So Bruno found himself alone, not really noticing, rapidly swamped by feminine attentions as calculating as they were tiresome. At length, having escaped this enterprising harem “for the sake of liberty and the Enlightenment,” as he put it, he settled into a comfortable, carefree celibacy. His only ambition now, his great priority, was to consolidate his position as a tough businessman. “The only publisher who doesn’t lose money by reading books”: quite a feat, I must say, in our times of runaway illiteracy. It won him respect across the board in the trade. Meanwhile he kept a proud eye from afar on the education of his twin sons, students at a prestigious business school across the Atlantic.
I thought he seemed shy, for once. His soulful eyes, like those of a romantic youth, slid surreptitiously from my lips to my cleavage and back, but sought more often to plumb my own gaze in search of goodness knows what depths. He had not, however, shed his old go-getting energy, his knack for knowing when to push. On this occasion he made bold to tell me about his boys, signaling intimacy. They had jointly won the sought-after Humboldt Prize, involving a training course in India related to the famous microcredits system that had earned its deviser a Nobel Prize. At the same time (“and this, Sylvia, is what matters!”) the experience had led the pair to discover Buddhism.
“You see, Thomas and Michaël are staunch rationalists, like their father, whose agnosticism you can rely on.” He took a long sip of Château-Lagune, closing his eyes beatifically. “But then they get to visit all kinds of holy places, temples, and monasteries. They talk to gurus, how about that? They even met up with one of their Israeli cousins, the son of my aunt in Haifa. The guy’s living in an ashram in Pondicherry, for goodness sakes! Mind you, what with those violent God-squad crazies in the Middle East not to mention our precious ally Bush and his neocons, I don’t blame the Israelis for getting hung up on Eastern spirituality, do you? First India, then Japan, it’ll be China next…Not your field, you say? Sure, it’s not mine either, but I’ve started learning Sanskrit, did I tell you? Absolutely, been doing it for a while now. No, I didn’t rediscover my faith, the future belongs to ecumenism, it’s just a matter of intellectual curiosity. At the same time I’m keeping up my Hebrew, in order to follow the teaching of a spiritual master who looks at the great currents within Judaism and knows how to put them across to people like me…So when I hear you talk about mysticism…Do you know that book by Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism?2 Absolutely essential, my dear…Of course you have, but allow me to suggest you read it again, you know how these things mature with every reading, however many, in my experience…How about his Zohar? No? But that’s the very pinnacle, the ne plus ultra, you absolutely must, it’s all in there…Excuse me? I’m being ridiculous? But I thought you were letting me know that…well, that all that was important to you, and so I thought to myself I wasn’t so alone after all.” It was my turn to drain another glass of wine. Bruno wasn’t alluding merely to an exchange of spiritual intimations. “Of course, I mean, you approach the issue from a Christian perspective, and that interests me too…You must agree that Agamben’s book on Saint Paul is his best by far? I should have published that, don’t you think?…Oh, I can’t tell you anything, you’re so much more knowledgeable than I am, with your training and your female sensibility, goes without saying. And yet, how can I put this, a complicity between you and me is worth saying…I think so. A new alliance, if you like, in Hebrew they call it akeda, sacrificial alliance, or berit, over circumcision…Now you mustn’t feel that I’m trying to influence you, far from it, you write it your way, like you always have. For me it’s the diversity of approaches that counts, you know me, Mister Multi-pronged Attack…”
He floundered and flailed, absurdly and endearingly, and I felt he was being genuine. Was this really the same Bruno I had known ever since my Duras book? The cynical big shot with his marketing jargon, the wizard of publishing scoops with an air of the soixante-huitard recycled into a credible CEO? He wanted to talk and talk, certainly not to listen to me; his outpourings were rambling rather than erudite. I liked him better that way; I let him ramble on. When finally he got around to his Charolais steak I managed to slip in edgewise some details of Teresa’s life. Her Marrano grandfather, the court case over her father and uncles’ right to call themselves hidalgos, her ambiguous friendship with John of the Cross, her dalliance with Fr. Gratian. I’d unplugged my “Sigmund” antenna, it seemed more appropriate to bolster his male yearning for complicity.
“Absolutely, absolutely,” he nodded absently, as if in a dream, “that’s it, our subject. You don’t mind me calling it ours? But look here: what exactly did ‘love’ mean, to these people? We don’t know anymore, do we? And that’s the problem. The ‘Hiroshima of love,’ you said the other day, if I remember rightly? There you are: we don’t know the first thing about it, we’ve lost the taste for it…I hope you’re enjoying your fish?”
We had gone out into the Tuileries court. A biting wind drove snow against the steep glass of Pei’s Pyramid, blew white flakes into my hair, my shoes, in a giddy vortex of lights. Bruno drew me close to shield me from the blizzard breaking over Paris. Then he slowly turned my face toward his, found my lips, and I lost consciousness of all but the taste of his mouth. Fragrance of blond tobacco, enveloping saliva that dilates me. A burning sap creeps through my chest, flows into my belly, floods my sex, my thighs. My legs have gone. I want to gulp down everything, this man, the wind, the wine, the museum and its auspicious scars, I am pleasure open wide. Bruno feels it, feels me, comes closer still, his face vanishes, now the whirlwind of memory that raked it vaporizes it into a mist of sleet. His tongue is still inhabiting me, I am fluid, I will not cry out, I will not fall, I strain, I melt, he licks the roof of my mouth, my cheeks, he holds me back, we start again. Not me, not him, it isn’t us, this kiss belongs to nobody; someone or something beyond ourselves courses through it. Who is kissing whom? The Louvre itself participates in this exorbitant desire, and Notre Dame as well perhaps, and the Bernini sculpture of Louis XIV on horseback nearby, and the Pyramid, and definitely the Carrousel mall, and why not the Great Architect while we’re about it; and then there’s the Ganges, and my readings of La Madre, and the complete Freud, and Gershom Scholem, and Agamben, and the installations crafted by the Beguines—everything and nothing, in this snowstorm that’s painting the city white.
Unplanned and futureless, that strange, long embrace, outside of time, outside of place, had the tang of impossibility, and we both knew it. All the more reason not to let go, to cling on, with bodies on fire and bellies throbbing, in a weightless suspense that was neither erotic nor antierotic: more than perfect, pluperfect. As the pluperfect tense indicates an action completed before another action in the past, so must our ancient histories, Bruno’s and mine, have crossed in the far distant past, around follies and temerities that had been lived and left behind by others long before us. For a quick moment this past made as if to snatch us out of our skins before bringing us back, inevitably but undramatically, for once, to those pleasures we still call physical—according to Mother, Colette, or Sagan, I’m not sure which. All of a sudden our bodies felt pneumatic, impalpably light, drained of passion. Just a smile and a swarm of symbols and memories, a trail of exploding grenades.
Silence, taxi, “Take care of yourself,” “Work well,” “I’ll call you,” “I’m going away tomorrow.” Serenity.
He’s going away, I don’t know where or with whom, and I don’t care. Attempting to decipher Teresa’s experiences is pride and exhilaration enough. Now Bruno’s effervescent kiss makes me think that the headiness of it might be shared, like lonelinesses are shared that do not communicate but walk side by side into infinity. And it reminds me, if need be, that the most ideal quests keep me enthralled only insofar as they are wedded to the body. Alright, it’s my job to know that, I knew that. The extraordinary thing is that it took that silly, infuriating Bruno to remind me of it!
Build up a little database gleaned f
rom the history of mysticism—now there’s an idea. After the Café Marly kiss plus the sensual details provided by my Teresa and avidly drunk in by me, I’ve lost my ability to classify, systemize, and synthesize. The useful oddments I come across in the works of theologians and other religious historians keep breaking up and scattering, before adhering like magnets to one another at the whim of my moods and fancies. I rearrange, I draw my Carte de Tendre,* my topography of feeling, in Teresa country. [*La Carte de Tendre: map of the emotions engraved in Madeleine de Scudéry’s Clélie, 1655–1661.—Trans.] Did I say country? “Continent” is a better word for that mystical universe that Teresa may not necessarily have understood or truly explored, but which precedes her, surrounds her, and nourishes her unawares. Yesterday it made her more intelligible to me; today, however, I feel it muddying her singular, boundless, scandalous trail.
Whereas in canonical faith all souls are divine and by the same token immortal, I use the word “mystical” to denote a psychosomatic experience that reveals the erotic secrets of that faith in a parlance that it either constructs or silently refuses. In the mystical experience an extraordinary union comes about—while the speaker is in life—between the soul and his or her God, the finite cleaving to the infinite in order to consummate its true eternity, “alone with God” in the most immediate, intimate sense of a successful incarnation and indwelling. The body wounded by desire experiences and signifies its unspeakable union with the “fundamental principle of being” (Lalande),3 with the Other (Lacan),4 with “Christ’s humanity” (Saint Teresa of Avila). The figures of this hierogamy, this sexual and sublimated osmosis with the absent Beloved may vary, but each inscribes a fracture in the sacral community to which they pertain, and by derivation often touch upon the social and political pact itself. Maximal singularity, rupture of links, recasting of the religious, or of the a-theological quest: mysticism is regarded by “ordinary people” as a form of inner, albeit extravagant, wisdom at odds with the official knowledge, whether ecclesiastic or secular, that so readily reveres it when unable to recuperate it retrospectively.
The impossible desire for a lacking love object is exaltation and pain that are hidden, reticent, at once thrilling and morbid. Excess or emptiness? Or both? The word mystery, from the Greek μυω, “to conceal,” to be closed up (like lips or eyes or sores) goes back to the Sanskrit mukham, “face,” “mouth,” “entrance.” But the mystics, nurturers of this most inner of interiorities inhabited by the All-Other (le Tout Autre), transmute it to the outside—and hiddenness becomes a path. Life bursts into fullness, absence into genuine presence, suffering into bliss, mortification into delight, Nothingness into ecstasy, and vice versa. Religious space is thus transformed into a stage for love, while the search for truth becomes a matter of body-to-body, spirit-to-spirit, body-to-spirit encounters. Mysticism, without distinction of “categories,” embarks on a genuine recasting of metaphysics.
The earliest instances of the word “mystic” appear during the first century, in Pseudo-Denys the Areopagite,5 sharpened to a fine point of Neoplatonism with Plotinus’s aphelepanta (“Leave everything behind!”)6 and even Aristotle’s theôria in contemplation of the One,7 separate from what can be apprehended by the senses.
And yet, far predating this lexical appearance, hints of “mysticism” abound throughout the Bible. Moses finding God in the midst of the burning bush,8 Ezekiel with a vision of God’s chariot, receiving a scroll he must eat in order to deliver its message;9 these are scenes in which reason is overturned in the clearest light of day. Indeed, mysticism filters into the apocalyptic scriptures (the books of Enoch and Esdras), into Essenian convents, the Pharisee world, and the thought of the Jewish Mishnah masters—all these being focused on the knowledge and contemplation of God and his throne (Merkabah), goal of the mystical progress through the heavenly palaces. Various aspects of the Torah (oral revelation) and the Talmud contain mystical tendencies. Thus the subtle reasonings, like “mountains hanging from a hair,” of the Torah’s inspired scribes; the thirty-two logical rules defining the ways of acceding to Talmudic wisdom and developing the dialectics of reason, aim to elicit visions with the supreme goal of man’s identification with God. Then, from the first century B.C.E. to the tenth C.E., the Kabbalah comes to swell this biblical and Talmudic initiation. It calls the earthly world into being through the operation of twenty-two originary letters in the air, creative entities whose permutations express every idea and every thing. Pharisees, Essenians, the journey through the Hekhalot—palaces of Heaven, which Teresa will call moradas, the seven dwelling places of her Castle—the mystical impulse reemerges in thirteenth-century Spain and Germany. Contemplation, based on a scriptorial combination and practiced by means of techniques recalling those of yoga (breathing, positions of the body, musical notes), culminates in prophetic ecstasy, supernatural illumination, identifying man with the Torah, with the Word, and with God. Cross-fertilization with Islam and Christianity enriches these mystical currents, while Islam and Christianity in turn absorb the wisdom of visionary Kabbalists, despite and throughout the vicious persecutions, expulsions, and exterminations suffered by the Jews.
During the Middle Ages, a full-blown “medieval Jewish philosophy” flourishes in counterpoint to Arab philosophy. Unacquainted with Greek metaphysics, Talmudic thought that could be described as a monism of thought and action nonetheless developed a rich ambivalence between abstract speculation and mystical experience. Theological ignorance of God, who is undefinable by definition, does not rule out a loving knowledge of Him based on the Alliance: through the concept of shekhinah, God accompanies the exiled Jew on earth. The medieval gaon—a spiritual master such as Saadia Gaon, the political leader of the eastern diaspora—links rationalistic interpretation with enthusiasm for revelation; the commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah,10 that germ of the Kabbalah, with the moderate religious philosophy followed by the Muslim Kalâm. As part of the same opening toward philosophical reflection, Jewish mysticism evolves with Judah Halevi11 and Maimonides,12 preceded by Ben Joseph of Fayum,13 Solomon Ibn Gabirol,14 who looks deep into his affinities with Plato,15 Philo of Alexandria,16 and Gnosticism. Not forgetting Bahya Ibn Paquda,17 who stands at the intersection of these tendencies, or Abraham Abulafia,18 who takes up the theory of the mystical power of the alphabet to explore the “unknotting of the soul” by means of musical experiments with arpeggios, transpositions, canons, and fugues. At last comes the surpassing step that is the Zohar, in the second half of the thirteenth century: the Sefer ha-Zohar, or Book of Splendor, whose presumed author, Moisés de León, insisted on attributing it to a second-century Mishnah scholar.19 Reprising the Sefer Yetzirah, the Zohar drops the distinction between “spirit” and “letter,” condensing them instead into an indivisible unit. And gathering the diverse components of Jewish mysticism into one harmonious structure, it graces the exile of Israel with the ultimate meaning of releasing the “divine sparks” and completing the work of redemption.20 Translated into French by Jean de Pauly,21 the Zohar went on to influence no less a figure than Marcel Proust!22
Such a wealth of tendencies, however, can never overshadow the Torah and the Talmud, writings that destined the Jewish people—committed to biblical exegesis and free of major mystical interferences—to a ceaseless study of the texts, so as to imbue themselves with the spirit of God’s Law and put it into practice, thus assuring the salvation of the chosen community.
Bruno is far away, it would be untrue to say I ever think about him, and yet I feel him alongside me, inside me, for example when I’m leafing through the Beguines catalog. My readings of the past few weeks are arranged in my mind like the surrealist collages of those bygone pious women who piled bits of string and handfuls of rose petals around the figure of Baby Jesus. The Sovereign Infant was liable to disappear altogether under the cumulative passion of those tender sisters. He merged with the huge heart they embroidered for him in cross-stitch or molded out of crushed, colorful butterfly wings, a heart that was the re
al theme and focus of the work. Was it Jesus’s heart, or was it theirs?
It would be wrong to assume that contemporary artists have transcended this kind of reiterative, magpie accumulation. I see a lot of it in the galleries, and most often the artist is a woman. One, Annette B., trusted me enough to lie down on my couch. Her wary, piercing eyes seem cloned from Picasso’s. As a rule her words do not get past her lips, or only in spurts of dulled, futile complaint, abruptly doused. A long, frozen silence ensues. When the artist can no longer bear her own speechlessness, she brings me some “beguinesques,” as she calls her confections of twisted threads, mounted letters, screws of paper, beads, buttons, leaves, and a series of tiny cut-up photographs, skillfully embedded in the vortices of this kaleidoscope of mega-significant nothings. Photographs of her dead children. Impossible icons of impossible loves. Annette’s “beguinesques” succeed in making such impossibilities visible. At least to people who enjoy looking. And who’ve been through a vortex like hers.
I cut out my data, I sort, I glue, I amass. My canvas is taking shape. No, it’s lost me. Later on I will set Teresa into it and she will resorb the picture, all that will be left is her very own heart, her style, her beat.
Teresa, My Love Page 5