But what I glimpsed in this conjunction of the Baroque and the labyrinth was a way of looking at the new that was itself very old. I had a hunch that the very antiquity of mazes would show up pomo as old hat. But I found more as the maze research progressed. I am only speaking now of what I had glimpsed. It was embryonic; some were good leads, others not. If this were about me and not about how I was once perceived, I might try to give some idea of where the trail has finally led.
In the Baroque and the Postmodern we had two periods obsessed with end-times: one bent on fulfilling the conditions for Apocalypse, the other in proclaiming itself the End of History. Two periods obsessed with games and their rules—but for the Baroque it is the game of Life and Death, while for the Postmodern the real game is to spot the trick in the magic, and thereby dispel it. (Which is to say, if the trick makes the illusion, spotting the trick makes the illusion unreal.) Construction, deconstruction. Basically, Derrida turning Descartes on his head. But the next step is an odd one, if we substitute ‘the construct of Reality’ for ‘illusion.’ Having spotted the tricks in our construction of Reality, the Postmodernist goes on to treat the very notion of the real as if it were a magic. Performed by a charlatan.
What could produce such a fantastic leap? Maybe a few interrelated things: a long habit of safety; a complacent illusion of magic as mere parlour trick; the presumption that while illusions may be dangerous, dispelling them is play.
For the Postmodern, the game is not true, not therefore real, and neither are its consequences—what matters is getting to the end. Which is where the Baroque comes in. For the Postmodern, mind is error, truth in the eye of the beholder, and beauty irrelevant. The untrue is unreal. For the Baroque, Truth is given, beauty is in the mind of the beholder, and in the eye is error. The Untrue is fatal.
The thinkers of our period taunt power from a position of privilege and the habit of safety; those of the Baroque serve absolute power from a position of ambivalence—of, say, fear and longing and contempt. Ergo mazes. The Postmodern’s experience of the maze could be said to be from above, the Baroque’s from below and within. But there were mazes of other kinds too. The terrain was extraordinarily rich.
These were all architectural metaphors of knowledge and experience. I had been publishing on the subject since Beulah was twelve. She knew my work, as only now I have come to know hers. How can they say the development wasn’t mine? How does someone with no track record make me a pariah among my colleagues?
The answer is not complicated: By being prepared to go far enough.
I might instead have hoped she would be delighted by my renewed interest—though I only mentioned it to her after she was technically no longer my student. It had barely crossed my mind to point out that she had not listened to me and now her project was going nowhere, or rather everywhere at once; whereas I had picked up a small corner of it and turned it to account, by working with method and discipline. But this was our summer of cruelty. I have admitted my conduct toward her in other respects was unsavoury. Still, I thought of this as something entirely separate. I thanked her for her input, gave her regular updates over the summer. All part of a healthy model of cross-fertilization. If it is fair to say I had come to a dead end in my work, it is also fair to thank Beulah for providing me with a way out of it, a kind of rebirth. Any sane person sees we are speaking metaphorically. What Beulah saw, or heard, rather, was a call to rip a hole in the bright shiny fuselage that was my life. My Lie.
A little less than two years later, I would be buying a last-minute ticket for one, one-way to London.
THE POET’S LABOURS
OCTAVIO PAZ
B. Limosneros, trans.
like a pain that advances and opens a pathway
between viscera that yield and bones that resist
like a file that files the nerves that bind us to life
yes, but also like a sudden joy
like a door opening onto the sea
like peering into the abyss, like reaching the summit
like a river of diamonds
and like the blue cascade that tumbles
in a landslide of statues
and whitest of temples
like the bird that rises and the lightning that descends
oh beating of wings, oh beak that rends and splits at last the fruit
you, my cry spouting plumes of fire
wound, resonant and vast
like the wrenching of planet from the body of a star
oh invisible fall on a floor of echoes
on a sky of mirrors that reflect you
and destroy you
and make you
innumerable
infinite
and anonymous
NE PLUS ULTRA
Two long months had I been given to consider my situation. Sor Philothea’s preface to the letter so worthy of Athena was dated November 25, 1690. The first leaflet denouncing it appeared on December 8th, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. The leaflet was signed simply the Soldier, who fairly wrung his spleen dry. And though he used phrases I was sure he had heard from Núñez, truly was the good soldier all but deranged—raving, emotional, unable to follow a train of argument, and I could not help wondering if the author was not His Grace the Archbishop himself.
On the third Sunday of Advent, a new series of leaflets appeared, all signed the Soldier. Polished, learned, theological. Sane. Now there were two soldiers. This one’s denunciations branched out, amplifying on the hints Sor Philothea had obligingly given the Holy Office. The negative finezas were clearly and foully heretical. As for Sor Juana, the list of her heresies was long, and would grow. Illuminist. Gnostic. Arian.
The inventory was unnerving enough. Surely we had to do something, my many friends urged—write a response, mount a defence. But so far the Inquisition’s involvement was unofficial. It would be undignified for them to display the least sign of haste, in moving against a mere woman especially. The people themselves must be seen to clamour for protection, yet the vulgo had thus far been quiet—no, not quiet but Decembers offered much else to talk of.
January was a quieter month. Though the days were lengthening, the nights were longer.
The day after Epiphany another run of leaflets flared up, these ones signed. Manuel Serrano, Franciso Ildefonso—two non-entities from Puebla, along with five other complete obscurities. My seven slanderers, my impugners, my persecutors.8
On the second Sunday in January the sermons of attack began all over the city. There was no stopping it now, and no stopping my friends, who had taken to meeting without me, since I would do nothing to help myself. They had to have Father Xavier Palavicino. Palavicino was ambitious, brave, eloquent, and a great admirer of the much slandered nun. Here in the temple, before the month was out, my attackers would have our answer.
Most Sundays, the only threats to the calm of a solemn Mass are the neighbourhood delinquents who have made a sort of ball court of the plaza. The double doors giving onto the ball court, while thick, are in such poor repair as to let bright brawling day sift in through the rifts and splits in the thick oak panelling. On a crisp Sunday morning in January there may be two dozen children outside, and it can sound as if there are twice that number. As Xavier Palavicino waded ever more perilously into his discourse, I found myself praying for another hundred young scufflers to drop by for a game outside.
Father Palavicino chose his moment carefully if not his words. The date being the feast day of the learned widow Santa Paula. Our convent chapel had received distinguished visitors before, but rarely in such numbers. Front row, centre, kneeling on cushions, were the Viceroy and Vicereine, the Count and Countess de la Granja. On her right the Archbishop’s Vicar-General. On the Viceroy’s left a nobleman from the highest ranks of the Spanish aristocracy, exiled to Manila and sufficiently forgiven since then to make his way back as far as Mexico. Beside him the fallen angel of Versailles, le Vicomte d’Anjou. Three rows back is a Creole suspected of sedit
ion on whose behalf I had once interceded with María Luisa, to secure his early release from prison. Though he perhaps meant well, his presence was not a comfort.
Standing as it does on the compound’s north side, our chapel is notable for its cool, and can be quite icy on winter mornings. Notable also for its tranquillity—when not a ball court—a place where I have spent many quiet hours. This January morning our chapel offered neither calm nor quiet. Never, I would wager, had the Holy Office been so well represented here. Consultors and familiars, assessors and censors, prosecutors and examiners, one by one they filtered in, in all the sulphurous pomp of their offices. Even the Holy Tribunal’s accountant put in an appearance, who rarely partakes of anything more carnal than the inventories of iron tools and personal effects. Even our Reverend Father Antonio Núñez de Miranda himself was there. Slowly, from where we sat behind the chancel lattice, the whispers among the sisters of St. Jerome rose in fits and gasps—at the entrance of each new official—to a pitch of strangled panic; until finally the Prioress was forced to rise, and striding before us at the grillwork—quenching light as she advanced, shedding it in spokes—furiously gestured for silence as our guest began to speak. And as he commenced, the quills of half a dozen secretaries seated at little writing desks in the aisles scratched like dogs at a kitchen door.
To the nave of our chapel now I saw drawn every rift and resentment, Dominicans to port, Jesuits to starboard—patterned like filings scattered on a parchment—no, arraigned along the axis of a needle pointing to a nun hidden in the upper choir. Who diverts herself with conceits such as these.
It would be saying too much to claim that Father Palavicino’s discourse was in my defence, as indeed he did, say too much. He began by predicating a more conservative position than mine on Christ’s fineza major, His greatest expression of love for Man. But even though taking a position somewhat distanced from my own, Palavicino did not contest the propriety of a woman, a nun, taking a position, and this would have been all the defence I could have asked. For then he did a brave thing, given his auditors, whose attendance he may not have predicted but by now was well aware of. Xavier Palavicino looked the Chief Inquisitors squarely in the eye, and opened with a quote from Jonah: ‘Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.’ And now this bride of Christ, our Minerva of America, has been summoned as a great fish to bear us up her prophecies, and to cause many a holy doctor to shake the dust from his books and sharpen his wits.
With Father Núñez, half-blind, somewhere below us in the chapel, Palavicino defended me against the blind depredations of the Soldier, this Soldier of Castile. Palavicino praised my intelligence, the deep learning implicit in my position, my grace in stating it. He was only echoing, in this, the published judgement of a bishop-nun but if I was not mistaken, much dust would indeed be shaken, many quills sharpened. What kind of black mirth would the fishers of souls make on this one day? Why did he not come to me first? Still am I treated like a child in theological matters, un menor de edad—speak when consulted, theologian’s muse. They do not need a woman to tell them how to act—to think, perhaps—but action requires courage. Yes, gentlemen, but thinking requires thought.
Still, who was I to criticize anyone for this?
Minerva, pagan goddess … Letter Worthy of Athena, her prophecies … a great fish—this last he said knowing I was writing carols for the cathedral on Saint Peter, fisherman. The allusion no doubt struck him as clever.
Oh yes, and glaring down at the Inquisition’s saintly officers, Father Palavicino likened my persecution to the persecutions of Christ.
My defender qualified me as an innocent lamb, spoke of a wound in my side from the Soldier’s cruel lance. What on earth or in heaven’s name had made him think to say this?—another helpful friend comparing me with Christ. Was he completely mad?
With defenders such as these …
Worse, it was not even me they defended—woman, prophetess, leviathan—nor any living creature at all. It was a principle they made of me. Some new category. They were like men born to the desert: rain they had seen, small springs, salt lakes, storm-born freshets foaming into sand—yet coming over the last dune at the world’s end, what they saw was mere water no longer but the gates of Atlantis.
Irony or iron consequence? For I had been the one to play this category game for them, lead the merry chase through monster, muse, paragon, virgin—the female in me being thus incompleted uncoupled unachieved, the dam of our perfidy not yet burst in me—they presumed to praise me as all but a man in validez y valor.
In my locutory afterwards the mood was somewhat glum. Each of my visitors had been at the sermon, but as the parlours were not opened Sundays until three, all made the trip back by their own separate paths, presumably to see how I was bearing up. Ribera was sitting in an ox-hide chair at the grille nearest the clavichord. Dean de la Sierra had not taken a seat at all, but stood rummaging in the bookshelf against the east wall. Carlos sat next to Ribera but not quite at the grille, as if he too were less than keen for a good frank talk. First to arrive, our convent chaplain sat quietly on a bench by the window closest to the door while I tried to cheer things up. I was becoming not a little resentful, not only of my lack of success but that it should fall to me, in the circumstances, to do such a lot of cheering.
Palavicino arrived last, and had a choice of the bench beside the chaplain or the armchair next to Gutiérrez, who had not been here for weeks yet appeared now. Slumping down beside the chaplain, Palavicino told of being accosted outside the chapel by a raving madman who had denounced the sermon in my defence as heretical. As Palavicino pronounced the word it took every mite of self-possesion not to glance at the Inquisitor Gutiérrez, who was staring at the chandelier.
Just then, a small new personage dropped by on his way to the palace to present his credentials. Baron Anthonio Crisafi gave the general impression of being the Sicilian envoy of the Spanish viceregal administration of southern Italy. I had not known we needed one of these. There was something funny and flighty about his eyes, which seemed never quite to meet mine. Although in better days I would have found his presence in every way comical he quickly proved much better informed than could be expected of a recent arrival, and moreover was taking pains to make clear that his information extended to me. He had arrived knowing that on my locutory wall was a copy of Velázquez’s The Geographer—more improbably still, he knew that the painter’s model was a lunatic at the court of Philip IV.
Glancing about him, the Baron took the empty armchair and as he sat, pulled it closer to the grille. He was all but telling me he came from Spain with a message from María Luisa. And yet I did not trust him. I had been having some trouble lately telling my friends from my adversaries.
Trying to marshal my wits I launched into a little peroration on the painter’s true model for The Geographer: Democritus, the laughing philosopher—a man so ruled by candour, the people of his own village thought him insane. I had the distinct impression the Sicilian knew this, too, perfectly well. Who has sent him? If it is María Luisa why has she sent him knowing this? Lest the frantic workings of my mind show in my face, I rose and made my way to the back of the room to pace back and forth, I hoped theatrically—the nun beneath the globe beneath the lunatic on the wall—as I cobbled together a few ideas from bits of Justinian,† and from Mondragón’s treatise on the virtues of insanity and the holy truths of the mad.
“Indeed, mis señores, we the sane, who never cease to thirst for conquest—to rule, found cities and cultivate our own holdings—can only look with envy on the estate of the one we call mad. El loco pays neither tax nor tribute, suffers neither vassalage nor servitude. Small wonder kings seek his candid councils, and the slyest of the sane feign holy madness….”
This won a few wistful nods from the cuerdos† among my interlocutors.
“In the ears of the king, gentlemen, such sooths are bittersweet, but in the eyes of Democritus are so filled with gall he puts them out to
maintain his philosophy of cheer….”
The Sicilian may have known all about the gravity of my situation and all about the painting—nevertheless he looked slightly dazed by the shift in tone. Foreigners—even the Spaniards themselves—were never quite prepared for the intensity of this game the way we play it, we the children of Spain and Mexico. The blood in the lace, the sword in the cape, the red in the tooth as we smile. I was thinking to draw the ‘Ambassador’ out, but in truth there was something I could no longer quite trust in such jests. It was a loss of dexterity I found unsettling.
“What say you, Baron—does not the lunatic’s smile as he contemplates the world make elegant comment on the philosophy of cheer?”
“La Casa del Nuncio,” the Baron blurted,“—in Toledo, Sor Juana, is not to be missed.”
What was this? What was he trying to tell me? “Has the Ambassador visited many of Spain’s casas de locos during his travels?” I asked. “They are a great favourite, I understand, of foreign visitors.”
“Yes, Sor Juana, that is true.”
Hunger's Brides Page 74