Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

TERESA’S VOICE, doubtful, quizzical. The understanding is one of the soul’s faculties, and is apt to be flighty. Flighty, yes, that’s the word, like a tortolito.…The understanding is like an inexperienced novice, or a smitten turtledove; it takes flight in so abstract a fashion that nothing embodies it. The imagination, for its part, cannot be confused with it, but takes from it the cue to soar up; since God alone can hold it fast, one is misled into thinking it detached from the body. “I have seen…that the faculties of my soul were occupied and recollected in God while my mind on the other hand was distracted. This distraction puzzled me.…The pain is felt when suspension does not accompany the prayer.…But it would be very bad if I were to abandon everything on account of this obstacle. And so it isn’t good for us to be disturbed by our thoughts, nor should we be concerned.…Let us be patient and endure them for the love of God since we are likewise subject to eating and sleeping without being able to avoid it, which is quite a trial.”⁹⁶ (Touches her arms, breast, stomach, then relaxes, exhausted.) Attached or detached? To the flesh or to the Lord? To each of them alternately and together? I love the imagination when it takes flight from the body, with the body, when it dives deep into our entrails and carries them away with it. I can feel it splitting from the senses, becoming purified in the Lord. And I prefer it to that other flighty thought, unsupported and disembodied — abstract thought. “Porque, como el entendimiento es una de las potencias del alma, hacíaseme recia cosa estar tan tortolito a veces, y lo ordinario vuela el pensamiento de presto, que sólo Dios puede atarle, cuando nos ata a Sí de manera que parece estamos en alguna manera desatados de este cuerpo. Yo veía, a mi parecer, las potencias del alma empleadas en Dios y estar recogidas con Él, y por otra parte el pensamiento alborotado: traíame tonta.”⁹⁷

(Exhalation, accelerated heartbeat, repose.)

TERESA’S VOICE, getting feebler, but firm, without trembling. Gratian maintains it’s a typical female fallacy to confuse imagination with the movement of thought. Ribera, by contrast, lets me develop my intuition about the existence of an imagination in which thought is fulfilled ad infinitum. One day Sylvia Leclercq will write that I am at the heart of the mystery of a sublimation that “journeys itself” between the instincts and the senses. But I say: a castle compartmented by transparent membranes, translucent walls, between the teeming of poisonous vermin below and the flashing of the central jewel. Between what seems to be me, and the God inside me. (Unseeing eyes, as in the Velázquez.) Ah, Sisters, only imagination can bring us close to that desire for the Other within, while at the same time releasing us from that hot brazier. I am leaving you now, so you’ll just have to read me. One final word before I depart. You mustn’t be afraid to play, to play with that thought in motion. Our worries and our fears don’t come from movement, but from a want of light. Inside us a whole world exists, and just as it’s not in our power to halt the movements of the heavens, swirling at prodigious speeds, neither can we stop our racing minds.⁹⁸

SYLVIA LECLERCQ’S VOICE. Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, 1, verses seven to nine: “Because in drawing near to its desire / Our intellect ingulphs itself so far, / That after it the memory cannot go.”⁹⁹ Is Teresa the Spanish Dante, as Meister Eckhart was the German Dante?

TERESA’S VOICE, her face in the painting eclipses the polyhedron. Let’s play, Sisters! Play, my girls! To deliver yourselves unto the King and be delivered from Him, endlessly, for there is no stopping this game, this vejamen, these death throes.…Am I lucid? Let me elucidate. “My soul is completely taken up in its quiet, love, desires, and clear knowledge”;¹⁰⁰ “y claro conocimiento,” oh, yes. Listen: someone who doesn’t know how to set up the chessboard will be a bad player, and if he doesn’t know to check the opponent’s king, how will he ever checkmate it? You will frown to hear me talk of games again, because no games are allowed in this monastery. Look what kind of a Mother God gave you, skilled at such a vain pursuit!..But this game is allowed sometimes. And very soon it will be allowed more often, if we practice enough to checkmate this divine King! After that He’ll never be able to escape, and indeed He won’t want to. (Perceptibly relaxing, cheerful smile.)