For Sontag

Susan Sontag is a powerhouse. Reading her gives clarity and vision to my pursuits. I immediately am reminded of the "why" in everything I do, the importance of words, thinking and feeling. Feeling and floating intensely through her mind. I run to her when I feel disordered, when the words don't work, when there is no harmony.

It is never as clear with other people of the magnitude, the
responsibility and seriousness writing, art brings to the world. I
read her into the night last night before bed. The experience, the
thrill in reading an essay on pornography, things I always felt and
became true only when she put them to words. She placed them gently in
me, slowly diffusing through my mind, body, my heart and soul. She
makes essays rock and roll. She would make a philosopher king trade
his kingdom for her paragraphs.

How her words opened me to new possibilities of being. How a woman at
some time in the 60s in her New York City apartment with her pen
reached to touch me last night in my solitude, is the true mystery of
life. That it happened, if only once, gives me enough strength to keep
going on awake and aware, not wasting the dawn, nor counting on any
eternal reward. She's enough. She's the one.

We all go through this though only some really move. She moved. She
moves. She moves through us.

"On keeping a journal. 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 any person: I create myself." - S.
Sontag