Teresa, My Love

by Julia Kristeva

  And of what did the secret garden consist? What images, what reveries, what fantasies fed into these women’s forsaking of all things in order to nurture and enhance that vital energy, self-command, and mischievous slyness that come through so clearly in these old portraits? Materialized in the hortus conclusus of the Beguinage, their “apartness” from the world touched off a profusion of naive confections and unselfconscious pieces of exuberance, cruelty, and love crafted by the weavers, spinners, embroiderers, tapestry-makers, gardeners, jewelers, and apprentice sculptors that they were. Voluntary seclusion was reversed into symbolic power. Women whose bodies had never “opened up to any creature” open themselves up here to unsuspected delights of the mind, which in turn will nourish the body. Frontiers are breached: those that surround the Beguinage, those that stand between man and woman, and between the Beguine and her God. It’s heaven to be cloistered in this secret garden amid such excesses.

  I admire the Beguines, but I admire Teresa more, because my nocturnal companion cultivates the seclusion of her soul nowhere else but in the folds of language, in the pungent beats of her rocky yet fluid Castilian, dreamy yet incisive. She, too, is into making and crafting, but when she speaks of hacer esta ficción, her materials are words. And suddenly I comprehend, no, I perceive with all the fibers of my body, with all the shades and glimmers of my mind, that it’s the power of language, handled with her own peculiar craft, that permits her to saturate the “cloister of the soul” differently from the Beguines, in order to escape it. Deployed in speech and writing, the same amorous loneliness as that cultivated by the followers of Saint Begga steps back from the signs of the unspeakable to become transformed, across La Madre’s pages, into subjective lucidity: as the captive of the Other, she is sure to capture this Beloved herself, and thus sure of existing. The sensual, manual, cosmic, biblical, and evangelical bricolage displayed by the Beguines’ installations is turned by Teresa’s pen into a new world: the thought of an aloneness (a lone Self) that encompasses the Infinite. The a-thinking of extreme singularity is on the way to being constituted, in and through fiction.

  NARRATIVE, OR THE SURPRISES OF WATER

  Neither simile nor metaphor, but both at once, playing one against the other as symmetrical opposites, Teresa’s fiction is a paradox: controlled yet wayward, serious and fantastical, imperious and docile. But these ambiguities are not due to mental laxity so much as to the bipolarity of the experience itself, at once impairment and conjunction, inventing an undecidable enunciation in which water will be the fiction par excellence. An enunciation in which water itself is trumped by fire, and vice versa, while the narrative goes on to lose the logical thread of these multiple inversions to create that perceptible ductility of Teresa’s writing, which infects us with its stylistic, psychological, physical, and theological metamorphoses.

  I say metamorphosis rather than metaphor, using the word in Baudelaire’s sense, when he refused to be taken for a poet “comparing himself” to a tree, for he was the tree, he took on its reality, rather than picturing himself as like a tree.16 Water, says Teresa, is not like divine love; water is divine love, which is water. And we form part of it: me, you, and God Himself. The watery image Teresa lights on shifts us from stylistics to the tactile nature of the psyche-soma, which the writer conveys through the sensory, tirelessly elucidated metamorphoses that are the fabric of her texts.

  In the eyes of the unbelieving denizens of the third millennium, the mystical experience equates to this recomposition of the speaking being by means of metamorphic writing. Teresa transcribes the dissolution (análusis or diálusis in Greek) of her intellectual-psychical-physical identity in the amorous transference toward the All-Other-Being: God, the father figure of our childhood dreams, the Sulamitess’s unpindownable Spouse. A lethal, blissful metamorphosis, this writing heals the melancholy of separation by appropriating the Other-Being in an infracognitive and psychosomatic yet infinitely nameable encounter.

  When regression, edged by masochistic pleasure, succeeds in adjusting to the Word, it is not rhetoric that helps us to read this elevation of the speaking subject, recomposed in the begetting of its speech, but Aristotle. In On the Soul and Metaphysics, he defines touch as the most fundamental property of being and the most universal of all the senses. To tell of touch, to touch by telling: might the inception of the incarnation myth lie here? Does Jesus’s “Noli me tangere” only prohibit the act as an invitation to the word to become touch, tact: delicate presence, subtle reciprocity?

  If it’s true that every animate body is by that token a tactile body, the sense of touch possessed by living things is also “that by which I enter into contact with myself,” as Jean-Louis Chrétien reminds us.17 On a naive level, touch appears as unmediated contact. But there always remains a hiatus between the toucher and the touch: sheath, air, blade; and therefore the impression of direct touch, with no mediating element, implies “a concealment of mediation from sensation itself.” Teresa, by contrast—aware of herself as being touched-bathed by and in the Other—far from concealing the mediation, grants it the status of a third element: the mystic third party of her immersion in the Spouse.

  The fiction further outlines a narrative that does not confine itself to naming the mediation as “water,” but refracts the water into a story involving God, the gardener, and the four ways of watering the garden. This ingenious procedure allows for an implicit critique of the immediacy of osmosis with the divine: Teresa distances herself from it and attempts to unfold the autoeroticism, painful and joyful in equal measure, of her nuptials with the Other into a series of physical, psychic, and logical actions, neatly figured by the four registers of water. It is not the water so much as the “narrateme,” the story, the novel of waters, that diffuses the fantasy of an absolute touch via a sequence of ancillary parables (the well, the water wheel, the rain, the gardener, the earth, the nun).

  In The Way of Perfection, the writer continues to relate the adventures of these waters, to which she now ascribes three properties: cooling, purifying, and thirst quenching. The soap opera of divine touch is compounded and amplified as Teresa proceeds to couple water with its opposite, fire, making these contrary elements vehicles for the contradictory states of amorous passion. Having distinguished the waters, she evokes the variants of fire, and compares the two elements while also mixing them up, undaunted by the risk of contradicting herself: “Oh, God help me, what marvels there are in this greater enkindling of the fire by water…!” Fire and water: on closer inspection, are they really so opposed? The story eventually reconciles its opposites in the realm of passion, the passion for writing the unnameable. Then it loses interest in images, words, writing; it pulls out of the exchange; it bows out of love itself to contemplate the brilliance of the diamond alone, petrified liquid in the cache of the “Seventh Dwelling Places.” Is water, then, as much the fiction of the sensory impact on Teresa of the divine, as a critique—unconscious, implicit, ironical—of that impact? Touched by the Other, I am diluted into Him, who Himself is diluted and then condensed in me.

  Let us follow the metamorphic adventures of water.

  The first [property] is that it refreshes; for, no matter how much heat we may experience, as soon as we approach the water the heat goes away. If there is a great fire, it is extinguished by water—unless the fire burns from pitch; then it is enkindled more.…For this water doesn’t impede the fire, though it is fire’s contrary, but rather makes the fire increase!…

  Those of you, Sisters, who drink this water and you others, once the Lord brings you to drink, will enjoy it and understand how the true love of God—if it is strong, completely free of earthly things, and if it flies above them—is lord of all the elements and of the world. And since water flows from the earth, don’t fear that it will extinguish this fire of the love of God; such a thing does not lie within its power. Even though the two are contraries, this fire is absolute lord: it isn’t subject to water.…

  There are other little fi
res of love of God, that any event will extinguish. But extinguish this fire?…

  Well, if it is water that rains from heaven, so much less will it extinguish this fire: the two are not contraries but from the same land.18

  If water provides a privileged link to the Beloved in the Life, in the Way it sometimes proves helpless in the face of fire, the “absolute lord” that is not “subject to water.” Here Teresa’s experience turns before our eyes into an “ignitiation,” to borrow Philippe Sollers’s coinage regarding Dante. And now a fresh reversal causes water to itself become fire: an antithetical figure, apophatic par excellence. Does this suggest poor reasoning? On the contrary, it betrays an outsized attempt to control everything, negating difference in a bid to obtain, in the process of writing, total dominion over all the things of this world, and find an absolute remedy for separation and loneliness:

  Isn’t it wonderful that a poor nun of Saint Joseph’s can attain dominion over all the earth and the elements?…Fire and water obeyed Saint Martin; even the birds and the fish, Saint Francis; and so it was with many other saints. There was clear evidence that they had dominion over all worldly things because they labored to take little account of them and were truly subject with all their strength to the Lord of the world. So, as I say, the water that rises from the earth has no power over the love of God; the flames of this love are very high, and the source of it is not found in anything so lowly.19

  Teresa’s water, cleansing and refreshing, can just as easily cease to be “living water” and turn into a parable of understanding. For when it comes to “reasoning with the intellect” it is “not so pure and clean,” but muddied by “running on the ground” and soiled by our “natural lowliness.” We must wait for the sublimity of the Other to “bring us to the end of the journey”:

  Living water is not what I call this prayer in which, as I say, there is reasoning with the intellect.…

  Let me explain myself further: suppose that in order to despise the world we are thinking about its nature and how all things come to an end. Almost without our realizing it we find ourselves thinking about the things we like in the world [things we love about the world: cosas que amamos de él]…20

  Wondrous Teresa, unearthing in every utterance—like Freud—the countermeaning that is pleasure’s secret lair!

  Lastly, water douses the fire of mortal desire, because the pleasure of slaked thirst is a “relief” that deflects the praying woman from the “desire to possess God”—from sexual, and hence lethal, passion: “and so sometimes it kills”—and nudges her toward an “enjoyment” depicted as a slackening of tension. Thus metamorphosed in this last water, love overwhelms the experimenter, leaving her without defenses or initiative, offered up, passive, deprived of her I. Teresa alludes to herself in the third person here, as a she delivered from “desires” and “devils,” whose ravishment has her “almost carried out of herself with raptures.”21 But since nothing is simple in this labyrinthine fiction with its multiple detours and switchbacks, her desires continue to pain her—a welcome pain, for it comes from Him, although one can never be quite sure of that: the devil’s stratagems are unpredictable. The very thirst for God, insofar as it is “indiscreet” and violent, is a desire verging on “derangement.” Witness the derangement of the hermit who threw himself into a well in order to see God sooner, not realizing he had been deceived by the devil.22

  As the princeps figure of metamorphosis, according to Teresa, water holds a last surprise for us: it will need the diversion of thought in order to “cut short” desire, if not to take it away altogether, thus helping the lover/beloved, who touches/is touched, to “enjoy God more.”

  There is always some fault, since the desire comes from ourselves.…But we are so indiscreet that since the pain is sweet and delightful, we never think we can have enough of this pain. We eat without measure, we foster this desire as much as we can, and so sometimes it kills.…And I believe the devil causes this desire for death, for he understands the harm that can be done by such a person while alive.…Anyone who reaches the experience of this thirst that is so impelling should be very careful.23

  Do you mean yourself, Teresa, my love? You continue, with razor-sharp intelligence:

  For I do not say that the desire be taken away, but that it be cut short.…Sometimes the pain [in itself…very delightful] is seen to afflict so much that it almost takes away one’s reason. Not long ago I saw a person of an impetuous nature who…was deranged for a while by the great pain and the effort that was made to conceal this pain.…

  I wouldn’t consider it wrong if [a person] were to remove the desire by the thought [que mude el deseo pensando] that if he lives he will serve God more…he will merit the capacity to enjoy God more.24

  That’s right, Teresa, the only resort we have left is to transmute desire by thinking (que mude el deseo pensando). You knew it, and you wrote it 440 years ago.

  THE TRIUMPH OF THE WORK, THAT GREAT FLOWER

  Let’s consider [let’s imagine: hagamos cuenta], for a better understanding…

  Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle25

  Gardens. The Paradise of dreamers, of Persian astronomers, of lovelorn poets, of seekers of the Grail, of Beatrice, of Molly Bloom, of flowers…and yours, too, Teresa? “And all my spring-time blossoms rent and torn” (Omar Khayyam);26 “O perpetual flowers / Of the eternal joy, that only one / Make me perceive your odors manifold” (Dante);27 “Sweetheart, let’s see if the rose…” (Ronsard);28 “I pray thee, give it me. / I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, / Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows” (Shakespeare);29 “I have punished a flower for the insolence of Nature” (Baudelaire);30 “Oh rose, pure puzzlement in your desire to not be anyone’s sleep beneath so many eyelids” (Rilke);31 “Though haunted by telephones, newspapers, computers, radios, televisions, I can watch right here, right away, dozens of white butterflies visiting roses against a backdrop of sea. The Work alone triumphs, that great Flower” (Sollers).32

  I return to the garden of the Beguines, which really was a garden: joy, bliss, mystical rose, triumph of ecstasy beyond words. But above all a secret, silent garden—on the other side of human passion, a simple craft of blooms, enamels, cameos, colored yarns tressed into figures. A geometry of the senses, metaphors of the fragmented body seized by a thought preceding thought. Red drops of your blood, my blood, intimate fluttering of my being, beacons of Being. Nature or abstraction, no matter, this ornamentation transcends human quibbles: whether pre- or postanthropomorphic, it exudes the simplicity of its communion with culture and the cosmos at their most rudimentary, most resistant to interpretation. The simplicity of these flowers, pebbles, tapestries is far from mean, but its wealth has an obvious immediacy that preempts comment. It does not argue with happiness or misery, it is content to appear, to exhibit what converts into a string of questions for you, visitors and interpreters: “What does this nosegay mean?” “Where did that stone come from?” “Whose is this coat of arms?” “What is that disembodied shower of blood about?” Here, face to face with the carpet of flowers, something remains undisclosed, not because it seeks to hide, but because the rose, for Angelus Silesius, has no why or wherefore.

  Still, as the reliquaries fill up with little flasks and pouches, and the secret garden begins to burst with buds and blossoms, the secret may betray itself: it comes within a hair of acknowledging its sexual underside, the image of a body that parades itself or, on the contrary, punishes itself in order to merit the Garden of Eden at long last.

  Judging from the paintings and objects shown in the catalog that will be my sole souvenir of Bruno, the mystical adoration of these far-distant women was prone to paroxysms of passion, unendurable splinterings, intimacies that stayed intact despite being shared. These lay sisters discovered, in mystical love, a continent—a continent-container, external and internal to the lay and religious communities of their time. They stood apart from both, not as a way to escape exclusion, horror, or evil, but the better
to confront them, to consume them in self-consummation. Such was their path to happiness.

  Teresa’s garden is quite different. It is not exactly poetic, as in the works of the masters of floral eroticism, nor does it contain, as in the enclosures of the Beguines. Flowers are mentioned in passing, they have no fecund names; there are no petals, no feathers, no wings, no pearls, no agricultural or horticultural bric-a-brac, no household accessories. A precociously intellectual outlook? A reflection of Castilian aridity? Maybe, but it is also more. In Teresa’s garden, we read about—she only desires—two things, an abundance of water and a solitary flower, which is her body. Drowned in the electric waves of her epileptic brain or soaked through and through by the mist of the divine Spouse, this woman wrote but a single garden to remember, the garden of sensation elucidated; the garden of her infinite introspection with the Infinite. The flower then becomes a way of perfection forever wending through the dwelling places of the translucid castle, which it also is. Once ensconced—inside the flower, the way, the castle—and quill in hand, Teresa will climb into carriages and carts, take the reins of horses, donkeys, whatever she must. She will set forth to conquer austere Spain and turn it into another garden, physical and political this time, the garden of the reformed Carmelite order.

  Chapter 7

  THE IMAGINARY OF AN UNFINDABLE SENSE CURLED INTO A GOD FINDABLE IN ME

  Turn your eyes toward the center.

  Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle

  UNFINDABLE OR OMNIPRESENT: TOUCH

  And so I arrived at this conclusion: Teresa’s ecstasy is no more or less than a writerly effect! Spinning-weaving the fiction of these ecstasies to transmute her ill-being into a new being-in-the-world, Teresa seeks to “convey,” to “give to understand” the link with the Other-Being as one between two living entities: a tactile link, about contact and touching, by which the divine gifts itself to the sensitive soul of a woman, rather than to the metaphysical mind of a theologian or philosopher. To sense the sense, to render meaning sensible: in Castilian, Teresa’s writing and her ecstasy overlap.