As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh
Page 40
Communism means the creation of a much more oppressive bureaucracy than capitalism.
There is no such thing as communism. Only national socialism. —That’s what won. (Nationalism the most imp[ressive] political force of the 20th C.). The fascist language was defeated—the communist language survived, + became the rhetoric (+ the flag of convenience) of most new nationalisms, ex-colonialized peoples.
Hitler lost. But national socialism—small n, small s—won.
You can’t become English, French, German; you are … But you become an American.
An invented, not a natural country.
A country in which every relation is a contract, including familyship, and may, at the displeasure of either of the participants, be broken. Indeed, should be.
[The contemporary American satiric essayist] Fran Lebowitz’s mother: “But everything you say is a promise.” The Jewish-Protestant view.
In Italy, a promise is no more than a plan, a statement of intention. It’s understood that one can change one’s mind.
4/30/80
An enthusiast modernist? An involuntary modernist?
Symbolist novel: examination of the inside of a fantasy
The first thing to understand is that Americans have never suffered. That they don’t know about suffering. (Me last night at dinner [with] Heberto + Belkis Padilla [the exiled Cuban poet and his wife].
Making lists of words, to thicken my active vocabulary. To have puny, not just little, hoax, not just trick, mortifying, not just embarrassing, bogus, not just fake.
I could make a story out of puny, hoax, mortifying, bogus. They are a story.
5/2/80
Story about a poet (Joseph!) so much less, morally, than his work
Joseph defending the Shah [of Iran], and torture, yesterday at lunch (The Silver Palace [a New York Chinese restaurant where SS and Brodsky ate often]) w[ith] Stephen + Natasha [Spender], and David. And now I re-read [Brodsky’s poem] “Lullaby of Cape Cod.”
…
5/6/80
Yes, an essay on aphoristic thinking! Another ending, wrapping up. “Notes on Notes.”
With the (1943) epigraph of Canetti. “The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other very well.”
One wonders why. Can it be that the literature of aphorisms teaches us the sameness of wisdom (as anthropology teaches us the diversity of culture)? The wisdom of pessimism. Or should we rather conclude that the form of the aphorism, of abbreviated or condensed or rogue thought, is a historically-colored voice which, when adopted, inevitably suggests certain attitudes; is the vehicle of a common thematics?
The traditional thematics of the aphorist: the hypocrises of societies, the vanities of human wishes, the shallowness + deviousness of women; the sham of love; the pleasures (and necessity) of solitude; + the intricacies of one’s own thought processes.
All the great aphorists struggle to assume the burden of pessimism, of disillusionment—some with more mildness (less ferocity) than others.
All note the mendacities + hypocrises of social life. And many of the great aphorists (Chamfort, Kraus) are not just condescending to but contemptuous of women; many are fascinated by their own mental processes + mental process in general (Lichtenberg, Wittgenstein).
[In the margin:] Taste for paradox, hyperbole
Aphoristic thinking is impatient thinking: by its very brevity or concentratedness, it presupposes a superior standard …
The characteristic arrogance of aphoristic thinking. A pose? A spur?
…
… The most notable exception (to the fact that most of the great aphorists have been pessimists), Lichtenberg, [who] followed English rather than European models of scorn for human folly: he regarded himself as an adopted Englishman, and declared common sense, which he considered characteristically English, as the mind’s greatest virtue.
[In the margin:] The English are cooler (Wilde, Auden)
[In the margin:] The aphorist’s favorite subject: himself; Lichtenberg not actively misogynistic.
Another exception among the great aphorists is [the Mauritian writer and painter Malcolm de] Chazal—neither optimistic not pessimistic. Because he is a naturalist.
Canetti shares in the scorn for human folly of the main European tradition—the misanthropy, and misogyny, endemic to the aphoristic tradition.
Aphorism is generally regarded as a product of detachment, a kind of superciliousness of the mind. In Canetti, as in Cioran, aphorism is the skill (product) appropriate to the over-passionate mind of the eternal student.
Montaigne, who created the modern essay—also an aphorist?
…
The writing doctors …
5/9/80
Nijinsky was not an intellectual. He was an idea. ([The American ballet critic] A. [Arlene] Croce)
Canetti essay—it’s a piece of fiction about “Canetti”—my Kien [the tragic hero of Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé]. In that sense, about me.
The only review of Under the Sign of Saturn would be the eighth essay—an essay describing me as I have described them. The pathos of intellectual avidity, the collector (mind as every-thing), melancholy & history, arbitrating the moral claim versus aestheticism, and so forth. The intellectual as an impossible project.
If there is a unifying theme of my work it is naïve. The theme of moral seriousness, of passionateness. A mood, a tone.
I must give up writing essays because that inevitably becomes a demagogic activity. I seem to be the bearer of certainties that I don’t possess—am not near to possessing.
5/18/80
Warsaw smells like an English city in the 50s. Coal—
Jarek [Anders—SS’s Polish translator, friend, and, during this trip to Poland, guide to the city]: “The rule in a country like Poland is, ‘Never trust someone who has power’”—
“The USSR is not the case of a revolution that failed, but of a totalitarian revolution that succeeded.”
Two of the richest men in Poland—millionaires—are [the filmmaker Andrzej] Wajda + [the conductor and composer Krzysztof ] Penderecki. (And [Stanisław] Lem.)
[The Polish poet Zbigniew] Herbert lives in W. Berlin / [the Polish poet Czesław] Miłosz in Berkeley
Jarek’s defense of the Catholic Church. “Don’t you think it stands for something universal? For moral values?”
The Soviet-built “Palace of Culture + Science”—built 1956—wedding-cake—Stalin’s name incised on top is blocked-out by a sign that repeats “Palace of Culture + Science.”
[In the margin:] A version: misunderstanding of the Empire State Building. (Another one: Moscow University.)
Jarek: “Don’t you think America is the only hope of the world?”
Book illustrations + paintings of Edward Okun (1872–1945), Beardsley-ite
There are no Communists in Poland, but there are lots of policemen. No one argues about Marxist revisionism any more.
…
There was a pogrom in Kielce in Poland in 1946.
Jarek speaks unaffectedly of “Poland the Brave”
Pyotr talking about [the literary critic Artur] Sandauer, “the official Jew” in the government—who takes credit for the rediscovery of [Bruno] Schulz, but it’s not true.
5/20/80 Casimierez [Kazimierz, a district in Kraków]
… The absolute absence of paradox in Tolstoy. (I am rereading War and Peace.)
Ashbery [the American poet John Ashbery, who was part of the group of writers with whom SS traveled to Poland]: “The privacy of my poetry is not a personal privacy. It is an exemplary privacy.”
“ … Poems going in and out of focus.”
An essay on Poland: begin with description of Polish plain, a country lacking natural boundaries. Then quote [Witold] Gombrowicz (Testament): a country (people) destined to inferiority.
Kraków: trams, avant-garde theatre, pollution, old city, tourists—More “conservative” than Warsaw. Wojtyła’s [Pope John Paul II] seat for 25 years.
Talk on my work …
Literary Cubism > being in many times + many places, voices
Principle of inventory [/] quotation
…
It is Flaubert who (first?) said: “Nothing is boring if you look at it long enough.” A century before Cage.
6/29/80 Paris
Dinner with Cioran: “I discovered that among leftists one was not allowed to be cynical.” Explaining why, even when he was young—in the 1930s—he was not tempted by Communism.
On Italy: “It’s paradise there. One can assassinate. One can leave the country.”
…
If this society didn’t furnish so many fantasies of violence, so many wouldn’t be so interested in s-m. True??
Novel as freedom: the only rules it can violate are internal—rules of its own making.
…
[In the margin:] Sex instinct subject to idiosyncratic linkages (fetishisms, etc.) because not policed—no instruction, no rules. Think how extensively gender roles are policed.
…
Surrealism: antipathy to everyday life + sentimental ideas about love + solitude
Meta-lesbianism of mid-19th century, cultivated Boston spinsters. Olive Chancellor [character in Henry James’s The Bostonians], etc.
…
Story about Joseph: “Vox Clamantis”
“What is the ethical import of all this elegant prancing?” asks Irving Howe, recent convert to Balanchine—+ then replies, “there are kinds of beauty before which the moral imagination ought to withdraw.”
Bravo.
Compare another Jew’s moralism. [The American ballet impresario and writer] Lincoln Kirstein: “Ballet is about how to behave.”
…
7/23/80
Life of art > the after-life of art (e.g. Venus de Milo, broken)
7/30/80
Derision, not piety
…
[Highlighted:] Great subject the West falling out of love with Communism. End of a 200-year-passion.
ALSO BY SUSAN SONTAG
FICTION
The Benefactor • Death Kit • I, etcetera The Way We Live Now • The Volcano Lover • In America
ESSAYS
Against Interpretation • Styles of Radical Will On Photography • Illness as Metaphor • Under the Sign of Saturn AIDS and Its Metaphors • Where the Stress Falls Regarding the Pain of Others • At the Same Time
FILM SCRIPTS
Duet for Cannibals • Brother Carl
PLAY
Alice in Bed
JOURNALS
Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963
A Susan Sontag Reader
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2012 by David Rieff
Preface copyright © 2012 by David Rieff
All rights reserved
First edition, 2012
www.fsgbooks.com
eISBN 9781466802179
First eBook Edition : March 2012
Grateful acknowledgment is made to David Goldstein and Penguin Classics for permission to reprint “Man runs towards the grave,” by Samuel ha-Nagid, published in The Jewish Poets of Spain; and to John Scagliotti, administrator, the Kopkind Colony, for permission to reprint Andrew Kopkind’s notes.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sontag, Susan, 1933–2004.
As consciousness is harnessed to flesh : journals and notebooks, 1964–1980 / Susan Sontag; edited by David Rieff.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-374-10076-6 (alk. paper)
1. Sontag, Susan, 1933–2004—Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Diaries. I. Rieff, David. II. Title.
PS3569.O6547 Z46 2012
818’.5409—dc23
[B]
2011041210