As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh
Page 32
2/18/76
The hot exaltations of the mind—
In youth, growing up, floated up by—with—the body; ageing or sick, the body drifting downwards, sinking or plummeting, leaving the self stranded, evaporating.
Half—or more—of all the human beings ever born are alive now, in this century.
Cioran: a Nietzschean Hazlitt.
2/22/76
… I need a mental gym.
…
6/1/76
Love affairs with their energy + hope [SS means the doctors who were treating her for breast cancer.]
When I can write letters, then …
Surgeon’s green hospital shirt
[This entry is emphasized by a horizontal line in the margin.] Different kinds of texts, like a broken skyline.
Who, what do I get a boost from? Language, first of all. Among people, Joseph [Brodsky]. Books: Nietzsche, Lizzie’s prose [the fiction of Elizabeth Hardwick]
Writing that is a grimace—virile, funny, shrewd. Not cynical. Malicious.
Beckett’s subject: the poetry, the malice of senility.
…
6/14/76 Paris
The minimum utopia
Leaving time for meditating and grasping
—Are you faithful by temperament?
—Yes. I accumulate fidelities
Re: “The Dummy.” It’s a fable, a fairy-tale, rather than sci-fi. His choice (drop-out, clochard [“tramp”]) is that of a crippled person—is continuous with the dreary life he has rejected.
Models: [Virginia] Woolf, “An Unwritten Novel,” [Robert] Walser, “Kleist in Thun,” [Bruno] Schulz, “The Book.”
…
Poets self-limited by some actual or mental regionalism, deliberately cultivated—so he / she will be seen to have [created] his / her “universe”
Weakness of American poetry—it’s anti-intellectual. Great poetry has ideas.
6/19/76 New York
I returned Sunday night. Have been meditating helplessly, suffering compulsively. I squirm like a pinned insect. There is no help for it. I am afraid, paralyzed. I need:
Energy
Humility
Obstinacy
Discipline
All these together = courage.
Note that obstinacy + discipline are not the same. I have often been obstinate but I have no discipline at all.
…
Not only must I summon the courage to be a bad writer—I must dare to be truly unhappy. Desperate. And not save myself, short-circuit the despair.
By refusing to be as unhappy as I truly am, I deprive myself of subjects. I’ve nothing to write about. Every topic burns.
…
8/15/76
… Changes in the body, changes in language, changes in the sense of time. What does it mean for time to go faster, for it to seem to pass more slowly?
Jasper’s observation that the reason time seems to go faster + faster as we get older is that we think in larger units. At forty, it’s as easy to say “in five years” or “five years ago,” as it was to say “in five months” or “five months ago” when one was fourteen.
Brodsky said there were two subjects: time and language.
…
8/30/76
[Under a news photo of the former Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver:] “Sceptical.” Sceptical. Be sceptical.
(the key lesson of the 1970s)
“New” British novelists: B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, David Plante, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, Gabriel Josipovici
Saurian
Perplexed
Stendhal said he loved his mother “with a passion almost criminal”
9/3/76 Paris
Resemblance between J.-K. Huysmans’ Là-Bas [Down There], published in 1891, and [J. G.] Ballard’s Crash, published in 1973
Both are about Satanism; both describe and celebrate a Black Mass; both describe search for a metallic, transhuman sexuality;—but for Huysmans the tradition was already there, indeed it dated back to the Middle Ages, while for Ballard it is a “new” post-modern or futuristic sexuality or diabolism.
Both reject the modern.
Both acclaim the violation (self-violation) of the body.
Common sense (le bon sens) is always wrong. It is the demagoguery of the bourgeois ideal. The function of common sense is to simplify, to reassure, to hide unpleasant truths and mysteries. I don’t just mean that this is what common sense does, or ends up doing; I mean this is what it is designed to do. Of course, in order to be effective common sense must contain some part of the truth. But its main content is negative: To say (implicitly) that, this being so, that is not so.
Similarly, all polls of opinion must be superficial. They reveal the top of what people think, organized into common sense. What people really think is always partly hidden.
Only way to get at it is through a study of their language—a study in depth: its metaphors, structures, tone. And of their gestures, way of moving in space.
All orthodoxy, whether religious or political, is an enemy of language; all orthodoxy postulates “the usual expression.”
Novalis’ definition of Romanticism: to make the familiar appear strange, the marvelous appear commonplace
…
Beckett found a new subject for the drama:—what am I going to do in the next second? Weep, take out my comb, sigh, sit, be silent, tell a joke, die …
[Undated]
Duchamp: “There is no solution, because there is no problem.” Cage, too. Stein.
Nonsense! Modernist-nihilist-wise-guy bullshit.
There are plenty of problems, everywhere you look.
[Undated]
(Conversation with Ted S[olotaroff])
1950s: Everyone wanted to be thirty—assume responsibility (marriage, kids, career), be serious.
We knew what our values were—we didn’t know what our experience was
Trilling—the bad rabbi—made of bourgeois grief a tragic sense of life
11/5/76
[SS made remarkably few notes about her surgery and treatment for metastatic breast cancer between 1974 and 1977.]
Death is the opposite of everything.
Trying to race ahead of my death—to get in front of it, then turn around and face it, let it catch up with me, pass me, and then take my place behind it, walking in the right rhythm, stately, unsurprised.
Joseph B[rodsky]: Homosexuality ([the Alexandrian poet Constatine P. ] Cavafy) a kind of maximalism.
The function of writing is to explode one’s subject—transform it into something else. (Writing is a series of transformations.)
Writing means converting one’s liabilities (limitations) into advantages. For example, I don’t love what I’m writing. Okay, then—that’s also a way to write, a way that can produce interesting results.
Writing like the five zig-zag lines of a [Oskar] Kokoschka [painting]—writing like the many different patterns of crosshatching in [an illustration by Gustave] Doré.
The great American novels of the 20th century (that is, from 1920 on: post-James): [Dreiser’s] An American Tragedy, [Dos Passos’s] USA, [Faulkner’s] Light in August.
Only thing Fitzgerald wrote that will last is The Great Gatsby—the rest (Tender Is the Night, The Last Tycoon) is midcult junk
Read [Robert] Frost’s poem “Away”—
[Walt] Whitman > [Pablo] Neruda
Joyce, Thomas Wolfe (“Only the Dead Know Brooklyn”) > [the contemporary Colombian novelist Gabriel] García Márquez Joseph: Latin American voice is a secondhand voice
An art of writing (that is, hearing): find the right tone of voice, the right ennui
Julian [the last pagan Roman emperor, Julian the Apostate], Against the Galileans
[The early Christian historian] Eusebius, “Eulogy on the Death of Constantine the Great”
Julian > Cavafy, Auden} theme of waning pluralist civ[ilization] vs. barbarian moralizing simplification
…
Terror incognita
Cavafy: “Ode to a Grecian Yearn” (Brodsky)
Protestant right-and-wrong vs. Catholic good-and-evil
Latin America has a tragic history, like Russia. The dictator, etc. A literature that writhes.
Misogyny in Barthes’s writing
TB / cancer essay [the book that became Illness as Metaphor]
TB: consumed (dissolved) by passion—passion leads to dissolution of the body. It was tuberculosis but they called it love.
…
Intern at Memorial [Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where SS was operated on in 1974—a radical mastectomy and the removal of lymph nodes—and where she received chemotherapy and immunotherapy treatments for the following three years]: “Cancer is a disease that doesn’t knock at your door first.” Disease as insidious, secret invasion.
Write aphoristically, with subheadings for sections (PASSION; INVASION; DEATH, etc.)—in form, midway between “Notes on Camp” and first essay on photography.
…
Patient at Memorial: “Physically I’m fine, medically I’m not.”
…
(Read Gass essays when writing disease essay)
11/12/76
Technological reproduction not simply an “era,” as Benjamin says. That’s misleading. It has its history—rather, [it] is inserted into history. Its artifacts become “historical,” not merely contemporary. Old litho[graphs], photos, comic books, movies, etc. are redolent of the past, not the present. B[enjamin] thought tech. rep[roduction] made everything into an eternal present—a Hegelian end-of-history (and abolition of history). Another four decades of living in this “era” has disproved this.
…
The range of recollection of a writer’s work.
Poetry is the enunciation of universality—some poet said
Taste is contrapuntal, reactive (definition of taste)
Style comes into existence, only as it discovers a subject. True?
[The Austrian art historian] Alois Riegl (on form + design in industrial arts)
…
“This is not a subject: one delicate sensibility confronting the slimy, heartless, disappointing world. Go get yourself an agon.” (me to Sigrid [the American writer Sigrid Nunez].)
…
[Rainer Maria Rilke’s] Malte Laurids Brigge—the first “notational” novel. How important, premonitory, and underestimated it is.
Benjamin is neither a literary critic nor philosopher but an atheist theologian practicing his hermeneutical skills on culture.
Rivière’s brilliant description of the Symbolist work of art—he describes what should be abandoned (as exhausted; too elitist; lazy; too life-denying) but I’m still in the grip of the Symbolist mentality … Proust included everything the Symbolists understood but still wrote a novel.
I’m looking for new forms of advocacy.
…
12/8/76
… “To think is to exaggerate.”—Valéry
…
All orthodoxy, whether religious or political, is an enemy of language; all orthodoxy postulates “the usual expression.” Cf. China
…
12/12/76
… Voltaire’s defense of Desfontaines. Saved from being burned alive, the penalty for homosexuality.
Mass suicide of ruling elite in Java (Bali?) in 1906
…
American culture is hospitable to the feminist revendications [“claims, demands”] (up to a point) in a way that European countries (e.g. France, Germany) are not because of the American cult of the individual—the right of the individual, of individual self-fulfillment.
1977
“If you want to be quoted, don’t quote.” (JB [Joseph Brodsky])
…
“All art aspires to the condition of music”—this utterly nihilistic statement rests at the foundation of every moving camera style in the history of the medium. But it is a cliché, a 19th c[entury] cliché, less an aesthetic than a projection of an exhausted state of mind, less a world view than a world weariness, less a statement of vital forms than an expression of sterile decadence. There is quite another pov [point of view] about what “all art aspires to”—that was Goethe’s, who put the primary art, the most aristocratic one, + the one art that cannot be made by the plebes but only gaped at w[ith] awe, + that art is architecture. Really great directors have this sense of architecture in their work—always expressive of immense line of energy, unstable + vital conduits of force.
2/9/77
Title for cancer / TB essay:
“The Discourse of Illness”
or
“Illness as Metaphor”
A good poem will have romantic form + modern content. (Brodsky)
To think only about oneself is to think of death.
The egoism of modernism
fantasies
solipsism
The novel (19th century >) implies
interest in the world (not solipsistic)
ability to pass judgments on human behavior (moralistic)
patience
Proust (the biggest, greatest work of prose fiction straddles both worlds—is about the world and is about solipsism)
Novelist as moralist: Austen, [George] Eliot, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust, DH L[awrence]
Modernist novel comes into being when no judgment seems tenable (e.g. Anna Karenina: marriage is good, passion destroys). We always think of counter-examples.
Tolstoyan conception of the novel has been abandoned to the dummies (James Michener, etc.) at the apex of which is Gore Vidal. The track record of modernism—the “art novel”—is infinitely better. But it’s at a dead end. What we have now is a codified orthodoxy of modernism (John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse; Sarraute; Coover, Pricksongs & Descants—they’re not writing about anything.)
Problem of writing a novel now: No story seems that important to tell.
Why?
Because we are unable to draw any moral (meaning: judgment) from it.
Tolstoy has subjects: the nature of marriage (Anna Karenina); of history, etc. (War + Peace)
If no story[, no] narrative seems that important or necessary. The only material that seems to have any character of inevitability is the writer’s own consciousness.
18th century:
“reason” not motivational
distinction between a sentiment and passion/ emotion; sentiments are calm passions (e.g. benevolence, self-interest, sympathy)—see [the Earl of] Shaftesbury, [David] Hume, and Rousseau
discovery of the plasticity of the emotions
[In the margin:] imagination as a moral faculty
Compare the Greeks:
reason is motivational
emotions are of two types—those expressing the person + those understood as invasive, alien (we don’t make this distinction—everything is “inner”)