Hunger's Brides
Page 45
Carlos
†Marvel wrought of flowers, America’s divine Protectoress, who becomes the Rose of Mexico in summoning Roses from Castile; she who brings down from on high not the dragon—whose neck she bowed in Patmos—but sovereign Intelligence, and glorious sign of its greatness and purest Majesty …
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
Alan Trueblood, trans.
Villancico: ‘peasant’ songs especially cherished by the poor, particularly in New Spain. A cycle of lyrics or simple carols to be sung on a religious holiday; these, at the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in Puebla, Mexico.
refrain
Black is the Bride,
the Sun scorches her face.
verses
Red clouds swirling dark
make the Bride think she’s black,
yet there’s no shadow in her,
of pure sunlight no lack.
The crucible of the Sun
leaves her purity intact.
Black is the Bride,
the Sun scorches her face.
Placing next to the Bride’s
the Sun’s spotless light
makes the creature look dark
since God is purest bright.
Yet, basking in the Sun,
she grows fairer in men’s sight.
Black is the Bride,
the Sun scorches her face.
Bathed in sunlight,
the Bride burns with his rays,
growing in fairness
as she draws near his blaze;
spotless, without flaw,
in his unceasing gaze …
GUADALUPE
In Mexico, each December 12th, as many as two million pilgrims—the devout, whether Christians or of a different faith—come, many on their knees, to file through Guadalupes Basilica. Near one exit is a hall crowded to a height of several metres with rustic, postcard-sized illustrations above simple testimonials to Guadalupe’s intercession over four centuries …
[12 Dec 1994, Hotel Xanadu]
GOOD MORNING GUADALUPE, it’s your big day today, how are you? We are so calm after this night of firecrackers, siren-night of writing shooting stars through my mind and through this pleasure dome in stereo. All the stately joys of home, my Hotel Xanadu. Lifted now its latex siege of Paradise’s milk machines rolled back its fell artillery / decamped the Trojan whores. Their honey-dew melodies plucked on dulcimer / before the Tartar hordes….
Up at dayglo dawn by Dupont friends my compliments, tanks for the chemistries. Down at nine to seize the day, notebook in one cramped hand. Down through mildly maidly ribaldries, Hoover wheeze, crusted sheets … slow day in the ancient trade. At the reception Deskclerk Beetlebrows fingers breathmints, condoms in a candy dish. Bordello eyes boring into mine—sleazesmirk: sleep well, señorita?
See him browbeaten now at my reply. Not at the Basilica today, infidel?
Ah, Guadalupe—nervous fingers start from the delving dish—Some protector, she is—seven people died up there last year. Don’t tell me you’re going there.
Al banco primero, I turn to go—why talk to him.
The bank!—yes even better, he answers smiling now. The pickpockets on the hill will thank you. The banks are closed today—but you all use machines don’t you. Careful they don’t kidnap you in the little room. What, you haven’t heard the stories? Come back—amiga, ven un ratito, que te lo diga. Sometimes these guys kill you but then one married a victima just last week in jail. Better pray to Guadalupe you get one of these, cabrones banditos románticos. I’ll pray too.
Thanks for the bulletin. Enter the streets. Banco ProMex on the corner. Jangle of nerves but it’s not the romantic bandits, it’s you, Mother Protectress of Mexico. I could stay away, not go—like the cathedral yesterday—fly eight long hours from Canada, just to ride the metro again.
But the corner brings more succour than bargained for—know this traveller: the ATMs, their uniformity, are your friends. We too have our rites, universal truths—polling booth verities. Insert card here, strip down, strike coded blow for global shopocracy. Out on the sidewalk sandalled pilgrims pause, hats-doffed, as the supplicant withdraws absolved / from greed’s confessional.
I swell by a single insignificance the tide of pilgrims lining up to ride battered breadbox buses to her Basilica. Brown hills shorn like sheep, or bristling with TV-towers. All, save the slate Basilica on Tepeyac, her sainted montecule. Guadalupe it’s years I’ve dreamed of you.
The traffic tangle slows, checks, bogs, on this pilgrim flood swelled on tributary lust. Bus after bus stuck fast in amber. We get down to walk, we are a hundred thousand here. On foot we follow a shattered causeway over the dustbed of an ancient lake. An Aztec avenue of skulls straight as a die / straight as an assembly line kilometres long. Cookiecuttered babycrania one thousand two thousand three carved in stone, I try to count these low reliefs alone isn’t anyone keeping score?
More, ever deeper without relent—last metro stop: Talpa. Thousands stream out jostle to cross this burning plain to meet the mother of their maker, Virgin Bride. Muttered prayers parched on lips slaked on hopes fed on highway dust from across all Mexico. Most walk others crawl on bludgeoned knees. Some now fall to join this bloody joinery of unhinged martyrdom. A brother and sister hand in hand, unspeakable torment in their unlined faces gory knees, smoky eyes defiant. Please get up please stand take my hand.
There an old man, his running sores—is this leprosy?—is that plague over there Welcome to the Decameron—bring me your disease I shall make it holy.
From up North / from the icecrystal palaces borealis we never get a view like this. I will never forget this.
Stop! Hey you can’t stop here to rest to write?—are you a journalist what are you doing?
I am afraid.
Between two grandsons a shrunken waif on a litter—abuelita, abuelita it’s not much farther it’s very near now we will get you there don’t fear we have carried you this far we would carry you a million miles to her she’s just ahead.
Guadalupe.
It won’t be long. We are half a million now. Guadalupe, mother of our sorrows mother of our pain. Heal me. I am afraid.
So too cloaked in terrors these shitscared men in riot gear. SWAT bottlefly blue. Alien visors, plexiglass shields / black billyclubs clutched to wield. Last gasp gasmasks-to-don for fear of extinction / for block after block they stand shoulder to shoulder as past we walk this alien avenue of skulls. How many skulls how many of us now is anyone keeping score isn’t anyone keeping count / when does the indigent insurrection start? Cue the newsreel. Move along.
What are you writing there?—I said move along.
At the gates waits my deliverance from terror, my comic disbelief: BANCOMEXICO LES DA LA BIENVENIDA A LOS PELERINOS GUADALUPINOS.†
Red, white and green, a huge banner. This is better much better this devil I know. Gracias BancoMexico, a thousand graces.
Inside the compound a fine cold drizzle falls purgatorial. Aztec dancers circle just inside the gates, solstice impending. Logdrums boom—echoes snuffed, fleshchoked in the dusthued mass. Clay pipes … a sinister fluteshrill gaiety—symphonic panther caged in too few notes. On the ground, prone, a small stiff girl. They lift her from the pavement pass her round lift her to the sky I lose sight of her in the sun’s harsh emergency. Movealong humid humansea of faith—two hundred thousand eyes overflowing. Mine … River of salt that wells us to the old Basilica above the new—
Old Basilica. Terminus of a million hearts. We move through by the thousands by the hour, through the great doors. Some deep place in us knows already this strange mobwalk evolved for paying respects / homages to monumental art and kingly death. Where have I learned this shunting, metronomic shuffle, keeping time marking time dancing to time’s forward ripple—instant of momentum arrested, then, again, dancesteps for the leg-ironed … shift, rock, glide. Hypnotic puppetry of unhinged hips and knees coaxed, tugged—expertly jigged.
We are a m
illion now.
Floor smooth as a stone watercourse. River of whisper, hoarse glide of soles. Voices funnel up through my chest—sternum-tuned, resonant—up through the nave—
A cough a whisper, a baby—its brief cry …
Slate. Stone.
Smoked light slants through a vaulted hush.
Incense, intense resins of pine … this is copal burning….
Wet hair, sweat—plump fatty flowerscent—what are those señora? Her eyes a mass of seams narrow an instant—Nardo, tuber rose … have you come from far to see her, joven? Yes very far, a distant galaxy. Her answering glance of shared piety, linked faith.
And we do share a faith—Old México, this truly exists, still, for now, this motherland of contingency—eggshell earth, famished sky, time recycled, spinning down to die. Time as cannibal dish, simmering, shrewd—apocalypse as not time but place. Guadalupe our public defender, all rise as the celestial court enters. Dusky maid / mistress of roses, mothershimmer of immanence….
Then, unasked, unhoped, the brief miracle of a quiet mind….
Moment of mercy, grace. Blind reprieve.
Peace. Stay.
I sway forward without thought, without eyes.
Stay with me.
Slow feeling returns, old sweet pain of penshaft to callused finger—writer hold out your crooked hands.
It begins again—this, this I must write as I’m carried past—a children’s exhibit a crêche of handmade paper faxpaper crêpe-paper garlands festoon an oval placard, petal-trimmed. It hangs at the neck of a papier maché effigy in white and black: Sor Juana Offers Her Love to Guadalupe.
Sor Juana offers …
Hello old friend.
But the shunting tide again carries us apart—I’ll come for you wait for me. Just a little longer I promise. A day or two when I’m stronger. Thighspierced fasted and clean. I’ve come for you. I can be strong for you. Soon.
On we the million drift, and above the shuffling mass Indian headdresses bob like quail crests. On through the hall of happy endings—exvotos, tales with childlike pictures—tableaus of propitiation embroider the walls with little testaments and thanks to our mother intercessor stormshelter / opener of the way.
And Juanita standing guard at the hall of happy endings—tell me it’s an omen. Tell me.
12 December 1872: Thank you Guadalupe for saving our brother during a mine explosion …
12 December 1914: Thank you Mother for healing our daughter who was burned by kerosene …
12 December 1971 … for saving our tractor from a grave engine fire …
12 December 1771 … his wife and all the farm animals thank you for saving her husband from a deadly fever …
12 December 1763 … from bandit rapists on the highway to Puebla …
12 December 1930 … for helping our father escape from prison…. 1982 … for the cure of syphilis…. 1940 … from a sinking ship…. 1961 … breast tumours so large she could not feed her newborn son…. 1827 a firing squad…. 1931 trainwreck…. 1786 the tempation of incest…. 1867 a mine cave-in…. 1894 for the rescue of our daughter from four months of desequilibrio mental…. 1794 gored by a bull…. 1852 attacked by a maddened female burro…. 1987 a chemical spill…. surgery smallpox cholera plague….
River of time river of mercy river of milk and honey / flow on sweet secret Nile / carry us home on the breath of god. I am hurt, I am heartsick, and broken.
carry me
I am weary I am yours please / I hunger I thirst—carry me—I love I want I burn
sweet time, wrap me in your arms I can’t go on.
Carry me.
At the exit across from the new Basilica, a Mass. We are two million now. A song surges up from the thronged amphitheatre, song for a hundred thousand corded throats, one monstrous organ, one slow hymn piped gasping belling through a hundred thousand souls. Calling so lightly to god.
But this music, this alien grace, I know this melody. Blowin’ in the Wind. Can this be happening? How strange now, this sixties poetsong here and now and always. What is the language, what lyric are they singing to this Dylantune, what Mass can this be?
How can I write this?
I cannot go in there I cannot go down cannot go on I am too filled with you. In my eyes I heard you, in my ears I saw.
†BancoMexico welcomes Guadalupe’s pilgrims
PSYCHIC MASOCHIST
From what Beulah termed the ‘fuckmuck’ of twentieth-century psychoanalysis, an undeniably unsavoury industry has sprung, resorting to theories of psychosis, narcissism, lesbianism, masochism and even penis-envy in order to account for Sor Juana’s prodigious hungers and accomplishments. Beulah, for complex reasons of her own, dubbed these new inquisitors ‘Scarabs.’
“… all human beings—to differing degrees—become addicts of ‘psychic masochism….’”
EDMUNDO BERGLER†
ACCORDING TO FREDO ARIAS DE LA CANAL (a disciple of Bergler, and another of Sor Juana’s posthumous psychoanalysts), poets wish to be ‘poisoned and devoured by the serpent,’ and in turn wish to poison and devour it. The psychic mechanism is as follows:42
1) ‘I wish to be killed by the maternal breast.’
2) The daemon’s reproach: ‘You wish to be killed by your mother’s breast.’
3) Defence of the ‘I’: ‘On the contrary, I wish to kill my mother’s breast.’
4) The daemon’s reproach: ‘You have been aggressive towards your mother’s image.’
5) The ‘I’’s acceptance: ‘Yes, I have been aggressive towards my mother’s image for which I feel guilt and a desire to be punished.’
For Arias, the punishment consists in a desire to have the penis devoured, the penis which is the projection of the maternal breast. The symbol of the devouring penis is the asp. In sex, the vagina is the projection of the mouth, and the penis the projection of the maternal breast, and the semen a projection of milk. The whole represents an inversion and a form of revenge: the serpent (penis) poisons and devours and in turn is poisoned and devoured (by the vagina).
The source of aggression towards the mother is hunger: ‘You are starving me.’ Even when he is fed, the poet’s anger remains: ‘Even when you feed me you are poisoning me.’ The poet says: ‘I will feed myself by fashioning objects of oral beauty … milk and honey.’
And Arias continues:
In order to go more deeply into her [Sor Juana’s] repressed curiosity or libidinized ignorance, one will have to take into account her mad hunger to know, to expound, and to put her learning on exhibition. And thus, in this so simple manner will we be able to induce and prove that this woman at her most tender age acquired what Bergler called psychic masochism; that is, that her fear of death, impotence and rejection she converted to unconscious pleasures….43
†From “The Superego” by Edmundo Bergler, as quoted in Intento de un psicoanálisis de Inés Juana y otros ensayos Sorjuanistas, by Fredo Arias de la Canal. Arias de la Canal, during his attempt to psychoanalyze Sor Juana, describes Bergler thus:“… the most brilliant mind of the twentieth century. A man who has given humanity the opportunity to know itself. It would be a tragedy that that humanity should come to destroy itself for not having understood this man …”
DELIRIOUS TRIUMPH
Just as the Middle Ages wracked its mind inventing instruments of torture to apply to criminals, the seventeenth century underwent fevered contortions discovering ever more subtle and dolorous means to torment and mortify one’s own body. Medieval man prosecutes, punishes and avenges crime in his neighbour; Baroque man hunts, finds, and wreaks vengeance for crime in himself. But in the convents of the 17th century, the masochistic modalities of asceticism have rightly celebrated their most cruel and delirious triumph….44
LUDWIG PFANDL, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico’s Tenth Muse
BEULAH SURELY SAW THE IRONY: In 1684 Sor Juana’s friend Carlos Sigüenza received a commission to write a history of the aristocratic convent of the Immaculate Conception, a
few blocks from Sor Juana’s own. Long excerpts of Carlos’s chronicle come down to us through one Ludwig Pfandl: German historian, the first of Sor Juana’s psychoanalysts, and for Beulah, the dark prince of Scarabs.
Beneath the delirious triumphs detected by Pfandl lurks the old theme of convent as harem, and of the male ecclesiastics who visited them as sultan-stallions. A certain vein in Medieval literature fairly courses with the lubricities of nuns, monks and priests, of which Boccaccio provides among the more pleasing examples. The convent or monastery as house of corruption continues as a literary device beyond the Renaissance, finding perhaps its most influential expression in de Sade, whose treatment is stripped of the past’s light smirking and tainted in the more sanguinary hues with which his name has become synonymous. Nor were dark tales of misconduct confined to the European side of the Atlantic. From their respective journeys across seventeenth-century America, an Englishman, Gage, and an Italian, Carreri, bring us snapshots (the latter’s at least untainted by Gage’s Protestant bias) of moral laxness and not infrequent scandals in many of Mexico City’s convents. Gage writes:
It is ordinary for the Fryers† to visit their devoted nuns, and to spend whole days with them, hearing their music, feeding on their sweet-meats. And for this purpose they have many chambers which they call Loquitorios, to talk in, with wooden bars between the nuns and them, and in these chambers are tables for the Fryers to dine at; and while they dine the nuns recreate them with their voices.45
More reliable witnesses confirm that the nuns received their visitors without veils, in open defiance, as it were, of the prohibitions of numerous bishops. Not even the chastening rule of separation by a grille could be strictly enforced….