CONSCIOUSNESS & ELECTRICITY
I stay up on the porch outside the cottage, reading Sontag’s journals. My arms and legs, a feast for the mosquitoes. Above my head, beetles smack their stubborn exoskeletons against the single lightbulb; white moths spiral up around its halo, then plummet down. A small spider spins a trap in the intersection of a beam and a column. And in the distance, a redeeming constellation of fireflies—intermittent—landscapes the dark immensity beyond the rectangle of the porch.
I don’t keep a journal. My journals are the things I underline in books. I would never lend a book to anyone after having read it. I underline too much, sometimes entire pages, sometimes with double underline. My husband and I once read this copy of Sontag’s journals together. We had just met. Both of us underlined entire passages of it, enthusiastically, almost feverishly. We read out loud, taking turns, opening the pages as if consulting an oracle, legs naked and intertwined on a twin bed. I suppose that words, timely and arranged in the right order, produce an afterglow. When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere—in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand. In our copy of Sontag’s journals, underlined once, twice, sometimes boxed-in and marked at the margins:
“One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents & lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal.”
“In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.”
“1831: Hegel died.”
“We sit in this rat hole on our asses growing eminent and middle-aged …”
“Moral bookkeeping requires a settling of accounts.”
“In marriage, I have suffered a certain loss of personality—at first the loss was pleasant, easy …”
“Marriage is based on the principle of inertia.”
“The sky, as seen in the city, is negative—where the buildings are not.”
“The parting was vague, because the separation still seems unreal.”
This last line is underlined in pencil, then circled in black ink, and also flagged in the margin with an exclamation mark. Was it me or him who underlined it? I don’t remember. I do remember, though, that when I read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time I read Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal, I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue—that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else’s words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They’re not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone’s words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.
Rereading passages underlined in this copy of the Sontag journals, finding them once again powerful years later, and reunderlining some—especially the meditations around marriage—I realize that everything I’m reading was written in 1957 or 1958. I count with my fingers. Sontag was only twenty-four then, nine years younger than I am now. I am suddenly embarrassed, like I’ve been caught laughing at a joke before the punch line or have clapped between movements at a concert. So I skip to 1963, when Sontag has turned thirty-something, is finally divorced, and maybe has more clarity about things present and future. I’m too tired to read on. I mark the page, close the book, turn off the porch light—mobbed with beetles and moths—and head to bed.
ARCHIVE
I wake up early the next morning in the cottage and make my way to the kitchen and living room area. I open the door to the porch, and the sun is rising behind the mountain. For the first time in years, there are slices of our private space that I’d like to record, sounds that I again feel an impulse to document and store. Perhaps it’s just that new things, new circumstances, have an aura of things past. Beginnings get confused with endings. We look at them the way a goat or a skunk might stare stupidly toward a horizon where there’s a sun, not knowing if the yellow star there is rising or setting.
I want to record these first sounds of our trip together, maybe because they feel like the last sounds of something. But at the same time I don’t, because I don’t want to interfere with my recording; I don’t want to turn this particular moment of our lives together into a document for a future archive. If I could only, simply, underline certain things with my mind, I would: this light coming in through the kitchen window, flooding the entire cottage in a golden warmth as I prepare the coffeemaker; this soft breeze blowing in through the open door and brushing past my legs as I turn on the stove; that sound of footsteps—feet little, bare, and warm—as the girl gets out of bed and approaches me from behind, announcing:
Mama, I woke up!
She finds me standing by the stove, waiting for the coffee to be ready. She looks at me, smiles, and rubs her eyes when I say good morning back to her. I don’t know anyone for whom waking up is such good news, such a joyful event. Her eyes are startlingly large, her chest is bare, and her panties are white and puffy, too big around her. Serious and full of decorum, she says:
I have a question, Mama.
What is it?
I want to ask you: Who is this Jesus Fucking Christ?
I don’t answer, but I hand her a huge glass of milk.
ORDER
The boy and his father are still asleep, and the two of us—mother, daughter—find a seat on the couch in the cottage’s small but luminous living room. She sips her milk and opens her sketchbook. After a few failed attempts at drawing something, she asks me to make four squares for her—two at the top, two at the bottom—and instructs me to label them in this order: “Character,” “Setting,” “Problem,” “Solution.” When I finish labeling the four squares and ask what they’re for, she explains that at school, they taught her to tell stories this way. Bad literary education begins too early and continues for way too long. I remember how one day, when the boy was in second grade and I was helping him with homework, I suddenly realized he probably didn’t know the difference between a noun and a verb. So I asked him. He looked up at the ceiling theatrically, and after a few seconds said yes, of course he knew: nouns were the letters on the yellow cards above the blackboard, and verbs were the ones on the blue cards below the blackboard.
The girl concentrates on her drawing now, filling in the squares I made for her. I drink my coffee, and open Sontag’s journals again, rereading loose lines and words. Marriage, parting, moral bookkeeping, hollowed out, separation: Did our underlining these words foreshadow it? When did the end of us begin? I cannot say when or why. I’m not sure how. When I told a couple of friends, shortly before the four of us went on this trip, that my marriage was possibly ending, or at least was in a moment of crisis, they asked:
What happened?
They