.
It’s not like Paris, where I felt how much she suffered—even if she couldn’t be loving to me. Now I feel something worse, more terrifying—a hardness in her, an incapacity of feeling and loving, an incredible selfishness. She said a few days ago that perhaps she has never loved anybody. That’s not true, of course. But maybe it’s true that she can only love intermittently—just as she can only “be” intermittently.
She doesn’t want the kind of love I feel for her. She wants the intermittencies of D.D.’s love.
God help me—help me—to stop loving her if she doesn’t love me any more.
I musn’t hang on because I have loved her more than anyone in my life. I still have that victory of feeling—of really loving for the first time—even though it has ended in defeat.
It is an honorable defeat. I risked everything—I gave all that I had—for the first time. If I was naïve enough to imagine that it must work between us, because of the immensity and certainty of my feeling, it was an honorable naïveté and nothing to be ashamed of.
It will be a long labor of recovery. I must give up my love, I must give up my dream—without building up a wall again that prevented me from feeling fully until I met C.
[In the margin:] I don’ t want to learn anything from the failure of this love.
(What I could learn is to become cynical or guarded or even more afraid of loving than I was before.) I don’t want to learn anything. I don’t want to draw any conclusions.
Let me go on being naked. Let it hurt. But let me survive.
10/15/70
C: Hypnotized (?) into believing she is incapable of transformation (“sick,” “confused”)
Not capable of emotional generosity—she gives her golden radiance, but carefully, pointedly promises nothing
All the timing in our relationship has been hers
Bice is sage, a shelter; undemanding up to a point (me) because she is Chinese, undersexed, insecure, unpassionate, etc. I’m a risk. U demand, I promise—myself, the miracle of transformation. My generosity is heavy, oppressive. Bice’s is light.
Joe’s [Chaikin] fantasy of the man with the beast whom no one knows (names)—takes it into the cellar + tries to kill it, but it won’t die—just keeps bleeding—gets weaker—doesn’t recognize man any more. Man has to return periodically to cellar to reopen wound
Novel # # 9?): Mutants
Caspar Hauser—in a box until 17, no sense of distance; apoplectic fit when he saw the stars
Superman
The pig girl
Visitors from other planets
Dracula
A convention of mutants (Marvel comics)
10/17/70
It’s dissolving. Blinded—looking away. The last image: bare legs in calf-length mauve socks.
10/19/70
I’m floating in an ocean of pain. Not floating—but swimming, badly—no style. But not sinking.
Like being run over by a truck. Lying in the street. And nobody comes.
I live inside a deep pain.
Being trapped in a small black box—that can’t be set down anywhere.
An abortion. Scraping it out. Terrible ache—a bloody mess.
Standing in a wind tunnel. I feel dizzy. All my energy goes into bracing myself—not being blown over.
…
11/19/70 Stockholm
[A box is drawn around this:] NEW LIFE
Once again (how many times?) un petit effort [“a little effort”]
Fantasia—perfect example of fascist aesthetics
World divided into:
Good—Evil
Light—Dark
Fast—Slow Types of movement: “flying” “dancing” “running”
Light—Heavy
Big—Small
Graceful—Clumsy
Masters < > “little” people
[Leopold] Stokowski fairies
God who makes storm baby animals
Devil in Mussorgsky Mickey Mouse
Sorcerer in [Paul] Dukas
Image of conductor (Stokowski) outlined in light—drawing music from orchestra with his baton—on pedestal
Music an affair of the perfect master leading the ideal servants
All beings are clichés, types
Male < > female (females bat eyelashes—males bound forward)
Master < > servant (cf. Negro servant / miniature female centaurs in Beethoven Pastorale
Everyone is in his right place (or is quickly restored to it; world is correctly ordered)
Fantasia is a whole world-view; a morality, an aesthetics, a cosmogony ([Stravinsky’s] Sacre du Printemps), a theology (devil of Night on Bald Mountain [a version of the composition by the nineteenth-cenury Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, orchestrated by Stokowski and used by Disney in Fantasia] vanquished by Ave Maria)
Frame: idea of sound as visualized:
the sound track—leaderless improvising
the orchestra (playing Swing—relaxing, being naughty—while waiting for Stokowski)
arrival of The Conductor—musicians fall into line
Beethoven’s Pastorale
About sex (wooing), play, nature, (“lighting” the world), family life (Pegasus—mother—black child learning to fly[—] storm > peace)
[Tchaikovsky’s] Nutcracker Suite—other races, their comedy mushrooms as Chinese
11/30/70
From [Saul] Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, p. 136—“try[ing] to live with a civil heart”
Olaf Stapledon
Victor Hugo’s maxim: “Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life”
12/18/70 Paris
Film about Saint Theresa
Bernini statue
Sade visited it when in Rome
? black & white
…
Read H. G. Wells, Mind at the End of Its Tether
W[illia]m James’s chapter on “The Sick Soul” [in] Varieties of Religious Experience
…
“Writing is only a substitute [sic] for living.”—Florence Nightingale
1971
1/16/71 [SS’s thirty-eighth birthday]
A crisis of self-respect.
What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work.
I must work.
I’m being wasted by self-pity and self-contempt.
…
I’m off balance.
I’m looking for my dignity. Don’t laugh.
I’m very intolerant and very indulgent (of others). Toward myself, the intolerance predominates. I like myself, but I don’t love myself. I’m indulgent—to an extreme—of those I love.
Idea for a fiction from one of Cioran’s aphorisms: “Physical need for dishonor. I would like to have been the son of an executioner.”
“The Executioner’s Daughter” …
2/2/71
Is it possible I owe yet a second liberation to Simone de Beauvoir? Twenty years ago, I read The Second Sex. Last night, I read L’Invitée. No, of course. I still have much to live through to free myself. But, for the first time, I was able to laugh. Change the class (most important), age (20 years more experience!), country, and physique of Xavière, and it is a perfect portrait of C[arlotta]. I see the entrapment from the outside (the way that self-sacrificing, Christian love is provoked, alongside the sexual passion),—I didn’t feel sorry for myself, I despised myself a little less. I ceased, a little more, to hope—and I felt lig
hter. I could laugh, tenderly, at myself.
4/11/71 New York
Joe: Two kinds of people—those who are interested in self-transformation and those who are not. Both require the same amount of energy—it takes as much energy to remain the same as to change.
I agree with the first—and I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation. But the second: I wish I could believe something so optimistic. It seems to me to require much more energy to change.
Aphorism by [the Polish writer, poet, and satirist] Stanisław Jerzy Lec: “When you arrive at the very bottom, you will hear knocking from below.”
What does sylleptic thinking mean?
… Stravinsky’s death this week. I remember when [SS’s childhood friend] Merrill and I used to debate whether we would sacrifice our lives to give Stravinsky one more year of life—or five. I was fourteen, maybe fifteen.
4/21/71
I’m suffering from a lack of intellectual stimulation. I’ve exaggerated, over-reacted against the academic milieu in which I was completely submerged in my youth. That was an exaggeration. Then, starting with Harriet, I began an equivalent exaggeration in the opposite direction. It has become more and more extreme, so that in recent years I have spent almost all my time with people with mediocre minds.—However [much] they pleased me (because they were warmer, more sensual, more sensitive, had more experience of “the world”), they didn’t stimulate me. I thought less and less. My mind got lazy, passive. I gained a lot but I also paid a big price. And it’s that price now that humiliates me. I find many books difficult to read! (Especially philosophy). I write badly, with difficulty. My mind is stiff. (That’s what’s causing the trouble with the women’s lib essay—more than my depression.)
…
Idea for a novella from [the Yugoslav writer and dissident politician ] Vladimir Dedijer today. “The Suicide Club.” A political story, set in Yugoslavia—imaginary small country. New social movement among students (high school, university): suicide clubs spring up. Young people charged with the project of committing “altruistic suicides” to awaken conscience, blackmail government. They have meetings, workshops, consciousness-raising groups to prepare themselves. Then do it. In all there are 24 who do—(some are murdered, lose courage at the end and are pushed by their comrades). Dedijer’s son did it at 19—jumped off a cliff just over his father’s house. Later, it’s discovered that the clubs were organized by the secret police.
Dedijer had 3 sons. First committed suicide at 15, after being interrogated + beaten up by the police (about his father’s activities) then sent home—he hanged himself. Second killed himself at 19 (suicide club). Third tried last year—failed—went on the road in US, took drugs, now in an athletic school in Switzerland.
Novella organized as a collection of “material” on the clubs. Like Oscar Lewis’ anthropological studies of Puerto Rico + Cuba. Letters, taped interviews, report of researcher … Ends with researcher trying to leave the country and has his documents confiscated.
Read [the French sociologist Émile] Durkheim on altruistic suicide.
Use story Florence told me about her father [the French writer and politician André Malraux]—at the cemetery, following the interment of her brothers, they walked around and he delivered an impromptu lecture on the history of coffins from Sumerians to the present. Use that—father of one of the suicides; he is a professor or government minister.
4/24/71
The density of Ivan Illich comforts me—makes me more present to myself, stronger.
Jeanne [the French actress Jeanne Moreau] this weekend: all air. How depressed I was.
I believed in miracles—all my life. Finally, I decided to make one. I failed. I wanted to die.
I knew you have to put your life on the line to perform a miracle. There can be no holding back, no reserve. So I did. And I failed.
The assumption on which I’d based my whole life was finally tested. I—it—failed the test. My life fell down.
Do I build it up? The same way? A better way? Is there a better way? (Without believing in miracles?) Or is “building up” the wrong metaphor?
It was as if my whole life was growing toward that point I reached two years ago—to be open finally, to be wholly generous, to give myself. I did. I was rejected.
I was pure. (Was I?) And I was also grandiose? Was that wrong?
BC [Brother Carl] is about making a miracle. It is the testament of that faith I still had: my prayer, my confidence … I made the film. Carl succeeded. I failed.
The energy—and the pleasure, the reward—behind the miracle was the longing for symbiosis. A pure, generous dream. But a defective energy.
Am I through with the search for the perfect ideal symbiosis? Is one ever through with a longing so profound as that one?
I am alone. I know that now. Perhaps I always will be.
4/27/71
Solitude is endless. A whole new world. The desert.
I am thinking—talking—in images. I don’t know how to write them down. Every feeling is physical.
Maybe that’s why I can’t write—or write so badly now. In the desert, all ideas are experimental in the body.
I touch a central place, where I have never lived before. I wrote from the margin, dipping down into the well but never fully gazing down. I drew up the words—books, essays. Now I’m down there: in the center. And I find, to my horror, that the center is mute.
I want to speak. I want to be a person who speaks. But, up to now, speech meant dealing in this left-handed, eyes averted way with myself.
I used myself as another person … Ivan says it’s all in [SS’s essay] “The Pornographic Imagination.” (Or Death Kit, I would say.) But I didn’t know it. I didn’t look down, but rather marveled at those curious, morbid, extreme thoughts I had—and thought myself lucky in not having to pay (in madness, in thickening despair) for being their vehicle. Lucky!
I was afraid of going mad. Now I’ve looked—I’m there. I’m not mad. I’m not even depressed being alone night after night in the apartment.
[The eighteenth-century German aphorist Georg C.] Lichtenberg: “There is something in every person’s character that cannot be broken—the bony structure of his character. Wanting to change it is the same as teaching a sheep to retrieve.”
Trying to enlarge my inner space.
[Undated, June]
McLuhan: black people are more telegenic than white people—from the pov [point of view] of television, white people are already démodé.
Don’t confuse subject (of a book, film) with its political character. [The French writer and publicist Philippe] Sollers thinks Céline is a radical culturally; his opinions are another matter.
Write a book about the body—but not a schizophrenic book. Is that possible? A book that is a sort of strip-tease, an elaborate minutely-detailed getting undressed in the course of which each bone-muscle-organ is tracked down, described, raped.
Greatest director? D. W. Griffith, hélas [“alas”]
Flora Tristan—French, early feminist (1803–1844 )—praised by Breton
Fascist writers: Céline, [Luigi] Pirandello, [Gottfried] Benn, Pound, [Yukio] Mishima.
