Teresa is not after a fortified, defensive retreat but a narcissistic, ideal, sublime place of reassurance where you are invited to dissolve into perfume, to intoxicate yourself, but gently and in peace. That’s right, perfume, a solid distilled, a sublimation, in other words: she says so explicitly, or almost, I’m coming to that.
(Talking fast.) The alchemy she develops in her inimitable style begins with the urge to tell. Nothing new in that, Confession relies on the same thing, as do plenty of spiritual exercises; the young Thomas Aquinas hazarded the notion that theology per se was basically a narrativus signorum, a narrating of signs.1 But Teresa does more than follow their lead: she comes up with fresh words to unfold the temporal phases of her amorous adventure with the Other into space, across spaces. Her baroque spirit whispered to her that only the “image,” itself generated by talking and “communication” between lovers, can provoke a “narrative.”
Listen. (Normal voice, underlining the emphases.)
“What you can do as a help in this matter is try to carry about an image or painting of this Lord that is to your liking, not so as to carry it about on your heart and never look at it but so as to speak often with Him; for He will inspire you with what to say. Since you speak with other persons, why must words fail you when you speak with God? Don’t believe they will; at least I will not believe they will if you acquire the habit. Otherwise, the failure to communicate with a person causes both estrangement [porque si no, el no tratar con una persona cause extrañeza] and a failure to know how to speak with him. For it seems then that we do not know him, even if he may be a relative; family ties and friendship are lost through a lack of communication.”2
SYLVIA LECLERCQ. Begin, then, by imagining the image of the person you love, and that will encourage you to speak with them, and thence to communicate with the good Being and ultimately partake of Him, logically and inevitably.
The images involved are first of all representations, fantasies that are not always present to the eye, but given to thought, which is visual, and to all the senses. From this derives an apology of mental imagery, with its power to contain the lover’s need to be loved and acknowledged as lovable. Here is the cornerstone of belief. We are like blind people in the presence of an interlocutor: “They understand and believe this, but they do not see the other [entiende y cree que está allí, mas no la ve].”3 They sense the presence: I sense, therefore I am. Rather than debating with the Lutherans, what Teresa is doing is rehabilitating a therapy of the imagination, calling it to the rescue of blind reassurance. For she knows from experience that the imaginary is vital to the survival of a subject who only exists insofar as she or he is in love. I am capable of imagining the amorous bond, of communicating with it and about it; I can create/recreate it by my powers of representation; by constantly expressing it in signs, or signifying it, I come to possess it; and therefore I believe in it—more and more. (Glances at the possible Velázquez portrait.) Can I say that I am? There are many ways one may be. My being has been indefinitely transferred into the Other.
Listen again. (Normal voice, underlining the emphases.)
“I could only think about Jesus Christ as He was as man, but never in such a way that I could picture Him within myself no matter how much I read about His beauty or how many images I saw of Him.…I was like those who are blind or in darkness…they know with certainty that the other is there (I mean that they understand and believe this, but they do not see the other); such was the case with me when I thought of our Lord. This was the reason I liked images so much. Unfortunate are those who through their own fault lose this great good. It indeed appears they do not love the Lord, for if they loved Him they would rejoice greatly to see a portrait of Him, just as here on earth it really gives joy to see the one whom you deeply love.”4
Finally the image becomes interiorized, as wordless, nonvisual sensations. Neither “belief” nor “reasoning,” this new way of “understanding” is frightening, because it imposes the lover’s companionship very very deep inside (en lo muy muy interior), in the manner of an inevitable, indelible truth.5
At this stage of the spatialization of subjective time, according to Teresa, the “knowledge” identical to “belief” is experienced as a “favor.” However, in a crowning twist of genius, the nun grasped that these states of reassurance by osmosis with the Ideal are imaginary “locutions” (hablas), and therefore “illusions” (antojos).6 The explorer nevertheless recommends us to entertain these fantastic exchanges in order to combat the devil, who is not, for Teresa, an absolute evil so much as resistance itself, opposed to imaginative experience. The tournament the writer has described creates the amorous union at the same time as it creates the interior space—the space that will be crossed repeatedly, without end.
The great enemy, then (smile of complicity) is nothing other than the deficiency of imagination and desire: the lack of figurable representations that makes us settle for harmful, unhealthy drives. Here is a devil whose power Teresa knows too well—son semblable, son frère, perhaps.* [*A reference to the famous address to the reader in Les Feurs du Mal: “Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!”—Trans.] It tips one into comitial excitability, undermining the containing capacity of thoughts and images. It is futile to resist these imaginary fissures, these feeble, fearful, terrifying fantasies. My message is that it is possible to transform them: plunge yourself into the abundant figurations of my lovers’ spaces, read how by amassing them I come into possession of the Other in me, how I change and grow. For is it not foolishness (desatino) to believe we could ever enter Heaven without entering into ourselves first?7
(Pause.)
SYLVIA LECLERCQ, puffs, and resumes at speed. And though the building thus erected constitutes a shelter, it is steeped in the inconstancy of the baroque: its safety is but a fleeting spark, “centella de seguridad.”8 A bolt of lightning, a whirlwind, interior rapids: Teresa’s writing, reflective and caressing, surges along nonetheless with the speed of Love in Angelus Silesius: “Love is the quickest thing and of itself can fly / To topmost Heaven in but the twinkling of an eye.”9
Saint Teresa of Avila in Glory. Tapestry woven by the first Carmelites in Avignon (twelfth century). © Fine Arts Museum, Budapest.
And just as opposites coexist, when they are not actually interchangeable, in the works of Rubens, Guarino Guarini, Andrea Pozzo, or Tiepolo, so God and the Devil rub shoulders in the tornado traced by La Madre’s pen: why do we cry “‘The devil! The devil!’ when we can say ‘God! God!’and make the devil tremble,” she writes defiantly, and earlier, “His Majesty favor me so that I may understand,…and a fig for all the devils [una higa para todos los demonios].”10 Teresa has no compunction about firing obscene insults at the paternal superego of her more disapproving confessors! Against them, her love upholds her legitimate right, as the Lord’s Bride, identified with His Royal Majesty, not to fear anything or anyone: “I fear those who have such great fear of the devil more than I fear the devil himself, for he can’t do anything to me. Whereas these others, especially if they are confessors, cause severe disturbance: I have undergone some years of such great trial that I am amazed now at how I was able to suffer it. Blessed be the Lord who has so truly helped me!”11 (Breathes out. Stares at the diamond.)
The Apotheosis of Saint Teresa (1722). Fresco by Giambattista Tiepolo (1696–1770).
Church of the Scalzi, Venice, Italy/De Agostini Picture Library/F. Ferruzzi/ Bridgeman Art Library.
Step by step the imagery of resistance to the erotic brazier gives way before the profusion of another imagery, orchestrating its success. The amorous subject triumphs over the soul unable to represent to itself the trials joining the lover to her Beloved; the castle-building narrative excludes from its halls disgraced souls who stray from the enchanted imaginary, like the prodigal son who once thought he could leave his father’s house and live off the husks of swine. A soul in love and proud of it, Teresa stakes out a double space (anxious voice): “outsid
e this castle,” an alien exteriority inhabited by the kind of person who eats pig-swill, is contrasted with one’s “own house,” which has everything a person could need, and “especially, has a guest who will make him lord over all goods.”12
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Giuseppe Bazzani, oil on canvas (1745–1750). © Fine Arts Museum, Budapest.
Could the imprecision of the phrase manjar de puercos (pig feed) suggest that people who are incapable of inhabiting themselves and fully enjoying the riches of the imagination are eaters of pork? A diet that offends Jews and Marranos, not to say…the hidden interiority of my Teresa, always in search of some secret faith, some protected clandestinity. Like the faith of her ancestors, perhaps? Of course the prodigal son was uncritically welcomed back by his adoring father, and Teresa herself addressed her experience en lo muy muy interior to everyone, for universal dissemination.
(Silence. In the background we hear the voice of Dr. Thomas Leclercq, softly humming the “Deposuit.”)
SYLVIA LECLERCQ, fast, reading and underlining. Clearly, this publicity for an amorous imagination that converts suffering into a gemstone and crystallizes masochism into self-overcoming, without letting itself be affected by the exaltation it rests upon, has nothing in common with the Freudian scalpel. Because the interpretation of transference/countertransference proceeds by means of subtraction, whereas Teresa amplifies in order to magnify; only thus can she render secure the inner being of the loved lover. Freud operates per via di levare, he writes, like a sculptor using the chisel of free association to chip away the patient’s defenses and uncover the infantile impasses of the capacity for loving and thinking. In aid of this dismantling he is armed with the discovery of the unconscious, based on the Oedipus: killing of the Father and identification with his ideality and power, incestuous desire for the Mother, the accidents of which exhort from our psychic bisexuality the emergence of speaking-thinking-loving beings.
Teresa, for her part, proceeds like the painter of a baroque cupola: applying layer upon layer, per via di porre, adding twist upon high-wire twist to her tale—inviting her sisters and readers to dreams and hallucinations of amorous success, a success warranted by the grace of the Trinity and the indisputable devotion of Mary and Joseph, the parental couple.13 Pointing out all the while what a fiction it was, a necessary game of infinite communication; but since the experience creates a saving neo-reality, it is the Truth. What’s more, this amorous intoxication does not display as a liberty taken with the transcendence underwritten by the paternal function and mellowed by the Marian cult, not at all! It merely, if I can put it that way, advances, with extravagant ease, through the fundaments of Christian ethics.
(Silence. Head in hands.)
SYLVIA LECLERCQ, enunciating slowly, underlining. To sum up, if Teresa’s lucidity unwraps the stages and components of amorous passion…she does not aim to be delivered from it, as promised by the adventure of analysis; on the contrary, she wants to enjoy it the more, and so demonstrate the ineluctable logic of the biblical and evangelical premise. While Freud questions and dismantles the patient’s defenses in order to leave the subject free to reconstruct his amorous and rational bonds, Teresa, on the contrary—in her infinite traversal of the Oedipus complex—never suspects that God is a question. For the Beloved is a strange Archimedes’ lever that sends one precisely inside oneself, where the Other dwells. It enables one to let go of the bristling array of defenses and fears, and thus to discover, along with the enigmas of love, well-being itself, the good and supreme Being. She would agree with Leibniz that “since we are beings, being is innate in us”;14 she went on to prove it by erecting the inner dwelling places of a being that only is if he or she is in love. While beating the Lord at chess, it doesn’t occur to Teresa for one second that the game could be possible without His august and loving Fatherhood; after all, the player’s desire reaches its acme in the avowal that she longs to have a child from Him, to become the Mother of God, Sovereign in her own right. Divine. (Long silence.) Reading her, listening to her, it seems the Other in me is not infernal, like the unconscious. It is forcibly uncertain, or prey to the devil. But it is definitively lovable if I can find it in me to listen to it, articulate it, and write it, as a lover/loved.
And yet, after this long trek in Teresa’s company, I maintain (measured, poised, confident voice, occasionally emphatic) that Freud, while embarking on a completely different course, could not be ignorant of the advantages of the interior dwelling places discovered by La Madre. What “substance” was the dauntless Viennese sculptor chiseling into, if not that enigmatic transference/countertransference that he never really theorized, leaving that task to the female psychoanalysts who were the first disciples of Melanie Klein? Alert to the double Judeo-Christian alliance concealed at the heart of the Spanish sixteenth century,15 Teresa amplified in her own way the diabolical resistances we each oppose to the flourishing of our amorous representations, themselves founded on a no less amplified need to believe, which succeeds to the oceanic dependence on the maternal container and the primal identification with the Father of personal prehistory.16
As a writer she shines a light on these fundamental logics, while not averse to pinpointing the abuse or distortion of them by those polar opposites to the Lord (to the ideal of the Self) constituted by the twin tyrants of the sex drive and the moralizing superego. But the holy woman would never question the Other’s love and her love for the Other: how could she conceive of a viable way of being if not in love with the ideal Father?
(Sylvia falls silent. We hear Dr. Leclercq’s muffled voice tackling the complex notation of “Exaltavit humiles.”)
SYLVIA LECLERCQ. In my view—but keep this to yourself (here her voice becomes intimate, hushed, singular)—our dear, great Sigmund was not far from thinking, though he stopped short of formulating it, the same as what Teresa celebrated in all her writings. What did he lay onto the couch, if it wasn’t love? Love, again, is what’s transferred in the attention we pay to our patients’ words, drives, and affects. Freud’s philosophy was explicitly based on the Enlightenment, his interpretative method was without doubt Kabbalistically and Talmudically Jewish, but his unconscious was baroque. (Sidelong glance at the diamond.) Baroque—as in inconstant, mobile, playful, reinvented on the go—is the word for the amorous principle upon which he founded psychoanalysis, and over which he lingered in his scrutiny of the history of myths, religions, arts and letters; the principle Teresa crosses back and forth, with cheerful faith, never underestimating the demons of excitation unto death. Teresa reigns as the high priestess of the continent of idealization that inaugurates the transference that precedes the cure, into which the psychoanalyst will hack with the blows of his chisel, ice ax, hammer, or pen.…
(She closes her notebook, rises from the chair, walks toward the door—then turns back and sits down again, picking up the pen in a mood of contented, tranquil solitude.)
Can I convince you that by remitting the truth of the amorous bond, and by extension of the transferential bond, to an unconscious that is equally in love and yet infantile, no analytical interpretation can expel this “delusion” of love from the field of that (interminable) analysis? Not only does the constant of the loving bond persist under the guise of some “future of delusion,” notably religious delusion, which Freud regards as regrettable yet insurmountable; the permanence of the Teresian problematic of love manifests itself even at the termination of the cure, which, for all its dissipation of illusions, merely leads to the creation of…new and no less amorous bonds. These new transferences, better apprised of the impasses of the subject’s former traumas and hatefatuations, embark all over again—at best more soberly, but never desisting—upon the quest for jouissance in the intimacy, forever to be reconquered, of an interior castle forever to be rebuilt, by the latest self with its latest set of narratives.
SYLVIA LECLERCQ, in a calm voice, eyes drawn to the divan. In order to remain psychically alive, or alive tout court, I can’t do
other than try to re-inhabit my inner dwelling places—with someone new this time—while realizing, courtesy of my analysis, that it will once more be in vain, or almost. But as the baroque poet said, “Everything is mutable in this world. We must snatch love as we can.”17 (Broad smile.)
Teresa, already a potential saint when on her deathbed, has not quite reached this point. Her brand of baroque differs from that of artists who solemnly assert, in the face of the One, the power of a nonessential, theatrical, “performing” humanity. The baroque illusion—triumph of the as-if, celebration of the inconstancy of objective reality (the very stage sets are to be cast into the flames, like Don Juan)—assumes an extravagant superiority nonetheless, negating every value and form of otherness. The baroque artist lays no claim to inner authenticity; he is praised for shape-shifting alone, for his dexterity with whirling masquerades and the opulent play of simulacra. (Amused glance at the divan.)
None of this with Teresa; La Madre was never content to approach delusion as an illusion. Being a mystic, she was afraid the crumbling of fantasy would reduce her to the condition of a worm in the nonspace of Hell; so she distilled the imaginary into the joy of love and a life founded on love, like an alembic distills spirits. (Exhales, looks at Teresa’s diamond.)
Like me, and after much weeping, La Madre no longer weeps as the end draws near. Now her tears pour forth of themselves, with abandon, with the certainty of happiness. The fruits of a once terrified imagination (before it tamed the plenitude of love), tears remain, to her valedictory eyes, illusions, deceits, engaños. They are the devil’s work. And if God Himself sometimes has a hand in them, for our gratification, we shouldn’t indulge all the same.
Hear what she says (in a normal voice, underlining): “I mark danger everywhere and in something as good as tears I think there can be deception; you are wondering if I may be the one who is deceived. And it could be that I am. But believe me, I do not speak without having seen that these false tears can be experienced by some persons; although not by me, for I am not at all tender. Rather, I have a heart so hard that sometimes I am distressed; although when the inner fire is intense the heart, however hard, distills like an alembic.…Let the tears come when God sends them and without any effort on our part to induce them. These tears from God will irrigate this dry earth, and they are a great help in producing fruit. The less attention we pay to them, the more there are.…”18
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