I've sat with this quote for a while now. It felt too revelatory to share in any venue, but especially this one, even as it seemed somewhere, somehow, it must be written down and shared as a truth, in any venue, especially this one. I recently came across it reading Susan Sontag's journals and notebooks. I've always thought her brilliant, but there is something chilly about her that never quite sat well with me. I know my own tendencies to intellectualism and emotional distance. I am not a better person when I give myself to cold logic. This might have been Sontag's path, but it is not mine.
These days though, I feel a little easier braving the element of air. Life on the water keeps emotions on the surface, keeps me emotionally engaged in life instead of the spectator I had become.
I can read a little Sontag, dwell for a while in the heady heights of mind she called home. Which is how I came to the quote above that stopped me in my tracks.
When I write I do feel inhabited by something more, vehicle or a force beyond me. It's not that I'm merely a scribe to some greater power. No, it's more that I am somehow fully what I should be when I write, more than just this body, this self, but a larger Self, maybe even a Soul. I suppose I understand when I write, the personal unconscious and Jung's collective unconscious. However, I haven't that way in my life for a long time, maybe ever, but certainly no the last 20 years or more. There have been moments, not no real surety, not until this last year. It struck me, reading Sontag's quote, that I do feel this way about sex these days. I feel it still about writing, but feel it about going to work too now, and coming home and the hours between. I feel it sitting at the table having dinner with Bryan. I feel it nearly every hour of every day. I have gone from a distant observer to a full participant to something more. I can't tell you what that more is, just that it feels the way Sontag describes writing. I wonder if this is how life and living should feel, andI wonder how long it's been since I felt that way, if I ever felt that way. The heart attack, a lost love, a found one, a change of venue, a sailboat and the ocean, they all brought me to this place. They turned me on, lit me up, and I pray to any and all the gods that my light never dulls and dims again.
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