The Benefactor

by Susan Sontag

42. I have put something into the world. Therefore I will take something out of it: myself.

  46. Good and evil laugh at each other.

  47. It may be said that I lack a sense of humor.

  50. Life in slow motion. Life engraved with the point of a nail; and on the head of the nail, an indecipherable message.

  51. Let the lights go out, so that a single light can shine.

  52. Let the lion’s roar be stilled, so that the bee’s sting may be heard.

  55. There are two paths, leading to two different goals. One is from event to knowledge: the well-celebrated path of wisdom. Another, from knowledge to event: the much advertised path to action … Are these all? Isn’t there a third: from non-knowledge to non-event? And a fourth? From non-event to non-knowledge?

  56. At first my activities exceeded my knowledge. Then, as I came to know less, I gave up action.

  57. There was once a man who was waiting for something to happen to him; it never did. There was once a man who was waiting for nothing to happen to him; finally it did.

  Let me tell you a dream which I had shortly after I moved into the house, which confirmed for me the correctness of my decision.

  I dreamed I was in a dimly-lit cellar. There was a large coal bin in one corner and a furnace in the other. Most of the floor was occupied by stacks of newspapers, garbage pails, loose bricks, old suitcases, and two travelling trunks pasted over with torn labels from foreign hotels. That I was alone in the cellar did not appear unreasonable to me, for there was hardly room for anyone else. That I was loosely chained to a stake in the center of the floor also did not trouble me.

  Beyond the length of my chain, across the cellar, was a stairway which led up to a door bordered with light. I regarded the stairs without feeling any impulse to climb them. The light was not intended for me. And hearing the distant noise of breaking glass, I was thankful to be where I was, safely away from the violence which I assumed to be taking place.

  Nevertheless I knew that it was possible to be more or less comfortable, wherever one is. I was trying to make myself comfortable with the bricks. Although fettered, I had a small area in which to move freely, and perhaps build something. I assembled all the bricks within my reach. Then, after lying down once on the floor to measure my body, I placed the bricks carefully next to each other making a sort of bed out of them long enough for me to stretch out at full length.

  But when I had lain on my bed of bricks, I found it was less comfortable than the floor. I dismantled the bed, retaining only a pillow of bricks, and settled myself to rest.

  There was one small window in this cellar, but when I looked in its direction, the light hurt my eyes. A child’s head appeared at the window, blocking the painful light. She was a pretty child, about four years old.

  “It’s a bear!” she cried, pointing at me. I smiled back, but this didn’t seem right. Then I growled amicably. I knew I wasn’t a bear, but didn’t want to disappoint her.

  The next thing I remember is eating a plate of rice. I was a bear now, or some sort of animal, for the way I ate was to gather the rice in my paws and rub it into my mouth. After I was finished I wondered who had brought the food and why I had not thought to detain him. I was lonely. I began to bang my bricks on the floor and shout. “Keeper!” I called.

  The man in the black bathing suit appeared in the doorway at the top of the stairs. His bare muscular arms and legs were as forceful and athletic as ever. There was one addition to his costume, however: a rope knotted around his waist, to which a heavy keychain was attached which hung down to his thigh. As he descended the steps I watched him expectantly. What followed, though, far surpassed my hopes that he would stay for a while and talk to me.

  “Unchain him,” said the bather.

  I was filled with joy at the prospect of leaving the cellar in the company of the bather. I would have been happy to go anywhere with him. Somehow I understood we were going to the park. In parks, I recalled, one receives consolation. The park is either a place to play or make love or talk. Any of these alternatives would have been delightful to me.

  But I had forgotten that the park is also a place where one watches, and where one is entertained by spectacles. In the park I found myself on a small stage with a painted backdrop of trees. The audience before me, seated on folding chairs, consisted of nurses with baby-carriages and small children.

  The bather was beside me on the stage, acting as the master of ceremonies. “Now he dances,” he said.

  I wished to dance for him! But my legs, which seemed made of wood or cardboard, refused to move.

  The audience became restive. “There is no need to leave,” the bather said. “He must dance.”

  I found, to my relief, that I was dancing. But the center of movement did not come from within me, but from wires attached to my wrists and ankles and to the nape of my neck. They were chains, really—familiar and cozy. I could not understand how I could now be a puppet, when just a moment before I had been an animal. But I knew that puppets could be as graceful as animals, and that dancing bears were ridiculous. It seemed better to be a puppet. I flung my arms and legs about rhythmically, straining to be worthy of the bather’s approval.

  “Perfect,” said the man. A feeling of peace came over me, and my movements slowly subsided.

  “Now we will show what else he can do,” said the man. He beckoned to one of the children sitting in the front row who was clutching a large rag doll.

  The child mounted the platform. “Bear,” said the man in the black bathing suit, “kick the doll and caress the child.” For an instant I wondered if he were addressing me. He repeated his command. I obeyed him immediately. But after doing exactly as he had directed, I found myself holding the doll in my arms; the child lay dismembered and bloody on the floor of the stage. Covering my face with my hands, I awaited the bather’s wrath.

  “That is innocence,” said the man. “He can no longer be blamed.”

  “Who would dream of blaming him?” shouted one of the white-uniformed nurses, a stout blonde woman with a cheerful face. I realized that she was the nurse in charge of the dead child. Although her approval was not as important to me as that of the man in the black bathing suit, I was concerned about her feelings. She did not seem at all angry when she came forward and collected the child.

  “He must kill,” the bather called after her, as she left the stage. “But he intends no harm.”

  I nodded agreement. The children laughed. Their laughter raised a final small doubt in my mind; I wished to explain why I had been exonerated. “It is himself but not himself,” I said, and this was the last thing I remember before I awoke.

  I consider this dream in many ways the most important of all my dreams. For some time I had known that my dreams had a life of their own: they were not simply the subject of my attention, in the dialogue which I had opened up between my waking and sleeping life, but constituted a sort of dialogue among themselves. This dream was the reply to “the dream of the two rooms,” my very first dream. In both dreams, there is the bather and a woman in white; in both dreams, I am asked to dance, I am chained and confined. But in the first, I cannot dance, my confinement is irksome, and the two personages of the dream are angry with me. In this dream, which I called “the dream of the puppet,” when I am asked to dance, I am finally able to; my chains actually assist me, for they have become the end of wires which move my body gracefully; and I please the masterful personages of my dream. In the first dream, I am ashamed. In this dream I am not ashamed, I am at peace.

  Incidents in my life, too, were illuminated by this dream. I thought back to my youth, soon after I had begun to dream, to that encounter long ago with a child in the park after the final conversation with Father Trissotin. I remembered how peaceful I had felt in that abandoned exchange of words with a child. It seemed to me that all my life had been converging on the state of mind represented in this dream in which I would finally be reconciled to myself—myself as I really am, the self of
my dreams. That reconciliation is what I take to be freedom.

  Do not think that I find this dream, or any of the others, unusual. For all I know, everyone has such dreams. What is unusual is the relation between my waking and my dreaming life. Under the pressure of my dreams, I came to adopt a style of living which cannot be called other than eccentric—except that ‘eccentric’ means literally ‘out of or departing from the center,’ while my life has, on the contrary, tended to revolve ever closer to the center, the very whirlpool of my dreams. But am I not quibbling? It is not distance from the center of one’s self, one’s dreams, which is meant by calling someone eccentric, but distance from the social center, the warm body of habits and tastes which are useful, amiable, and communally reinforcing. No, I will not disavow the label of eccentric.

  Nevertheless there are labels which I do repudiate. I’m aware that any kind of eccentricity may be considered a psychological deformity; and that a narrative about someone of unusual tastes and inner experiences, as this one is, tends to be read as a psychological study. In a psychological study one takes dreams as evidence, as supplying information about the dreamer’s preoccupations. I beg the reader not to avail himself of this simple way out, without at least considering my own example.

  I am not interested in my dreams in order to understand myself better, in order to know my true feelings. I am not interested in my dreams, in other words, from the point of view of psychology. I am interested in my dreams as—acts.

  I am interested in my dreams as acts, and as models for action and motives for action. I am interested in my dreams from the point of view of freedom. It may seem odd that, just at this point, in discussing a dream which presented me with so clear an image of my own enslavement, I should speak of freedom. I am aware of the alternatives. Were I to inspect my dreams with the purpose of “understanding myself,” I would be considering my dreams from the point of view of bondage. I would then see how my dreams reflect my enslavement to my own character, its limited themes, its stale anxieties.

  But one has only to declare oneself free in order to be, truly, free. I have only to consider my dreams as free, as autonomous, in order to be free of them—at least as free as any human being has the right to be.

  Another notebook describes the routine of a model day in my new home. Remember, I spent six years there, and each day had to be filled with some activity. I invented a formula for awakening, getting out of bed, washing, dressing, eating, reading, exercising, going to sleep, so that their character as activities would be modified by my new understanding.

  I have never wanted to be a specialist and I had not yet come to acknowledge the value of useful activity. But certain things have to be done daily, thrice daily, all one’s life; and through repetition one inevitably acquires proficiency. What I wanted to do was to rid these acts of any practical aspect, to think of them as executed each in and for itself. Thus I converted my most menial daily acts into what might be called rituals, which I performed faithfully, without any illusion that they were efficacious. I kept myself very clean, although there was no one to smell me. I was punctual, although I made no appointments.

  I must emphasize that these rituals were, like all else in my life except my dreams, entirely voluntary. Once again, I must caution the reader not to reduce my acts to neurotic compulsions.

  What are the features of ritual? First, and most obviously, repetition. Second, that this repetition proceeds according to a script in which every detail is fixed. Ordinarily, the goal determines the form of the act. The least form that achieves the goal which the person has in mind suffices. Say, I want to remove a candlestick from the shelf and place it on the table. It doesn’t matter how I carry the candlestick, whether in my left or my right hand, whether I walk or run, or even whether someone else does it for me. All that matters is that in the end the object be where I want it. I will put it down emphatically. Further, the spot on the table doesn’t have to be exactly specified. Anywhere on the table will do, so long as it doesn’t fall off.

  But if this act becomes a ritual the goal is absolutely precise. Equally precise are the means I take to arrive at the goal. There is only one correct way to transport the candlestick from shelf to table; only one place on the table where it may stand. The agent’s intentions and wishes are irrelevant. He must not infringe upon the act by performing it in a personal and idiosyncratic manner. Ideally, he should move as in a trance.

  Now I understood the most elementary but far from obviously intelligible feature of ritual—repetition. For why should any act need to be performed over and over in exactly the same way, which is laborious, unnatural, and difficult? Why should anything be repeated, ever? Why is once not enough?

  Common sense tells us that the only good reason for doing something more than once is that it has not been consummated the first time. This is exactly what happens in ritual. The rules of ritual forbid precisely that which makes it possible for an act to be consummated or fulfilled: the breakthrough of personal emphasis, the uneven distribution of attention, a climax. Ritual, whose essence is repetition, is that act which is never done properly, and therefore must be repeated indefinitely. Ritual is that way of performing an act which guarantees the need of doing it again.

  Consider my dreams. They consisted of acts which had to be performed repeatedly, hence their recurrence. Further, the emotional tonelessness of the dream after successive repetitions and variations had just this familiar quality of ritual: outward agitation contradicted by inner trance. The only task remaining to me was to execute the command of my dreams in my waking life, which is what I was attempting in that period of meditation in Frau Anders’ house. I wanted my acts to become as automatic as they had been in “the dream of the puppet,” for I had divined that once I moved in this way my dreams would be appeased, and the man in the black bathing suit placated.

  Let me give you an example of how I learned to behave. It was a real event, in fact a situation of some danger to me—danger being more real than safety.

  One night I was asleep in one of the rooms on the first floor when I was awakened by footsteps and a rustling noise in the corridor. I left my bed and went to investigate, taking care to arm myself with a poker from the fireplace. As I peered down the corridor, I saw a figure pressing himself against the wall. I pretended not to see him, and returned to my room. About twenty minutes later, hearing more noises, I rushed out into the hall and shouted at the intruder. He turned and faced me, a lean pimply youth in a black leather jacket.

  “You better watch out,” he said.

  “I’m watching,” I replied.

  “This is a robbery!” He brandished a gun, and I dropped my poker.

  I told him that he could have anything in the house which he put a bullet through, on the first try, at a distance of twenty paces. He looked at me incredulously, then laughed harshly. “I don’t have enough bullets for all I want,” he said.

  I told him that I had a gun and he could use mine when his ran out. I followed him about the house, as he put holes in the officers’ chairs and trophies in the salon, in each franc note of the cash I kept in a desk, in the gold balls in a room I set aside for the improvement of the senses, in a manicure set in a leather case, and in a few other articles of mine which he claimed.

  At the end of his tour I complimented him on his marksmanship. He turned to me and said, “What if I want you? Is that part of the bargain, maître fou?”

  I assured him that it was. “But you could only sell me if I am alive and in good condition,” I added.

  “Jesus!” he exclaimed. “What am I going to do with this junk?”

  “The money is still good, the gold can be melted down, the furniture can be repaired.”

  He stared at me in a peculiar way and rubbed his eyes. “Christ! I think I’m dreaming. How did you get me to play this idiotic game? Nobody will believe me if I tell them about tonight.”

  “Don’t regret what you have done,” I said. “You’ve relieved yoursel
f of a great burden. The burden of hiding and skulking. You have learned about disinterested violence, and I the secret of disinterested surrender.”

  He shook his head, laughed, and asked for a drink. We sat down and he told me about the three jail sentences he had already served—he was only twenty-two—and about his girlfriend, and the profession of house-breaking. A very decent fellow, really; I should be sorry not to have known him. About seven in the morning, he called a truck-driver friend who came and took the things he had chosen away.

  You will remember that at the beginning of this narrative I formulated my researches into myself as a quest for certitude. A great philosopher, the first to make this the goal of his inquiry, found that all he could be entirely certain of was that he existed. He was certain he existed because he thought; denial of this was itself an act of thought. My quest led to the opposite conclusion. Only because I existed—in other words, thought—did the problem of certitude arise. To reach certitude is to learn that one does not exist.

  Understand me, I do not deny common sense. I admit that I have a body, that I was born in such a place and at such a time. But it is never thoughts which are certain, only acts—acts cleansed of thought.

  My dreams, although full of reflections and impressions, were a parody of thought, cleansing me of thought, and therefore of personal existence. Rather than being an obstacle to the original problem which I had set myself, they were the solution to it. Thus they deserved the fate of all solution: ladders which must be kicked aside after gaining the desired altitude. The discipline which I imposed on myself in Frau Anders’ house was precisely an attempt to remove the dreams, by integrating them fully into my life—to dissolve the means, now that they had brought me to the end.

  There is only one loophole in my argument, one chink in the armor I have fashioned for myself out of the union of my life and my dreams. I talk of certitude—even boasting to you, my reader, that I have achieved it. I am concealing something which I must admit, embarrassing or inexplicable as it is. While I talk of certitude, I remain uncertain of one important thing! It concerns Frau Anders, or to speak more carefully, of the woman for whom I furnished the house years before, whom I installed in it during the war, and whom I later joined there.