Never to cut the umbilical bond with the Other—such was your right, your frailty, and your charm. It’s also what enabled you to remake your body at the same time as you were fashioning your life’s work. You are neither a philosopher nor a psychoanalyst, Teresa, you are a writer, and writers are revealed by their propensity to be physically altered by the bare fact of writing. With one difference: I’ve never known a writer who brought off anything like the fakir’s tricks, if I may so describe them, attributed to you by the Carmelites (such as levitating upright, inches above the ground). Despite your vaunted humility you granted live performances in this vein to extramural audiences, too.
This metamorphosis troubles me a bit, so I shall try to approach it more closely by reading you. Reading the fabulous space of your body, between death (they were so sure you were dead, one time, they sealed your eyelids with wax and wrapped you in a shroud) and laughter (even the Inquisition, you wrote, “makes me laugh”), between paralysis and agitation, between suckling the Godhead and fleeing from toads, between plumbing inner depths with exquisite skill and manipulating your superiors, between the foundation of the Discalced Carmelite order and the invention of a way to be “outside oneself.” Not forgetting your bold, funny, forceful style in Castilian, the language Cervantes was to magnify a few years later and that engulfed Catholicism itself.
Your body is a paradoxical place, at once inward and outward, flesh and word, desire and Nothingness; a nonplace where I merges into you and is then referred in the third person, she, a nonperson in the feminine. A vision? Perhaps; but one that “sees” with something other than “the eyes of the body.” An inner, metaphorical vision, which turns you into Him:
She saw some visions and experienced revelations. She never saw anything, nor has seen anything, of these visions with her bodily eyes. Rather, the representation came like a lightning flash, but it left as great an impression upon her and as many effects as it would if she had seen it with her bodily eyes, and more so.7
A suffering–jubilant body turns into characters and visions, a cascade of third persons brought about by the grace of the Other, the better to know oneself in losing oneself.
You are attracted by the “jewel” whose sparkle is attenuated by a fold of fine linen, you say, and which lies in a reliquary as in an impenetrable stronghold.
But we do not dare look at it [the inner vision of the divine] or open the reliquary, nor can we, because the manner of opening this reliquary is known solely by the one to whom the jewel belongs.…
Well, let us say now that sometimes he wants to open the reliquary suddenly in order to do good to the one to whom he has lent it. Clearly, a person will afterward be much happier when he remembers the admirable splendor of the stone, and hence it will remain more deeply engrained in his memory.…And even though the vision happens so quickly that we could compare it to a streak of lightning, this most glorious image remains so engraved on the imagination…
Although I say “image” let it be understood that, in the opinion of the one who sees it, it is not a painting but truly alive…But you must understand that even though the soul is detained by this vision for some while, it can no more fix its gaze on the vision than it can on the sun. Hence this vision always passes very quickly, but not because its brilliance is painful, like the sun’s, to the inner eye. It is the inner eye that sees all of this.…The brilliance of this inner vision is like that of an infused light coming from a sun covered by something as transparent as a properly cut diamond. The garment seems made of a fine Dutch linen. Almost every time God grants this favor the soul is in rapture, for in its lowliness it cannot suffer so frightening a sight.8
You stumble against that nameless threshold where the erotic drive becomes meaning. You pass over to the other side, even though the third person, the non-person, she, has no idea of what this could possibly mean, because the sensorial meaning has not yet hardened into conceptual meaning. You stand on the edge of the originary repression, a psychoanalytic dictionary would say. Hovering in the place at which “most people” go mad. But not you, Teresa, for you seize on that dazzlement, the brilliance of the jewel, and dim it beneath a gauze of written language. And in the telling, the writing, your body changes.
Since your humanity is what fascinates me, as you might guess, and with apologies to your worshippers in the Lord, I shall begin by nosing into your background, your family, your friends, your loves: things you yourself bring up only to subordinate them to the events of your faith. Discreet to begin with, these epiphanies become steadily amplified in step with your metamorphoses. This is the subject matter of The Book of Her Life. You practice writing as a power of regression proper to desire, and as a power of desire over regression: this is, I consider, the experience in which you’re dying of not dying.
Being a busy woman, you weren’t always ready or able to commit your experience to paper, and this omission often pitched you into painful distress, rather than the death to self that would let you curl into the Other. In the end, the written word—as you explain it in the “Fourth Dwelling Places” of The Interior Castle—replaces suffering by the transubstantiation of sensual desire into the desire to formulate ideas. Yet the text as it has come down to us today (in a 1588 first edition of the Life revised by Ana de Jesús and Luis de León) seems to interest you less than the actual movement of writing. You write in a rush, seldom bothering to correct, caring more for the exploration than for its traces. What better proof than this lack of perfectionism of how little—while aspiring to simplicity and depth, like the humanists—you care about creating a “work”? Instead you avidly pursue transmutation in a stream of images that overwhelms you, overwhelms us! I hear you, and I hear us. It is written in the relish of your mother tongue, which in your hands sounds lively, cadenced, and muscular while being also dreamy, negligent, and relaxed. You keep an eye on your language, revisiting and correcting it. But this is far from the obsessive rituals of the professional writer, and I can well believe that the making of your books was spurred onward by the same élan with which you wrote to your brother: “You shouldn’t make the effort to read over [the letters] you send me. I never reread mine. If some word is missing, put it in, and I will do the same here with yours. The meaning is at once clear [que luego se entiende lo que quiere decir], and it is a waste of time to reread them unnecessarily.”9
Proud voluptuousness forbade you to engage in sexual intercourse, so far as we know, even though your letters and writings are oddly spiced with mild erotomania. But you were not a modern, by any stretch. Belying the ostentatious way you were clothed by the baroque spirit of Bernini’s sculpture, the writhing of your body and soul convey but one, infinite, possession: that of you by your own self, that of I by her own other. Your boudoir needs the Eucharist, but it is only in writing that you taste all the flavors of the divine and are drenched in all the waters of the Other.
Nevertheless, psychoanalysis maintains that the Heavenly Gardener who floods through you is unquestionably the heavenly Father, relayed in life by your father Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, whose hidalguía court case turned him for you into a negative of Christ. I will suggest that the paternal image was reinforced by the far more internalized faith of your uncle, Pedro Sánchez de Cepeda, whose love of courtly novels and Franciscan—perhaps indeed Erasmist—manners perturbed your adolescent body.
But the Other was already locked into your own psychic virility by osmosis with a beloved brother, like a twin but two years older, the one you played at martyrs with: “Para siempre, Teresa—para siempre, Rodrigo.” Forever. And the four celestial waters you so avidly imbibe in the pages of your Life, what are they but allusions to an “idle seed” (Klossowski), their idle seeds, as much as to your intense and lonely pleasure inundated by the fantasy of the human masculinity of the divine? A great big masturbation session: some have not hesitated to say so in writing. The “spurts” of the Heavenly Youth are yours, it’s your body melting, relaxing from nun-like stiffness as your conv
ulsive-hysterical juddering softens and trickles away through your nib. It’s the only way to appease your sexual tension while womb and vagina remain unnamed and unnameable, amid a bright ripple of words.
To modern consumers of guilt-free sex, to sadomasochistic role models who would rather beat themselves than know themselves, to fundamentalists swathed in hypocritical prudishness, to the casualties of the new soul sickness—if they have not already been destroyed by deadly enactments of fantasies or toxic psychosomatic pathologies—you offer the sumptuous halls of a flesh that throbs to imagined perceptions, embodied images, in an insatiable orgasm of impossibility. Is this spiritual wedding night anything but the peak of delusion? Indeed it is, for your successive rebirths, Teresa, my love, testify to the vivifying powers of the imaginary when it truly inhabits the desires that brought it forth.
Have your seasons and your castles* [*A reference to Arthur Rimbaud’s poem, “Ô saisons, Ô châteaux…”—Trans.] since been drowned? I fear they have, now that the imaginary has been killed off by the Spectacle: nothing is impossible in this increasingly virtual world, and so there’s nothing to desire. And yet my wager is to lift a corner of your habit—not just to display your body and works before the fetishistic curiosity of jaded spectators, but to invite them to a tryst with your metamorphic intensities. We are in want of such a thing, let’s take the risk.
Part 2
Understanding Through Fiction
This image I’ve used in order to explain…[this fiction: hacer esta ficción para darlo a entender]
Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection
Chapter 5
PRAYER, WRITING, POLITICS
Between us and other people there exists a barrier of contingencies, just as…in all perception there exists a barrier as a result of which there is never absolute contact between reality and our intelligence.
Marcel Proust, Time Regained
Whatever the wellspring of her writing, internal urgency or external urging, Teresa clearly knows that she writes in order to be: to encounter herself, to encounter and understand others, to “serve” as a conduit for “words” so as to “seek herself” and hopefully “find herself.” She writes “almost stealing time, and regretfully because it prevents me from spinning”;1 “[Saint Martin] had works and I have only words, because I’m not good for anything else!”2 And again, “I don’t understand myself…So that when I find my misery awake, my God, and my reason blind, I might see whether this reason can be found in what I write” (pueda ver si la hallo aquí en esto escrito de mi mano).3 None of this diffidence prevents her from holding her imagery, or fiction, in high esteem—not least when noting the appreciation of the Inquisition.
Thus she tells Fr. Gaspar de Salazar that The Book of Her Life, then under examination by the Grand Inquisitor Gaspar de Quiroga, bishop of Toledo, is a “jewel” in the latter’s hands. He “praises it highly. So until he tires of it he will not give it over. He said that he wants to examine it carefully.” Teresa champions her fiction with mixed anxiety and irony. She affects a swagger when announcing that “another” gem awaits her detractors, with “many advantages over the previous one. It deals with nothing else but who [Christ] is; and it does so with more exquisite enameling and decoration. The jeweler did not know as much at that time, and the gold is of a finer quality, although the precious stones do not stand out as they did in the previous piece.”4
Indeed, while not as straightforwardly autobiographical as the Life, The Interior Castle chisels in its Dwelling Places a faceted itinerary of the mystical journey, revealing Teresa as the master craftsperson of a rarefied genre: theological psychology. The poems of John of the Cross, such as the Dark Night of the Soul, the Living Flame of Love, or the Spiritual Canticle, are accompanied by explanatory “spiritual treatises” both short and long. More intersubjective and physical than the prose of the man she called her “little Seneca,” less elliptical than his verse, might Teresa’s fiction constitute that gemstone, that crystal, condensing theopathic states and expounding them so thoroughly as to rule out any future hermeneutics or philosophy of stature in the Castilian tongue?5 Contrast with the Rhenish case, whose densely intellectual mysticism, of an Albertino-Thomist cast, cried out to be conceptualized—as it would be by German philosophy. In reality the two Avilan mystics, John and Teresa, invented bridging genres that passed between theopathy and theology on the one hand and the psychology of extreme creative states on the other. The writing produced by these “ungenred” genres appears to us, at this distance, as the crucible of the continent in gestation that was European literature; its fiery quality remains unequaled, with rare exceptions.
Teresa suspects that she thinks like a novelist, and comes close to saying so, with a proud twinkle. And sure enough I see a novel of introspection, appropriating Chrétien de Troye’s Grail, to be decoded in the “precious gems” of her greatest texts, just as there is a picaresque novel lurking in her letters.6
In all these forms, however, and given that it traces the begetting of the self, writing seems to be an essential stage, foundational but not final, of the experience of the “love of God” according to Teresa. Is this “mystical theology, which I believe it is called”?7 But “I am speaking about what has happened to me, as I have been ordered to do [yo digo lo que ha pasado por mí como me lo mandan].”8 Precaution, irony, disclaimers: Teresa frames her fiction from the outset by defining it as the “account” of a complex “sensorial experience” whose initial station was prayer. The act of re-founding the Carmelites, which would mark the history of the Catholic Church in general and Spanish society in particular, would be its political counterpart.
Regardless of her epileptic seizures, in these writing states, on their twin pillars of prayer and foundation, the Carmelite nun exhibits a remarkable capacity for observation, bolstered by an unprecedented rhetorical elaboration of what it is to lose and to reconstitute oneself through amorous transference onto the other. These writings cannot be reduced to the discharge of a duty; they refashion in depth the complexity of a whole person, along with her relationships. First in the verbalization of Confession, then in the still more intimate act of writing, the ground covered mentally and physically, emotionally and culturally, biographically and historically takes over the subjective state of distress, be it neuronal or existential, and moves aside from it—when not independent of it—to transform it at last into a being-in-the-world that re-founds both self and others. From that point on, prayer-writing-politics are lived and restored as the three indissociable panels of a single process of ceaseless re-foundation of the self, of the subject, continually open to its own otherness, thanks to the call of the Being-Other (“Seek yourself in Me”). They trigger the spiraling re-creation of the woman who prays, and writes, and is metamorphosed: “When the soul [in the form of a silkworm] is, in this prayer, truly dead to the world, a little white butterfly comes forth.”9
Teresa begins her “search” with a “suspension of the faculties”—in scholastic terms, the intellect, the will, and the imagination—in order to regress to that state in which the thinking individual loses the contours of his or her identity and, beneath the threshold of consciousness and indeed of the unconscious, becomes what Winnicott calls a “psyche-soma.”10 In that state, which for psychoanalysis is a reversion to the archaic osmosis between mother and infant (or fetus), the tenuous link to the self and the other is maintained solely by that infralinguistic sensibility whose acuteness is the greater in proportion to the relinquishment of the faculty for abstract judgment. A different thought results, an a-thought, a dive into the deeps that terms like sensorial representation or psyche-soma convey better than any notion of mind. It is as if the reasoning mind had passed the baton of being-in-the-world to a fantastic fabrication domiciled in the entire body, touching-feeling outside and inside, its own physiological processes and the external world, without the protection of intellectual work or the help of a judging consciousness. Winnicott wondered why we locate
the mind in the brain, when the regressive states entered by some of his patients testified, he thought, to how all the senses and organs play a part in self-perception and perception of the outside world: his observation suggested that the psyche is the body, or soma, and the body is the psyche.
UNIVERSAL SEPARATION
After the work of repentance, quiet, and union, Teresa describes the fourth degree of prayer, which is rapture: this shows how the destitution of the self in the psyche-soma begins with the sense of “being distant from all things.”11 In an acute state of melancholic loneliness, the soul desires “only to die,” feeling bereft of consolation and not finding “a creature on earth that might accompany it.” And yet this low mood does not lead it to complain:
Now, I understand clearly that all this help [from others] is like little sticks of dry rosemary and that in being attached to it there is no security; for when some weight of contradiction or criticism comes along, these little sticks break. So I have experience that the true remedy against a fall is to be attached to the cross and trust in Him who placed Himself upon it.12
For there is not a “creature on earth” who is consistent, lovable or kind; people invariably let one down; and this primary frustration has me cloistered in a convent as if to embody, confirm and perpetuate my isolation. My longing for love is not however quelled by this universal separation, this “distance from all things”: in a last-ditch erotic impulse, I invest it in an imaginary Object who is the absolute Subject, the God-man who bestowed divinity upon human suffering (and vice versa) to the point of fusion with it, a merging of the two. Is Christ the last of the gods? Did He betray divinity? Or perhaps, by revolutionizing the one God of the Bible, He incarnates an ultimate anthropological truth: it is imperative to divinize the universal separation and turn it into a Great Other, this being the only way to mend the distance and mend ourselves in the union with Him, our fellow, the Crucified One who rose again. If you wish to be “saved” from universal separation, if you believe in the possibility of rapture, go in for regressions as delightful as they are excruciating, because the price of salvation is to cross that distance (a process later known as masochism—albeit the friars of Duruelo, supporters of Teresa’s reforms, could have shown a thing or two to that scandalous Sacher-Masoch).
Teresa, My Love Page 10