Teresa, My Love

by Julia Kristeva

  JOHN OF THE CROSS’S VOICE. “O living flame of love.”

  (We hear Teresa laughing.)

  Sylvia Leclercq sees the shadow of Bossuet approach against the quivering, dark red firelight.68 The silhouette of the bishop of Meaux advances, carrying the Funeral Orations in one hand and the Instructions upon States of Prayer in the other.

  BOSSUET. “It is an odd weakness of mankind, that while death surrounds us in its myriad forms, it is never present to our minds.” But since “we must only be lofty where St. Teresa is concerned,” bear in mind that Heaven above “has a plan to repair the house he has given us. When he destroys it and casts it down in order to make it anew, we must move out. Yet he himself offers us his palace, and within it, gives us rooms.” “And yet it was never so for this creature, Teresa, who dwelt on earth as though she were already in Heaven.”69

  SYLVIA LECLERCQ, occupying La Madre’s shadowy place stage right, speaking in a drained voice. Here’s a surprise Fénelon will appreciate, not to mention Madame de Guyon.…70 I might have known the Eagle of Meaux would be here; he was never very keen on intimate, Quietist, or amalgamated-type scenes, but he made an exception for Teresa. Sylvia Leclercq “in the footsteps of Bossuet,” who’d have thought it? Ah, he’s no longer the bos suetus aratro, the “ox accustomed to the plough” of the Jesuit school.…The old theologian has aged as well, he’s got excema and gallstones and who knows what else.…But he will still go down fighting, weapons in hand, Saint-Simon tells us, and might have added: “like Teresa.”

  BOSSUET, in a metallic, slightly breathless voice. “Our society is in heaven above,” nostra autem conversatio in coelis est.…And the hope of which the world speaks is but an agreeable illusion, somnium vigilantium.…If I don’t dare to affirm it, who will? I am a Cartesian, but not to the last ditch. Primo: Hope equals the “sleep of vigilance,” of course, except.…Except when hope comes from the Lord. In that circumstance its words are assured, and consequently the hope in Him is likewise assured, ergo it is certain.…Secondo: Contra spem in spem.…This is the anchor of our souls, something the true Christian does not possess, but is looking for. (Puts down the two tomes he was carrying and takes the Panegyrics proffered by Leclercq, riffles through while holding forth in a firm, steady voice.) And this “infinite munificence” was lavished on Teresa in life, while she yet inhabited her mortal coil.…Tertio: Such is indeed the grand spectacle to which the Church invites us.…

  SYLVIA LECLERCQ. Nicely put, “munificence” and “grand spectacle” are appropriate. (Hand over mouth, she has finally been awed by the infallible rhetorician).

  BOSSUET. “St. Teresa lives among angels, convinced that she is with her Spouse,” and thus fulfillment succeeds to yearning.…“A divine sickness,” undoubtedly, one whose power increases day by day? But there remains the “link, gentlemen, which is charity.…It elevates Teresa above the throng.…She speeds toward it, driven by ardent, impetuous desires…which prove unequal to severing the bonds of mortal flesh, against which she now declares a holy war.…For all true Christians should feel like travelers on a journey.” They must feel, yes, feel.…

  SYLVIA LECLERCQ, hand over mouth again, disconcerted by her sudden admiration for the bishop. That’s right, go on.…

  BOSSUET, imperturbably. Qui non gemit peregrinus, non gaudebit civis.…Saint Augustine had some splendid turns of phrase, madam. “He who does not lament the journey will not rejoice on reaching the city.” And Saint Teresa becomes “ever freer, more disengaged from perpetual agitation.” “The harder she finds it to cast off her body, the more detached from that body she becomes.”

  SYLVIA LECLERCQ, admiringly. Is that in relation to John of the Cross? How unexpected, from you! Might you be an unjustly neglected author?

  BOSSUET, ignoring the compliment, enthused by his panegyric. One can scarcely credit the way she built her monasteries, that girl.…

  SYLVIA LECLERCQ, thoughtfully, almost inaudibly, hugging the Orations and the Instructions. Bossuet the Academician turns out to be a pragmatist with his own brand of mysticism, quite unlike his image. But he couldn’t have been any less, if he was to prevent a schism with Rome. Courted by the dauphin, the king, society ladies like Maintenon, Montespan, Sévigné; patron of men like La Bruyère, associating with the likes of Pascal, Molière, La Rochefoucauld, Leibniz.…Yet he still remembers his conversation with our Teresa. “That girl,” he calls her. Their conversation is in Heaven above, apparently, albeit that Heaven exists down here on earth, according to La Madre? Intermittently, but still. A weird space it is, Monseigneur. Go take a look.…(She tries to detain the Eagle of Meaux but he returns the Panegyrics to her and vanishes, holding a Cross, into the darkness stealing across the stage.)

  ACT 3, SCENE 3

  The voices of TERESA and SYLVIA and the virtual characters of LEIBNIZ71 and SPINOZA.72

  The stage is empty. A huge diamond stands in place of La Madre’s body, shot through with rays of light and cascading waters that bathe the facets of cut stone and also circulate inside it. The fire that consumed Teresa’s letters to John of the Cross has left its red-gold color in the air. From time to time three shadows move through the permeable walls of the liquid jewel; one resembles the Teresa of the portrait attributed to Velázquez, another is Leibniz, and the third, Spinoza. There is also a mathematical formula, to wit:

  We hear a high-pitched choir of Carmelites singing the Veni Creator, as well as the voice of Sylvia Leclercq and La Madre’s mature tones; her body has been removed. This castle without walls stands in for it. The portrait of Teresa the writer is animated, miming the stage directions and accompanying the saint’s voice.

  TERESA’S VOICE. “A great gush of water could not reach us if it didn’t have a source somewhere; it is understood clearly that there is Someone in the interior depths who shoots these arrows and gives life to this life, and that there is a Sun in the interior of the soul from which a brilliant light proceeds and is sent to the faculties. The soul…does not move from that center nor is its peace lost.”73 It’s true, the center exists and is at peace, and that’s why I can be so fluid…and vagabond, if I wish it.…(Subtle smile.) Who am I? “You who seeks yourself in Me,” or “Me who seeks myself in You?” Who speaks? Is Teresa I, You, or She? “We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment.”74 (Eyes glance right, left, close.) “These interior matters are so obscure for our minds.…Whoever reads this must have patience, for I have to have it in order to write about what I don’t know. Indeed, sometimes I take up the paper like a simpleton, for I don’t know what to say.”75 (Wrinkles nose.)

  TERESA’S VOICE, coming from the immense diamond revolving on the stage. My castle is not an accumulation of images, it’s an imaginary discourse: ask Michel de Certeau if you don’t believe me! I am indeterminate, fluid, permeable, radiating light from my center: ask Mercedes Allendesalazar.…“I want to make one or more comparisons for you.”76 “Turn your eyes toward the center, which is the room or royal chamber where the King stays, and think of how a palmetto has many leaves surrounding and covering the tasty part that can be eaten.…The sun that is in this royal chamber shines in all parts. It is very important for any soul that practices prayer, whether little or much, not to hold itself back and stay in one corner. Let it walk through these dwelling places which are up above, down below, and to the sides, since God has given it such great dignity. Don’t force it to stay a long time in one room alone. Oh, but if it is in the room of self-knowledge!77 (Momentarily short of breath, coughing.) “God help me with what I have undertaken!…Let’s consider…two founts with two water troughs.…I am so fond of this element.…With one the water comes from far away through many aqueducts…with the other the source of the water is right there.…The water coming from the aqueducts is comparable, in my opinion, to the consolations drawn from meditation…thoughts…tiring the intellect.…With this other fount, the water comes from its
own source which is God…with the greatest peace and quiet and sweetness in the very interior part of ourselves.…This water overflows through all the dwelling places and faculties until reaching the body. That is why I said that it begins in God and ends in ourselves.…The whole exterior man enjoys this spiritual delight and sweetness.”78

  (After trying in vain to help her drink, Teresita refreshes Teresa’s face with a moist cloth.)

  SYLVIA LECLERCQ’S VOICE. “Transumanar,” why, she talks like Dante:

  “To represent transhumanise in words

  Impossible were; the example, then, suffice

  Him for whom Grace the experience reserves.”79

  TERESA’S VOICE. “The King is in His palace,” just as the soul is. The King, the soul, it-you-I? It’s all the same. Interchangeable, permutable, reversible. “In those other dwelling places there is much tumult and there are many poisonous creatures and the noise is heard”—all this being the drives, as Dr. Freud will tell us. And yet “no one enters that center dwelling place and makes the soul leave.…The passions are now conquered.” This is sublimation. “Our entire body may ache; but if the head is sound, the head will not ache just because the body aches.”80 The mind and the word “must have amounted to much more than is apparent from [their] sound.”81 (Turns head leftward, with calm face.) It is not an imaginative vision, even if the soul, unable to express it in words, perceives it here by means of sight. And yet the sight is neither with the eyes of the body nor with those of the soul.…The three Persons of the Trinity are perceived in an intellectual, yes, intellectual vision, like a certainty of truth in the midst of fiery brightness, like a magnificent splendor coming straight to the mind.82 I am a point inhabited by infinity, the infinite contracted into a dot, a dot dilated to infinity. Infinitesimal Teresa: a curious phenomenon, don’t you think? (She opens her eyes again, unseeing eyes, as when she bent them on the portrait of Velázquez. La Madre is listening to herself.)

  (Silence.)

  LEIBNIZ, in the voice of an anonymous man. “To me, infinities are not totalities and infinitely small values are not magnitudes. My metaphysics banishes them. I regard infinitesimal quantities as useful unities.” “My fundamental meditations turn on two things, namely, on unity and on infinity.” “Each monad is a living mirror, or a mirror endowed with an internal action, and that it represents the universe according to its point of view and is regulated as completely as is the universe itself.” “Everything is taken account of, even idle words…the just will be like suns…neither our senses nor our mind has ever tasted anything approaching the happiness that God prepares for those who love him.” “Imaginary numbers have the following admirable property, that in calculus they enclose nothing absurd or contradictory and yet by the nature of things they cannot be represented seu in concretis.”83 The same goes for the infinitesimal: it is a fiction, and not a true difference. God is “the realm of possible realities.”

  SYLVIA LECLERCQ’S VOICE. “The infinity-point obeys the laws of transition and continuity: nothing is equivalent to anything else, and apparent coincidences really conceal an infinitely small distance. Thus the infinity-point does not form a structure but instead posits functions and relationships that proceed by approximation. A difference, never to be made good, persists between the number marked π and the set of terms able to express it:

  The unit has been dislocated. The sign-number, a unifying mirror, shatters, and notation resumes beyond its scope. The resulting differential, equivalent to the sixteenth-century nominalists’ syncategorical (in fieri) infinite smallness, is not a unity that can be added to other unities to form a whole, but rather the slippage of infinity itself within the closed enunciation.”84

  LEIBNIZ, in the voice of an anonymous man. “Teresa of Avila had this fine thought, that the soul ought to conceive things as if there were only God and itself in the world.” How this limpid, fecund insight gives us to understand immortality! “This thought gives rise to an idea which is significant even in philosophy, and I have made good use of it in one of my hypotheses.”85

  TERESA’S VOICE. Might I be a soul, then, a woman co-present ad infinitum? Might I be an ancestor of infinitesimal calculus?86 Little me?

  SPINOZA, in the voice of the anonymous man. “God loves himself with an infinite intellectual love.”87

  TERESA’S VOICE. God loves Himself? Himself, myself, yourself? I are the Trinity. I was writing the sensual mathematics of sacred humanity!

  SYLVIA LECLERCQ’S VOICE. “Paradise and its plenitude of grace, the Trinity in person, are unveiled in the Intellection of love. The more I love, the more I understand. The more I understand, the more pleasure I feel, and the more I love.” Not my words, but those of Philippe Sollers in his introduction to Dante’s Paradiso.88

  TERESA’S VOICE. “The image may be very helpful—to you especially—for since we women have no learning, all of this imagining is necessary that we may understand that within us lies something incomparably more precious than what we see outside ourselves.” (Coughs, trickle of blood.) You say women are hollow inside? You have no inkling of what a Guest we harbor!89 You smile, I see: so who might this Guest be? The Father? The phallus? Animal lust? Hysterical excitability? All of the above, and of necessity sublime? Call it what you please, call it desire for the Other if you want to. Personally I’ll stick with Guest, for the moment.…“Nor is that happiness and delight experienced, as are earthly consolations, in the heart. I mean there is no similarity at the beginning, for afterward the delight fills everything; this water overflows through all the dwelling places and faculties until reaching the body. That is why I said it begins in God and ends in ourselves.”90 Clear as day, is it not? Are you with me, my Seneca? (No reply.)

  TERESA’S VOICE, meditatively. Some minds are orderly, and some are “so scattered they are like wild horses no one can stop.” I’m thinking of myself, of course…you guessed it.…Always restless and on the go…“and perhaps they were no more than two steps from the fount of living water, of which the Savior said to the Samaritan woman, ‘whoever drinks of it will never thirst.’ How right and true!”91 (Voice weakening, trembling of the arms, legs, head.) Between ourselves, I prefer Saint Augustine above other spiritual masters because he was once a sinner,92 a runaway horse. O rushing storm, euphoric tempest that “comes from regions other than those of which [the devil] can be lord”!93 And how can we be sure? Why, because the soul derives benefits from it, by confronting the ringing Voice of His Majesty, or the superego if you prefer, the ideal Father who imparts the Law—that of both Testaments at once, needless to say. Poor butterfly-soul, “that went about so apprehensive that everything frightened it and made it fly.…The Lord has now fortified, enlarged, and made the soul capable.”94 (Long silence. The crimson light turns violet.) The soul does not leave the wondrous company of His Majesty and never ventures out of its interior mansion, as a consequence of which it is somehow divided, like Martha and Mary Magdalene: perpetual calm and repose on the one hand, problems and worries on the other. (Exhales.) Although the degree of clarity is not the same, because the vision of the Divine Presence is rarely as vivid as it is on the occasion of its first manifestation, when God elects to grant His gift, “quiere Dios hacerle este regalo.”95 (Breathing faster.) The light has changed color, it will accompany me to the very end of this final road. Its variations still illuminate, even today, the anguish I felt when I discovered that the movement of thought, or more precisely the imagination, was not the same thing as understanding.

  (Pause. Bright lights diffracting the sparkle of the diamond.)

  TERESA’S VOICE, doubtful, quizzical. The understanding is one of the soul’s faculties, and is apt to be flighty. Flighty, yes, that’s the word, like a tortolito.…The understanding is like an inexperienced novice, or a smitten turtledove; it takes flight in so abstract a fashion that nothing embodies it. The imagination, for its part, cannot be confused with it, but takes from it the cue to soar up; since God alone can hold it fast, o
ne is misled into thinking it detached from the body. “I have seen…that the faculties of my soul were occupied and recollected in God while my mind on the other hand was distracted. This distraction puzzled me.…The pain is felt when suspension does not accompany the prayer.…But it would be very bad if I were to abandon everything on account of this obstacle. And so it isn’t good for us to be disturbed by our thoughts, nor should we be concerned.…Let us be patient and endure them for the love of God since we are likewise subject to eating and sleeping without being able to avoid it, which is quite a trial.”96 (Touches her arms, breast, stomach, then relaxes, exhausted.) Attached or detached? To the flesh or to the Lord? To each of them alternately and together? I love the imagination when it takes flight from the body, with the body, when it dives deep into our entrails and carries them away with it. I can feel it splitting from the senses, becoming purified in the Lord. And I prefer it to that other flighty thought, unsupported and disembodied—abstract thought. “Porque, como el entendimiento es una de las potencias del alma, hacíaseme recia cosa estar tan tortolito a veces, y lo ordinario vuela el pensamiento de presto, que sólo Dios puede atarle, cuando nos ata a Sí de manera que parece estamos en alguna manera desatados de este cuerpo. Yo veía, a mi parecer, las potencias del alma empleadas en Dios y estar recogidas con Él, y por otra parte el pensamiento alborotado: traíame tonta.”97

  (Exhalation, accelerated heartbeat, repose.)

  TERESA’S VOICE, getting feebler, but firm, without trembling. Gratian maintains it’s a typical female fallacy to confuse imagination with the movement of thought. Ribera, by contrast, lets me develop my intuition about the existence of an imagination in which thought is fulfilled ad infinitum. One day Sylvia Leclercq will write that I am at the heart of the mystery of a sublimation that “journeys itself” between the instincts and the senses. But I say: a castle compartmented by transparent membranes, translucent walls, between the teeming of poisonous vermin below and the flashing of the central jewel. Between what seems to be me, and the God inside me. (Unseeing eyes, as in the Velázquez.) Ah, Sisters, only imagination can bring us close to that desire for the Other within, while at the same time releasing us from that hot brazier. I am leaving you now, so you’ll just have to read me. One final word before I depart. You mustn’t be afraid to play, to play with that thought in motion. Our worries and our fears don’t come from movement, but from a want of light. Inside us a whole world exists, and just as it’s not in our power to halt the movements of the heavens, swirling at prodigious speeds, neither can we stop our racing minds.98