We Are All Harnessed to Flesh, the Most so on Sunday

Geof Huth, Cultural Education Center, Northwest Corner, Ninth Floor, Empire State Plaza, Albany, New York (20 Apr 2012)
Give me enough details and I’ll miss the whole.

I have recently finished reading the second in a series of published journals and notebooks of Susan Sontag,  As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980. It is a long book, 523 pages, and it both reveals and obscures the person who Sontag was. Unlike the first volume of her jottings, this volume is less focused on herself as a person and less narrative in direction. Lists of movies watched or discussions of books read do reveal something about a person but not usually the core. When that core is revealed herein, it is shown to be both damaged and unformed. We see that she had not grown, even by her late thirties, into a full adult. She was weighed down by a burden too heavy to escape from underneath it, as many of us have been. But more about that in a moment.

This volume, as the one before it and as the one after it will be, is edited by her son, David Rieff, who generally appears to do a good job choosing material and putting it in context for us. (Though I wonder why he believed he needed to define the common word "goy" for us when all of Sontag's recondite vocabulary he allows to pass by our eyes without explanation. Could we not look up any of these words? Could we not also be expected to understand a reference to any number of hugely famous writers mentioned by Sontage with no other identifying information beyond a surname? As I read this book, I kept recalling that the editor of the annotated edition of Lolita complained about exactly this kind of excess in annotation.) Rieff, who is a dedicated son and a good writer himself, does decide to forgo editorial intrusions unless they seem absolutely necessary, but he also misses a few typographical errors on his mother's part.

Although Sontag writes in the late 1970s with disdain about youngsters who use “it’s” for “its,” she herself uses “its” for “it’s” in 1964, and her son does not catch the error. I would have expected Rieff to have silently corrected the misspellings in the document, since it is impossible to believe that anyone, even Sontag, could keep a journal for decades without multiple unintentional miswritings. (For example, I wrote "out" for "ought" yesterday, while trascribing text.) While reading these journals, I focused too much in spelling errors, typographical problems, or spelling in general. For instance, Sontag, for reasons I cannot figure out, used lots of British spellings and text formatting, but not the most obvious: the -our ending for words, which is common in British English but rare in the American variety. And there was always an extra space after the word “of” whenever it appeared in an italicized line. Since I make notations in pencil as I read books, I spent much of my time marking these British spellings, these extra spaces, these inconsequentia, certainly to the detriment to my focus on the words themselves.

But not entirely. I was surprised about how unrevealing this book was. For most of it, I saw nothing of the private Sontag and her many travails. She also almost never mentioned anything about any of the books she was writing or having published during these many years. (I remember a few brief mentions of I, etcetera, nothing more.) What she did reveal was how her childhood broke her, and how she hadn't recovered from that damage.

What she described is something that psychologists now call the narcissistic family, one in which the parents focus on their own needs, to the detriment of the children. One in which the children, by the time they are as young as three, are made the caretakers of the parents. One where the parents don't take care of the children. One in which the children are either ignored or punished often for small or imagined sins. Without realizing it, Sontag describes her mother as the lead character of a narcissistic family, and she even uses some of the terminology from the field as she does so.

But, of course, at the same time, I also hate her narcissism. It means involvement with herself not with me--therefore rejection of me. I feel contempt for her for being so weak that she cares how she is for "others"—so much that she gives so much time to washing, making up, dressing, etc. I feel superior to her because I'm entirely indifferent to these things—and vow I always will be when I'm grown up. I'm going to be an entirely different kind of woman. I despise her for the pleasure she takes in my admiration. She doesn't see me. Doesn't she see I want something from her? even though I also do mean what I say)[.]

...

But there's something more. Hard to describe. Like magical powers which my mother ascribed to me—with the understanding that if I withdrew, she'd die. I must hang on, feeding her, pumping her up. 

With a mother entranced by and focused on her own self, a mother who required validation from her own child, Sontag grew up without any parental support. Instead, she had, as she even mentioned in her journals, taken on the role of the parent herself. She was not tended to and grown right. She was allowed (actually, forced) to raise herself, understanding that no-one was there to help her in the ways that she needed help.

People growing up in this way develop ways to survive these situations, ways to protect themselves, ways to care for themselves, and ways that don't always serve them well in their adulthood. From Sontag's journals, we see that she had many serious romantic and sexual relationships over her lifetime, and by 1980 none of these has been particularly healthy or successful. She frets about many of these relationships, about the love that others are not able to show her, about the unlovableness that she sees in herself.

Which interests me because we have before us, laid out over the course of 500 pages, the random thoughts of an intelligent person, a fine writer, and an exceptional intellect, yet we also have a woman who is still a child. She intellectualizes through all her emotions quite well, as an intelligent child might do because she has no way of dealing with her emotions as emotions.

Yet the book isn't focused on these instances of hurt in her personal life so much as it is focused on the randomized tesserae of an intellectual life. She presents some thoughts on film, some on writing, and some not always cogent thoughts on North Vietnam, but these form no whole, no constellated mosaic. This is a book of pieces, those pieces that have fallen in place after the fracturing process of thinking deeply and frequently. The book is still interesting, and it does give us some insight into the woman and her work, but most of what we learn is tentative, inconclusive. Sontag is almost there. We see her shadow instead of herself.

After reading this book, I copied down the phrases I had marked within it, I reworked them a bit (breaking them into lines, rewriting them, substituting words for words I wanted to use). I gave these some structure, some form, made them mean what they didn't originally mean. And I added text to them to produce a long poem with a strange, yet somehow beautiful title. At least it is to me. And this poem ends my thoughts on (and, also, from) this book.



Overdrive / Aphasia in the Wortschatz / Beaufond

I. Esoteric
a. Paraphasia
I’ve forbidden myself to thinkto feel
Therapy isin this way deconditioning
the knock on the tablethe rapture
I have come awake
Dans ce que j'écrisje dois prendre un risque
No factsonly interpretations
interpenetrations
intrapolations
what has comeinside meremains
there it abides
Having lost his mindhe has lost the ability to stop the mind
what tumbles throughis thinking
I don’t care at all
Either way is fine with me
Man can embody truthhe can embuoy it
he cannot know the trutheven the rhyme is fragmented
One must go against instinctto get what one wants
Lacking all convictionhe was regarded as sane
No poet operating at 5 times a normal ratewithout its governorsweating farting pouring out words
lurching back + forth
could be
I am incompletein that
I am not more responsive alive generousconsiderate originalsensitive brave
clean or reverent
Every act is a compromise
Every thoughta demand
all converging on a breastthe sweetness of itsoftness
givingto the touch
otherwise neglected ignored unperceivedand ultimately deathical
I must not think of the pastI must go ondestroying my memory
I find analysis humiliatingI’m embarrassed by my own banality
I am reducedto self
Apollinaire deleted all punctuation from his first collection of poetry
Left werediacriticshyphensline breaks
grand apostrophes
and letters
Within parentheses this
My cartographic mind
ending in a period
infinite

b. Dysnomia
I live in a strange and sovereign language
where the name for my catis Dogwhere the nameform Yis a jog in the road
The flexible body so distinct from the ceremonial body
native in my bodyversus formed through my body
I call my body Versus
because she isagainst myself
To be a poet is to failFailure is the name of her country
Moments when even alphabets and books of reference appear poetical from a distance
How exoteric the wordesoteric
But it wasn’t all of me
I knew the whole time there was a transcendental ego who had survived alongside the damaged ego of my childhood
For the reasons I have alluded toI present myself as an intelligentwell mannered cooperativeand decidedly legible person
All rectono verso
I know I am alone
I’m the only reader of that that I write here
Such knowledge isn’t painful
On the contrary I feel stronger for itstronger each time I write something down
I become throughthe process of writingit down
Extended also by the longing to touch / be touched
I feel gratitude when she touches mewhen I touch someonewhen I am realizedby the act of touching
I’m not busy dyingI’m still busy being born
Is there a word foryestermillennium
I read through these words
rageangerrancor
I see through the words
how one transformsto be the other how eachis different from the others
how rage is rearrangedand extended into anger
how anger is extendedand resounded into
rancor
how they move in a linefrom terrible fury todiminished but palpableanger to the continuityof rancor
Rancor anchors me
I think I am ready to learn how to write
Think with wordsI say to myselfnot with ideas
Art is the ultimate condition of everything
Too badhe is dead
I amI sayto myselfonlyto myself
I amtrying to live with a civil heart
Aphoristic
Concision in stylePrecision in thoughtDecision in life
Writing is only a substitute for livingI know that
More than a supplementmore supple than the body
I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformationengaged in projectingtheir transformationsupon the world configured as wordas page as text as voiceas body
I am aloneI know that nowPerhaps I will always be
Afterwardswhat will remain isthe bony structureof my character
If I resistI persist

2. Exoteric
a. Alexia
Recycling my life with booksRecyclingmy life with books
If I cannot read the book I can’tready myself
Steadyyou meanReadyou mean
Poetryis piracy
How could that be so
Poetryis privacy
words that livein an hermetic ball
or is it hermeneutic
Someone who regularly has ideas is by definitionhomeless
A bindle A bundle
wandering
All that makes life worthwhile are these moments of ecstasy
I thought I had to say everything I thought
Similes are something different
but no one before had advanced difficultyand the elimination of contentas a kind of purity as the criterion of value
This poemis about nothing
It is filledwith nothing
Nothing overflowsthe boundariesof this poem
To be connected with people sexually is a way of knowing them
To be disconnectedis a way of forgettingthem
I am taken by fits of lucidity
I have written thisin two fitts
One screamingOne raging
My dream
ageing or sickthe body drifting downwardssinking or plummetingleaving the self strandedevaporating becomingair
the air you breathe
I perceive different texts
a broken skylinelines of a poem
those that extend to the rightthose that hold close to the leftedge
How esoteric the wordexoteric
Governed by ironyand platitudes great poetry has ideas but no body
Death is the opposite of everythingEverything is the opposite of me
Terror incognita
I dream at night
consumed dissolvedby passion
why passion leads to dissolution of the bodyof my body of her body
It was tuberculosis but they called it love
The only material that seems to have any character of inevitability is the poet’s own consciousness
in writing
I want to singthe song you taught meof
RuthlessnessHuthlessness
I am stuck inthe clot of light
shiningupon me

b. Dysprosody
AloneI am all one
The huge enrichment of the imagination and of language that comes with solitude
Procryptic I need nothide in the cave of the self
yet I do
to put some emptinessin the middle of all the sense
separating inflection from meaning
what tilts rolls laps sways slaps the stone
gives the stonemeaning
We need to empty the stoneof sense
It is not coldIt is not wetIt is not black
If you break itin halfit is not St Onepatron saintof the solid self
I am a solid state persontoo filled with meaningto exist
Blood shushing throughmy body at nightdraws me to sleep
The senses are sharper at night
That change in usis a means of self-protectionagainst the dreamswe are about to make
avant gardethese shallow enigmasshadow enigmas
They dance against the bedroom walls
A kind of motiveless sorrowfanned with strange feelingsthe geography of pleasure
yet we dream itinto submission
Being with peopleBeing alone
Breathing in and Breathing out
Systole And diastole
As long as I’m afraid of being aloneI’ll never be real
I’m in hiding from myself
coessential with the earthdry and cold
within a constant night
My insipid certaintiesabout
a poem that it is the cry of its occasion
that is allusive or illusive or elusive
or all three
The stiff serpentinities that ride through me
The unit of the poet is the word
Marketable
Incroyable
Horizontal
I was born inCalifornia and
California is the America of America
thereforeI am the most Americanof Americans
I amI errI can
I don’t write to others anymore
I write to myself
only notesto myself
maybe my sonwill understand them some day
but he is notthe audienceof these words
I am focusedon
thisconcentratedness
this purity
and on other kinds of beautybefore which the moral imagination ought
to withdraw
Derisionnot piety
_____

Sontag, Susan. As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980. Edited by David Rieff. Farrar Straus Giroux: New York, 2012.  

ecr. l'inf.