by Susan Sontag
It’s not easy to clothe oneself. Since the Easter bombing in Bloomingdale’s third-floor boutique section, shoppers in large department stores are body-searched as they enter. Veined city!
If it is not Doris, Julia’s Doris, then perhaps it is Doris II, whose daughter (B.A., Hunter College, 1965), having been bewitched, now lives with a woman the same age as her mother, only fatter, muscularly fat, and rich: Roberta Jorrell, the Queen of the Black Arts; internationally known monologist, poet, set designer, filmmaker, voice coach, originator of the Jorrell System of body awareness, movement, and functional coordination; and initiated voodoo priestess third-class. Doris II, also a maid, has not heard from her daughter for seven years, a captivity of biblical length that the girl has been serving as assistant stage manager of the Roberta Jorrell Total Black Theatre Institute; bookkeeper for Jorrell real-estate holdings in Dakar, Cap-Haïtien, and Philadelphia; decipherer and typist of the two-volume correspondence between R.J. and Bertrand Russell; and on-call body servant to the woman whom no one, not even her husband, dares address as anything other than Miss Jorrell.
After taking Doris, if she is Doris, to 143rd and St. Nicholas, the taxi driver, stopping for a red light on 131st Street, has a knife set against his throat by three brown boys—two are eleven, one is twelve—and surrenders his money. Off-duty sign blazing, he quickly returns to his garage on West Fifty-fifth Street and unwinds in a corner, on the far side of the Coke machine, with a joint.
However, if it is not Doris but Doris II whom he has dropped at 143rd and St. Nicholas, the driver is not robbed but immediately gets a fare to 173rd and Vyse Avenue. He accepts. But he is afraid of getting lost, of never finding his way back. Writhing, uncontrollable city! In the years since the city stopped offering garbage collection to Morrisania and Hunts Point, the dogs that roam the streets have been subtly turning into coyotes.
Julia doesn’t bathe enough. Suffering smells.
Several days later, a middle-aged black woman carrying a brown shopping bag climbs out of a subway in Greenwich Village and accosts the first middle-aged white woman who’s passing by. “Excuse me, ma’am, but can you tell me the way to the Ladies’ House of Detention?” This is Doris III, whose only daughter, age twenty-two, is well into her third ninety-day sentence for being a, etcetera.
We know more than we can use. Look at all this stuff I’ve got in my head: rockets and Venetian churches, David Bowie and Diderot, nuoc mam and Big Macs, sunglasses and orgasms. How many newspapers and magazines do you read? For me, they’re what candy or Quāāludes or scream therapy are for my neighbors. I get my daily ration from the bilious Lincoln Brigade veteran who runs a tobacco shop on 110th Street, not from the blind news agent in the wooden pillbox on Broadway, who’s nearer my apartment.
And we don’t know nearly enough.
What People Are Trying to Do
All around us, as far as I can see, people are striving to be ordinary. This takes a great deal of effort. Ordinariness, generally considered to be safer, has gotten much rarer than it used to be.
Julia called yesterday to report that, an hour before, she had gone downstairs to take in her laundry. I congratulated her.
People try to be interested in the surface. Men without guns are wearing mascara, glittering, prancing. Everyone’s in some kind of moral drag.
People are trying not to mind, not to mind too much. Not to be afraid.
The daughter of Doris II has actually witnessed Roberta Jorrell—stately, unflinching—dip both hands up to the wrists in boiling oil, extract some shreds of cornmeal that she kneaded into a small pancake, and then briefly reimmerse pancake and hands. No pain, no scars. She had herself prepared by twenty hours of nonstop drumming and chanting, curtseying and asyncopated hand clapping; brackish holy water was passed around in a tin cup and sipped; and her limbs were smeared with goat’s blood. After the ceremony, Doris II’s daughter and four other followers, including Henry, the husband of Roberta Jorrell, escorted her back to the hotel suite in Pétionville. Henry was not allowed to stay on the same floor this trip. Miss Jorrell gave instructions that she would sleep for twenty hours and was not to be awakened for any reason. Doris II’s daughter washed out Miss J’s bloody robes and stationed herself on a wicker stool outside the bedroom door, waiting.
I try to get Julia to come out and play with me (fifteen years have gone by since we met): see the city. On different days and nights I’ve offered the roller derby in Brooklyn, a dog show, F. A. O. Schwarz, the Tibetan Museum on Staten Island, a women’s march, a new singles’ bar, midnight-to-dawn movies at the Elgin, Sunday’s La Marqueta on upper Park Avenue, a poetry reading, anything. She invariably refuses. Once I got her to a performance of Pelléas et Mélisande at the old Met, but we had to leave at the intermission; Julia was trembling—with boredom, she claimed. Moments after the curtain rose on the Scene One set, a clearing in a dark forest, I knew it was a mistake. “Ne me touchez pas! Ne me touchez pas!” moans the heroine, leaning dangerously into a deep well. Her first words. The well-meaning stranger and would-be rescuer—equally lost—backs off, gazing lasciviously at the heroine’s long hair; Julia shudders. Lesson: don’t take Mélisande to see Pelléas et Mélisande.
After getting out of jail, Doris III’s daughter is trying to quit the life. But she can’t afford to: everything’s gotten so expensive. From chicken, even wings and gizzards, to the Coromandel screen, once owned by a leading couturier of the 1930s, for which Lyle’s mother bids $18,000 at a Parke-Bernet auction.
People are economizing. Those who like to eat—a category that includes most people, and excludes Julia—no longer do the week’s marketing in an hour at one supermarket, but must give over most of a day, exploring ten stores to assemble a shopping cart’s worth of food. They, too, are wandering about the city.
The affluent, having invested in their pocket calculators, are now seeking uses for them.
Unless already in a state of thralldom, like the daughter of Doris II, people are answering ads that magicians and healers place in newspapers. “You don’t have to wait for pie in the sky by-and-by when you die. If you want your pie now with ice cream on top, then see and hear Rev. Ike on TV and in person.” Rev. Ike’s church is not, repeat not, located in Harlem. New churches without buildings are migrating from West to East: people are worshiping the devil. On Fifty-third Street west of the Museum of Modern Art, a blond boy with a shag cut who resembles Lyle tries to interest me in the Process Church of the Final Judgment. “Have you ever heard of the Process?” When I say yes, he goes on as if I’d said no. I’ll never get into the 5:30 screening if I stop to talk to him, but I hand over a buck fifty for his magazine; and he keeps up with me, telling me about free breakfast programs the Process runs for poor children, until I spin into the museum’s revolving door. Breakfast programs, indeed! I thought they ate little children.
People are video-taping their bedroom feats, tapping their own telephones.
My good deed for November 12: calling Julia after a lapse of three weeks. “Hey, how are you?” “Terrible,” she answered, laughing. I laughed back and said, “So am I,” which wasn’t exactly true. Together we laughed some more; the receiver felt sleek and warm in my hand. “Want to meet?” I asked. “Could you come to my place again? I hate leaving the apartment these days.” Dearest Julia, I know that already.
I try not to reproach Julia for throwing away her children.
Lyle, who is nineteen now, called me the other morning from a phone booth at Broadway and Ninety-sixth. I tell him to come up, and he brings me a story he’s just completed, the first in years, which I read. It is not as accomplished as the stories that were published when he was eleven, an undergrown baby-voiced pale boy, the Mozart of Partisan Review; at eleven Lyle hadn’t yet taken all that acid, gone temporarily blind, been a groupie on a cross-country Rolling Stones tour, gotten committed twice by his parents, or attempted three suicides—all before finishing his junior year at Bronx Science. Lyle, with my encouragement, ag
rees not to burn his story.
Taki 183, Pain 145, Turok 137, Charmin 65, Think 160, Snake 128, Hondo II, Stay High 149, Cobra 151, along with several of their friends, are sending insolent messages to Simone Weil—no Jewish-American Princess she. She tells them there is no end to suffering. You think that, they answer, because you had migraines. So do you, she says tartly. Only you don’t know you have them.
She also says that the only thing more hateful than a “we” is an “I”—and they go on blazoning their names on the subway cars.
What Relieves, Soothes, Helps
It’s a pleasure to share one’s memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe—though we didn’t know it at the time. We know it now. Because it’s in the past; because we have survived.
Doris, Julia’s Doris, has decorated her living room with photographs, toys, and clothes of her two dead children, which, each time you visit her, you have to spend the first half hour examining. Dry-eyed, she shows you everything.
A cold wind comes shuddering over the city, the temperature drops. People are cold. But at least it clears off the pollution. From my roof on Riverside Drive, squinting through the acceptable air, I can see—across New Jersey—a rim of the Ramapo hills.
It helps to say no. One evening, when I drop by Julia’s apartment to retrieve a book, her psychiatrist father calls. I’m expected to answer the phone: covering the mouthpiece, I whisper, “Cambridge!” and, across the room, she whispers back, “Say I’m not home!” He knows I’m lying. “I know Julia never goes out,” he says indignantly. “She would have,” I say, “if she’d known you were going to call.” Julia grins—heartbreaking, childish grin—and bites into a pomegranate I’ve brought her.
What helps is having the same feelings for a lifetime. At a fund-raising party on Beekman Place for the New Democratic Coalition’s alternate mayoral candidate, I flirt with an elderly Yiddish journalist who doesn’t want to talk about quotas and school boycotts in Queens. He tells me about his childhood in a shtetl ten miles from Warsaw (“Of course, you never heard of a shtetl. You’re too young. It was a village where the Jews lived”). He had been inseparable from another small boy. “I couldn’t live without him. He was more to me than my brothers. But, you know, I didn’t like him. I hated him. Whenever we played together, he would make me so mad. Sometimes we would hurt each other with sticks.” Then he goes on to tell me how, last month, a shabby old man with stiff pink ears had come into the Forward office, had asked for him, had come over to his desk, had stood there, had said, “Walter Abramson, you know who I am?” And how he’d gazed into the old man’s eyes, scrutinized his bald skull and shopping-bag body, and suddenly knew. “You’re Isaac.” And the old man said, “You’re right.”
“After fifty years, can you imagine? Honestly, I don’t know how I recognized him,” said the journalist. “It wasn’t something in his eyes. But I did.”
What happened? “So we fell into each other’s arms. And I asked him about his family, and he told me they were all killed by the Nazis. And he asked me about my family, and I told him they were all killed … And you know what? After fifteen minutes, everything he said infuriated me. I didn’t care any more if his whole family had been killed. I didn’t care if he was a poor old man. I hated him.” He trembled—with vitality. “I wanted to beat him. With a stick.”
Sometimes it helps to change your feelings altogether, like getting your blood pumped out and replaced. To become another person. But without magic. There’s no moral equivalent to the operation that makes transsexuals happy.
A sense of humor helps. I haven’t explained that Julia is funny, droll, witty—that she can make me laugh. I’ve made her sound like nothing but a burden.
Sometimes it helps to be paranoid. Conspiracies have the merit of making sense. It’s a relief to discover your enemies, even if first you have to invent them. Roberta Jorrell, for instance, has humorlessly instructed Doris II’s daughter and others on her payroll exactly how to thwart the enemies of her federally funded South Philadelphia Black Redress Center—white bankers, AMA psychiatrists, Black Panthers, cops, Maoists, and the CIA—with powders, with hexes, and with preternaturally smooth flat stones blessed by a Cuban santera in Miami Beach. Julia, however, doesn’t think she has any enemies—as, when her current lover again refuses to leave his wife, she still doesn’t understand that she isn’t loved. But when she goes down on the street, which happens less and less frequently, she finds the cars menacingly unpredictable.
Flight is said to help. Dean and Shirley, Lyle’s parents, having pulled out of the market last year, have bought into a condominium in Sarasota, Florida, whose City Fathers recently voted, in order to make the city more seductive to tourists, to take out all the parking meters they installed downtown five years ago. Lyle’s parents don’t know how many weeks a year they can actually spend in the Ringling Brothers’ home town; but there’s never been a decade when real-estate values haven’t gone up, right? And that crazy Quiz Kid, their son, will always have his room there if he wants it.
It helps to feel guiltless about your sexual options, though it’s not clear that many people actually manage this. After eventually finding his way back from Hunts Point into the well-lit grid of more familiar predators, the driver who had taken Doris II to 143rd and St. Nicholas picks up a pale, blond boy with a shag cut who also resembles Lyle and who says, as he gets into the cab, “West Street and the trucks, please.”
Lately, my sexual life has become very pure. I don’t want it to be like a dirty movie. (Having enjoyed a lot of dirty movies, I don’t want it to be like that.)
Let’s lie down together, love, and hold each other.
Meanwhile, the real Lyle has again skipped his four o’clock class, Comp. Lit. 203 (“Sade and the Anarchist Tradition”), and is sprawled in front of a TV set in the dormitory lounge. He’s been watching more and more television lately, with a preference for serials like Secret Storm and As the World Turns. He has also started showing up at student parties, instead of rebuffing his roommate’s kindly, clumsy invitations. A good rule: any party is depressing, if you think about it. But you don’t have to think about it.
I’m happy when I dance.
Touch me.
What Is Upsetting
To read Last Letters from Stalingrad, and grieve for those lost, all-too-human voices among the most devilish of enemies. No one is a devil if fully heard.
To find everyone crazy—example: both Lyle and his parents. And to find the crazy particularly audible.
To be afraid.
To know that Lyle will be introduced to Roberta Jorrell next week at an elegant SoHo loft party given in her honor after her speech at New York University; be recruited by her; drop out of college; and not be heard from again for at least seven years.
To feel how desperate everyone is. Doris, Julia’s Doris, is being evicted from her apartment. She not only has no money to pay a higher rent; she wants to go on living in the place where her children perished.
To learn that the government—using information that the law now requires be recorded on tape and stored indefinitely by banks, the telephone company, airlines, credit-card companies—can know more about me (my more sociable activities, anyway) than I do myself. If necessary, I could list most of the plane trips I’ve taken; and my old checkbook stubs are in a drawer—somewhere. But I don’t remember whom I telephoned exactly four months ago at 11 a.m., and never will. I don’t think it was Julia.
To find in myself the desire to stop listening to people’s distress.
To be unsure of how to exercise the powers I do possess.
Julia had once fallen under the spell of an ex-ESP researcher, then a specialist in the North American Indian occult, who claimed to know how to help her. Most people who meet Julia, stunned by her vulnerability, take a crack at helping her; the pleasure of her beauty, which is the only gift Julia has ever been able to make to other people, helps too. The sorceress
in question, Martha Wooten, was white, Westchester-born, crisp, a superb tennis player—rather like a gym teacher; I thought, condescendingly, she might be good for Julia, until as part of a program for freeing Julia from her demons, she had her bay at the full moon on all fours. Then I swooped back into Julia’s underfurnished life, performed my old rites of counterexorcism—reason! self-preservation! pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will!—and Martha Wooten vanished, metamorphosed, rather, into one of the Wicked Witches of the West, setting up in Big Sur as Lady Lambda, head of the only Lucifer cult that practices deep breathing and bioenergetic analysis.
Was I right to de-bewitch her?
To be unable to change one’s life. Doris III’s daughter is back in jail.
To live in bad air. To have an airless life. To feel there’s no ground: that there is nothing but air.
Our Prospects
Aleatoric. Repetitious. On a Monday, after taking Doris, Julia’s Doris, home from cleaning Julia’s apartment, the taxi driver stops to pick up three fourteen-year-old Puerto Ricans on 111th and Second Avenue. If they don’t rob him, they will get in the cab, ask to be taken to the juice bar in the alley by the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, and give him a big tip.
Not good. A hand-lettered sign pasted at eye level on the bare brick wall of a housing project on the corner of Ninetieth and Amsterdam reads, plaintively: Stop Killing.
Wounded city!
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
Here’s a solid conservative rule, deposited by Goethe with Eckermann: “Every healthy effort is directed from the inner to the outer world.” Put that in your hashish pipe and smoke it.