I recap by riffing on the name: What is Don Quixote, an emblem of holy war or a cheese tart—a custard pie, if you like? A hybrid, invented composite, does he exist to any greater degree than the windmills he tilts at? Or are those windmills imaginary enemies fueling the paranoia, sorry, the enthusiasm of the potential warrior who slumbers in all of us since time immemorial, the soldier of unavoidably holy wars during the sixteenth, seventeenth, or twenty-first centuries?—Not forgetting Toumaï!* [*Name given to specimen of a new possible human ancestor whose skull was found in Chad in 2002.—Trans.]
Beyond his satire on the madness surrounding rank and status, Cervantes has it in for the act of faith in itself, and that includes being madly in love. Don Quixote exposes the absurd underside of human passion, the jester side of the saints, if you will. Teresa isn’t unaware of this facet: it comes out now and then in her laughter and the farcical scrapes she gets into as a traveling founder. But she needed it to remain a secret, stowed away by His Majesty in the very cellars of the interior castle.
Less than half a century after the death of your Discalced Carmelite, along comes Don Quixote, who has mystical Spain splitting its sides over the pathetic amours of crazed knights-errant, the very love that fired the simple hearts and fathomless transports of John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila. Mystical Spain is tangled up body and soul in the sails of the windmills—or to take another great scene from the novel, it rolls on the ground with laughter, still flapping its powerful wings: wings of windmills, wings of angels and conquests, resilient, ridiculous engines.
On our last journey in the footsteps of the saint, we were both very struck by the wind turbines on the hills around Avila, their slow rotation churning the memory of Castile as much as anything. I agree with you about the paradoxical complicity between the mystic and the jester. As explorers of love, the one proceeding in deadly earnest, the other mockingly, they’re poles apart, for sure. But both of them construct and dismantle our machines for producing fantasies, passions, and beliefs. Adventures and high winds.
That laughable hidalgo, “of a hardy habit, spare, gaunt-featured, a very early riser and a great sportsman,” whose “brains got so dry that he lost his wits”—isn’t he unmistakably a man in search of absolute love? He is sold to us as a saint, but in pathetic mode, having turned up fifty years too late for waxing earnest about the Beyond and about oneself. He has a go, all the same. And we’re still having a go today, aren’t we?
When Teresa felt the need of someone or something, she would turn to the Master. Don Quixote, on the other hand, “came to the conclusion that nothing more was needed now but to look out for a lady to be in love with.” His lady would be a version of himself, the febrile male, for in resolving to christen this imaginary damsel “Dulcinea del Toboso,” our literary knight was selecting “a name, to his mind, musical, uncommon, and significant, like all those he had already bestowed upon himself and the things belonging to him.” This game of mirrors isn’t completely alien to Teresa’s erotic logic, is it, when she’s communing with His Voice? With or without the capital letter, it’s the same. And the deconsecrated love affairs of the moderns, as you’re in a position to know, partake of the same beliefs and credences that magnetized Teresa toward her Father and those spiritual fathers…
By that point, who cares if the Quixotic visor is made of pasteboard! Our visionary was able to turn a swineherd driving his pigs through the stubble into a dwarf sounding a horn to herald his arrival at the next castle. And who cares if Jesus is not really walking by the Carmelite’s side? She enjoys him deep in her guts, skewered by the dart of the heavenly lad who appears in her dream. The force of desire is enough to transform an inn and its host into a great fortress commanded by a splendid lord, girls of easy virtue into noble maidens, and a laborer on an ass equipped with a saddlebag and a bota of wine (one can’t imagine Don Quixote without Sancho Panza!) into a faithful squire.
The novelist and the nun seem to be saying the same thing: that the love-fevered imagination must never, God forbid, be asked for evidence! You have to understand that in these misty regions of human truth, things are neither demonstrated nor disproved, they are imagined.
“If I were to show her to you,” says Don Quixote to those who doubt the beauty, not to say the existence, of his Dulcinea as others doubted the existence of His Majesty, “what merit would you have in confessing a truth so manifest? The essential point is that without seeing her you must believe, confess, affirm, swear, and defend it; else ye have to do with me in battle, ill-conditioned, arrogant rabble that ye are.”
A few years ago, in a paper I e-mailed to you, I wrote that Cervantes the humanist was a committed debunker of religious faith, practically opening the door to unbelief. But now, after rereading him with Teresa in mind, I think it’s more complex. The normally sardonic Miguel smiles with compassion at the ineluctable, indefectible passion of faith. This passion makes him laugh, because he shares it. He manages to detach himself long enough to write, but he doesn’t rid himself of it. This way of being inside and outside at once makes him, and us, laugh louder. What else is one to do, when belief—like unbelief—is impossible, and sometimes deadly? Let’s write, let’s laugh.
Teresa, as you see it, had already taken that road. We’ll keep this from the worshippers who sanctify her and will go on doing so for ever and ever, why spoil their fun? But it’s good to know it between ourselves and to pass the word to a few other people who would never read her unless we pushed them. Conversely, they might see Cervantes in a new light if they read him along with Teresa’s works.
Decades before Cervantes and the don, Teresa knew that her visions were not perceived by the eyes but by the whole body before crystallizing them into “intellectual visions.” I took in what you told me in the hired car. Basically, while immersed in her carnal fantasies, she never stops wondering whether it’s a state of grace or a state of sin to believe that her body has merged with the Trinity, that our Lord has entered the garden of her soul, that the Other dwells within her, that she is penetrated by Him, and infinite, like Him. And the more she gives voice to these doubts that enrapture and terrify her and sometimes make her laugh, the more of a novelist she becomes. The more of a novelist she is, the better she founds. The better she founds, the more questions of this kind she asks herself.
What’s different with Cervantes? In his case, he exits the interior castle and observes it from outside, not abandoning the grounds altogether. “I chuckle at that poor believer of a Quixote, who is what I am when I’m not writing,” the diplomat-pirate seems to say. Standing at the intersection between the gullible hidalgo and the unbelieving boors who fancy themselves as modern, Cervantes mocks the whole lot of them: Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and himself.
Teresa enjoys and suffers in the incarnation of her fantasies, in her raptus, whether illnesses or foundations, and pushes on in writing, further and further. If she’s readier to laugh than most other saints, with her it’s the laughter of a naughty girl, who giggles at La Madre swooning over her Husband like the little brat she remains to the end. Teresa is also a great writer, of course, and she senses it, but that matters less to her than her pleasure-pain in the Other and their common works on earth, pleasure-pain in the foundations of His Majesty, of the Third Person incorporated within her. La Madre likes to think that she’s a vehicle for the reason of the Other, and only wakes up intermittently to the fact that she is an unreasoning confabulator. And whenever she allows herself that grotesque insight, she turns into a precursor of—Cervantes! Do you follow me?
Descartes was born in 1596, when Teresa had been in the grave for fourteen years. It would be Cervantes’s irony that carried out, and with what elegance, the instruction the Carmelite liked to give her sisters, though she never included it in the authorized copy of The Way of Perfection, because its brutality probably made her laugh with fear, the instruction that’s one of your favorite quotes: “Play chess, Sisters, you could checkmate God!”
You see, I’m feeling provocative, I’m being blasphemous, just hope I’m not mutilating the complexity of your saint, as if she hadn’t been pruned enough already by a finger here, an arm there, courtesy of the relic hounds, the “faithful” who really take love to catastrophic extremes…I’ll stop, with apologies for such a long message. In London it’s freezing cold, these luminous chrysanthemums won’t warm me up, I do miss our Mexican Day of the Dead, a much more Cervantesque occasion.
I miss you. Hugs to Andrew.
Later,
Juan
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Miguel and Teresa
Dear master-expert in the Golden Age,
I miss you too, and you were right. Neither the Indian summer nor the civil war are enough (so far) to unseat me from my gallop with Teresa. And what you wrote really hit home with me, as ever. After a quick jog through the Luxembourg Gardens, to wash my saint and the arsonist youngsters out of me for a moment, I wanted to pick up without breaking stride but can’t quite manage it, you see, so my reply will be leisurely and won’t resist the pleasure of contradicting you; you know how I am.
Cervantes describes delusionism, or the illusory part of faith, in other words, Love. I’m with you there, he is one of the greats who opened the shutters of the European and universal soul, letting fresh air into the dank cellars of their neuroses.
But—there’s always a but—do you really think idealism is the same thing as faith? I’m asking that question of myself, as well as you. A colleague of mine, Dr. Barbier, claims that there are three kinds of idealism: dynamic, delusionistic, and fundamentalist.
Teresa is undoubtedly a species of fundamentalist when she imposes her vicious mortifications on herself and the rest of the reformed Carmel. It’s too high-minded and hence cruel, a familiar pattern. It’s hard to figure out, but I’m going to try. She’s certainly a sadomasochist, although with a big dose of humor! She becomes a “fundamentalist” as a matter of “historical necessity,” as you put it with your knowledge of the Inquisition period, and with a view to bringing me down to earth! Let’s assume that’s the case. She is obliged to harden her stance against slackness (that of the ruling classes battening on the spoils of conquest, that of the decadent religious orders, that of the warmongers stirring up hostility to the Marranos, and more—thanks for the relevant attachments), but she also seeks to exalt the supernatural in opposition to the overexclusive asceticism of other groups (Lutheran rigor, for example). Basically, she wants to modernize the Church without severing it from its traditional sources and popular audiences.
La Madre is just as plainly a delusionist. She would be incapable of Cervantes’s sardonic distance when mocking Don Quixote’s fancies.2 She dreams of becoming one with her fantasies, turning body and soul into the Other she lacks, incarnating their fusion—and standing back at times with the intromission of a little water here, a scrap of Dutch linen there. Now for the thousand-dollar question: Can this embodied fantasy really be termed a “delusion,” when it is experienced as a potentially lethal reality (as when Teresa imagines that God condemns her desires, or when she somatizes her guilt until falling into a coma)? And the term seems even more far-fetched when “delusion” is experienced as a life-giving reality (as when her nuptials with the Lord hoist her into physical and spiritual bliss). Here, words become things and ideas grow into genuine forces: we are closer to Judge Schreber than to Madame Bovary. And yet the pragmatic advantages of this real delusionism—note the paradox—could appear negligible or absent if they merely shut Teresa into a dungeon of narcissistic megalomania, or, worse, into masochistic mortification. Although, even then, the experience would be worthwhile for the sake of the summits Teresa reaches and reports on. Many others have sought such thrills to enliven the dull world, after all, in a different way but following a similar logic of extremes: from Sade to Mishima, with God or without Him, as a Christian, a Samurai, or an atheist.
It is the dynamism of Teresa the delusionist that astounds me as a modern, if that’s what I am. Not losing sight of Cervantes, let me play (just provisionally, stepping into the inviting dance of your message) the advocate of delusion, Teresa-style, against the jesting of the novelist. What’s more, I think the energy of her prayer actually challenges the novelist’s laughter, not to say refers him back to his own infantile facility.
It’s because I am a delusionist, in the sense of assuming my delusions, that I don’t tilt against windmills but instead make foundations: What do you say to that, Miguel? Don’t you think Teresa might have said that to Cervantes, had she lived until 1605? And if I’d been present at their encounter, I’d have asked another question: Is it possible to act without being a Quixote? Including one who is self-aware when combining windmills with the spirit of enterprise? It isn’t? Then what’s the difference between the sterile delusionism of a knight-errant lost in the Renaissance, and the genuine, dynamic delusionism of a founding Mother? Who draws the line between them, the Church? The commission that decides on the canonization of saints? The judgment of history? The Nobel Prize committee? The League of Human Rights? Or does the power of decision over where “madness” stops and “genius” begins come down to that elucidation of the longing to believe known as “writing,” “analysis,” or whatever you want to call it? It’s a process that leads to works, and sometimes to action.
My dear Juan, let me sum up my answer in brutally concise fashion, hoping that one day I’ll be able to develop it further, given the courage and the time. Teresa turned the embodied fantasy of the ideal Father, that brought her both joy and pain, into self-knowledge; into a journey, argued in writing, through her “interior dwelling places.” She managed to extract what is real about the fantasy that “the Ideal exists”—i.e., its foundational component, indispensable to the constitution of the human psyche. Yes, that’s it, I’m talking about the inner life of our contemporaries, about you and me, about humankind as it emerged from the last Ice Age and progressed through a civilizing process that climaxed with the cult of the dead, the dead Father, his authority and his love, in short, the fantasy of the Beyond. Now, this psyche and this humanity, ours, are in crisis, increasingly sapped and enervated, clones or no clones, take a look at American Idol if you don’t believe me; or else they are exploding in the night courtesy of the arsonists in our suburbs and elsewhere. As for so-called atheists like me, we are just as susceptible to other, mostly violent, delusions, if you care to examine our intellectual pretensions or the latest trendy cop series more closely…Before different psychical lives or different humans arrive to populate this globalized earth, let’s try, at least, to understand the metamorphoses undergone over the centuries by a believing humanity and the experience of faith.
Teresa in particular did not succeed in flipping the fantasy that “the Ideal exists” into a caustic guffaw at the very notion of idealization, as Cervantes did, and relatively few others, for instance Voltaire and Nietszche, in their way. But she did convert her belief into a relentless investigation of the recesses of the soul capable of idealizing, or of loving, if you prefer. That was (past tense) capable of idealizing and loving?
Cervantes blew faith and love to smithereens of derision, not abolishing them, you’re right, but regaling humans with the gift of disabused pleasure. Whereas Teresa uses faith and love in order to recondition the belief- and love-producing machine. She ventures as far as possible along the route that beckons the person who doesn’t give up on believing, the person who talks as a way of sharing, and who loves in order to act. With all the benefits and all the follies involved in this expectant belief, and while describing it with disturbing, seductive subtlety.
But Cervantes’s attitude won out in the end, didn’t it? Look around! What’s left of that universe of faith and love, what’s left of the windmills? Chimeras, TV soap operas for avid women and their partners. Or God’s madmen, the suicide bombers who pretend not to realize that He (the Almighty
, the Master, the One and Only, the True, the Beyond) has mutated into pure spectacle, and twist their alleged faith into murderous nihilism. Dogmatic, moralistic, terrifying and terrified, or just as often insubstantial, drunk on images, there they are, with no knowledge of Teresa, Cervantes, or any of a few others, bent on deleting our memories, too.
Still, dare I suggest those dangerous maniacs of the virtual Absolute might not really be so scary? Cervantes’s laughter will get the better of them. Their fundamentalist rage would be defused if they just read him instead of burning flags, embassies, and Danish cartoons. And he could detoxify the rest. I know, there’s a long way to go—fanatics are no good at reading, or laughing, and the inner halls of my nuanced Teresa would be way above their heads. What would it take? Nobody knows, not even me. Missionaries? Believers? Educators? Committed people opening up spaces for reading and writing? People daring to analyze the “fundament,” to renew it? Maybe some of that will happen eventually.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking for Teresa to be dusted off as a model for the third millennium. I’m only saying that she encourages us to think again about the place of ideal Love in the soul—or if you prefer the psyche—of the talking beasts we are. She invites us to open up the interior castle of our need to believe, death-dealing and lifesaving at once. Can we manage without such a place? And who’s “we”? Stammering humanoids with embryonic psyches, currently unable to be contained by any family, tribal, or ideological refuge whatsoever. We’re all suffering from a disease of the ideal, all nihilists. It’s because this species of humanoid surrounds us with waves of globalized fanaticism, or is lying in wait for us inside, that I’m so beguiled by Teresa’s story. And that’s why I persist in my efforts to decipher her embrace of the Other.
Teresa, My Love Page 46
