Perceived by the mouth and the skin, essentially gustative and tactile, water is the fiction par excellence of a body thought-touched by the Other, thinking-touching the Other. It is the privileged element of an unsymmetrical reciprocity that realizes the contact between outer environment and inner depths. Water also reveals that the praying body is an orifice-body, a skin-body, that operates through proximity and is perpetually in vibration with everything that affects it.
Normally, sight and hearing tend not to be invaded by what is seen or heard. In the case of mystics and artists, however, the senses may be so overwhelmed by perceptions that they all work like the sense of touch. With Teresa, this incessant exposure is no bar to lucidity, but rather a royal road, the divine road to a more nuanced apprehension of that Self reborn in the link to the Other.
In Greek (aisthesis) as in German (Gefühl), the same term designates both touch and sensitivity, as though to insist that touch—understood as the generic for all the senses—transcends the senses; it founds them and exceeds them. That is why touch is not confined to any particular organ; it is not exclusive to the skin, or the mouth, or the hand, or the flesh.
Teresa seeks in vain, all through her body, for this enigmatic agent of contact and sensibility. After journeying through the multiple dwelling places piled up in her castle, she finally withdraws to the deepest retreat of inner space, a provisional, elusive place of shifting levels that liquefies at the very instant when the writer—and with her the reader—tries to stabilize it within fixed contours. Is it some cavity (vaginal, gastric, pulmonary)? A ceaselessly pulsating cardiac muscle? Where should the nameless site of self-perception of one’s own insides be located, when a touch from outside filters through into one’s heart of hearts? Teresian theology, echoing the Aristotelian idea that intelligence becomes intelligible “by contact with the intelligible,” “for “thought does think itself,”1 is a psychosomatic intelligence engaged in a permanent act of deconstruction–reconstruction; it perceives and traverses itself by constantly destabilizing and restabilizing the contact between contingency and the intelligible: to-ing and fro-ing, crossings, ripples.
Hunting for the mots justes, for an exact image of the touching-touched body thrown open to the plenitude of the Other-Being, Teresa adds to the water fiction of the Life and later works the fiction of overlapping dwelling places inside a castle: heaped, penetrable, ostensibly numbering seven but consisting of a host of doorless rooms and cellars, porous spaces separated as if by stretches of translucent film. Is it an allusion to the Sheva Hekhalot, the seven palaces of Jewish mysticism?2 Or to the parable of the palace in Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed?3 No testimony survives, whether from Teresa, her associates, or her exegetists, to settle the question. At any rate the echoes are striking.
From the very beginning of the Dwelling Places, Teresa admits to her lack of a “basis” for what she is preparing to write. “While beseeching our Lord to speak for me because I wasn’t able to think of anything to say nor did I know how to begin to carry out this obedience,” it occurs to her to ground her account in a vision of frozen water, a diamond: “We consider our soul to be like a castle made entirely out of a diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in heaven there are many dwelling places.” The castle of the soul or the palace of the Lord? Both, of course, for however wide the gap between them, the creature is in the image of the Creator. Here we have it: interpreted in masterly fashion by Saint Augustine,4 the image experienced by Teresa, in which she experiences herself, is consubstantial with the Creator, and, again, she will apply herself to conjuring “visions” (representations) in order to cast light on how “the very secret exchanges between God and the soul take place.”5
Straightaway the image-visions start proliferating, contaminating one another, changing places, blurring together, always touching-touched: a castle, but made of glass; a stone building, but transparent; an earthly work, and yet celestial; a single castle, but many rooms. The habitat thus designed is not out of bounds, barred and fortified against trespassers; on the contrary, it can be entered at will: “I think it will be a consolation for you to delight in this inner castle, since without permission from the prioress you can enter and take a walk through it at any time.”6
It would be no good trying to delineate this topography, although many still attempt to do so, for the chief property of imaginary vision is to baffle our eyesight. We catch barely a glimpse of the jewel’s brilliance, only a rapid “streak of lightning” is left “engraved on the imagination” should we try to open the reliquary, that hiding-place of the Other in the Self. If any sort of image transpires, it’s not so much a painting as a bedazzlement, always sensory and implicitly tactile: like a “sun covered by something transparent,” the Beloved’s body is nothing but a draped form, in a garment like “a fine Dutch linen.”
Bernardino de Laredo, whom Teresa had read, expresses the closeness to God in tactile terms: “Thus was God’s will touched…without the mediation of reason or thought.”7 The “application of the senses,” for Luis de la Palma among other Jesuits, was after all a higher method of prayer than verbal orisons.8 The beginning of contemplation? The prerogative of perfect men? Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, whose coincidences with Teresa’s practice cannot be overstated, urge the meditator to “realize and relish things interiorly” (el sentir y gustar de las cosas internamente), in imitation of Christ.9 The ecclesiastical authorities jumped at that: did he mean imagined or spiritual senses? There loomed the danger of heresy, the specter of an excessive fleshliness: such lack of rigor could open the door to those Illuminati, already in the Church’s sights, or to the misplaced fervor of overemotional women. Aristotelo-Thomism was always on its guard, and rightly so. The Jesuits’ riposte showed them to be more knowledgeable and prudent than Teresa. Are not sense impressions, they argued, always-already molded by the spiritual virtues, at least among the faithful? Theological reason was saved, and Fr. Jerónimo Nadal, who had great insight into the founder of the Society of Jesus, could proclaim, in a sublime prayer: “From the conviction of faith comes hearing, and from its intelligence comes sight. From hope comes the sense of smell. From the bond of charity comes touch; and from the joy of charity comes taste.”10
The aesthetic profusion of the Counter-Reformation imbues this cenesthesia of virtues and senses governed by…the virtues themselves. It could equally be a synesthesia of Teresa’s glorious body as she wrote her Dwelling Places.
A cascade of sensible and ephemeral images, in fluid movement: the partitions between the dwelling places seem as yielding as hymens, and to pass through them unleashes such an intensity of emotion that these “intellectual visions” obliterate ordinary cares and feelings. Is this to say they petrify the woman as she prays? Make her into a fortress? No, they turn her rather into a crystal hive whose cells enclose the invisible, the searing flash, the imprint…God’s touch is forever diffracted into warmth, flavor, fragrance, and sound, and sometimes it whips up a storm: a babble of parables orchestrates the polyphony of sensations around this unfindable sense, the most human and sublime of all. Not to touch, while yet touching: isn’t that the definition of tact?
What Teresa sets out is a delicately mobile approach to God. First He is “this sun that gives warmth to our works”;11 he is also the “center” toward which all eyes turn, likened to the tender heart of a “palmetto” whose outer bark is “covering the tasty part.”12 This mystical desert does not prevent the writer from gulping in the divine “touch” with a great longing of the soul to enjoy that “spiritual delight in God [pleasures, in Spanish the same word as tastes: gustos de Dios].”13
Taste, that olfactory contact that ensures our survival and inspires the refinements of cooking, seals the Teresian link to the divine in what she calls “the prayer of quiet.” In the Fourth Dwelling Places, “two founts” overflow “through all the dwelling places and faculties until reaching the body,” for “the delight…begins in
God and ends in ourselves.”14 But the union of the Lover to the lover can just as easily smolder away like a “brazier giving off sweet-smelling perfumes,” and this “swells and expands our whole interior being.”15 Not forgetting the eardrums, tickled by a “whistle so gentle that they themselves [the senses and the faculties] almost fail to hear it.”16 A flurry of parables relates the lover’s metamorphoses: Teresa calls them comparisons, again, and blushes for them: “I am laughing to myself over these comparisons for they do not satisfy me, but I don’t know any others. You may think what you want; what I have said is true.”17 What is truth? A cataract of metamorphic fictions telling of the perceptions anchored in the touched and touching body, which thrill the flesh like a “delightful tempest” (tempestad sabrosa).18
The castle curves in on itself, and its partitions give way when the soul’s love touches the mercy of the King. Just as the hedgehog and the tortoise retract into themselves (according to Francisco de Osuna in the Third Spiritual Alphabet, which Teresa knows by heart), so the soul pulls the Other inside before rising to float above itself.19 Should its senses and faculties “have gone outside and have walked for days and years with strangers—enemies of the well-being of the castle,” they need only to have “seen their perdition” and, abashed but “not traitors,” “begun to approach the castle,” for the Monarch to call out to them, like the shepherd he is, “with a whistle so gentle that even they themselves almost fail to hear it,” before they “enter the castle” once more.20 They enter it differently, for the ever-malleable doors are absorbed into the state of “suspension” that overtakes the soul: there is no closed door between the Sixth and Seventh Dwelling Places.21 Only thus can the ductility of the dwelling places touched by the supreme Good deal with “enemies,” wretchedness, and every “symptom.”
Was Teresa anorexic, bulimic, or both? That cluster of disorders being so fashionable just now, my friend Dr. Baruch and even Bruno has asked me about it, all agog. I dodge the question: “Read her and see!” But I have my suspicions. Teresa, anorexic? Maybe, at times, not always. She was certainly keen on “experiences that are both painful and delightful [delicious: sabrosas]”,22 and strove to defend herself against her own hearty appetite for tasting, feeling, knowing, listening, seeing: against the blooming of all the senses together in aiesthesis-Gefühl. As a novice it disturbed her, and she’d make herself vomit, empty herself out in order to meet the high standards of her heart’s Elect. Later, she learned to convey conaesthesia in words. Desire, experienced as a delectation of all the senses triggered by suffering, would then become equal to its object, and ultimately be assuaged in the “spiritual marriage” of the Seventh Dwelling Places. With the strange, asymmetrical parity that obtains between the Bridegroom and his Bride, this spiritual soaring also finds expression in sensible or sensory terms—metamorphic terms, in Baudelaire’s sense: “When our Lord is pleased to have pity on this soul that He has already taken spiritually as His Spouse because of what it suffers and has suffered through its desires, He brings it, before the spiritual marriage is consummated, into His dwelling place which is this seventh.…Let us call it another heaven.”23 On reaching this point, the writer ceases to defend herself. For speaking and writing for the Spouse about their mutual truth, touching and touched, is proof in itself for Teresa that the divine, not the devil, has entered into her.24
But can we be so sure? No appeasement of Teresa’s spirit can be read in her account, no matter how serene she tries to sound: the story goes in circles, and the comparison—yes, that again—links Jesus and the one who prays, sets off again, contradicts itself, asserts itself by dint of repetition. Teresa is aware of it, she scolds herself: “Indeed, sometimes I take up the paper like a simpleton [idiota], for I don’t know what to say or how to begin.”25 Or is this perhaps a scrupulous loyalty of the pen to the psyche-soma that will be transmitted—drowning the visible in the sensible—by tracing the very loss of intellectual understanding in ek-stasy, where the conscientious silkworm is annulled and there is only the dancing butterfly of the imaginary incarnate?
“IMAGINARY VISIONS”
Teresa’s visions dictating her experience of the divine have nothing in common with a painting, as I’ve already said. For by sensorializing to extremes her contact with the All-Other via the fiction of water and its multiple conaesthetic transformations, La Madre inscribes it into the cosmos. But in the fiction of the castle, whose walls turn into nets, her experience relates to the constructions of men—oppressive fortresses in contrast to her own crystalline mansions—which can only be justified by being perpetually rewritten. In so doing, Teresa of Avila is not content with humanizing the Creator. Against Lutheranism, she rehabilitates images…and becomes a Counter-Reformation saint.
I read in a book that it was an imperfection to have ornate paintings.…And…I heard the following: that what I wanted to do was not a good mortification (what was better, poverty or charity?); that since love was the better, I shouldn’t renounce anything that awakened my love, not should I take such a thing away from my nuns; that the book was talking about the many carvings and adornments surrounding the picture and not about the picture itself; that what the devil did among the Lutherans was take away all the means for awakening love, and so they went astray. “My Christians, daughter, must now more than ever do the opposite of what they do.”26
Suspected at one time of Illuminism, then anointed a Catholic saint, perhaps Teresa is inviting us to temper our resistance and raise the portcullis of our defenses. Her apologia for an interior body and soul fully exposed to the Other, inhaling the Other, is certainly not given to everyone. But what a demonstration of the therapeutic powers of the imaginary! What openness toward the possible metamorphoses of the divine itself, under the impact of the fiction Teresa managed to found upon…an unfindable sense!
The water parable and the permeable castle lay the groundwork for the recurrent fable of the silkworm that evolves into a butterfly, which to my mind marks the climax of Teresa’s metamorphic fiction.
You must have already heard about His marvels manifested in the way silk originates, for only He could have invented something like that. The silkworms come from seeds about the size of little grains of pepper. (I have never seen this but only heard of it…) When the warm weather comes and the leaves begin to appear on the mulberry tree, the seeds start to live…The worms nourish themselves on mulberry leaves until, having grown to full size, they settle on some twigs. There with their little mouths they…go about spinning the silk [out of their own selves: van de sí mismos hilando la seda] and making some very thick little cocoons in which they enclose themselves. The silkworm, which is fat and ugly, then dies, and a little white butterfly, which is very pretty, comes forth from the cocoon.…The silkworm, then, starts to live when by the heat of the Holy Spirit it begins to benefit through the general help given to us all by God and through the remedies left by Him to His Church…It then begins to live and to sustain itself by these things…
Well, once this silkworm is grown…it begins to spin the silk and build the house wherein it will die.…This house is Christ.…It seems I’m saying that we can build up God and take Him away, since I say that He is the dwelling place and we ourselves can build it so as to place ourselves in it.…Not that we can take God away or build Him up, but we can take away from ourselves and build up, as do these little silkworms.27
Where the hysteric fails—in defying the Master, in seducing Him, in being unable to dispense with Him—the metamorphic soul (seed, silkworm, silk, butterfly, and seed once more, and silkworm…eternal return) succeeds, by merging into oneness with Him. He, the “intellectual vision,” the “flight of the spirit,” the “Giant” with “milky breasts.” A feminine sensibility, with typically extravagant, immoderate drives? Absolutely. Accompanied by a terrific superconsciousness, it sets off an unexpected biblical and Hellenic return to shake up the austere, Albertino-Thomist interpretation of the Areopagite corpus.
Touching a
nd touched, this fiction is still, of course, an act that requires the full vigilance of her own judgment, according to La Madre. Nothing “automatic” about Teresa’s writing: laxness and torrential fancies, keep out! Stiffened by her experience as founder, she was critical of postulants whom she felt did “not have good judgment.” Not only would such girls not be accepted by the Discalced Order, they must be discouraged from writing about prayer: “Even though doing this amounts to nothing but a waste of time, it impedes freedom of soul and allows one to imagine all kinds of things.…and if something could do them harm, it would be for them to give importance to what they see and hear.…I understand the trouble they will run into from thinking about what they should write.”28 For cloistered little Bovarys like these—a breed Teresa disliked—it was quite sufficient to talk to their confessor. In the same dismissive vein she calls one overschooled woman a letrera, rather than letrada, or “lettered”: she is a mere bluestocking, more at home with facts than with experience. And the rapture goes on…in writing.
In the “Sixth Dwelling Places,” “another kind of rapture” appears, which she calls “flight of the spirit.” Here it is no “small disturbance for a person to be very much in his senses and see his soul carried off (and…even the body with the soul).”29 And so on to the Seventh Dwelling Places, where the “spiritual marriage” comes to pass, “not in an imaginative vision but in an intellectual one, although more delicate than those mentioned” before; “I don’t know what to compare it to,” and yet there will be no shortage of metamorphic comparisons.30 The more high-minded are gratified here to see Teresa revert to the “core experience” of the likes of John of the Cross, purged of “imaginative visions.” However, I invite them to read the lines that surround the moment, finally regarded as authentic, of Teresa’s elevation.31 In this text the “flight of the spirit” mutates into a “straw” being snatched up by a “great and powerful Giant,” then into a “little bark” being lifted high by a “huge wave” (the waters, again) let loose by “this great God.”32 As for the “spiritual marriage” whose glory is revealed “in a more sublime manner than through any spiritual vision or taste,” is it really quite relieved of imaginative comparisons when God can appear as “divine breasts” from which “flow streams of milk bringing comfort to all the people of the castle”?33
Teresa, My Love Page 14
