“And what if we became discalced?” says María de Ocampo suddenly. “Like Saint Francis, or the Poor Clares? They had no truck with the worldly pleasures we Carmelites indulge in.” She seems agitated by the very idea, unless it is the thought of the infernal compressor that’s upsetting her.
The others are surprised and a little disconcerted. What does Teresa think? A silence falls. A silence from Hell. Does it cause her to waft up from the abyss or to descend from glorious summits? Immortalized by Velázquez, or perhaps by a pupil of his, her holy gaze is lifted upward, the better to plumb her own depths. A double interiority. The small company holds its breath.
“What do you mean, María?” Ahumada does not immediately grasp the scope of the proposal, but it does not surprise her: in it she hears an echo of her own wish.
“We could set up a new convent! With stricter rules!” María bursts out.
Dreamy Teresa can be briskly efficient when required. No more thoughts of Hell! No time to waste.
“The first thing to do is find a source of income for the future convent!”
Is this project unfeasible? Ahumada is too pragmatic not to think so at first. Then, one day after Communion, our Lord chips in, ordering her to pour all her energies into getting the initiative off the ground.
A foundress is born.
Andrew has quit teasing me. Oh, I know he’s a long way from coming around to Teresa’s virtues, and his sardonic asides will always be the best way of proving he exists while loving me. But he’s now prepared to continue the trip—a change of plan on his part.
“So we just follow the trail of your saint’s foundations, okay? We start with Saint Joseph of Avila. What’s next, remind me, Medina del Campo? Malagón? Valladolid? Toledo? Pastrana? Salamanca? And then Granada? I’ll drive, Juan can twiddle the radio. What’s the latest on the human bombs?”
I never know whether he’s kidding or writing a novel. Will it be my novel this time? Will it be Teresa’s? Anything can happen. Personally, I always travel best in the company of books.
We’re off!
Part 5
From Ecstasy to Action
What is necessary is a different approach, the approach of a lord when in time of war his land is overrun with enemies.
Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection
Chapter 20
THE GREAT TIDE
The purpose of this spiritual marriage: the birth always of good works, good works [de que nazcan siempre obras, obras].
Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle
Now the tide’s breath gusts over the island, there’s a confetti of rose and wisteria petals whirling toward the waters of the Fier, the birds have vanished, and I am looking out from my veranda, which defies the winds as stoutly as the Baleines lighthouse. Here on the Île de Ré, the late August storms tear through the nonchalance of summer, and none too soon. I’m used to them. Is it because my roommate never leaves me for a second? I tend increasingly to the view that repose is not a thing of this world, and everything else is a lie.
I buy magazines to read on the beach, I listen to the radio, I watch TV. All sorts of dramatic events are happening. Nothing is happening. The culture pages pretend to get worked up about the imminent literary season. The new pope reassures the synagogue (somewhat), and tries to rationalize (elementary) faith, or vice versa, while the president of all the French jets off to foist our national compassion on someplace in the Hexagon or in the world: one deed of republican charity is worth two pledges on paper. Tide for tide, the surge powered by the media is lapping these days around the feet of the sacred—or of its absence. That’s my opinion, anyway. I won’t mention it to Andrew (who sends me cryptic, i.e., besotted, daily e-mails), or to Marianne—who since her return from Cuenca has been studying Hebrew and Freud, and is planning to go into analysis in September. Happy news! I can guess what they’re both thinking, differently and spontaneously: Oh, just another of Sylvia’s obsessions, an optical illusion created by the saint’s works, in league with the bad weather that’s keeping her on her island. No two ways about it. Unless…
This fall’s literary season, with apologies to my publisher Mr. Zonabend, I mean Bruno, is pure marketing, considerably more so than usual, in fact. I’m not one of those who bemoan the extinction of Literature with a capital L, plaintive aesthetes left high and dry by the tsunami of the spectacle. I’ve sweated long enough in the august precincts of Jussieu and Columbia, and then over my Duras book, to know that literature has got to roll with the breakers. The smart wave to which I made my own modest contribution has ebbed. Adieu well-wrought language, high-flown style, writerliness, textuality! Too hard and too slow. Now that form is dead, courtesy of TV, long live the platform! A few fastidious mourners for the world of belles-lettres bleat on about the philistinism of the “society of the spectacle,” but they don’t mind raking in the profits. Nobody has yet read the novel already labeled the best seller of the rentrée, but every arts-and-leisure reader knows that it cost millions, as befits a fine sci-fi synopsis written in French for Hollywood; they know the author is ready to trot his pooch up the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival or the Élysée Palace, and that lawyers for Muslims, Jews, women, and God are lining up to sue him.
As a matter of fact, everyone will get hauled over the coals around this probable Prix Goncourt and the scandal it’s bound to create. Destroy, he said, she said, with a jaundiced laugh; some laughter is just a dressing over the inability to have a good time. And a way of stirring up the sex wars that in turn drive many a righteous female memoir of rape and abuse—poor little girls who loved it, really.
In the past, the masses wanted fascism. No longer. Today, in our leaderless civilization, the masses only aspire to a dismal smirking. What masses, anyway? The survivors of the class struggle have adopted the mores of the petty bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeois have traded their cultural pretensions for the artificial paradises of instant gratification. The spectacle numbs and revolts us, and yet the exploits of technology have captivated our dreams, and some of the brightest brains are researching the regeneration of this tawdry species to the point, perhaps, of immortality. So it doesn’t take much for the most apocalyptic of despairing scribblers to push us over the edge, doped by a chain of promoters with scores to settle and profits to make—we laugh fit to bust, we buy the product. Jaded, depressed, without a future, sulky as spoiled kids full of rancid grudges and aimless lusts, we wallow smugly in the consumption of bitter disenchantments and mirth without catharsis. I understand you, clones of toxic nihilism that you are: you relish the ultimate pleasure of lording it over manipulated spectators of whom you’re one, as am I, with only the forlorn hope of getting the hell out, clutching your loot, sooner than put an end to it all.
And yet your Hell is just a cry to Heaven, which must exist someplace not far away, otherwise the earth would not be round. Sure enough, while I glance through the splutterings of the so-called literary press, the pageantry of World Youth Day in Cologne is being broadcast on TV. A dazzling multilingual show of flawless intellectual mastery over the need to believe! Baby Jesus at the wheel and holy wafers on arrival, in a choreography of chaste young bodies, beatific smiles, and the jazzy lilt of postmodern hymns. The Vatican could not have achieved a more universal triumph.
On another channel, Jewish settlers wearing yellow stars brandish babes in arms, as if that would stop the Israeli army evicting them from their moshavs in the Gaza Strip. Muslim guerrilla groups, meanwhile, divided into pro- and antisuicide tactics, are at each other’s throats, and it ends up in slaughter either way. Next there will be footage of car bombs in Baghdad, Hamas shooting up Fatah and vice versa, Hezbollah wreaking havoc in Lebanon…one humanitarian disaster after another.
Who said there were no more masters at the helm, no great mentors anymore?
There is one: Jesus Christ Our Lord, relayed by his deputy on earth. Humanity needs a Lord who loves it, and needs still more a Child-Lord, a Loving Child-Lord. This cryin
g need had to be discovered, had to come forth, and now it has. It doesn’t have to be satisfied. It is enough to manifest it, to make it apparent, to voice it. Be content to receive the message: fulfillment will follow in and through the mere hope of fulfillment. Waiting for God may be like waiting for Godot, yet this festive imagery of tambourines and trumpets is a world away from parsimonious Protestant patience, Beckett style. The need for love is a need for unbridled communication, and communication is a rich promise of love: Catholicism has never revealed the secret of its message better than in these popular fêtes punctuating our planetary age. These adolescents in quest of love—which is to say, every single one of us in the four corners of the world—have yielded to the one true religion, the faith that has come to dominate all others (which are green with envy!) and outlived the ideologies (which succumbed to terminal totalitarianism, and good riddance): the religion of Love.
I gaze at the trusting, well-behaved, well-policed crowds. The mystery of love subjugates all these young people, and smoothes its balm through the screen onto the hurts and desires of the world’s viewers, who were all Catholics for a day—remember?—when John Paul II was buried. The essence of communication, especially when it adopts the guise of a spectacle, is Catholic: childish, affectionate, clinging to the Father and prepared to suffer unto death, to destroy itself, the better to resume the search magnetized by the promise of a possible Good, for later or for never. Irrespective of the decline in vocations and the emptying churches, this promise of and patience for love is all that survives in these dark times, transmitted by the evidently “catholic” magic of Christianity, to the whole of a humanity that has lost its way and needs to believe.
I’m not denying that the citizens of the consumer society are slower to sacrifice themselves for their fellow man—whether out of love for the latter or for the Lord—than the saints and martyrs of old. Or that the pleasure–pain tandem that once underpinned both self-mortification and the spirit of charitable giving has noisily decamped into SM clubs and backrooms. Is the love imperative that communicants and spectators seek here compatible with the work upon oneself, and for the democracy of proximate community, which Christian morality demands, or demanded? We may well wonder. The Holy Father, himself an exacting theologian, is sufficiently preoccupied by the question to impress on his splendid, young, festive listeners that the time has come to “give yourselves.” It was the right moment. Is it still?
The chortling nihilist and the incestuously abused seductress of the new literary season are not beyond rescue; they could still be fished out by that universal net. A believer in Evil is simply an orphan of Good. This hardly prevents such a one from devoting himself or herself, body and soul, to personal advancement. Fine. But when they are the first to say so, while delivering themselves into the jaws of the spectacle, are they not aching for a word from the loving Father? As graceless depressives, or tireless officiators at the altar of one-night stands, such artists could well be Catholics in waiting. They receive indulgence even before they get the Prix Goncourt.
The most pathetic need of all, the most impossible to satisfy, the need to believe is unlike other needs in that it links biological survival to the pleasure of making meaning. It became entwined, two thousand years ago, with the love of an ideal Father inseparable from a Virgin Mother; this is a dogma that contains plenty of involuntary wisdom, nuggets of which come across in the stories my patients tell me. I would go so far as to contend that human beings owe many achievements to this need to believe, and particularly to the Christian and post-Christian versions of that amorous, fretful logic: infinitesimal calculus, Picasso, Joyce, Cantor, the hydrogen bomb, and the space shuttle, to pick a few at random. Provided we tear ourselves away from it with infinite subtlety, because if it is done too abruptly, blunders ensue, and then Terror—we have seen it often enough.
I don’t think I ever underestimated the presumptuousness of my loving desire to understand Teresa of Avila. Faced with the spectacle of devotion this late-August storm has forced me to watch, cloistered indoors before the TV, the enormity of my absurd ambition comes home to me more forcefully than ever. In the world that’s hardening into shape today—on one side, this youthful embrace of faith, whose most peaceful, most triumphal, most irritating (after reconsideration of its long history) manifestation is doubtless the Catholic faith; on the other, the shrill misery of a would-be iconoclastic culture of success—there seems little room for my “third way.”
Here are the options. One, you are an eternal adolescent mooning after love, in which case, knowingly or not, you are a believer: you need that ideal Father in whom you shall recognize another eternal adolescent, not to say the Infant Jesus himself, who a good father who knows his business will not fail to advise you to cultivate in your innermost being. That’s how it goes, faith is a dialectical spiral, and the logic of the same name lost no time in giving it an extra twist. At this point you take refuge in the bosom of the Virgin Mary, whose orthodox icon you may parade along the banks of the Rhine in order to scare Protestants, for example. You trust in the pope, a Holy Father who utters truths you had not been aware of, truths your dreams had been awaiting, all impatient, in the dark. You are saved.
Two, you know a bit more about sex. In which case Love—as preached by the churches, and, in a different key of virtual salvation, by the media—does not strike you as being the basis of everything, the cornerstone of morality, society, and progress. Your experience tells you that this pesky Love tends to break down into numberless splinters of lust and hatred. You succumb to the vertigo of being the last person standing in a vile, debased world. One hope left: to snigger all the way to the bank when your novel proves a hit. Alternatively you might heed the president’s summons, and join the club of power. Anything is possible, but whatever it is it will be televised.
No room for a third way, then? I fear not, especially when I look around me, rather than skulk in a tower immersed in the writings of a Counter-Reformation saint, a junk-shop curiosity of no interest to anyone except a handful of oddballs like me.
All the same, I’ve been following that third way myself for a while. Forty years of a woman’s life is not nothing, even if it’s not very much, counting back from Bethlehem! I’ve got no choice. Love, that is, faith, is not something I “stepped in,” as the sniggering author said, being a depressed rationalist and egregiously scatological, just to warn everybody off. But I don’t ritually bend the knee before Eros or Agape, either. With Freud I listen to them, lie them on the couch, question them. With Kafka I sidestep, estrange myself from the ranks, analyze. Does the essential remain? What remains is the movement, and the eyes open to the road, which is also open.
Since I count myself a Freudian, I’ve obviously taken seriously the question of whether we are a sect, a sort of die-hard branch of post-Judeo-Christianity. And if we are (it’s not inconceivable), are we living through one of those metamorphoses of love’s call and response that aspire to the renewal of infinite truths? Our tenets do not posit the “death of God” in the sense dear to the zealous disciples of “pleasure with no strings attached,” of self-loathing, of terror painted as revolutionary and Nothingness painted as philosophical—and I’d rather forget the stalag-cum-gulag exterminators who appointed themselves to decide which human beings were surplus to requirements. Are we carrying out, on the contrary, with our psychoanalytical way of comprehending and doing, one of those endless queryings of the divine? Or should I say, queryings of the very lucidity of love—of its elucidation?
Putting Teresa back on the agenda, Lacan thought that Catholics couldn’t be analyzed. I, Sylvia Leclercq, have the gall to contradict that wild-eyed post-Catholic post-Freudian. Backed up by my cherished research, much of which has been conducted at the MPH (for my sins!), I hereby declare that it is possible to put the mystery of the Lord Himself through the scanner, and analyze the need to believe in love.
In this cavalier adventure you are, investigative Teresa, my unwitting acc
omplice in lunacy.
The tempest over the Fier is abating, and through the window the bell tower of Ars stands placidly outlined against the horizon. Me and the old salt-marsh worker down there, perfecting his pyramid of crystals, we live in a Christian land. I’m not sure he either knows or cares. It doesn’t matter. Next to him, with my geraniums on the wall, I lose the sense of time. But when time catches up with me again, like an inescapable occupational hazard, I get back to the magazines and the TV, to history swinging by. That’s when there’s nothing to beat you, Teresa, my love, for keeping me connected—and completely unplugged.
Chapter 21
SAINT JOSEPH, THE VIRGIN MARY, AND HIS MAJESTY
Between me and You, an “it is I” disquiets me. Ah, let Your “it is I” remove my “it is I” from in between us!
Mansur al-Hallaj1
To found her house of God: Teresa’s desire, irrepressible and majestic, had altered course. But what house, hers or His? The difference is a matter of voice: henceforth Teresa hears His Voice becoming hers. No longer is there a loving Spouse, the vision of whom carries her toward exile in Him body and soul, and whose presence envelops her here and now—both things simultaneously and alternately. Instead a third person intervenes, more overwhelmingly than ever: His Majesty or the Lord speaks to the foundress at crucial moments of the enterprise and buoys her up; indeed, He often dictates the plans of battle. The sight and touch of the Spouse is increasingly superseded by hearing, the most intellectual of the senses, tailored for decisiveness and action. In Teresa’s case, that is; I could name a few (in my workplace, as it happens) whose experience of hearing voices does nothing to bring them back to reality, quite the opposite—but that’s another story.
Teresa, My Love Page 33
