I, Etcetera

by Susan Sontag

  Conception, pre-conception.

  What conception of this trip can I have in advance?

  A trip in search of political understanding?

  —“Notes toward a Definition of Cultural Revolution”?

  Yes. But grounded in guesswork, vivified by misconceptions. Since I don’t understand the language. Already six years older than my father when he died, I haven’t climbed the Matterhorn or learned to play the harpsichord or studied Chinese.

  A trip that might ease a private grief?

  If so, the grief will be eased in a willful way: because I want to stop grieving. Death is unremittable, unnegotiable. Not unassimilable. But who assimilates whom? “All men must die, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Szuma Chien said, ‘Though death befalls all men alike, it may be heavier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.’”

  —This is not the whole of the brief quote given in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, but it’s all I need now.

  —Note that even in this abridged quote from Mao Tse-tung there is a quote within a quote.

  —The omitted final sentence of the quote makes clear that the heavy death is desirable, not the light one.

  He died so far away. By visiting my father’s death, I make him heavier. I will bury him myself.

  I will visit a place entirely other than myself. Whether it is the future or the past need not be decided in advance.

  What makes the Chinese different is that they live both in the past and in the future.

  Hypothesis. Individuals who seem truly remarkable give the impression of belonging to another epoch. (Either some epoch in the past or, simply, the future.) No one extraordinary appears to be entirely contemporary. People who are contemporary don’t appear at all:

  they are invisible.

  Moralism is the legacy of the past, moralism rules the domain of the future. We hesitate. Wary, ironic, disillusioned. What a difficult bridge this present has become! How many, many trips we have to undertake so as not to be empty and invisible.

  IX

  From The Great Gatsby, p. 2: “When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”

  —Another “East,” but no matter. The quote fits.

  —Fitzgerald meant New York, not China.

  —(Much to be said about the “discovery of the modern function of the quotation,” attributed by Hannah Arendt to Walter Benjamin in her essay “Walter Benjamin.”

  —Facts:

  a writer

  someone brilliant

  a German [i.e., a Berlin Jew]

  a refugee

  he died at the French-Spanish border in 1940

  —To Benjamin, add Mao Tse-tung and Godard.)

  “When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world…” Why shouldn’t the world stand at moral attention? Poor, bruised world.

  First half of second quotation from unnamed Austrian-Jewish refugee sage who died in America: “Man as such is the problem of our time; the problems of individuals are fading away and are even forbidden, morally forbidden.”

  It’s not that I’m afraid of getting simple, by going to China. The truth is simple.

  I will be taken to see factories, schools, collective farms, hospitals, museums, dams. There will be banquets and ballets. I will never be alone. I will smile often (though I don’t understand Chinese).

  Second half of unidentified quote: “The personal problem of the individual has become a subject of laughter for the Gods, and they are right in their lack of pity.”

  “Fight individualism,” says Chairman Mao. Master moralist.

  Once China meant ultimate refinements: in pottery, cruelty, astrology, manners, food, eroticism, landscape painting, the relation of thought to written sign. Now China means ultimate simplifying.

  What doesn’t put me off, imagining it on the eve of my departure for China, is all that talk about goodness. I don’t share the anxiety I detect in everyone I know about being too good.

  —As if goodness brings with it a loss of energy, individuality;

  —in men, a loss of virility.

  “Nice guys finish last.” American saying.

  “It’s not hard for one to do a bit of good. What is hard is to do good all one’s life and never do anything bad.…” (Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Bantam paperback edition, p. 141.)

  A teeming world of oppressed coolies and concubines. Of cruel landlords. Of arrogant mandarins, arms crossed, long fingernails sheathed inside the wide sleeves of their robes. All mutating, peaceably, into Heavenly Girl & Boy Scouts as the Red Star mounts over China.

  Why not want to be good?

  But to be good one must be simpler. Simpler, as in a return to origins. Simpler, as in a great forgetting.

  X

  Once, leaving China to return to the United States to visit their child (or children), my father and M. took the train. On the Trans-Siberian Railroad, ten days without a dining car, they cooked in their compartment on a Sterno stove. Since just one breathful of cigarette smoke was enough to send my father into an asthmatic attack, M., who smokes, probably spent a lot of time in the corridor.

  —I am imagining this. M. never told me this, as she did tell me the following anecdote.

  After crossing Stalin’s Russia, M. wanted to get out when the train stopped in Bialystok, where her mother, who had died in Los Angeles when M. was fourteen, had been born; but in the 1930s the doors of the coaches reserved for foreigners were sealed.

  —The train stayed for several hours in the station.

  —Old women rapped on the icy windowpane, hoping to sell them tepid kvass and oranges.

  —M. wept.

  —She wanted to feel the ground of her mother’s faraway birthplace under her feet. Just once.

  —She wasn’t allowed to. (She would be arrested, she was warned, if she asked once more to step off the train for a minute.)

  —She wept.

  —She didn’t tell me that she wept, but I know she did. I see her.

  Sympathy. Legacy of loss. Women gather to speak bitterness. I have been bitter.

  Why not want to be good? A change of heart. (The heart, the most exotic place of all.)

  If I pardon M., I free myself. She has still not, after all these years, forgiven her mother for dying. I shall forgive my father. For dying.

  —Shall David forgive his? (Not for dying.) For him to decide.

  “The problems of individuals are fading away…”

  XI

  Somewhere, some place inside myself, I am detached. I have always been detached (in part). Always.

  —Oriental detachment?

  —pride?

  —fear of pain?

  With respect to pain, I have been ingenious.

  After M. returned to the United States from China in early 1939, it took several months for her to tell me my father wasn’t coming back. I was nearly through the first grade, where my classmates believed I had been born in China. I knew, when she asked me to come into the living room, that it was a solemn occasion.

  —Wherever I turned, squirming on the brocaded sofa, there were Buddhas to distract me.

  —She was brief.

  —I didn’t cry long. I was already imagining how I would announce this new fact to my friends.

  —I was sent out to play.

  —I didn’t really believe my father was dead.

  Dearest M. I cannot telephone. I am six years old. My grief falls like snowflakes on the warm soil of your indifference. You are inhaling your own pain.

  Grief ripened. My lungs wavered. My will got stronger. We went to the desert.

  From Le Potomak by Cocteau (1919 edition, p. 66): “Il était, dans la ville de Tien-Sin, un papillon.”

  Somehow, my father had gotten left behind in Tientsin. It became even more important to
have been conceived in China.

  It seems even more important to go there now. History now compounds my personal, individual reasons. Bleaches them, displaces them, annihilates them. Thanks to the labors of the greatest world-historical figure since Napoleon.

  Don’t languish. Pain is not inevitable. Apply the gay science of Mao: “Be united, alert, earnest, and lively” (same edition, p. 81).

  What does it mean, “be alert”? Each person alertly within himself, avoiding the collective drone?

  —All very well, except for the risk of accumulating too many truths.

  —Think of the damage to “be united.”

  Degree of alertness equals the degree to which one is not lazy, avoids habits. Be vigilant.

  The truth is simple, very simple. Centered. But people crave other nourishment besides the truth. Its privileged distortions, in philosophy and literature. For example.

  I honor my cravings, and I lose patience with them.

  “Literature is only impatience on the part of knowledge.” (Third and last quote from unnamed Austrian-Jewish sage who died, a refugee, in America.)

  Already in possession of my visa, I am impatient to leave for China. To know. Will I be stopped by a conflict with literature?

  A nonexistent conflict, according to Mao Tse-tung in his Yenan lectures and elsewhere, if literature serves the people.

  But we are ruled by words. (Literature tells us what is happening to words.) More to the point, we are ruled by quotations. Not only in China, but everywhere else as well. So much for the transmissibility of the past! Disunite sentences, fracture memories.

  —When my memories become slogans, I no longer need them. No longer believe them.

  —Another lie?

  —An inadvertent truth?

  Death doesn’t die. And the problems of literature are not fading away …

  XII

  After walking across the Luhu Bridge spanning the Sham Chun River between Hong Kong and China, I will board a train for Canton.

  From then on, I am in the hands of a committee. My hosts. My gracious bureaucratic Virgil. They control my itinerary. They know what they want me to see, what they deem proper for me to see; and I shall not argue with them. But when invited to make additional suggestions, what I shall tell them is: the farther north the better. I shall come closer.

  I hate the cold. My desert childhood left me an intractable lover of heat, of tropics and deserts; but for this trip I’m willing to support as much cold as is necessary.

  —China has cold deserts, like the Gobi Desert.

  Mythical voyage.

  Before injustice and responsibility became too clear, and strident, mythical voyages were to places outside of history. Hell, for instance. The land of the dead.

  Now such voyages are entirely circumscribed by history. Mythical voyages to places consecrated by the history of real peoples, and by one’s own personal history.

  The result is, inevitably, literature. More than it is knowledge.

  Travel as accumulation. The colonialism of the soul, any soul, however well intentioned.

  —However chaste, however bent on being good.

  At the border between literature and knowledge, the soul’s orchestra breaks into a loud fugue. The traveler falters, trembles. Stutters.

  Don’t panic. But to continue the trip, neither colonialist nor native, requires ingenuity. Travel as decipherment. Travel as disburdenment. I am taking one small suitcase, and neither typewriter nor camera nor tape recorder. Hoping to resist the temptation to bring back any Chinese objects, however shapely, or any souvenirs, however evocative. When I already have so many in my head.

  How impatient I am to leave for China! Yet even before leaving, part of me has already made the long trip that brings me to its border, traveled about the country, and come out again.

  After walking across the Luhu Bridge spanning the Sham Chun River between China and Hong Kong, I will board a plane for Honolulu.

  —Where I have never been, either.

  —A stop of a few days. After three years I am exhausted by the nonexistent literature of unwritten letters and unmade telephone calls that passes between me and M.

  After which I take another plane. To where I can be alone: at least, sheltered from the collective drone. And even from the tears of things, as bestowed—be it with relief or indifference—by the interminably self-pitying individual heart.

  XIII

  I shall cross the Sham Chun bridge both ways.

  And after that? No one is surprised. Then comes literature.

  —The impatience of knowing

  —Self-mastery

  —Impatience in self-mastery

  I would gladly consent to being silent. But then, alas, I’m unlikely to know anything. To renounce literature, I would have to be really sure that I could know. A certainty that would crassly prove my ignorance.

  Literature, then. Literature before and after, if need be. Which does not release me from the demands of tact and humility required for this overdetermined trip. I am afraid of betraying so many contradictory claims.

  The only solution: both to know and not to know. Literature and not literature, using the same verbal gestures.

  Among the so-called romantics of the last century, a trip almost always resulted in the production of a book. One traveled to Rome, Athens, Jerusalem—and beyond—in order to write about it.

  Perhaps I will write the book about my trip to China before I go.

  Debriefing

  … Frail long hair, brown with reddish lights in it, artificial-looking hair, actressy hair, the hair she had at twenty-three when I met her (I was nineteen), hair too youthful to need tinting then, but too old now to have exactly the same color; a weary, dainty body with wide wrists, shy chest, broad-bladed shoulders, pelvic bones like gulls’ wings; an absent body one might be reluctant to imagine undressed, which may explain why her clothes are never less than affected and are often regal; one husband in dark phallocratic mustache; unexpectedly successful East Side restaurant owner with dim Mafia patronage, separated from and then divorced in fussy stages; two flaxen-haired children, who look as if they have two other parents, safely evacuated to grassy boarding schools. “For the fresh air,” she says.

  Autumn in Central Park, several years ago. Lounging under a sycamore, our bicycles paired on their sides—Julia’s was hers (she had once bicycled regularly), mine was rented—she admitted to finding less time lately for doing: going to an aikido class, cooking a meal, phoning the children, maintaining love affairs. But for wondering there seemed all the time in the world—hours, whole days.

  Wondering?

  “About…” she said, looking at the ground. “Oh, I might start wondering about the relation of that leaf”—pointing to one—“to that one”—pointing to a neighbor leaf, also yellowing, its frayed tip almost perpendicular to the first one’s spine. “Why are they lying there just like that? Why not some other way?”

  “I’ll play. ’Cause that’s how they fell down from the tree.”

  “But there’s a relation, a connection…”

  Julia, sister, poor moneyed waif, you’re crazy. (A crazy question: one that shouldn’t be asked.) But I didn’t say that. I said: “You shouldn’t ask yourself questions you can’t answer.” No reply. “Even if you could answer a question like that, you wouldn’t know you had.”

  Look, Julia. Listen, Peter Pan. Instead of leaves—that’s crazy—take people. Undoubtedly, between two and five this afternoon, eighty-four embittered Viet veterans are standing on line for welfare checks in a windowless downtown office while seventeen women sit in mauve leatherette chairs in a Park Avenue surgeon’s lair waiting to be examined for breast cancer. But there’s no point in trying to connect these two events.

  Or is there?

  Julia didn’t ask me what I wonder about. Such as:

  What Is Wrong

  A thick brownish-yellow substance has settled in everyone’s lungs—it comes from too much sm
oking, and from history. A constriction around the chest, nausea that follows each meal.

  Julia, naturally lean, has managed lately to lose more weight. She told me last week that only bread and coffee don’t make her ill. “Oh, no!” I groaned—we were talking on the phone. That evening I went over to inspect her smelly bare refrigerator. I wanted to throw out the plastic envelope of pale hamburger at the back; she wouldn’t let me. “Even chicken isn’t cheap any more,” she murmured.

  She brewed some Nescafé and we sat cross-legged on the living-room tatami; after tales of her current lover, that brute, we passed to debating Lévi-Strauss on the closing off of history. I, pious to the end, defended history. Although she still wears sumptuous caftans and treats her lungs to Balkan Sobranies, the other reason she is not eating is that she’s too stingy.

  One thickness of pain at a time. Julia may not want to go out “at all,” but many people no longer feel like leaving their apartments “often.”

  This city is neither a jungle nor the moon nor the Grand Hotel. In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints. Only some of its citizens have the right to be amplified and become audible.

  A black woman in her mid-fifties, wearing a brown cloth coat darker than the brown shopping bag she is carrying, gets into a cab, sighing. “143rd and St. Nicholas.” Pause. “Okay?” After the wordless, hairy young driver turns on the meter, she settles the shopping bag between her fat knees and starts crying. On the other side of the scarred plastic partition, Esau can hear her.

  With more people, there are more voices to tune out.

  It is certainly possible that the black woman is Doris, Julia’s maid (every Monday morning), who, a decade ago, while down on St. Nicholas Avenue buying a six-pack and some macaroni salad, lost both of her small children in a fire that partly destroyed their two-room apartment. But if it is Doris, she does not ask herself why they burned up just that much and no more, why the two bodies lay next to each other in front of the TV at exactly that angle. And if it is Doris, it is certainly not Monday, Miz Julia’s day, because the brown paper bag holds cast-off clothing from the woman whose seven-room apartment she’s just cleaned, and Julia never throws out or gives away any of her clothes.