by Susan Sontag
… The writer does not have to write. She must imagine that she must. A great book: no one is addressed, it counts as cultural surplus, it comes from the will.
3/15/80
Lacanianism: It gives you a heavy language to walk around in.
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insipid certainties
Blind man who took up sky-diving—microphone in ear, receiving instructions from someone on the ground (woman instructor)—he broke his leg. The second time he fell holding a lead weight at the end of a 20-foot string so he’d know 2 seconds before he hit ground. He said he w[oul]d never have dared to sky-dive sighted.
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Mesmerism = restructuring of the will
English artist—Edward Ardizzone (he just died)
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The blind man didn’t want to hear about colors, he didn’t want things described to him. He often went to the movies. “You did?” “Why not,” he answered. “But I didn’t go to the ballet. I wouldn’t, unless the music was very good.” He got his sight back after two years. Micro-neurosurgery at NIH [the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland]. Now he’s the curator of a gallery in Soho [New York]. “Of course, I have no taste at all. I don’t know anything about art. But I know what’ll sell, what the public likes.”
Wallace Stevens said of a poem that it is the cry of its occasion
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The past as a chamber of horrors—and a grand school of persona and social liberty.
Ordinary language is an accretion of lies. The language of literature must be, therefore, the language of transgression, a rupture of individual systems, a shattering of psychic oppression. The only function of literature lies in the uncovering of the self in history.
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Tsvetaeva said of Pasternak that he looked like an Arab and his horse
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… “You’re walking on my story” (to someone interrupting)
Rhythm of sexual excess (male homosexual world)
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kenosis > emptying out
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The child must leave paradise. Is he / she nostalgic? Not really. Describe depression (using [the contemporary Swiss critic Jean] Starobinski essay) then say: they called it nostalgia. End with contrast between melancholy and euphoria.
3/26/80
Barthes died.
And David is in love. “She’s being Greta Garbo today.” When one is romantically in love, the other usually is Garbo.
3/27/80
(on the phone; he’s in S[an] F[rancisco]) Syberberg wants now to make a super-Parsifal, in the head of Richard Wagner.
Utopia = death
Film a system of thinking, a cosmos
Problem of utopia
Giving up life (women, love) for utopia—is it worth it? No. And yet the only …
My technical system: walk through Western civilization (paradise, hell)—can never do this on stage
Symbolist notion / concept of “analogies”
Basis of the one scene that Syberberg didn’t shoot: Heine ballads, Die Zwei Grenadiere [The Two Grenadiers] [—in the ballad] two soldiers [reminisce] about Napoleon (Hitler)
Dietrich Eckhart’s “Glacial Cosmology” …
3/28/80
“It’s our destiny. Our computer is made like that.” (Syberberg)
A one-act play. “Two Socrates”—both Socrates are on stage at the same time. Two adjoining cells. Each with their disciples. One takes the hemlock, the other leaves.
3/29/80
… She can’t be disturbed. She’s having a sentence …
An apartment is a drawing of one’s self. My apartment(s) is [are] about exclusion—what has been conquered.
A theatre set is allusive or illusive.
Giotto is allusive.
Most famous theatre set ever—[the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea] Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza is allusive (can be a temple, a church, whatever)
19th c[entury] sets are illusive
An essay on historical periodizing
Century > generation > decade
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3/30/80
… The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
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When what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived.—[the twentieth-century American poet] Marianne Moore
Sexually alert …
4/3/80
Barthes
People called him a critic, for want of a better label; and I myself said he was “the greatest critic to have emerged anywhere …” But he deserves the more glorious name of writer.
His body of work is an immense, complex, extremely discreet effort at self-description.
Eventually he became a real writer. But he couldn’t purge himself of his ideas.
4/7/80
Art(ists) invents the ideology of modernity—
The ideology of modernity denies the fact (continuing existence) of class. It puts spectacle in the place of a more complex totality
Art pictures ideology—can show (through examining art)—its incoherence
In the 1860s, [the French diarists, Edmond and Jules de] Goncourt mourned the death of Paris (their Paris—of the 1830s, 1840s)
Pleasure: a commodity, a (sub-)culture
New, spectacular, artificial spaces—highly capitalized—day at the races, soccer game, picnic, boating party, bicycling in country.
Space of pleasure now institutionalized
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4/12/80
An essay w[ith]o[ut] ideas: description, + modulations of description
The masculinization of homosexuality—h’s no longer alienated; no longer identify with culture (against nature). Being h. no longer facilitates a critical attitude to society. Now h’s affirm some of the worst, + most conventional, tastes of this society: sexism (hatred of women), consumerism, brutality, promiscuity, emotional dissociation. Not alienated but (self-ghettoized). The notion that good experience is extreme experience. Hence, drugs are necessary. How else could one disco for 8 hours or practice sexual abominations which are so painful.
Woolf, Diary (April 19, 1925): “The pale star of the Bugger has been in the ascendant too long.”
And Sartre! [He had died on April 15.]
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4/25/80
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Photography as enlightenment, de-mystification, hallucination. Both.
Joseph:
Under Stalin: not censorship but blackout.
The boot of the state on the brake, slowing the “progress” of literature—to decorate this break.
Count von Metternich on reading a poem of Heine: “Excellent. Confiscate all copies immediately.”
Traditional choice—setting your mnemonic apparatus in motion—+ you can never shut it down again.
[The following entries are undated but were clearly written in April or May of 1980, when SS was working on her Canetti essay.]
[A box is drawn around this:] Strippings
(In a notebook, save the strippings from stories + essays)
He was an architect, now he’s a “store planner.”
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“I’m not brave. It’s just that I don’t let being afraid keep me from doing the things I wasn’t afraid to do.”
[The following is titled “A Marriage” and SS drew a box around the title. It appears to be an undated account of her marriage to Philip Rieff.]
Madness is his legacy. Of course I didn’t know that when I married him. He was pitched high in my expectations. A hundred archaic longings stupefied me. I was young. The oily aromatic atoms of youth hid his bony face.
When you took your shirt off, I was shocked at [SS wrote the alternative words “upset by”] the roll of fat at your waist. Trembling as I put my arms around you. It was like hugging the floor.
The temptation of the spirit is a terrible thing. Pride, lust repressed. The contempt for instinct. Easy to feel superior to the others. They’re not as pure as we.
> Our marriage, our holy marriage. Everyone is unfaithful. So we won’t be.
But we were pure.
You looked so much older than me. I was embarrassed by that.
Acidly observing the decline of everything—manners, language. Vulgar TV programs. Children who talk back to [alternative: “sass”] their parents. Students who write “it’s” for “its.”
The sexual sordidness + cynicism of French in the 19th century (Flaubert, Goncourt Bro[ther]s)—the stupidity + provinciality of English—the savagery + sufferings of Russia
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German culture is the highest expression of Western culture … (so they didn’t have liberal political institutions)
The task of art is formulated by philosophy in Germany. That’s why all German art leads to Wagner. Nothing is big enough >>> They were the most advanced, the deepest culture in Europe (philosophy, scholarship + music)
Moral felon
Emotional felon
The aphorist’s favorite subject: himself
Notebook writer’s
Lichtenberg not actively misogynistic
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[On Canetti:] Pre-War: Three Upton Sinclair translations (1930 & 1932—age 25 and 27); then Auto-da-Fé (1935); he was thirty!—then an essay on Broch (1936), he was 31; it was delivered as a speech. Says that writer is (1) original; (2) sums up age; (3) stands against his time. Ends: writer wants to breathe.
Canetti is both the writer who denies the last 150 years of thinking—as he denies history—the prototypical European intellectual of the old school. Within this curious body of work lie—both hidden + exposed—all the problems of consciousness.
“Le grand absent” is history
[A box is drawn around this:] Mind as Passion: Notes on Canetti Each section has equal weight therefore note form is logical
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When asked, Duchamp used to say that he did nothing, that he was just a breather.
C[anetti] is a survivor,
Duchamp’s idea: totally liberated man—he no longer needed to have a career, to build a reputation, to gather power …
The ultimate crowd is the crowd of one’s thoughts. As there are fast + slow crowds, there are fast + slow thoughts.
4/26/80
The Canetti essay is about admiration …
The love of books. My library is an archive of longings.
Watch out for incorrect use of “presently” + “hopefully”
Two ideas—“the idea of the artistic vocation, of the artist who has renounced worldly ambitions in order to dedicate himself / herself to values that cannot be realized by commercial society” and the idea of cultural or artistic iconoclasm, the artist’s alienation from society, art as transgression, adversary art, avant-garde—these have been conflated. Both seem irrelevant or unreal to most artists now. But are scorned by art critics. But they’re not the same.
Old notes (1960s) I just found:
California is the America of America
Morality = reliability
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Essay: (?)
The Aphorism. The Fragment—all of these are “notebook-thinking”; are produced by the idea of keeping a notebook.
One could trace history of thought / art in relation to the forms of transcription: letter manuscript notebook.
The notebook has become an art form (Rilke, Lizzie’s book [Sleepless Nights]), a thought-form (Barthes), even a philosophical form (Lichtenberg, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Cioran, Canetti).
Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn’t write to others any more; one writes to oneself.
Why? Parsimony? Don’t squander one’s pretty phrases, one’s wisdom on someone else—a distant recipient who may not have the courtesy to save the letter.
Save it for yourself!
Hoarding ideas.
The persona of a notebook is different. More insolent (let’s not think about the whiners!)
Aphorism. Aphorism features aristocratic pessimism [In the margin:] scorn, cool. Alt[ernative]: Aphorism features pessimism and rapidity.
[Canetti’s] aphorisms are concentrated thought.
[In the margin:] Reading Canetti recalls Montaigne, Gracian, Chamfort, Lichtenberg, and (among contemporaries) Cioran—the same wisdom, essentially: a wisdom of pessimism.
Aphorisms are rogue ideas.
Aphorism is aristocratic thinking: this is all the aristocrat is willing to tell you; he thinks you should get it fast, without spelling out all the details. Aphoristic thinking constructs thinking as an obstacle race: the reader is expected to get it fast, and move on. An aphorism is not an argument; it is too well-bred for that.
To write aphorisms is to assume a mask—a mask of scorn, of superiority. Which, in one great tradition, conceals (shapes) the aphorist’s secret pursuit of spiritual salvation. The paradoxes of salvation. We know at the end, when the aphorist’s amoral, light point-of-view self-destructs.
Example: Gracian, who concludes his book on the courtier by observing that the courtier must, logically, be a saint; or Wilde, whose brilliance seems much of the time to be Nietzsche minus the tragic sense, ends with the wretched mortifying wisdom of De Profundis.
4/29/80
The quotation < > the trip
Silence
The three ideas with which I have the world.
Each one needs the other two.
I can’t replace one without changing the other two.
[In the margin:] Trip to Hanoi, “Unguided Tour,” “Project for a Trip to China,” “Debriefing”
Fictions constructed out of quotations—
The world perceived as an anthology of quotations (the essays on photography)
Stories that end with an affirmation of silence [—] “Dr. Jekyll,” and The Benefactor
[In the margin:] Death Kit ends with a vision of death as a museum of quotations. Theme of quotation in the essays on Godard + Benjamin, + in “Project for a Trip to China”
Quotation, for me, is my continuation of the idea of “the fragment”—the first discovery of the modernist sensibility {Schlegel brothers [August and Friedrich], Novalis}
In Russia, people wait for the poet to have the last word. (Nowhere does literature matter so much.)
“No, tell me first,” said the Hungarian exile, “between truth and justice which would you choose?”
“Truth.”
“Right,” he said.
Tout est là [“It’s all there”]
One must oppose communism: it asks us to lie—the sacrifice of the intellect (and the freedom to create) in the name of justice. (And, finally, order.) Think of [the Russian novelist and, having become an apologist for Stalin, publicist Ilya] Ehrenburg, who knowingly sacrificed his talent.