I was also thinking about this comparison. Since what is given to those who are further advanced is totally the same as that given to them in the beginning, we can compare it to a food that many persons eat. Those who eat just a little are left only with a good taste in their mouth for a short while; those who eat more, receive nourishment; those who eat a great deal receive life and strength. So frequently can these latter eat and so filled are they from this food of life that they no longer eat anything that satisfies them other than this food. They see how beneficial it is to them, and their taste has so adapted to this sweetness that it would prefer not living to having to eat other things that serve for no more than to take away the pleasing taste the good food leaves behind.37
Now that the guilt of incest has been lifted, now that He has convinced you, you have the right to love Him and be loved in return. His Voice neither forbids nor judges: it is simply a lovely taste that penetrates with the Voice into all the body’s cavities. Deeper down than the mouth, the guts themselves are touched by it. And this feeling spirals up toward the Other who authorizes the pleasure and gives it a meaning, the meaning of reciprocal love. Orality and genitality, mingled and disinhibited, are no longer felt as “rape” or abduction (in French: un rapt; in Spanish: arrobar, “to tear,” “to mutilate,” “to damage”) but as rapture (French: ravissement). To “ravish” in the sense of entrancement is another cognate; “one” is torn out of oneself, but in a situation of trust. You entrust your bewilderment (desconcierto) and your folly (desatino) to Him so that He might contain them and contain you, as one cradles a baby, and so that you might contain Him as the perforated female body contains a lover. “We are not angels but we have a body.”38
Catalina, who wanted to be a man, couldn’t unite with Him except by sadistically hurting-killing herself. You, just as much of a tomboy and more virile than many of the monks around you, accede by means of fantasy (and who knows, in reality too, perhaps?—the texts are discreet, but undoubtedly suggestive) to female genitality as well as to symbolic motherhood. How was this possible?
Let me hazard an enormity that psychologists and writers might understand. Your appropriation of language by writing revealed another Teresa to you—a new Teresa who transformed the fear of divine judgment into attentiveness to the Other’s Voice. By speaking and writing about your culpable (hence frustrated and painful) desires, you take onto yourself both divine judgment and its redemption. Because you are in the place of the Other, the Other takes Its place in you. Fear is compounded, or rather superseded, by receptiveness: openness, welcome, abandonment to the gift.
This is how from being feared, then heard, the Other rewritten becomes an Other touched, felt via all the senses. Writing does not enact the respect for otherness (for evil, for impossibility, for crime, for “characters”…) as morality would wish, although this can happen too. Through writing, the Other and all forms of alterity cease to be forbidden, cease even to be separate from me. By writing I think them, perceive and possess them, touch and am touched by them. Writing is the supreme, innocent move from word to deed, the consummation-assumption of all prohibitions, including the primal one of incest. Henceforth, by authorizing herself to write, Teresa is “another,” capable of feeling in the fundamental sense of touching. All those “others” who frightened or at least impressed her are inside her, and she is inside them—a reciprocal interpenetration. The Scriptures and Gospels, the family superego, the demands of honra, or the aspiration to the Ideal and to eternity no longer assail you as external imperatives, Teresa, my love, since you have the audacity to assimilate them into your own sensory experience and to impregnate your style, your fiction with them. Others, the Other, are your fiction, which is not even “yours,” since you exist outside yourself, in the third person.
Your writing was born, as we have seen, in the wake of amorous transferences with your confessors (akin to psychoanalytical transference) and with variably loyal fellow nuns and female friends (akin to every heightened attachment between women), all of which unlocked your desires. A sensual body, alive to the passions of men and women, was thus made available to your pen. Through guilt and repression, and despite renunciation and punishment, you built yourself a new corporeal and psychic space; sensual, ravished, in a continual state of elucidation, and, by all these tokens—I say this confidently—a glorious body.
If masochism and its twin, sadism, are not entirely avoided here, they are nonetheless crowned by ravishment, or rapture, and surpassed in “marriage.” Meekness vanishes in a surge of loving elation, and the imaginary flows back into the body and its erogenous zones to relieve them of the tensions that so harrowed the young novice. La Madre’s potency and impotencies together diminish, her dominion and humiliation of self and others abates, her comitial or flagellant mortifications become few and far between. Relieved of desire itself, body and soul find peace in the fusion of everything with nothing, of nothing with everything, of self with Other, of flesh with Word, and vice versa.
You achieved this entrance into the writing of fiction around the age of fifty, with the book of your Life, and you consolidated it through the trials of founding houses, themselves objects of love and writing. I interpret this, also and simultaneously, as a reiteration of the immemorial founding metamorphosis of the speaking being: when the infans, touching and feeling, undergoing and rejecting, begins to move through the language of its home environment and to appropriate it, at which point its sensations become refined into meanings. How many years did it take Toumaï, our prehistoric ancestor, to learn to speak? Did language come about at a stroke or after some protracted evolution? The children who come to my consulting room, my patients’ and my own dives into the forgotten, teach me that I accede to language when the words of other people do not seem a menace or a violation; when other people do not inflict on me either their incomprehensible opacity or their judgments, let alone their blows, frustrations, or neglects. I welcome their voices as they welcome me, I co-take or com-prehend a voice, it does the same to me, in a flowering of sensible intelligence and intelligent sensibility. This leaning on the other voice and its leaning on me place me in a different connection to others: the persecutory other invaginates into the receiving-received other. I cease to be an infans and become a speaking-desiring subject, a thinking child; I build sexual theories; I am a potential seeker.
As its final surprise and greatest benefit, this reciprocal receptiveness is not, or not feared as, a victimized passivity, aggravated throughout one’s life until it is time to merit—maybe—a posthumous reward in heaven. If at the start of my graduation to speaking subject I acquired the use of language through jouissance, then language will never be just a utilitarian communication code for me. I will understand and practice it as a co-penetration: not rape but rapture. Is this a delusion? No, it’s a constant therapy, which takes over from original fear and unpicks the cascading chains of infantile hatefatuations and primal abjections into the trials and pleasures of speaking.
Chapter 29
“WITH THE EARS OF THE SOUL”
If reality were indeed a sort of waste product of experience…
Marcel Proust, Time Regained
En lo muy muy interior…
Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle
Your visions, Teresa, are not perceived with the eyes of the body, you often insist on this point; rather they are built by a listening that avails itself of touch. Does this relate to the infrastructure of language, the gradual intelligibility of sensation, the primary molding of meaning which Julia Kristeva calls “the semiotic”?1
She never saw anything with her bodily eyes, as has been said. But what she saw was so delicate and intellectual that sometimes at the beginning she thought she had imagined it; at other times she couldn’t think such a thing. Nor did she ever hear with her bodily ears—except twice; and these times she didn’t hear what was being said, nor did she know who was speaking.2
I read and reread your words; might not th
at “intellectual delicacy” that pertains to your visions be the very element of your interior castle, body and soul included? With the scalpel of your self-analysis, you probe into the deepest, most intimate region, where metaphysical categories overlap and combine—body and/or soul, matter and/or spirit, space and/or time, subject and/or object…From another perspective, an evolutionary one, you might be auscultating the emergence of thought: as a writer, you stand at the borderline where thought is not yet a thought. It is no more than the delicacy of a wholly intelligent flesh, whose understanding is a function of its smelling-listening-seeing-tasting: each sense a threshold you approach and step across in order to come into contact with the Other, and with others, without being raped, frightened, or hurt. Ravished, yes. “In spite of the halo of light surrounding his form, the youthful Persian god remains obscure to us,” writes Freud, dumbfounded by the incestuous bliss of Mithras-Zarathustra.3
During your ecstatic visions that is the face you wear, Teresa, over the body of an infant prior to its separation from the mother, prior to the prohibition of incest.
Here the psychologist in me discerns the glee of the fabulous infantile satisfaction you preserve intact beneath and throughout the separation that prompts humans to speak and which you acquired, like all law-governed humans, by force of grief and melancholy—only to conquer the independence of existing. You are always reconquering that realm, that paradise, while facing up to the ache of prohibition and abandonment.
And yet your sensual reconquest is not confined to a regression, far from it. It is not before, but after separation and prohibitions that you give yourself leave, accompanied by the Voice, to reconquer those delectable depths (the “interior of the soul,” as opposed to “whimsical imagination”), and it is this belated reconquest, on the other side of frustrations and sufferings, that you so scrupulously observe and name. Reconciled with your tempests and attendant comas, you distinguish these from the “external part of our being” that, being prone to sorrows, agitations and disturbances, remains the domain of the devil. Thus you’re able to separate suffering, the kind we call masochistic and which seems connected to an unacceptable “melancholia,” from that “delightful tempest [that] comes from a region other than those regions of which [the devil of disturbing, contentious desires] is lord.”4
The Voice of His Majesty, issuing from a different region, is no longer received as an imaginary favor, a “fancy [caprice: antojo],” a flattering, trying, or agonizing injunction from the superego. Instead you hear it as unmistakably as a “loud voice is heard” by the ears of the body. No doubt about it: “There’s no basis for thinking it is caused by melancholy, because melancholy does not produce or fabricate its fancies save in the imagination. This favor proceeds from the interior part of the soul.”5
Your enamored state, identified with incest with an Other endowed with the attributes of both parents, profoundly alters your relationship with meaning. Meaning becomes sensible for you, which helps attenuate the cruelty of the prohibitions and the judgment inherent in them. Your relationship to the body is also changed; you take possession of a new body that flourishes in the delicacy of that sensual intelligence made possible, no matter how intermittently, by its incorporation of thought. “A person with the ears of the soul seems to hear those words…so clearly and so in secret.”6 The intelligence of your interpenetration with the Other alleviates the spasms, labors, and agitations of ill-being, and allows you to “enter” into the “tempest” of contacts with the Other, a turbulence that carries you away without obliterating you in psychosis. Your union with the Other does not destroy you; there’s no threat of identity catastrophe. On the contrary, you succeed in meticulously depicting the yearning for nonseparation.
“Sometimes my pulse almost stops.…All my longing then is to die…if anything could give the soul consolation, it would be to speak to someone who had suffered this torment.…So it seems to me that this desire for companionship comes from our own weakness…the desire the body and soul have of not being separated is what makes one beg for help.”7
True enough, that separation can only be consummated in the eye of the storm; I am reminded of the “depressive position” Melanie Klein considered a psychic precondition for the acquisition of language.8 But in your case, Teresa, after that long meditation upon your states of prayer, with which I’m familiar thanks to your accounts, the unbearable separation is redressed by reunion. Confident in the knowledge—or is it faith?—that reconciliation makes up for suffering, the soul feels neither abandoned nor guilty, neither helplessly depressed nor inexorably excited, neither melancholic nor hysterical, even though it has known all of those states. “The soul is purified,” you say, “purged like gold in the crucible.” You’re an alchemist, Teresa, since you can’t be a psychologist. You borrow from the masters of the occult to explicate how, by going through depressiveness with its ascetic temptations, you became worthy of “the enameled gifts” from the Lord. A new “purification” occurs, fulfilled and gratified, a “golden” purgation that preempts the one awaiting sinners in purgatory, with its expected mortifications: “Que en esta pena se purificaba el alma, y se labra o purifica como el oro en el crisol, para poder mejor poner los esmaltes de sus dones, y que se purgaba allí lo que había de estar en purgatorio.”9
The prayer of union finally leads your soul to a “complete transformation…in God,”10 which although it “lasts only a short time” makes you feel “healed.” A therapeutic prayer, then (unlike the one that used to send you into a coma as a novice!) replaces the judgmental, fearsome Voice with a new Voice that offers itself, touching and penetrating while letting the other senses penetrate it.
This new topology of intimacy imbuing your lover’s rapport with the Beloved completely changes the experience of suffering: were you to feel pain, you couldn’t assign to it the negative value of ill-being. This rather undermines the sadomasochistic nosography that I’m pinning on you from the outside! Here, “separation” and “the incest prohibition” are not scotomized; you don’t pitch into psychosis or even perversion, Teresa, my love—I’ll sign you a doctor’s note on that—you only teeter on the edge. Instead, like all the suffering in your realm, separation and prohibition allow themselves to be veiled by a “transparent covering,”11 as you describe in your Dwelling Places—in other words, by your fantasy incarnate, carnal and permissive, as though by a caressing, flimsy veil. As you write it, the pleasure of love in the form of incest with the Son-Father turned Spouse is wiped of guilt by the fable of a “union” you desire so much that you experience it as a physiological reality. Is it a veil, or a penetrable hymen? Nothing licenses me to jump to the conclusion that one or another of your confessors, some intrepid explorer of female desire like your adored Eliseus-Gratian, might have given you the opportunity for congress itself. But we know for a fact that spiteful contemporaries, and you had your share of enemies, did not refrain from hints to that effect.
Given and received, the Voice uttering the words of the Beloved—and therefore also the words of the Bride “transformed” into the Beloved—are freighted with a “supreme authority,” far more powerful than any abstract verbal message. In the new economy of amorous writing, of Teresa’s new body that is constituted by the acts of writing and foundation, there cannot possibly be a barrier between words and things, writing and making, reading and doing work in the world. There are only transitions to and fro through the “veil” (in place of the repression that governs consciousness): “locutions from God effect what they say [speaking and acting: hablando y obrando].”12 It is not surprising that if He speaks-and-acts, as one would expect from a Creator, Teresa “transformed into Him” also writes and acts (i.e., makes foundations), both things together.
Make no mistake, Teresa is not calling upon human beings to do as they say and say as they do. Her experience is not a morality. Indwelt by a speech reconciled with her desires, she pushes incarnation as far as erasing the last borders between speaking and being,
meaning that she only speaks by being and only is by speaking; there is no barrier, just a “veil.” Manic agitation and its symmetrical other face, the melancholic-masochistic guilt generated by forbidden desire, which racked her before, are no longer a threat. Voices and words alongside acts of foundation become, in this great alchemical flask, of “great repose” and “engraved on our memory.”13
A great repose engraved in memory?
This experience of incorporation, authorizing the embodied fantasy of incest over and above the incest taboo, will require a new “imaginary vision” if you are to convey it to your sisters and confessors—and to us, your readers in the third millennium. It will be the story of a hidden treasure, the casket enclosing a secret jewel.
The alchemical metaphors and the metamorphoses of this radical experience travel from invisibility to light, from imprint to brilliance, from the casket of empty space to the density of the diamond, from blinding sunlight to the veil of fine linen or the transparency of the gem, from impenetrable stone to infused light. None of these extremes immobilize or alarm her, for they have eased into thresholds, landings, membranes, in the journey of the I toward the Other, of the body toward the soul, in an indefatigable to-and-fro.
The recasting of identities and the suspension of categories was already intrinsic to the Christian dogma of the Incarnation, in which God became a man. But you pushed this logic further, Teresa, to extremes that must have shocked many a theologian. What a heretical notion, this access to an inaccessible “jewel” in a “reliquary” whose keys are in the Beloved’s keeping, but which you, a simple nun, are capable of appropriating! As if you could house the very sun inside yourself, making your conjoined body and soul into a “case” so thoroughly penetrated by the scorching star that nothing separates them any more from Him, beyond a transparent veil. And this diamond, the Other within, is the most precious thing you have—or better said, the most precious thing you are. To have or to be: to have is not enough for you, you must be the gem. Therein resides the effrontery, the heresy, the paranoia (as Jérôme Tristan insists, and I let him, I share, I murmur: To each his alchemy).
Teresa, My Love Page 53