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

20. “¡Ay, qué vida tan amarga / Do no se goza el Señor!” These two lines at the start of verse 5 in this poem reminds us of Plotinus’s “Leave everything!” (aphele panta), associated with Aristotle’s contemplation (theoria) and understood as a “denuding” or detachment, as well as a surpassing of all representation (aphairesis), and Gelassenheit (abandonment) in Angelus Silesius’s sense; see Selections from The Cherubinic Wanderer, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1978), 1, 22.

21. Poems, “Aspirations Toward Eternal Life,” CW 3:375.

22. Life, 20–21, CW 1:172–90.

6. HOW TO WRITE SENSIBLE EXPERIENCE

1. The Spanish title Libro de la Vida (Book of the Life), was given by the Augustinian friar Luis de León: “The book of the life of Mother Teresa of Jesus and account of some of the graces she received from God, written by her own hand by order of her confessor for whom it was intended.” The autograph manuscript is stored in the library of the Escorial Palace, at the original request of Philip II. It goes by the title: “Book of Mother Teresa of Jesus written in her own hand with the approval of Fr. Domingo Báñez, her confessor, the Prime Chair at Salamanca.”

2. The first draft of The Way of Perfection was completed in 1564 and reworked in subsequent years. Teresa revised the text in 1569, and it was ready for publication by 1579 under this title, chosen by her. However it was not to appear until 1583, after her death, in a highly “corrected” version. It was republished by Fr. Gratian in 1585. In 1588, at last, Luis de León oversaw the release of the original as revised by Teresa.

3. Chapters 1–20 of the Foundations were written in 1573; the next, 21–27, date from 1580; and 28–31 were completed in 1583. Ana de Jesús and Jerome Gratian were responsible for the first publication, in 1610, of the “Book of the Foundations of the Discalced Carmelite sisters, written by the Mother Foundress Teresa of Jesus.”

4. Life, 13:15, CW 1:129–30.

5. VI D, 5:3, CW 2:387.

6. Life, 11:9–10, CW 1:114–15.

7. Life, 11:16, CW 1:118.

8. Way, 19:4, CW 2:108.

9. Life, 11:6, CW 1:112–13.

10. Life, 11:7, CW 1:113.

11. Dominique de Courcelles, Langage mystique et avènement de la modernité (Paris: Champion, 2003), 189–294.

12. Estéban García-Albea, Teresa de Jesús, una ilustre epiléptica o una explicación epilogenética de los éxtasis de la Santa (Madrid: Huerga y Fierro, 2002); Pierre Vercelletto, Expérience et état mystique. La maladie de sainte Thérèse d’Avila (Paris: Éditions La Bruyère, 2000).

13. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, § 70, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931), 201.

14. Life, 20:2–4, CW 1:173–74.

15. Life, 16:4, CW 1:149.

16. Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises, trans. Stacy Diamond (1860; New York: Citadel, 1998): “You endow the tree with your passions and desires; its capriciously swaying limbs become your own, so that soon you yourself are the tree” (51); “cause and effect, subject and object, mesmerizer and somnambulist” (25).

17. J.-L. Chrétien, L’appel et la réponse (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1992), 125.

18. Way, 19:3–5, CW 2:107–9.

19. Way, 19:4, CW 2:108.

20. Way, 19:6–7, CW 2:110.

21. Way, 19:8, CW 2:111.

22. Way, 19:13, CW 2:113.

23. Way, 19:9–10, CW 2:111.

24. Way, 19:10–12, CW 2:112.

25. IV D, 2:2, CW 2:323.

26. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, trans. Edward Henry Whinfield, 1883; http://therubaiyat.com/whinfield (accessed May 14, 2011).

27. Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Henry W. Longfellow, Paradiso, canto 19 (London: Capella, 2006), 337.

28. Pierre Ronsard, “To His Mistress,” trans. A. S. Kline, 2004; http://poetryintranslation.com (accessed May 14, 2011).

29. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 2, scene 1.

30. Charles Baudelaire, “To Her Who Is Too Gay,” in Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire, trans. Geoffrey Wagner (New York: Grove, 1974).

31. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Epitaph,” trans. Erik Bendix, http://movingmoment.com/poetry/Rilke'sEpitaph.htm (May 14, 2011).

32. Philippe Sollers, Fleurs. Le grand roman de l’érotisme floral (Paris: Hermann Littérature, 2006).

7. THE IMAGINARY OF AN UNFINDABLE SENSE