Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser
Today’s viewing pleasure is a cocktail of Joan Didion being interviewed on CSPAN, and bits – only bits, mind you – of part one of an 80-hour course on quantum physics.
Joan Didion, it seems obvious, is not unlike Susan Sontag… and Susan Sontag is nearly exactly like my medicine pillbox, which my caregiver keeps in the upper bin of my stack of clear bins near the door.
The pills are multicoloured, and indeed I will now have to go visit the medicine pillbox to tell you how those colors are arranged. I do know that yellow is involved.
I am thinking, of course, not only of Benjamin Moser’s book Sontag: Her Life and Work (2019), but also Janet Malcolm’s review of Moser’s book. The review, appearing in The New Yorker on September 16, 2019, is titled “Susan Sontag and the Unholy Practice of Biography.”
Is the comparison of my pillbox to the life of Susan Sontag more like classical physics, or would your opinion be that it is more like quantum mechanics, with so many unknowns, so many probabilities?
The pill container is made up of 28 smaller square compartments, four for each day. One might think of these, in my case, as Early Morning, Morning, Evening, Late Evening (i.e. sleep time).
All the boxes going across horizontally for Early Morning are yellow; Morning is reddish-orange; Evening is a light purple; Sleep time is a dark blue.
The other night, I approached the pill container cautiously, as always, because he and I have had multitudinous bad interactions with each other over the years. I opened the pillbox for the Evening, only to find that it contained the wrong pills. These were the pills for the Morning. Again, as with so many mix ups over the years (increasing indeed in the last few months), I posed the question to myself: what to do?
My caregiver and I have worked together carefully on so many past problems that we have a set of contingency protocols for various problems that can occur, especially if I am feeling as though I should not contact her about any current matter, even though she has made it clear that it is OK to contact her.
I went through a range of emotions. Is that sentence too trite? And yet that is what happened. At one point, of course, I was mad at my caregiver for putting the pills in the wrong tiny box within the larger pill container. At some point, I simply went about asking myself what to do that would be the best.
Susan Sontag was a complicated woman. Her diaries, having been made public, are very difficult to read for how very hard she was on herself in private. Thank goodness at least she had her public life, to which she would look, I can only hope, for some sense of relief and accomplishment.
Looking at my pillbox more closely, I realised that I simply had the object upside down. A sigh of relief. A sigh of relief.
Endnotes:
1) Here is a link to Janet Malcolm’s article “Susan Sontag and the Unholy Practice of Biography” in which Ms. Malcolm speaks not only of Susan Sontag’s self-damning diaries but also of Benjamin Moser’s book Sontag: Her Life and Work. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/23/susan-sontag-and-the-unholy-practice-of-biography. Tuesday 1 September, 2020.
Marc Isaac Potter (we/they/them) is a differently-abled writer living in the SF Bay Area. Marc’s interests include blogging by email and Zen. They have been published in Fiery Scribe Review, Feral A Journal of Poetry and Art, Poetic Sun Poetry, and Provenance Journal. Twitter is @marcisaacpotter.