The Benefactor

by Susan Sontag

  At that moment I was aware that something was wrong with my body, and looking under the towel I saw to my horror that, from the middle of my ribs to my hip, my entire left side was open and wet. I couldn’t understand how I had failed to notice it before. This butcher’s view of myself was revolting. I wrapped the towel around me even more tightly and, with both hands pressed against my side to prevent my entrails from falling out, I started to walk. At first I felt dignified and brave, and I determined to ask help of no one.

  It was dusk now. People were hurrying home through the streets, on foot and on bicycles. It grew darker. I had to find a hospital, for I felt weak now from the loss of blood and could barely walk. I also thought of trying to find the mansion of my aged patron, where I would lie down in the garden, for I dared not go inside and tell the little old man how I had failed to carry out his advice. There was a doctor there, I remembered, although I was not sure that he was not a consul or some passport official. Yet finding the mansion seemed out of the question. I was lost. There was no one to ask directions from; night had fallen and the unfamiliar streets were empty. I pressed my left side, holding back my tears of humiliation. I wanted to lie down, but I was reluctant to dirty my white towel on the pavement. The feeling of heaviness on my left side increased. I was draining away and struggled to lean toward the right. It was then that I died. At least, it became completely dark.

  “This dream is too heavy,” I said to myself when I awoke, in an effort to be cheerful. Whenever I woke up still submerged in a dream, I would try to recover my equanimity as quickly as possible. It was not easy, for this dream told me all too plainly how burdened I was and how I despised myself. Who am I to aspire to being free? I thought. How dare I go about disposing of others, when I cannot even dispose of myself. Yet I am free, except for the languishing captivity of my dreams. I cursed my dreams.

  After a melancholy morning, I managed to slough off my heaviness, but it was only through the most extreme posture of resignation to the dream. I said to myself: if I am burdened, so be it. And I was reluctant to consider a more hopeful interpretation of the dream.

  But someone to whom I related this dream, Professor Bulgaraux, a scholar whose special field of study was ancient religious sects, thought differently. “According to certain theological ideas with which I shall acquaint you,” he said, “this may be interpreted as a dream of water. You dug a ditch and it filled with water. And in the end, you were not heavy. You were—how shall I say?—liquefying.”

  It was a comforting thought, but I was not convinced. “Do you think I should travel, as the old millionaire advised?”

  “You have been travelling, have you not?”

  I nodded.

  “Now you must digest what you have learned, and then expel it. There is guilt in your bowels.”

  I did not answer, but considered sadly that he might be right.

  “You credit yourself with a detachment which you do not yet possess. You are right in listening to your dreams and accepting them—how could you refuse?—but wrong in condemning the self that is revealed in them. I could show you, if you will listen to me.”

  At first I did not understand this invitation, and felt wary of revealing myself once again. I may have made a mistake in telling my dreams to this man. God knows what he believed! I had been told that he practiced incantations and tried to summon dream-sending demons, all of which is repugnant to any person of sense. However I would not convict him of charlatanry without giving him a full hearing. I respect an authentic mystery, while I deplore the attempt to mystify. I had to find out whether Professor Bulgaraux really believed in what preoccupied him.

  “It is rumored,” I told him one day over a glass of sherry in his book-lined apartment, “that you are not content with the vocation of a scholar, but in your private life actually subscribe to the beliefs you study.”

  “Yes, it’s true. Or partly,” he replied. “I do not believe, alas. But I know how these beliefs truly apply. I am prepared to carry them out, and to teach others how they may be carried out.”

  “To teach me?” I asked.

  He looked at me thoughtfully for a while. “You say your dreams concern you more than anything else?”

  I nodded.

  “Let me read you the theogonic myth of a sect about which I am lecturing and writing a paper at the moment. It occurs to me that their doctrines apply particularly well in your case.”

  He took down several volumes bulging with paper slips, opened one, and began to read in his dry, rather nasal voice. I will summarize as best as I can. According to this sect, there was originally one god, a self-sufficient male deity named Autogenes. He was not entirely alone, though. In creating himself, by a super-abundance of the creative gesture he had also brought into existence a certain number of angels and powers. But he created no world. His own being, and that of the angels and powers who reinforced his being by knowing and acknowledging him, was sufficient. He only was; he knew nothing of himself. Then it happened that this all-sufficient god came to know one thing—that he was known. And then he wanted to know himself; he became dissatisfied with merely being. This constituted his fall. He united with one of his female attending angels, Sophia. The issue of that union was a child who was both male and female named Dianus.

  The sect which adhered to this myth flourished about two thousand years ago. Its earliest devotees regarded Dianus as a usurper, a pretender, an evil god whose birth signified the corruption of the original godhead. But when the sect began to spread and win converts, the newer members tended to regard Dianus as the principal god, and to relegate Autogenes to the status of an ineffectual guarantee of the divinity of Dianus. More and more it was to Dianus that they turned. To him they could pray, in the hope of their salvation, while Autogenes remained distant and inaccessible. Dianus, unlike Autogenes, was not an altogether aloof god. But he had some of the traits of his father. Most of the time he slept on top of a mountain. Periodically he ventured forth among human beings to be worshipped, assailed, and martyred by them. Only in this way could he continue his divine sleep.

  “Of course,” observed Professor Bulgaraux, “I do not give credence to the magical arts which this sect practiced. Members of the Autogenist fellowship used to brand each other inside the lobe of the right ear. You may examine my right ear, Hippolyte. You will find only a small mole which I have had since birth.”

  Not understanding the application of this myth to me, I challenged the value of myth itself. “Such tales are just a sop for the credulous, picturesque concessions to those who cannot stand the shock of a naked idea.”

  “Are your dreams merely allegories?” returned Professor Bulgaraux. “Do you believe that they present themselves to you as stories because you can’t bear the shock of a naked idea?”

  “Certainly not! My dreams are no more or less than the story they tell.”

  “Would you be content to regard your dreams as poetry, if poetry be opposed to truth?”

  “No.”

  “Then reflect, Hippolyte, and see if you do not find more than attractive poetry in this obscure mythology.”

  I agreed to try, and found that there was as much truth, and a truth quite similar in content, in the Autogenist myth as in my dreams. Were not my dreams about the ideal of self-sufficiency, and the inevitable fall into knowledge? If I had begun to feel martyred by them, was this not ingratitude? However painful they were, I needed my dreams—the metaphor for my introspection—if I was ever to be at peace. I liked very much that part of the myth which explained that the periodic martyrdom of Dianus was necessary not for the salvation of men, but for the comfort and health of the god. Here was god-making in its most dignified and candid form. Similarly, I was learning to regard my dreams not as producing any knowledge useful for others, but for myself, my own comfort and health alone. Here was dream-interpreting in its most dignified and candid form.

  In the Autogenist account of the creation of man, I found another clue to my dreams, pa
rticularly this last one, which I called “the dream of an elderly patron.” The Autogenists believed that the human race is not created by the aloof father-god, nor by the somnolent and lovely Dianus. Rather man owes his generation and allegiance to Sophia, the female agency, who took the form of a serpent; and as proof of this their teachers pointed to the shape of the human viscera. Our internal configuration in the form of a serpent—that is, the shape of the intestines—is the signature of our subtle generatrix. I was delighted with the idea. I would not have thought that among the body’s juices and bones and crowded organs churning and pumping, there was room for such an extravagant symbol—much more imaginative than the banal identification of the brain with thought, or the heart with love. When, in this last dream, I dreamed that my entrails were falling out, was I not dreaming that I was losing the signature of my humanity? It was a warning to me—of the guilt in my bowels, as Professor Bulgaraux put it.

  I decided to lay aside my intellectual reservations, and hear further what Professor Bulgaraux had to say. If I was to escape the insupportable view that the dreams were an ultimately senseless burden foisted on me by my own malice toward myself, I would have to be purged of any residual attitudes by which I stood condemned in my own eyes…. No matter that this was another “religious” interpretation. At least Professor Bulgaraux, unlike the good Father Trissotin, did not urge me to submit my dreams to judgment, but encouraged me to go on as I had been doing—grooming my life for the judgment of my dreams. If this was heresy, so be it. The most exacting forms of spirituality are usually found among heretics.

  I thought I was already acquainted with all the heterodox movements available to the searcher for truth in this city and, as I have already indicated to the reader, I am not addicted to group enthusiasms. There are too many ill-thought-out sects in our century, too many partial revolutions inspired by little more than the vogue of being revolutionary. Yet I do not condemn heresy as such, if it be sincere enough, and I came to believe that Professor Bulgaraux really meant what he said.

  On his invitation, I visited his apartment several times in the next month to hear him expound the views of the Autogenists. He had in his possession an ancient codex which had been found in an urn buried in a cemetery in the Near East. For many years he had been deciphering and preparing it for publication; these private seminars were, ostensibly, about the contents of the codex. Though there were always other auditors, a few curious academics and some middle-aged women with foreign accents whose occupation I could not determine, the meetings had a very different character from the university lectures I had once attended with such naive zeal for enlightenment. A few simply took notes. But to those who listened eagerly to Professor Bulgaraux’s words without paper and pencil in their hands, he made a point of interspersing personal remarks, showing his auditors how these ideas applied to each of them. As I looked about the room, I saw women who reminded me of Frau Anders. It stirred me to realize that Frau Anders might well—if she had ever heard of this group—have become one of Professor Bulgaraux’s disciples. What was he expounding if not the idea of being liberated through contradicting one’s settled life and unleashing one’s deepest fantasies—the very thing which I had done when I disposed of Frau Anders?

  I don’t mean to give the impression that he sent the ladies off to murder their husbands, or eat candle wax, or steal from church poorboxes, or drink the semen of their poodles. However, the incitement to action which he offered was not a subtle one. I found it in remarkable agreement with my own instinct in these matters.

  “Moderation is the sign of a mixed spiritual state,” he said. But any act, he continued, might be performed moderately or immoderately. There are moderate murders and immoderate walks along the river.

  You see, the Autogenist cosmology and plan of salvation entailed a whole code of conduct, or rather anti-conduct. Man was created by Sophia, the subtle generatrix, out of dark matter in which only a spark of Autogenes’ pure light remained. But man, whom the Autogenist scripture calls “the subjacent dregs of matter,” nevertheless can, by various rites of purification, ascend to heaven. Man can return to the bosom of Autogenes, if he becomes “light”—meaning, Professor Bulgaraux explained with a glance intended just for me, as much the absence of weight as luminousness. This purification does not take place through self-denial but through total self-expressiveness. Thus the Autogenists held that men cannot be saved until they have gone through all kinds of experience. An angel, they maintained, attends them in every one of their illegal actions, and urges them to commit their audacities. Whatever might be the nature of the action, they would declare that they did it in the name of the angel, saying: “O thou angel, I use thy work! O thou power, I accomplish thy operation.” “They called this perfect knowledge,” continued Professor Bulgaraux, “performing such actions as their critics blushed to name.”

  “There is no need to name them,” cried one of the ladies of the enrapt circle. “Or to blush at naming them,” I added to myself.

  The Autogenist view that good and bad are only human opinion had nothing in common with the familiar modern disenchantment with morality. They intend this view as a means of salvation. As the result of moral distinctions is that, through them, we gain a personality, that is to say a weight, so the purpose of defying the moral law is to become weightless, to free the person from being only himself. Individual personalities must be neutralized in the acids of transgression.

  Looking at Professor Bulgaraux’s broad bespectacled face, his unkempt beard, his egg-stained vest, his baggy wrinkled suit, I could not determine whether I saw before me a paragon of anonymity or merely an unsuccessful zealot in all his picturesque and particular squalor. But if he had something true to teach me it did not matter what he was himself. “What is this personality that you advise us to lose?” I asked him at the last meeting I attended in his apartment. This was the only time that I dared to allude publicly to his more than scholarly attachment to the beliefs of the Autogenists, to take for granted that these were indeed his own beliefs.

  “Lose it, and you will understand.”

  “Tell me how,” I asked.

  “Do you still dream?”

  “More than ever.”

  “You’ve lost it,” he cried, and each of the dozen or so other auditors rose from their upholstered chairs to shake my hand and congratulate me.

  Yes, I still dreamed. Would that it were as simple as that! Nightly I lay in the sarcophagus of sleep, the man in the black bathing suit carved in stone on the coffin lid. But, like Dianus, I awoke restless, expectant. Sometimes it seemed as if my dreams were a parasite upon my life, other times that my life was a parasite on my dreams. I wanted to find the heart of my preoccupation. I wanted to escape from this personality which hedged me in, and clashed so sorely with my dreams. The divorce between my life and my dreams I came, through Professor Bulgaraux’s instruction, to see precisely as a result of this thing—call it personality, character—which everyone around me seemed to cultivate and take pride in. I concluded that “personality” is simply the result of being off balance. We have “characters” because we have not found our center of gravity. A personality is, at best, a way of meeting the problem of imbalance. But the problem remains. We do not accept ourselves for what we are, we retreat from our real selves, and then we erect a personality to bridge the gap.

  Is not to have a personality just to define our points of vulnerability and strength? A personality is our way of being for others. We hope that others will meet us half way or more, gratify our needs, be our audience, soothe our fears.

  But how to escape having a personality? I should have liked to be Chinese for a while, to see if their fabled impassivity feels different, lighter, on the inside. But I could not change the color of my skin or the geography of my heart. Narcotics were equally out of the question. They had never supplied me, even temporarily, with this sense of imperturbability and lightness.

  There is one well-advertised way of exp
eriencing this loss of personality—the sexual act. For a time I went often to prostitutes because I expected they would not pretend to be persons; at least their calling forbids it. In the carnal maneuvers of two people who have not been and will not be introduced to each other, a certain silence and lightness may prevail. But one may not count on it. The odor of personality—a photograph on the wall, a scar on the woman’s thigh, a certain print dress in the closet, an appealing or contemptuous look on her face—is always seeping in. I learned not to expect too much from sexuality. Nevertheless, I understood why sexuality, like crime, is an imperishable resource of the impersonal. Properly performed, these acts do blunt the sense of self. It is, I think, because the end is fixed: in sexuality, the orgasm; in crime, the punishment. One becomes free precisely through those acts which have an inescapable end.

  But for this purpose there is something even more valuable than sexuality and crime—and I testify from the experiences which I relate to you of a life at times libertine, a life in some respects criminal. That is the dream. Could it be that my dreams, which had been often a source of anguish and heaviness to me, were in fact the transparent medium whereby I would lose my tiresome personality? I had thought of the dreams as a foreign body in my flesh, against which I fended as best as I could. Now I was inclined to see them as a blessing. The dreams were grafted on my life, like a third eye in the middle of my forehead. With this eye, I could see more clearly than I ever had before. Jean-Jacques had warned me against my dreams, and my seriousness. Father Trissotin had urged me to confess and rid myself of them. Frau Anders had submitted to my dreams, but had understood them only as fantasies. Now Professor Bulgaraux had suggested to me that I might be proud of them. If I was losing something in the dreams, it was something I should be happy to lose. I was losing myself—losing the serpent that is inside, as shown in my last dream, “the dream of an elderly patron,” which ended so graphically with the loss of my very entrails. I was becoming free, if only to be more exclusively a man-who-dreams. I knew that I did not yet understand the nature of freedom, but I had hopes that my dreams, with their painful images of enslavement and humiliation, would continue to elucidate it for me.