1.
Reading Susan Sontag makes me feel bossy. Arguing against any indifference to aesthetics or ethics, she is always in the middle of persuading me with her avidity, and sometimes her leaping is over some ground that doesn’t really exist or has yet to be laid, but the way she leaps is often persuasive because it’s assertive, and I like assertiveness; it’s a break from my daily world self, where mild-to-wild surmising is the rule.
Reading Susan Sontag makes me feel bossy. Arguing against any indifference to aesthetics or ethics, she is always in the middle of persuading me with her avidity, and sometimes her leaping is over some ground that doesn’t really exist or has yet to be laid, but the way she leaps is often persuasive because it’s assertive, and I like assertiveness; it’s a break from my daily world self, where mild-to-wild surmising is the rule.
Susan Sontag’s a great essayist; she’s a fair fictioneer. But she hungered after fiction in a way she never did about any other kind of material. “I want to sing!” she wrote in her later journals. When I go sentence by sentence through her essays, I can see how she does—her bald, pointy thoughts assert a fluid melody of argument. Only later in her life did she acknowledge that the aims of her fiction and her essays were close to the same: “It’s almost frightening,” she told an interviewer.
David Rieff, her son, writes in his memoir that when, at 71, she was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, she maintained up until her death an unstoppable drive; she was intent on producing her greatest fiction—she saw it there in the future, and she was hardly one to think herself unable to accomplish it. To be an ambitious writer like Sontag requires the ability to change your mind at any time, and to believe, somehow, in your own fatedness. You will say what you need to say—to swing at that one point you eye in the soil that, when you break it, will break.
2.
2.
I am obsessed with bodies; every day when I wake up I get out of bed and go down the hallway to the bathroom and pass a floor-length mirror and usually don’t pass up the opportunity to look at myself (especially if I worked out the day before)—embarrassing to admit, but it’s true.
I begin most days by jerking off—if I turn on my computer, I scroll down Tumblr pages where I look at updates from over a hundred gay porn sites. Lean builds or muscular beefy forms or ones in between in their twenties or thirties or forties or fifties; men in arrangements of one or two or three or four or more, posed in almost classical arcs, hands on each other, or not; eyes looking at each other, or not, looking at the looker, i.e. me—the eyes are blank or full of absolutes—desire, energy, wildness.
Jerking off and looking at porn are a kind of impersonality (the experience is obviously more personal without porn). Afterwards follows a backwards-looking revelation: I look at myself and what I was just looking at or thinking of or imagining. I feel disconnected from my body.
In high school this kind of body worship manifested in my drawings. My favorite choice of subject was the nude form, and I usually drew women, although I started to draw men in my senior year. One drawing in particular I worked on for a few weeks—I had used the grid method, which involved laying a 9x9 grid on my source picture, and a 9x9 grid on my large sheet of paper, then working box by box on transferring the gradient values to my paper from my source picture, a guy named Chad from a site called RandyBlue. The method is a common enough tool for beginning artists who are learning to see subjects in terms of their visual information (lights, darks, shadows, negative space, et cetera). That drawing I still have but I could never get rid of the grid entirely—it was laughably obvious I had used porn as my source.
When I see a man I desire, I both want him and want to be him—this is a trope of same-sex desire narratives. I have invariably become a viewer of bodies everywhere I go; I observe the shapes they make as they move with and without clothes.
It’s an adolescent perspective; the beginner is present.
When I see a man I desire, I both want him and want to be him—this is a trope of same-sex desire narratives. I have invariably become a viewer of bodies everywhere I go; I observe the shapes they make as they move with and without clothes.
It’s an adolescent perspective; the beginner is present.
3.
Susan Sontag’s The Pornographic Imagination roots its tremendous polemicisms in the occasion of reviewing two French books translated into English at the time, The Story of O and The Image. I’m not interested in pornographic literature, as Sontag was, as a way of spotlighting the dismissive attitude of English and American critics toward pornographic work (including the work of genuine literary merit, argues Sontag). But I am interested in the implications of the failure of the capitalist system to nourish the imaginations of its citizens. This failure looms huge, as art lets us imagine alternatives to the world we live in—alternatives we can critique and inhabit in equal turns (or so goes one of today’s common defenses of art and art making, issued by many, from poets like Ann Lauterbach to science fiction writers like Ursula K. Leguin).
The idea of what constitutes a healthy mind is at stake here: addictions, anxieties, melancholia inflict themselves on our wares. Which is not to say that we need to monitor, control, evict, guard our minds, but that we need to consider the mind’s forays, its own curiosities; I was about to say “natural” curiosities in order to do what many do by evoking that easy word—to endow it with beneficent aura, as trees or sweet plums. But I’m the last to deny the way culture shapes desires. I need to know our range of materials, the way those materials empower our ability to move over time among forms of response—solace, anger, and a sense of humor, by which I mean not merely jokes or cleverness (though those are fun) but rather the delicacy of consciousness whose uptick is a kind of perfume.
The question of radical will is ever urgent for me; I don’t feel the urge to make heresies for their own sake—which is always the move of a false imitation of an idea of the avant-garde. I want to make the kinds of leaps that feel necessary and in some way—it surprises me to say it—instruct the reader. Unnecessary work has a heart of small-time ironies, easy conclusions, easy personalisms, complacence up the wazoo. Which is not to say that great work can’t draw upon irony, satire, or other ‘decadent’ devices—it certainly can, and maybe the work I want to make is about energy and movement as well as personality.
What’s been key to me is learning how to connect acrobatic acts of consciousness—extended wordplay, loopy dream logics, anything-goes syntactic arrangements, motivated by the feeling of laughter in my mind, maybe not outloud—to grounded emotional truthiness, where the red fern grows, so to speak. All I have to be is a truth-teller. My next great lesson will be to pay attention to what bodies do in various removes—local, digital, lexical. Which is not to say that watching porn will help me make radical art (although maybe it does for some people; pornography has been the occasion or genre convention to bounce back on for the likes of Mapplethorpe to some contemporary poets like Dorothea Lasky). I understand erotics to be about feeling in a way that pornography often is not. But I say that anything goes—no detail is trivial; the failure isn’t in the given details but rather in the artist’s inability to make those details spin.
Art, religion, sex—each is a total world. Religion and pornography, in particular, are ruled by an internal logic and power relations; they are both marked by eternally reptitious energy, brands of absolutism. They exact transcendence as well as a kind of revenge on consciousness—an evacuation of ego. They perpetuate themselves. So says Sontag:
“No wonder, then, that the new or radically revamped forms of the total imagination which have arisen in the past century—notably, those of the artist, the erotomane, the left revolutionary, and the madman—have chronically borrowed the prestige of the religious vocabulary. And total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.”
Serious, ardent, and enthusiastic. I am working on it, Susan.
4.
4.
When it comes to the poets, my mother reveres Robert Frost; for the essayists she has found a staggering enthusiasm for Christopher Hitchens, the fabled atheist critic (the day he died, I had just come home for a winter break in college; my mom and I sat on stools at a bar in the Mexican restaurant La Tolteca; she sighed over a beer; the end of her voice had a droop and a waver; she blinked back tears: “To lose such a voice—such a voice—”). It’s not unusual for American Jews to be unreligious, or even devoutly atheist; but my mother, born and raised a Catholic Portuguesa in Fall River, Massachusetts, converted to Judaism after marrying a Jew, so I found myself surprised when an atheistic air began steeling our conversations.
I’ve also seen my mom cry in happiness, if that’s what it is. Last year we were at dinner at an Indian restaurant in North Wilmington (lots of shopping and dining, money in the air like a lavender nonchalance). I pulled out an interview with Adam Phillips, who cites the British Psychologist D.W. Winnicott’s essay “On the Capacity to Be Alone.” Here’s what I read aloud to her:
There’s something deeply important about the early experience of being in the presence of somebody without being impinged upon by their demands, and without them needing you to make a demand on them. And that this creates a space internally into which one can be absorbed. In order to be absorbed one has to feel sufficiently safe, as though there is some shield, or somebody guarding you against dangers such that you can ‘forget yourself’ and absorb yourself, in a book, say. Or, for the child, in a game. It must be one of the precursors of reading, I suppose.
I looked up to see my mother smiling at me with tears in her eyes; I had made a point of bringing up this interview because, that evening, my mother had entered a dark mood of doubting her worth; she’s shared with my sister and me darker thoughts—of suicide, of not wanting to live anymore; of feeling herself to be a burden on my sister and me and herself—so I did the best I could, in that moment, to show her what she meant to me, in, at least, that way. She had enabled me to be a writer.
I could also say these dark thoughts were her most illuminated. She sometimes remarks that she hates sunlight because it illuminates—in our cramped house—grime and stain and poor form, unkemptness. The house she lives in now is very small compared to the looming upscale townhouse we lived in before that, and before that, in what—to my childhood mind— was a mansion: four floors, seven and a half bathrooms, four fireplaces, a half basketball court in the backyard. And my parents bought it; they had saved up for it after my dad’s fledgling import-export business started doing well in the mid-1990s.
Soon the mansiony dream house filled up with despair—my father passed away two weeks after we moved in (I was eight, it was my sister’s fifteenth birthday). Since then, my mother’s life—up to that point upheld by my father, whom she relied on for energy, for the lead—has collapsed. So when she had looked at me, moved by the passage and my feelings about it, it was bittersweet. Our word bittersweet is, in Greek, glukupikron; literally translated, sweetbitter.
I could also say these dark thoughts were her most illuminated. She sometimes remarks that she hates sunlight because it illuminates—in our cramped house—grime and stain and poor form, unkemptness. The house she lives in now is very small compared to the looming upscale townhouse we lived in before that, and before that, in what—to my childhood mind— was a mansion: four floors, seven and a half bathrooms, four fireplaces, a half basketball court in the backyard. And my parents bought it; they had saved up for it after my dad’s fledgling import-export business started doing well in the mid-1990s.
Soon the mansiony dream house filled up with despair—my father passed away two weeks after we moved in (I was eight, it was my sister’s fifteenth birthday). Since then, my mother’s life—up to that point upheld by my father, whom she relied on for energy, for the lead—has collapsed. So when she had looked at me, moved by the passage and my feelings about it, it was bittersweet. Our word bittersweet is, in Greek, glukupikron; literally translated, sweetbitter.
5.
I have my vision—the work has energy, takes the lead.
In the meantime, I’m self-conscious about being too literary, about being too self-conscious of the artiness of my enterprise, which is also a part of my duty; the duty of the self-conscious is to avoid mere embarrassment and opt for the greater self-awareness. This shame of identifying as an artist has to do with a feeling of inadequacy. What you want is to make the terms of the world inadequate (because you’re frustrated with capitalism, with patriarchy, with the stupid ideas of how bodies are supposed to be and look and connect with each other) and you want to make the terms of the world adequate (because you like a lot about living; you have your dark thoughts—suicide, just run-of-the-mill depressive episodes where everything is mellow and distant—but you recognize the capacity for transforming outermost realities, be it your body through obsessive fitness or your output of work, shaping art-poem experiments).
For example.
Before I moved from Brooklyn to St. Louis, I published a chapbook of poems for friends and family. My sister’s response:
btw there's a quote in there about violence that is sooo fucking good- I thought you wrote it and that you were becoming an explicitly political poet and then I saw it was someone elses work. I still like it. And I love your words/what you have to say! Eek- cool on making a book.
I was annoyed because I could tell if I had written work that was “explicitly political,” she would have been totally into it. She doesn’t understand poetry, she’s told me. Many people feel the same way. It frustrates me. But I kept my hat on. My response:
yeah, that ben lerner epigraph is amazing, right? he's fantastic. he's at brooklyn college. there are moments in the book that are pretty political (see the first exercise poem about hierarchies and monsters). it takes skill to write explicitly political poetry without sounding self-righteous or whiney—or like you’re telling a sympathetic audience what it already knows or believes. and lerner does that extremely extremely well.
6.
Hurricane Sandy struck New York City on October 29, 2012, causing many billions of dollars in damage. That day I kept to my bedroom in my fifth-floor apartment in Washington Heights, reading Sontag’s journals; my envy only stopped after I reached 1958, when Sontag was older and therefore her amazing wisdom, her reckless ambition, was less threatening. I could relax my comparisons.
I am now twenty-five (I have been for a little over three months). Here is an entry from the year Sontag was twenty-five.
12/31/57
Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself.
Why is writing important? Mainly, out of egotism, I suppose. Because I want to be that persona, a writer, and not because there is something I must say. Yet why not that, too? With a little ego-building—such as the fait accompli this journal provides—I shall win through to the confidence that I (I) have something to say, that should be said.
My ‘I’ is puny, cautious, too sane. Good writers are roaring egotists, even to the point of fatuity. Sane me, critics, correct them—but their sanity is parasitic on the creative faculty of genius.
Now here’s an entry from my journal, January 25, 2014, when I was living in Brooklyn:
January 25, 2014
Just read some passages of Plath’s unabridged journal (thank Gigi for messaging you recently, mentioning how she likes them) and like the way she writes as a 27y.o., and the January – February entries when she was 24/25 are solid. Plath having lived in many places by then, and yet still hadn’t done the writing she thought that such traveling and living abroad would bring about.
Maybe I too need to write a novel—get out of the language space and into the character space. Problem is that my sense of character is entirely given over to affect, too influenced by the qualities of voices I notice and like. The British accent, the affected feminine lisp, the wide-eyed Victorian posture of Alice in Wonderland, the Virginia Woolf way—these are strategies of drag, as I notice them. And to write a novel about drag queens and kings would be stunted and predictable from the start.
Potential subjects—my writing life (too literary, too many traps set up), my sex life (too crude). I should be able to write—then that boring old flag in my window: you can write about anything as long as you do it well. Thus the parade for sincerity begins. For realism. I may be sincere, I may be real. I may be neither of those things. “Oh how you talk! Such nonsense,” says Alice. At the door with her axe of metaphor.
Paul Auster’s Winter Journal. I see it on my big white bookshelf. It’s at a lean, as if considering me. What say you. Can I say that? At some point I really just have to stop ruminating about writing and just write—these journals don’t count. They only, at parts like now, reinforce my self-consciousness. The pikes fall and I’m prisoner.
I walk around thinking of the same things over and over—fantasies. Fantasies are the…but I don’t want to be a philosopher. I just wanna sing.
7.
Sontag and I diverge in key respects. I’m not a moralist writer (I don’t think) so I don’t quite hear the call of war, poverty, natural catastrophe, accidents, disaster, and decay—not in the way that others like Sontag do. I find my way to issues of moral urgency through their stakes in imagination—hence my drive to examine representations, to absorb their means, so I can do my own kinds of responses as well as be a sensitive inhabitor of my own times. Nor have I shown myself to be a generalist yet (in some ways it would be dreadful to keep going on in my narrow interests; I hope I’ll diversify).
The idea of the poet is odd too; it survives in public consciousness as an anachronistic model of justice and beauty. When Sontag mentions the poet in her early essays, it’s to examine the changing ways that different arts have been interpreted over time. In The Aesthetics of Silence, Sontag dissects Valery’s idea that prose is communication and poetry the ineffable—this, she says, is “naively unhistorical,” as the ineffable had been considered long before then not as the reward of poetry but rather as the singular effect of religious discourse (also philosophy). In the space of an essay like this I’ll take up the historicist cue, or I’ll take it up if I’m having a conversation with someone about ideas, and it occurs to me that I might be able to surprise it from behind with a timeline. But in my reading life I tend to disavow it—I enjoy reading poems for the kind of amazing feeling of nonthinking.
And of course I want my family and friends to be able to understand my poetry. It’s for other people—not just myself. (There’s this great moment in an interview I watched on Youtube where a journalist asks Sontag whether she cares if people read her work and Sontag—rightly so—bursts out in great offense—“Well of course the book is for people!”) This past July I had lunch with a college friend in Chinatown. I told her I didn’t have a title yet for my book, which had a long center poem full of inside jokes and my friends’ names; —and then I told her I’d just name that poem and the book after her—she laughed. She was shocked when she received her copy of Maddy a few weeks later.
When I sent the chapbook to my mom, her enthusiastic response gave me my heart back. She was enjoying what I was doing—which amazed me and gladdened me, because for years I’d shared my work with her and, when I visited home, read aloud the work of poets I loved. Usually she looked confused in response to my writing and the work of those poets. So it was a relief to me to get her happy emails. I was getting somewhere—I was approaching my ideal.
8.
8.
My mother’s quip about the wait staff at an upscale hipster pizzeria in St. Louis:
9.
When I’m not writing, I hold on to what other people tell me of my abilities. Some that I can recall off the top of my head:
“You don’t think like this [10th grade English teacher Mr. Gerken draws a straight line down the air], you think like this [he draws a circular shape in the air]
“Your poems’ endings have that great thing of inevitability. That’s a great talent” [Bernadette Mayer, when I studied with her for a weekend this past May]
“You gave me over thirty ways that bananas and oranges are alike, but you failed to say that they’re both fruits.” [A doctor who was discussing with my mother and me the results of an IQ test I took in high school to qualify for extended time for tests]
I’m super-aware of my circles now; I wonder if I don’t take enough risks; I question every ending now under the pressure of a presumed talent. I’m wary always of forests and trees. Knowledge from others about your self becomes full of itself very quickly, and it tips more on one side, making you lopsided.
10.
10.
What I admire about Sontag is her sense of middleness. In her Rolling Stone interview with Jonathan Cott, Sontag goes into her frustration about the general trend of attitudes of certain critics or public opinion about “low art”—shifting from dismissal because of ignorance to dismissal because of presumed knowledge. Maybe Sontag could be a contrarian, but she was always putting ideas or works of art in dialogue with each other, with precursors, and with herself. I’d never thought about dialectics in terms of compassion, but as a writer and interviewee, Sontag was all about refusing to take absolute sides—to always try for different positions, to be alert and responsive. I like this—and it seems the key to radical work.
If I want to make radical work—and I do—how will I do it? It would seem that radical work can’t be forced out of you—isn’t just a matter of will. I think about it a lot but I don’t know if I’ve really written any radical work. The accident has to fall on the right design; tone will out. By radical I mean work that is both at the root and also gets at the root. Poetry that’s radical challenges inherited ideas about poems, ideas that have built up over time or perhaps fallen away: a poem must mean, it must seduce, it must tell a story, it must have meter, it must have rhyme, it must be free of verse, it must make sense, it must make no sense, it must horrify, it must veer toward the ineffable, it must be beautiful, it must work through ugly feelings, it must not try to create new feelings—that would be perverse; it must be perverse, it must not contain any part that doesn’t contribute to its reception and interpretation, it mustn’t do anything, it must consist of whole fragments, it must disavow subjectivity because of capitalism, it must be saturated in subjectivity because of capitalism, it must be original, it must not be original, it must not give a shit, it must only see the world as it will be in the future, it must care about the world as it is, it must make noise, it must comply. At any given time in our age, any of these ideas can become fresh—depending on how stale everything else is. But none of these vectors pinpoint what is so crucial about all radical art.
Radical art occurs between the artwork and the audience, the former needled enough that the latter is agitated. What role does pleasure have in the work of dissent? I’d think the best works of dissert are also intensely pleasurable. To that end, I wonder what the ends of consciousness are, and whether I should risk reaching them. After Bernadette Mayer concluded her project Memory, where she documented and photographed 36 images a day for a month, she had what she describes as a psychic breakdown, and had to go to a psychoanalyst. It turned out to be fruitful for her work, but as someone who already has mental health issues I have to evaluate that kind of risk for myself.
And we can bring up pleasure in terms of sex, too, the way Sontag does in the Rolling Stone interview to postulate what it means to play with fire. She was thinking of sadochism and masochism specifically: “People have understood that it can get out of control and be completely destructive."
But I’m not interested in the way sex and consciousness—as experiments, as paths with certifiable ends—can lead to ruination, flames, and pain. I’m committed to the idea of making the world livable and making a life in the world.
But I’m not interested in the way sex and consciousness—as experiments, as paths with certifiable ends—can lead to ruination, flames, and pain. I’m committed to the idea of making the world livable and making a life in the world.
The risks in art-making—it’s a subject I think about frequently, and one that Sontag touches upon in The Pornographic Imagination. “However fierce may be the outrages the artist perpetrates upon his audience,” argues Sontag, “his credentials and spiritual authority ultimately depend on the audience’s sense… of the outrages he commits upon himself.” Then comes this declaration: “The exemplary modern artist is a broker in madness.” I have no desire to glamorize mental illness, nor, at all, does Sontag. The link between madness and art is that they occupy the prestige of the spiritual, of awe itself. What is it about spirituality that just won’t stop informing how we conceive, make, and absorb art? If spirituality is a project we constantly redefine, our allegiances shift in response. Our allegiance to pleasure, to silence, and to each other (or more often, to our annihilation, which drives sex) is in constant flux, and in that flux is a hollow where I think I’ll play to make my work. Call me indulgent, but that’s where I’m at.
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11.
Sontag’s later essay “The Poet’s Prose” shocks me. I am shocked. As I type this out, I feel both relief and humiliation, as it seems I’m (too much?) in line with my precursors.
“Poet’s prose not only has a particular fervor, density, velocity, fiber. It has a distinctive subject: the growth of the poet’s vocation.”
“Typically, it takes the form of two kinds of narrative. One is directly autobiographical. The other, also in the shape of a memoir, is the portrait of another person, either a fellow writer (often of the older generation, and a mentor), or a beloved relative (usually a parent or grandparent). Homage to others is the complement to accounts of oneself: the poet is saved from vulgar egoism by the strength and purity of his or her admirations. In paying homage to the important models and evoking the decisive encounters, both in real life and in literature, the writer is enunciating the standards by which the self is to be judged.”
“Poet’s prose is mostly about being a poet. And to write such autobiography, as to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet’s self, to which the daily self (and others) is often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies. (To have two selves is the definition of a pathetic fate.) Much of the prose of poets—particularly in the memoiristic form—is devoted to chronicling the triumphant emergence of the poet self. (In the journal or diary, the other major genre of the poet’s prose, the focus is on the gap between the poet and the daily self, and the often untriumphant transactions between the two. The diaries—for example, Baudelaire’s or Blok’s—abound with rules for protecting the poet self; desperate maxims of encouragement; accounts of dangers, discouragements, and defeats.)”
“In prose the poet is always mourning a lost Eden; asking memory to speak, or sob.”
“A poet’s prose is the autobiography of ardor.”
12.
Sontag claims that her Notes on Camp made a breakthrough because she was alone in maintaining a traditional literary sensibility and an interest in the open and kitsch forms of the art world at the time. I’m not in a similar literary or historical slot, and even if I were, I wouldn’t want to be a critic or a “happy pedagogue” as one professor in college described me; my brain can do too much messiness well enough, and I don’t want to have any responsibility to adequately liberalized mores—social or political or academic.
Fortunately, there are no more errors to be made and so no unnecessary lessons to be given. Any good work I produce will mediate the following problem: if I suffer, what else can I do? Rilke urged to the young poet in many letters—you must write only if you must write. Which in its tone lends a religiosity that approaches a worshipful silent horizon; I love the human figure, too, but I see it outside of the dropdown of shining hierarchies and am more interested in bouncing the ball off of traditional art walls. Why—why not? Work, at this point in my life, is the only way to Live. Or, alternatively put, when I read bad work, I feel full. When I read great work, I feel hungry.
Nathaniel Rosenthalis was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware. He earned his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and is currently a candidate in the M.F.A. poetry program at Washington University in St. Louis. His poems have appeared in Yes, Poetry and he has an essay forthcoming from the Los Angeles Review of Books. His first chapbook will appear in the spring from Deadly Chaps Press.
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