The repeated new starts that characterize the trajectory of Louise B are not just psychological stages in a therapy of survival. In her borrowings from analysis, self-analysis, and, inevitably, the “intertextuality” of contemporary art, most art critics have merely seen the “subjective cures” of an idiosyncratic artist rather too involved with her own moods. But observed close up in Andrew’s video, these artistic departures don’t strike me as illustrative. Instead they seem to be generated by their own products, in an oeuvre of sudden leaps and eternal returns. In the later, more mature achievements, they manage to condense the ruptures and reprises into polymorphous geometries. Neither a cubist nor a surrealist, although bearing the marks of both “schools,” Louise B juxtaposes without breaking and links without isolating.
“I like Cells the best.” I’m only saying that because it’s a good idea to have a favorite work when approaching an artist. I’ve picked one: Cells.
These cells—whether the units that comprise a sculpture or an installation, or the actual series entitled Cells—are not impenetrable castles. They are merely embryos or shards of life, calling out to one another. Sometimes the link between them is conducted via mirrors, which like the membrane partitions that demarcate the rooms inside Teresa’s interior castle, protect the impregnable singularity of the alveoli. But there are paradoxical gangways between the enclosures: oneiric narrative threads, unthinkable and yet now peaceful anecdotes, open to the gaze.
Take Cell (You Better Grow Up), from 1993. Andrew’s lens slides as lovingly as his prose over the materials, hugs the surfaces, brushes the contours. Steel, glass, marble, ceramic, wood. Here the polyphony of textures materializes in the diversity of forms and voids. A ring of phallic cylinders, old favorites with Louise, variously erect or flabby, twist in this particular Cell like granulated substances heaped into towers, liable to blow away or to collapse. The erectile, sperm-fat Babels of earlier periods are starker here, in these twists of broken glass. Crystals pile up, spinning skyward—threatening at every moment to dwindle, thin, deflate, lured earthward, tempted to come crashing down. On another plane in the same cohabited space, three hands poke up, straight out of another era, Greek, Renaissance, or baroque. It might be a child’s two hands in an adult one, or else a man’s two hands folded in prayer, clasped by a woman’s hand, or vice versa. A glass-paned pagoda stands like a transparent hourglass counting the seconds, which this sculpture will not allow to become petrified; our participative contemplation flows through it. Light spirals over the curves of the building. Three circular, pivoting mirrors encompass these objects, mingle and dissolve them, fracture and recompose them. Not forgetting the spectators and visitors roped into the pirouette of art by these membrane-mirrors, their inner children rediscovering long-lost fantasy caves: the title reminds them that they’d better grow up. Maybe moving into one of these cells is a fine way to do it…
Andrew pours himself a drink. I remain before the screen, watching the documentary.
“Or maybe I’ll go for Topiary IV, takes up less room than the so-called Cells. Just right for my apartment on place d’Italie?” I can’t stop teasing him.
After birds, my favorite beings on earth are trees and shrubs. Like outsize flowers, not content to defy beauty but challenging the tempests of time, they seem to embody the best of human yearning. Topiary IV, from 1999, is a kind of tree-woman, the anti-mermaid par excellence. Instead of swapping her lower body for a fishtail that dreams of water, the tree-woman knows that one day her legs will give way and she’ll be on crutches before she dies. But she keeps her lower woman’s body, sporting a flimsy adolescent frock below the profusely ramifying crown. Her sap has risen, and despite her scanty foliage the tree-woman continues to beguile us with jeweled clusters along her branches. A hybrid made of steel, fabric, beads, and wood, for me this shrub is the heavenly resurrection of Beckett’s Not I. Sometimes a male or female artist, female in the present case, manages to attain the psychic plasticity that transforms a failing body into a blossoming tree.
But Teresa does that too, Andrew, wait! I haven’t got there yet! Let’s see more of your Louise meanwhile.
Oh, this sculpted shrub is nothing like the flowering cherry of the teenager’s body, and yet its bunches of emerald, raspberry, or purple beads caught in the looking glass of time have a vitality that reminds me irresistibly of the freshness of the cherry trees under the Great Wall of China, where I stood in admiration, dreaming I was pregnant. As Andrew and I gaze at it now, the Topiary body seems to be clad in an elegant white satin shift or a teenager’s nightgown, but the body’s missing a leg, she can’t stand up, she needs a crutch, the artist makes no bones about it. And yet for all its dry branches and trunk, the organism grows tall, sprouting and budding—if not into juicy flavors, then into emerald gems. The seduction of crystallization. And what wonderful details: the arms of the artist-arbor, snaking out like the limbs of a Hindu divinity, are full of surprises! Two garnet-colored raspberries, when we expected pink! Plus, I ask you, what’s that sort of orange wineskin doing in a female head that’s a leafless tree tipped with blossoms? Is it a nest for butterflies or caterpillars? Or, given that black hole it’s got, is it a watchful eye, mocking so much assurance on the part of a woman artist, even a runaway one?
At the end of In Search of Lost Time, Proust saw his characters mounted on stilts. They had grown because their bodies incorporated the time of years and turned it into space. Only one of them didn’t age, Odette, the cocotte, associated in the writer’s mordant imagination with his own mother, how blasphemous is that! Odette (and/or the mother) stops time inside her: men can age or grow, she’ll remain in bloom until the end, in spite of everything.9 The femininity of Louise B, outside time in its own way, is not afraid to stand tall like a tree of life in defiance of death, laughing at death. Teresa’s the same, which is odd for a Carmelite, isn’t it? You’ll see…
Andrew has finished his whiskey and gets back into gear, clicking on this and that, coming up with more surprises.
“Look at that! I’ll take Seven in Bed, how’s that for a Tantric dream?”
What does he see in these lewdly entwined rag dolls? A three-way orgy mixed with a four-way swinger’s party, at least three of the figures have two heads…Bisexuality, incest, and betrayal. The hurts inflicted on Louise B, in childhood or early youth, are apparent here in rose-tinted version. Are the nestling bodies deceased, aligned in a sarcophagus and already petrified by the lava of memory, that bestows innocence but does not purify? Or are they floating in a state of weightlessness, in some ultra-ecstasy beyond sexual pleasure, in postwrestling reconciliation? Human puppets either way, makeshift stuffed bolsters, tacky and ugly, touching and touched. Evil has not disappeared into some banality or other, but suffering has been staunched by the urge to hug; touch, that most essential of the senses, can be seen and felt in this “sculpture.” Does it posit the victory of the breast over every other kind of eroticism, exhibited, assumed, and dealt with at last? Not really. It represents the same search for the origins of space (the metaphor of our desires, according to Louise B) that her work tirelessly inquires into—in ricochets, with no end in sight.
Teresa veiled her body, she had no choice, modesty and faith required it. But the fiction enacted in her foundations stripped her bare, embraced the Spouse, and diffused their caresses as felt by her—a majestic solitary orgy, a polytopical, kaleidoscopic vitality—through centuries to come. And in all innocence. If Andrew doesn’t want to know, that’s his problem. From the heights of the Tate Modern he looks pityingly down on me, stuck God knows where with my saint. He only has eyes for Louise B, who’s old enough to be his mother or grandmother, as if I cared. We all have our fictions.
It is fate. “It lies not in our power to love or hate…” He hands me a glass of claret, closes the computer, kisses my cleavage, and pulls me toward the bed.
Chapter 28
“GIVE ME TRIALS, LORD; GIVE ME PERSECUTIONS”
Comfort me
with apples…
Song of Solomon
A total transformation into God, as what Teresa went through—albeit momentary and climaxing with a translucent castle—is still a living sculpture carved out with blows of programmed death. Andrew admires the edifice and the haste; my pleasure lies in detecting the survival that germinates in the work of death. Ah, the space-time of women! As a child I never cared for snowmen, I used to dig with frozen fingers into the thick, crisp crust in order to free the snowdrops. There had to be some.
To merge with the murdered Lord until the husband-Father becomes a brother-husband, a double, an alter ego, is more than a passion for Teresa, it’s her way to be. To suffer through and for Jesus is hard, but given her complete confidence in His existence, His approval, and her future recompense in the form of His eternal grace, this hardship is clearly preferable to unsatisfied desire and the want of love that damages health as a symptom of hysteria. Teresa knows it and spells it out: “I am my usual self, for trials are health and medicine for me.”1 The tribulations prompted by the fantasy of reciprocal love relieve her somatic conversions, migraines, and convulsions; the heartaches of love are always “trials,” but far from being experienced as maladies, they are like vehicles of healing to her. In the spiritual life, “everything seems to be a heavy burden, and rightly so, because it involves a war against ourselves.”2
All trials and all persecutions remind her of those Jesus endured, so they can only be glorious. This narcissistic reward, as well as a phallic assumption into identification with the Lord in His troubles, is felt in the short and long term as intense pleasure: “Give me trials, Lord; give me persecutions.”3 Teresa longs for these with complete sincerity, before she gets to reap the still more gratifying rewards of the art of victory. But since the duty of humility most often forbids her to articulate her satisfaction, not to say her personal glorification, all her pleasure will be in “somehow imitating the laborious life that Christ lived.”4 Being without self, her jouissance derives from the Other: entirely projected into the Other, she is the Other’s protecting, saving, nonperson.
At that point a further step is possible: the praying woman gives herself leave to consider the pact with the ideal Father as a matrimonial contract, or rather a patrimonial and indeed notarial one, under the rules of a kind of universal community of assets (“what is Yours is mine”). This alliance between proprietors confers on Teresa a far higher dignity than the unlikely “honor” she had struggled for hitherto. La honra is only vanquished by virtue of this most seigneurial (con señorío) marital agreement, and the “friendship” of the divine Father, by whose side she walks for the duration of the Passion, can be received as comfort and more, as a rightful property:
And the Lord said: “You already know of the espousal between you and Me [ya sabes el desposorio que hay entre ti y Mí]. Because of this espousal, whatever I have is yours. So I give you all the trials and sufferings I underwent, and by these means, as with something belonging to you, you can make requests of My Father [con esto puedes pedir a mi Padre como cosa propia]. Although I had heard we share these [somos participantes de esto], now I had heard it in such a different way that it seemed I felt great dominion [pareció había quedado con gran señorío]. The friendship in which this favor was granted me cannot be described here.…since then I look very differently upon what the Lord suffered, as something belonging to me—and it gives me great comfort [como cosa propia, y dame gran alivio].”5
Extolling the rights, duties, and benefits of suffering, your most radical passages employ the pronoun “she,” my exiled Teresa. Who is this she? The human soul? The female soul? The Bride in the Song of Songs? It’s your own soul you observe, Teresa, but from so close that its/your contours are blurred, there is no more I, I is overlaid by her, absorbed in her. But you are not erased by this osmosis into the nonperson, you grow bigger by it, and create another, impersonal I; “I” becomes a nonperson in the Christian faith you hoist to its zenith by ceaselessly transcending yourself in your ideal Him, until you become Him. Although you call her “she,” it’s a selfless, sexless “I” that rejoices in being the Other in you, in all senses and meanings, burned away in a wholesale cleansing that is itself re-sexualized. By “putting a cross” over your person, you are not interring yourself, as the ingenuous might think; you are exiling yourself “in majesty.” Among apples, as in the Song of Solomon: “Comfort me with apples.” “Asking to be sustained doesn’t seem to me to involve a request for death but for life and the desire to serve in some way the One to whom she owes so much.”6
The transference that transmutes suffering into fruitful jubilation comes at a cost: carnal fulfillment must be renounced, and persecution endured, although you exaggerate the latter at times, as though every moment of your life were a battle. Exhausting, no doubt—but a great deal more bracing than the repose of ennui between bouts of somatization. The benefits of outwitting your harassers far outweigh the drawbacks of being harassed: you obtain the reunion with the Great Other, which not only satisfies an incestuous desire to possess the Father, but also promises the grace of your metamorphosis through the Word that He is, into Eternity. By your work as a founder and re-founder, you taunt the passage of time with spaces of rebirth that are secluded and yet noticeable, incisive. You broaden the course of the world; your way of being, your deeds and your writing drive it outside of itself; with the Other and like the Other, you are outside time.
This surplus jouissance (plus de jouir) in your total transference, which nonbelievers regard as fanciful and affords scant consolation even to regular believers, becomes a physical reality for you, Teresa: the joy of the union with the Beloved is so powerful that it obliterates the perception of ill-being and transforms it into continual jubilation, perpetual acquiescence.
Having reached this fork in the road of psychic experience, you choose neither of the two paths available; but you definitely tilt toward the second.
The first is mortification. Your guilt at transgressing the prohibition (of incest, of carnality), magnified by and through your identification with the sacrificed Father-Son, turns you into a dab hand with scourges and hair shirts. You flagellate yourself diligently, nothing special, until you add an extra twist: your niece Teresita swears she’s seen you rubbing nettles on the welts. There, how’s that for pain! Malicious tongues, out of envy or cynicism, wax ironic on the disinfectant properties of nettles. Even if you knew of this, I doubt there have been many volunteers for such a biting balm. Fasting days are prescribed by the liturgical calendar, but one is welcome to fast more, and you often do. In addition, as an intermittent but proud anorexic, you make yourself throw up by tickling the back of your throat with a goose feather—a quill too far! But that’s the kind of refinement a nun thinks up when competing with the sisters. You want to be the first, the best, the only one to merit the Other’s grace.
For twenty years, and more intensely from 1591 to 1597, more than 1,500 people testified before the Sacred Congregation of Rites for the Counter- Reformation Church to beatify, and then canonize, Teresa of Avila. After death her sanctity rested upon the basis of this collective memory, detailed in the numerous depositions whose accuracy was no doubt tinged with subjectivity. But the reports concurred on one point: Teresa inflicted appalling injuries on herself. “There was nothing she liked more than to martyr her body for the sake of our Lord” (Ana de la Trinidad); “Her haircloth is made of sharp-edged patches to cut the flesh into bleeding wounds” (María de San Ángel); “Her body is covered in sores caused by the scourge and the hair shirt” (Ana de San Bartolomé, her nurse, who testified that even when she was old and sick, Teresa went in for savage penances); “This was a woman who disciplined herself so often that her confessors grew concerned; owing to her constant use of the cilice, her skin was permanently raw, despite her frequent illnesses and convulsive fits” (Beatriz de Jesús); “This torture was so excessive that the confessors often had to intervene” (Alonso de los Ángeles). But Teresa p
ersisted, even when her sores became infected: “The wounds on her body grew empoisoned and turned into pus-filled sacs” (Ana de la Madre de Dios). The precision of these accounts suggests they were genuine observations, not the histrionic hyperbole of zealous companions trying to boost her chances.7
Nevertheless, you frowned on the reckless mortifications of friends such as Mariano de San Benito, and even on John of the Cross’s elaborate taste for pain. Nor had you any sympathy for women who are always miserable, plaintive, and ailing; you hated any such weakness in yourself. It’s one thing to take care of nuns who are poorly: the Constitutions prescribe it; but too much melancholy is unacceptable. Sisters, beware! Even love, supposed to be the universal remedy, often induces a lamentable mushiness.
“But I thought Love was our God, Madre?” simpers María Bautista. She is a crooked soul who cannot help being disingenuous and will ultimately prove treacherous.
“Certainly it is, but mind: it must be virile love.” Teresa stares at her with eagle eye. “I would not want you, my daughters, to be womanish in anything, nor would I want you to be like women but like strong men.”8
“Like men?!” Cheeky scrap, either pretending to be dim or else asking to be punished.
“The soul understands that so as to reign more sublimely, the only true way is that of suffering. You know that much, María Bautista, don’t you?”9
The unfortunate girl didn’t expect such a put-down. Had she forgotten that the truly virile way was to be put to death? That the worst humiliations, when endured in place of the Man, are glorious? Her initiation has only just begun.
Teresa doesn’t let go yet. With regal poise she seizes a rotten cucumber from the table and proffers it to her insolent cousin, transfixing her with the same predatory stare.
Teresa, My Love Page 51
