Teresa, My Love

by Julia Kristeva

  The comparison with water practically forces itself on Teresa, not without arousing her misgivings:

  I shall have to make use of some comparison, although I should like to excuse myself from this since I am a woman and write simply what they ordered me to write. But these spiritual matters for anyone who like myself has not gone through studies are so difficult to explain. I shall have to find some mode of explaining myself, and it may be less often that I hit upon a good comparison.…

  Beginners must realize that in order to give delight to the Lord they are starting to cultivate a garden on very barren soil, full of abominable weeds. His Majesty pulls up the weeds and plants good seed. Now let us keep in mind that all of this is already done by the time a soul is determined to practice prayer and has begun to make use of it. And with the help of God we must strive like good gardeners to get these plants to grow and take pains to water them so that they don’t wither but come to bud and flower and give forth a most pleasant fragrance to provide refreshment for this Lord of ours. Then He will often come to take delight [deleitar] in this garden and find His joy [holgarse] among these virtues.9

  Is she embarrassed by the sensuality of this watering, which might seem to overstep a strictly spiritual contact? She disowns the image: “It seems now to me that I read or heard of this comparison—though since I have a bad memory, I don’t know where or for what reason it was used.” She goes on to distinguish the four degrees of prayer by comparing them to the “four waters” that may irrigate a garden:

  It seems to me the garden can be watered in four ways. You may draw water from a well (which is for us a lot of work). Or you may get it by means of a water wheel and aqueducts in such a way that it is obtained by turning the crank of the water wheel. (I have drawn it this way sometimes—the method involves less work than the other, and you get more water.) Or it may flow from a river or stream. (The garden is watered much better by this means because the ground is more fully soaked, and there is no need to water so frequently—and much less work for the gardener.) Or the water may be provided by a great deal of rain. For the Lord waters the garden without any work on our part—and this way is incomparably better than all the others mentioned.10

  RHETORICAL FIGURES OR WORD-THINGS?

  Always ready to laugh at herself, Teresa pretended not to know the first thing about rhetoric, when in fact she was highly proficient in this art. As Dominique de Courcelles has shown, she is highly likely to have read Miguel de Salinas’s Retórica en lengua castellana (1541), as well as the Libro de la abundancia de las palabras.11

  Sixteenth-century Europe was richly endowed with courtly literature. Beatriz de Ahumada, Teresa’s mother—like Ignatius Loyola—was a great fan of Amadis of Gaul and its sequel Esplandian. She passed down this taste to her daughter, despite the reservations of her husband Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, who, as befits a second-generation converted Jew, made it a badge of honor to prefer Seneca, Boetius, and spiritually edifying “good books” such as hagiographies. Meanwhile the popular surge of vernacular literature was spawning, even then, a science devoted to studying its allure: the various “discourses” came under intense scrutiny in the light of the rediscovery of Greco-Roman grammar and rhetoric, which scholars rapidly adapted to the new profane registers. Sifting the novels everyone was talking about through the screen of his erudition, Salinas stressed the importance of comparison for their narrative structure. “The third manner of amplifying a story is comparison: whether by similarity or inversion, it permits all circumstances to be taken into account.” Inventio, the author insists, is built of images; and “do not the Latins use imago to denote both comparison and parable without distinction?”

  There is every reason to suppose, then, that Teresa was familiar with Salinas’s works. So what prevented her from citing her source? Was it, as she claimed, her “bad memory”? Or is the water she evoked not really a rhetorical figure like comparison or metaphor? In that case, what is it?

  Let us go back to the account of the water that comes between the lover and the Beloved.

  Water is, for the writer, the soul’s link to the divine: the amorous link that puts them into contact. Springing from outside or inside, active and passive at once, or neither, and not to be confused with the gardener’s labor, water transcends the earth whence it emanates and on which it falls. I, earth, says Teresa (tierra: terrestrial, Teresa), can only become a garden by the grace of contact with the life-giving medium of water, which bubbles from my entrails up to the surface, and/or showers down and soaks into me from on high. Water I am not, for I am earth; nor is God water, since He is the Creator. Water is the fiction of our encounter, that is, the sensible narrative representation of it. This representation figures the space and time of an interaction that can only be expressed in narrative, resorting to comparisons and metaphors that narrative converts into metamorphoses. At the moment when fiction utters the interaction between I and He, it also accomplishes it: an erotic cleaving body to body, a co-presence and co-penetration that convince me I exist, I’m alive.

  This written water is a crucial moment in the event we refer to as “Teresa of Avila”; I would even say it constitutes Teresa’s own brand of ecstasy. The fact is that before being whispered abroad by sisters who had witnessed her raptures, before being put into words in the aquatic fictions of the protagonist, this ecstasy was basically an epileptic fit, as modern physicians like Esteban García-Albea and Pierre Vercelletto have diagnosed.12 Only fiction, first speechless, then spoken, and finally written, and above all the fiction of water, could transform what had been undergone, but was unnameable, into an experience. For the water fiction maintains the tension between God and myself; it fills me with the divine but does not subordinate it; it saves me from the madness of confusing myself with Him, while allowing me to claim an association. Water is my living protection, therefore my vital element. As a figure of the mutual contact between God and his creature, water preserves agency, the Other’s action, but it also demotes God from his suprasensible status and brings Him down, if not exactly to the role of a gardener (though didn’t Mary Magdalene take the resurrected Jesus for a gardener at the Holy Sepulcher?), then at least to that of a cosmic element I can taste and which feeds me, that touches me and which I can touch.

  Husserl wrote that “the element which makes up the life of phenomenology as of all eidetical science is ‘fiction.’”13 In other words, fiction “fructifies” abstractions by resorting to rich, precise sensory data, transposed into clear images. Never has this value of fiction as the “vital element” for the knowledge of “eternal truths” been more justified, perhaps, than it is in Teresa’s water fiction, used to describe her states of prayer and to figure the meeting between the earthling and her Heaven, her Beyond.

  The fable of the four waters severs Teresa from the faculties (intellect, will, imagination) to plunge her below the barrier of word-signs, into the psyche-soma. So what remains of “words” in the economy of this kind of writing as fiction? Assuredly not signs (signifier–signified) independent of external reality (referents, things), as is habitual in everyday language and understanding. Prayer, which amalgamates self and Other, likewise and inescapably amalgamates word and thing. The speaking subject then comes dangerously close, when she does not succumb, to catastrophic speechlessness: the self “is undone,” “liquefies,” becomes “bewildered.” “Exile from self” is a psychosis: I am the other, words are objects. Nevertheless, through the novel of her liquefaction, Teresa balances her experience at a point halfway between these two extremes, on one side the faculties and on the other a delirious befuddlement (between consciousness and psyche-soma), without falling into the vacuum of asymbolia. Here lies her genius, in that ability to go back over the loss and to designate it with the mot juste. In her prayer fictions, what separates the word water from the thing water is not so much a “bar” as a fine and permeable membrane through which they alternately overlap and separate, as the self is lost and recovered, stric
ken and jubilant, forever between two waters. Annihilation/sublimation: the fluidity of the aquatic touch exactly translates this rapturous to-and-fro. And the penchant for “greatest ease and delight” (grandísima suavidad y deleite) leads Teresa to set water’s thirst-quenching properties above its capacity to drown, its cleansing above its siltiness; she also prefers water’s coolness to fires of pitch—the black desire that even water is apt to be enkindled by, inflaming too the woman at prayer.

  Let us consider now that the last water we spoke of is so plentiful that, if it were not for the fact that the earth doesn’t allow it, we could believe that this cloud of His great Majesty is with us here on earth.…

  There is a very strong feeling that the natural bodily heat is failing. The body gradually grows cold, although this happens with the greatest ease and delight.…In the union, since we are upon our earth, there is a remedy; though it may take pain and effort one can almost always resist. But in these raptures most often there is no remedy; rather, without any forethought or any help there frequently comes a force so swift and powerful that one sees and feels this cloud or mighty eagle raise one up and carry one aloft on its wings.

  I say that 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.…Like it or not, one is taken away.…Many times I wanted to resist…especially sometimes when it happened in public.…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.14

  By the end there is no longer violence in the raptus (from Latin rapere, “to seize or abduct”). The abruptness of rapto and vuelo (flight) gives way to euphoric transports (traspasos), subtilized by entrancement or arrobamiento, and Teresa’s rapture dispels into clouds, mists, serried raindrops, billows of vaporized spray. Or into a “mighty eagle” (viene un ímpetu tan acelerado y fuerte, que veis y sentís levantarse esta nube o este águila caudaloso y cogeros con sus alas). Isn’t that so, my apophatic Teresa?

  Had these written waters been sensed during the epileptic seizure itself, or were they subsequently reconstituted in the act of writing? We cannot know. But Teresa’s intellectual honesty, the vivid detail of her chills, frights, and swoons, suggest that verbalization was not part of the shock of the experience. It seems likely that the aquatic narrative emerged later in a written reconstitution, with its cortege of physical, psychological, and spiritual comments giving rise (or place, literally) to ecstasy. Therefore I confidently maintain that Teresa’s ecstasy, as it has come down to us, is the doing of her writing. By returning to the “tournament” of the fantasy incarnate that is prayer, writing recreates the theopathic state, and only then does ecstasy exist. In this very real sense, Teresa only found jouissance in writing.

  In this fiction of a soul’s romance with its Other, it would be pointless to ask whether Teresa’s water image is a simile (a figure comparing “two homogeneous realities belonging to the same ontological kind”) or rather a metaphor (a figure establishing a resemblance between two heterogeneous realities). Doubtless the infant science of rhetoric as expounded by Salinas was more or less directly of assistance to the writer-nun, who shared that author’s fondness for the vernacular. But, like all the “disciplines” that sprang from the fragmentation of metaphysics, rhetoric, with its elaborate figures, was ultimately irrelevant to the experience Teresa was attempting to translate in terms of water.

  In Teresa’s hands, the referent water is not just an object—and one of the four cosmic elements—but the very practice of prayer: the psyche-soma induced by the state of love, that generator of sublimated visions. Language is not a vehicle, for her, but the very terrain of the mystical act. To discourse, the object of study for rhetoric and other recently rediscovered stylistics at the time, Teresa adds the ingredient of a savory, tactile, sensual, overwhelming passion—to the point of annihilating herself in it, the better to dodge both discourse and passion. But it is also a sovereign, imperious passion, as God’s captive captures God to make Him her pleasure-giving prisoner.

  Unschooled in Latin, and lamenting this ignorance with a certain coyness, Teresa finds great relish in Castilian. But unlike a linguist concerned with dissecting a language by uncoupling its signs from their objects, the better to analyze them, Teresa plunges into her mother tongue as into a bath consubstantial with the experience of engendering a new Self, coiled in the Other: a Self that loves the Other, whom the Self resorbs and the Other absorbs. Her “water story,”* [histoire d’eau, pun on Histoire d’O, the mystico-erotic novel published in 1954 under the pen name Pauline Réage.—Trans.] if I may call it that, imposes itself as the absolute, inescapable fiction of the loving touch, in which I am touched by the other’s touch who touches me, whom I touch back. Water is the fiction of the decantation between the other-being and what is intimate and unnameable, between the external milieu and the “organ” of an interior empty of organs, between the Heaven of the Word and the greedy void of a woman’s body.

  What language could possibly accommodate such porosity? None could satisfy the writing of this woman. She presses on with it, not rereading very much, so that her fiction will always be the outpouring of herself into manifold streams of subjective positions, sites of utterance, moradas. It will be her delirium and her rebirth. Her soul “would want to be all tongues so as to praise the Lord” (toda ella querría que fuesen lenguas para alabar al Señor).15

  BEGUINES

  I leaf through the Beguines catalog Bruno gave me. As time goes on I find myself accepting the truth: it wasn’t Bruno I was hugging in the courtyard of the Louvre, it was the life of these women, among other experiences and higher things of the mind that were dancing through my head that Christmas Eve. Or at least the novel I was building around them, the stories I still can’t stop weaving around “all that,” as my publisher calls it.

  These paintings, covering a span from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, were part of the everyday life of the lay Beguine communities of the southern Netherlands. They were anonymous commissions, most likely designed by the Beguines rather than painted by them; only the reliquaries and the “installations” they called “secret gardens” seem to have been made by their own hands. Their vows were not for life, and they did not give up their property; they worked to support themselves, and celebrated Saint Begga as their patroness. A world away from Teresa and her Carmelite reforms—except perhaps as regards solitude.

  Here, look at this woman with her luminous face, framed by a black wimple and crowned by a circlet of thorns. She loves just one man. He is her God. It is absolutely indispensable for this man to have suffered and died. Jesus’s martyrdom, the Nothingness He walked through, is proof for this woman of what her subconscious experience has already taught her, what the males of this world stubbornly deny: no man is not castrated, no father is not dead. While lavishing this sadistic assurance on her, the depiction of the Passion and the skull in the right-hand corner reconcile the woman to her own melancholic passion—the passion for suffering, for becoming gradually frozen into indifference, for dying. In love, this man, this death’s head, is her. And yet He came back from Nothingness into life. His loving heart delights the earth, fulfills her to overflowing. She will stroke Him with an infinite, maternal, absentminded tenderness. Is it the male sex she is saving from damnation? Or the germ of life, their reciprocal immersion, her own fertilized womb? In another painting, the crucified Christ’s breast is cut open to show a heart in which nestles the embryo of Jesus, as if in a uterus of its own.

  A woman is fundamentally alone. By leaving her mother to enter into language and the father(s), she has no other choice: either she attempts to love the man, that stranger, with the aid of a few children and a dash of sublimation (daydreams, embroidery, reading, and faith); or, she returns to the mother via a homosexual affair or a sisterly community of mutually idealized women. The shadow of an i
ncomplete separation always hangs over her. Alternating between frustration and euphoria, female solitude removes us from (provisional) communities and casts us out into the black sun of melancholy; on our good days, it furnishes us with all the masks of irony.

  How does this female condition differ from that of all other humans? Men, too, have to give up the mother in order to become speakers, but variants of incest remain open to them; men can regain, in sexual encounters and even in the fleurs du mal, the fragrant Paradise of yore. More radically, women share this common condition, and yet they are (with rare exceptions) debarred from regaining via eroticism the safe haven of primary oneness—even the original relationship is often refused to them, because mothers are liable to reject their daughters for the sake of more dependable values. Female loneliness simply adds pathos to the common condition of both sexes, one that in given historical circumstances has relegated women to silence, isolation, or repression. The nun or Beguine constructs an experience that is at once imaginary (a series of fantasies), symbolic (adherence to sacred law), and real (modulation of her body, her existence, her entire being), allowing her to sidestep this choice, or better said, to reconcile the two options. Thus she loves the absolute Man (Jesus), devotes herself to ordinary men (by treating their symptoms), and appeases her female passions (through solitude and proximity in the fabric of collective work and prayers).