Teresa, My Love

by Julia Kristeva

  No sign now of convulsions or vomiting. From now on it glides in the pure pleasure of touch and hearing: ecstasy is soft (es vuelo suave, es vuelo deleitoso) and noiseless, rapt in the silence of the spheres. Away from the world of the senses, the soul is more sensual still.12

  Could Teresa’s rapture be a way to lift depression? Not in the sense of throwing off the weight of melancholy, but acting as a corkscrew auscultation-palpation, a highly charged annihilation? Against depression Teresa invents not an antidepressant but a “sur-pressant” that annuls her—not because she lacks the love object to the point of madness, as is the case with melancholics, but because He overwhelms her with His superabundant presence; body-and-soul together, over and above the absence of all the hes and shes who can possibly be imagined.

  The saint’s celebrated beatitude may cause the hasty reader or the superficial lover of baroque art to forget that there are two aspects to this magical rapture. It is an excruciating bliss that transports the soul, for “it is the soul alone that both suffers and rejoices on account of the joy and satisfaction the suffering gives,”13 while the body is left racked and dislocated by pain: “Sometimes my pulse almost stops, according to what a number of the Sisters say who at times are near me and know more, and my arms are straight and my hands so stiff that occasionally I cannot join them. Even the next day I feel pain in the pulse and in the body, as if the bones were disjoined.”14

  Seized by “anxious longings for death,” fearful “that it will not die,”15 the soul yet comes to take pleasure in the process. The love of the Lord means eternity, after all. More prosaically, Teresa has survived other epileptic fits and awakened from comas at death’s door. She has since arrived at the certainty that enjoyment is possible: the soul experiences itself as a construct dependent on this Love, just as much as on the comas that herald it. Teresa does not say it in so many words, but with that intellectual integrity that spares us nothing of her mental and physical states, she clearly implies it. The suggestion is indeed that pleasure is felt against the sick body, for at this stage the soul communicates only its torment to the body, keeping all the pleasure for itself: “The body shares only in the pain, and it is the soul alone that both suffers and rejoices on account of the joy and satisfaction the suffering gives.” It is the soul, in short, that makes the body sick by shifting anguish onto it, communicating torment to it, and loading it with ill-being. And if it, too, suffers in its way and for good, the soul is just as capable, in the same movement, of enjoying its suffering unburdened from fear of death. Is it always so lonely in bliss, detached from the tortured body, radiant and victorious without it? The transfixion causes us to doubt it, as do the metaphors-metamorphoses describing the exile of the soul in the Beloved by means of a cascade of sensations. As always it is your writing that speaks truth, Teresa. Your self-analysis told you that the soul alone, provided it be magnetized by the love Object, can reverse suffering into joy (in the name of the Other)—even if it means that this blessed reversal takes it out on the body, whether plunging it into a coma, as neurologists have observed, or exalting it to the point of orgasm, as shown by the baroque sculptor.

  When you wrote, you did not say everything at once. Sometimes, too, you were writing under the eye of your fathers and counselors. Bernini himself must have grasped this double scene, for he displayed the Transfixion that dispossessed you of body and soul right in front of the cardinals of the Cornaro family, the patrons of the chapel where you recline. Their eyes are on you, and it must have been from the gazes of such fathers, rather than from ours, that you sought to remove yourself, to banish yourself. Who knows, perhaps the paternal and paternalistic surveillance you were under pushed you, even more powerfully than your own personal history would have done, toward that inversion of pain into pleasure that ravished you and took you out of yourself?

  There were times when Teresa felt the union with the divine as an annihilation, a brush with death. I picture her pacing under these low ceilings, beside herself, down the corridors and narrow stairways of this modest Convent of the Incarnation with its burden of temptations and hostilities; body and soul on a knife-edge, shaking with epilepsy, hopelessly sad. Writing after the event, she feels able to say that it was the prayer of union with the Spouse that led to such a loss of all her “faculties.” Or maybe it was the other way around: maybe it was the seizures, the neurological dysfunction, that first put her vigilance into abeyance and melted the borders between herself and the Other? No understanding, no will, no memory; no communication, no words. This abandonment, which to her is beatitude, cannot possibly be conveyed. A senseless beatitude?

  Here…the soul rejoices incomparably more; but it can show much less since no power remains in the body, nor does the soul have any power to communicate its joy. At such a time, everything would be a great obstacle and a torment and hindrance to its repose. And I say that if this prayer is the union of all the faculties, the soul is unable to communicate its joy even though it may desire to do so—I mean while being in the prayer. And if it were able, then this wouldn’t be union.16

  This may be the description of a swoon induced by a comitial crisis; we are reminded of time standing still for Mohammed’s pitcher, in the epileptic euphoria evoked by Dostoyevsky in The Devils. Although “this suspension of all the faculties is very short” (half an hour “would be a very long time”), and it is difficult to know what is happening, since “there is no sensory consciousness,” even so, “these faculties don’t return to themselves so completely that they are incapable of remaining for several hours as though bewildered.”17

  This is where the strength of the love union comes in. Thanks to this construct (an embodied fantasy, as I see it four centuries later), it is not I who speaks, but Him; I is Another, *[*“Je est un autre”: in a letter by Arthur Rimbaud.—Trans.] I is God, a Voice that makes me hear things, reassuring explanations—for God is a protective rationality in Teresa’s Catholicism. Unable to speak or to read, the soul (when united with the Other to the point of fusion) is nevertheless flooded with “the most marvelous and gentlest delight” in the most sensitive part of itself.18

  Other elevations, more painful still, are like veritable trysts with death:

  In these raptures it seems that the soul is not animating the body.…one understands and sees oneself carried away and does not know where. Although this experience is delightful, our natural weakness causes fear in the beginning. It is necessary that the soul be resolute and courageous—much more so than in the prayer already described—in order to risk all, come what may, and abandon itself into the hands of God and go willingly wherever it is brought since, like it or not, one is taken away.…At times I was able to accomplish something, but with a great loss of energy, as when someone fights with a giant and is worn out. At other times it was impossible for me to resist, it carried off my soul and usually, too, my head along with it, without my being able to hold back—and sometimes the whole body until it was raised from the ground.19

  These brutal forces that “carry her away” suggest the violence of the electric discharges neurologists speak of, and only the divine “cloud” that conveys the lover to her ideal Father bestows mystic value upon the trauma. The sacred comes to the rescue of ill-being.

  Embarrassed by these prodigies, Teresa forbade the other nuns to talk about the “carrying-off” effect when it happened to take place in public. Sometimes, feeling it coming on, she stretched out flat and asked the nuns to hold her down; “nonetheless, this was seen.”20 At such times she is “greatly frightened,” then comes a “rare detachment.”21 Although playing no “active role” in the pain, Teresa feels stranded in a “desert so distant from all things” that she “doesn’t find a creature on earth that might accompany [her].”22 Union or no union, God then seems achingly distant from the soul; the dereliction is total. Mental pain coupled with physical pain provokes a catatonia compounded by an insuperable melancholy: “Usually when unoccupied [my soul] is placed in the midst
of these anxious longings for death; and when it sees [the pains] are beginning, it fears that it will not die.”23

  Throughout these “clinical” descriptions, we can clearly make out a sequence: the detonator is anguish, accompanied by fits, followed by a neuronal disconnection, and ending in the physical relief that succeeds to fatigue. I shall not fail to deliver my novel interpretation of Teresa’s raptures to my colleague Jérôme Tristan. I am out to impress him, of course, by encroaching upon his professional terrain as a neuropsychiatrist, but I also plan to mention that my way goes further than science. I’m trying. So is he, but the poor fool holds back, with his cramped little life as a specialist in who knows what. With Teresa, the prodigious amorous construct of the lover penetrated by the Beloved is what downshifts the postcomitial distension. A micro-fiction of eroticism in fits and states that would have interested Andrew, if he weren’t acting the sniffy Voltairean, purely to annoy me.

  Chapter 15

  A CLINICAL LUCIDITY

  Despite all these struggles…there remains a spark of assurance so alive…though all other hopes are dead, that even should the soul desire otherwise, that spark will stay alive.

  Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle

  Voice message from Bruno on my cell: “Hiya! Not too hot down your way? How’s it going? Found a title yet?” (Long pause. Clink of ice cubes swilled in JB. It’s probably not my book that’s on his mind.) “Everyone well, I hope…Listen, so what does a woman like your Teresa think about jealousy? I mean, no big deal, it just occurred to me. I imagine God comes in very handy for shielding her from that kind of human emotion, a bit too human, right?” (He can hardly expect an answer to this kind of provocation.) “Nobody’s jealous of God, are they? Or are they? Call me. Byeee.”

  Bruno jealous, that’s all I needed. I have no intention of calling back. He’ll just have to wait till I give him the book.

  Musing on the ways to take a woman, Marguerite Duras’s vice-consul says: “I should play on her sadness.”1 He says. Marguerite says. She used love to help her die to life. Her pain was her cry, Hiroshima. Outlawed, out of reach. Anne-Marie Stretter confirms it with her absence, imprisoned in a sorrow too old to weep for. The ravishing of Lol V. Stein is not a pleasure either, passion suffocates her; unhappiness crushes Tatiana Karl, a woman never gets over it. “Destroy, she said,” cried Élisa, afraid of hunger, poverty, and truth.2

  In the book that first brought Bruno and me together, I wrote—and it’s been held against me—that Duras is a witch. A witch who passes on to her female readers a boundless misery of which these victims endlessly complain in singsong voices, so badly infected that their only escape is often the psychiatric hospital of Sainte-Anne; I’m one, I know what I’m talking about. People resented my insight, but it was true. Bruno confirmed it to me: “You know what, Bruno darling, I recognize myself in Sylvia’s portrait of me.” That’s what she told him over a drink, Duras the survivor, who between a corpse and her own body saw only “similarities…screaming at me.”3

  Nothing to do with my Teresa, all this, or very little…Bruno doesn’t understand much; Juan, my London pal, is happily grazing the sunny slopes of the Golden Age; as for Andrew, I’ve no idea, he’s too well barricaded behind his sarcasm to give a hint of what he really thinks. Pain is certainly the hidden face of philosophy, its mute sister, and Proust, who used to kill himself laughing while paying tribute to perpetual adoration, came close to making Albertine into a social suicide. Gomorrah is depressive and Sodom is criminal, as everybody knows, but writing in search of lost time replaces the amorous impasse with the narrative of jealousy. “Little Marcel” becomes a storyteller, after all, when he realizes that what was torture to imagine about Albertine (or Albert) was actually his own unrelenting desire to please new people (whether male or female is another matter), and even more powerful, his desire to sketch out new novels. “Only from one’s own pleasure can one derive both knowledge and pain.”4 Enough to perform the miracle of transubstantiation all over again, and contend that language, by the power of fiction, becomes flesh once and for all. At last this “fresh and pink” material, the work, can replace pale “substitutes for sorrows,” and compete with cathedrals.5 “I thought he was Jewish,” whispered Maurice Barrès, as he followed the Catholic funeral of a writer who had been among the earliest supporters of Dreyfus, while at the same time opposing the closure of cathedrals.6

  Teresa, too, believed in transubstantiation, and my guess would be that she subscribed to it even more resolutely by the grace of her writing than by any submission to the dogmas of faith. What’s more, she managed to climb out of the frightening sloughs of despond that accompanied her epileptic episodes without lingering in the thickets of autofiction.7 Her own brand of fiction (hacer esta ficción para darlo a comprender8) aimed directly at exile in the Beloved, sidestepping—unlike Colette—the purity of plants and animals. The Burgundian writer wept as painfully as a man and savored her “idle” misery with something akin to greed. “What I lack I can do without,”9 proclaimed the high priestess of buds and blooms, despising the surface froth of some “good fat love.”10 Down she would go, pen in hand, into those “feeling depths” to which “love can’t always accede,” disguising herself as a female Dionysus, a dream-cat. “I swear to you it’s not really a mental thing,” the miscreant would say.11 She never thought that Teresa was by her side in this crossing, this extreme pass where we “are burned,” because “we possess in abstention, and only in abstention”—hence the “purity of those who lavish themselves unstintingly.”12

  But Dostoyevsky is the one who resembles my Carmelite the most, when he has Kirilov describe the sensations that precede a seizure, or indeed suicide:

  “There are seconds—they come five or six at a time—when you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony in all its fullness. It is nothing earthly. I don’t mean that it is heavenly, but a man in his earthly semblance can’t endure it. He has to undergo a physical change or die. This feeling is clear and unmistakable.…It is not rapture, but just gladness…Nor do you really love anything—oh, it is so much higher than love! What is so terrifying about it is that it is so terribly clear and such a great gladness. If it went on for more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and must perish.…To be able to endure it for ten seconds, you would have to undergo a physical change…”

  “You’re not an epileptic?”

  “No.”

  “You will be one…”13

  And yet Fyodor Mikhaylovich has no pleasure in transfixion; for him, the main thing is “despondency,” and this is the whole difference between Orthodoxy and Catholicism.14

  Dare I admit it to my friend Marianne? Since spending time with Teresa, I prefer her way of crossing the Acheron: the fairy Mélusine’s cries drowning out the moaning of the saint.*[*An allusion to Gérard de Nerval’s 1853 poem “El desdichado.”—Trans.]15 I even dare say I understand her, which doesn’t mean that I recommend her solution to an age of surrogate mothers and homoparental families. It’s simply that Teresa knocks me out with the power of her self-destructiveness, as much as with the vigorous efficacy of her rebirths.

  Let’s see, who invented the bitter joys of the inner life? I wager it was the melancholics, sucked in by their injured narcissism (“Negative narcissism, Sylvia dear,” Jérôme Tristan reminds me), so injured that it melts into Nothingness and thrives on denigration. The black sun of introspection is something Teresa knew well. She liked to distill this knowledge, as did medieval monks before her with their acedia. But the self-destructive energy of my roommate goes much further than that of her predecessors or imitators, for at the same time as sweeping body and soul away in the comitial crisis, it sublimates itself, with renewed and no less impetuous violence, into exile in the Other, a magnified ex-portation. And I never get tired of tracking her in the microanalysis of her desires.

  Although she speaks of the “impossibility” of conveying the force of her transports, the Carmelite convinced
herself, with the corroboration of visions, that the very brutality of the epileptic fit was proof of its divine source: who but a loving Spouse would inflict such violence upon you? And so the malady of love undergoes a metamorphosis: without really departing from the letter of the Gospel (“God is Love”), the writer inscribes her personal story into it so as to transmute—through the Passion of Christ—the most unbearable suffering into indelible grace.

  Strongly felt, but fleeting, is another aspect of rapture: the certainty of oneness with God surrounds the writer with the aura of a glorious identification that “lasts only a short time,”16 for “rapture is experienced at intervals,”17 but the soul, lifted up “to the highest tower,” unfurls the “banner for God…as someone who in a certain manner receives assurance there of victory.”18

  Teresa is conscious of the twofold nature of this regenerative alchemy. The combination of “pain” with “glory”19 is a source of rapture as much as of peril. The influx of ambivalent, excitable affects ultimately blows up the castle of intimacy, that haven where the nun, deep in recollection, succeeded in more or less conquering her centrifugal desires. The passing safety of purity cannot resist the magnet, it shatters to smithereens and sweeps away, along with conscious understanding, the confines of the very self: “The soul is suspended in such a way that it seems to be completely outside itself”;20 “nothing satisfied me, nor could I put up with myself; it truly seemed as if my soul were being wrested from me.”21