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

I have tried to channel your imagination, passion, and empathetic compassion for your nun in another direction in my own exploration of the interior dwelling places of Teresa of Avila. My heroine was not spared the woes of the good sister of Longchamp and Arpajon, but she forged ahead right through them, first toward ecstasy, then into writing and action, and finally into sainthood. I spoke of the “interior dwelling places of Teresa of Avila,” but they are not only hers. They do not harbor only the pioneering audacity of an elite soul of the sixteenth century, or the ravings of certain Catholic women in any century; perhaps (following Leibniz, with deficient humility once more) Teresa’s inner mansions could be relevant to all kinds of passionate souls? Not because they share the same faith, but because such souls speak and think and are in time in a particular way. “There is a great difference in the ways one may be,” the Carmelite wrote.

To get to the bottom of religious experience a slow, interminable effort remained and remains to be made, and it always will. Your Nun initiated the process with an almighty thwack at pious hypocrisy, but it was received with bland applause, reducing your text to an institutional operation: you were not seen to be interested in religion itself, let alone in God, you were merely attacking religious “power” in relation to personal and private life. There was a reaction of denial, a refusal to dig further! And yet your polyphonous adventure, your polymorphous oeuvre meant so much more. Is it by chance that you are the only Enlightenment philosopher cited by Freud? Your Nun pulled open the secret drawers of faith. Pieces like “First Satire,” Rameau’s Nephew (my own favorite), “Conversation of a Father with His Children,” and “Conversation of a Philosopher with the Maréchale of—,” attempted to explore religion’s links with the law, filiation, and parenthood. Delving into the exquisite refinements and treasures of perversity lodged within bodies and souls with, around, and despite the realities of servitude and despotism, you continued to construct the bridge that leaps from Teresa’s ecstasies (via Bernini, Tintoretto, and Tiepolo) to the passions of those modern monsters, the men and women of today, balanced aloft on the stilts of incorporated time, à la Proust, or dispersed into kaleidoscopic shards à la Picasso.

Teresa leads me through that labyrinth where the present has no meaning unless it recollects the inaugural moment and re-engenders it; where the now is only of interest insofar as it continually re-founds what came before, like Teresa does when she places Solomon’s Bride inside the body of a woman praying to Jesus. This woman passes the baton to Bernini, who passes it on to Molly Bloom. Let us walk a little further in La Madre’s company. I am trying to work through the tangled mazes you abhorred with a patience I hope to make as incisive as your own sardonic passion. Wounding or tiresome I may be, and yet somewhat appeased, I hope. And if so, it will be thanks to your preparatory spadework.

NEITHER RHENO-FLEMISH, NOR A QUIETIST

Did I say patience? Am I not rather caught, with this great Teresa, in the turmoil of a transference—that again, always that! — which I am trying to assume with whatever vigilance I still have? Behind my curiosity about this saint, what really fascinates me is the dynamic of the loving bond itself. It preexists this or that individual along with whatever objects of transference may present themselves in the course of the person’s lifetime, for it is by the grace of the transference upon my parents, which founded my psychic life, that I think and therefore I am. “I have found out that you were less dear to me than my passion,” wrote the Portuguese nun to the French officer who had forsaken her.¹⁵ You will understand, Mister Philosopher, that if I am not content with thinking up equations but ask myself: “What causes me to think?” then I am still preoccupied by that foundational passion. So I am not about to close down my dialogue with my roommate, Maître, and now you know why you are its last witness here. How could I interrogate the original transference without moving backward through the battles you fought on behalf of the freedom of bodies and souls, the struggles you bequeathed to us, which are now mine? Who am I? Who is she? What is she looking for?

Who are you, Teresa? A garden irrigated by four waters, a fluid castle open to infinity with seven permeable “dwelling places,” an inexhaustible writer, a dauntless warrior, a languid lover sighing for “more!” under Bernini’s caress? A pitiful epileptic or a woman of power? A Carmelite cloistered in hopeless delusion or a modern, more than modern, subject? Do I really have an answer, at the end of this long sojourn side by side?