Desire existed before she did, and this woman knows it. Nevertheless she is consumed: a burning wound, a delightful pain. In the key of the Song of Songs, but by the hand for the first time of a European woman, pleasure unto death is conveyed with a sensual exactitude that defies decorum. Make no mistake: the fire that “carries off” the deepest part of her suggests that rather than capture the potency of the “large dart,” as in the male fantasy of the castrating female, Teresa gifts it to the angel. It is in dispossession and exile that she joins with the Other and becomes divine. In the same vein, at once a shooting star and a clap of thunder, she resumes her account in the “Sixth Dwelling Places” of The Interior Castle, her spiritual testament:
The soul dissolves with desire, and yet it doesn’t know what to ask for since clearly it thinks that its God is with it.
You will ask me: Well, if it knows this, what does it desire or what pains it? What greater good does it want? I don’t know. I do know that it seems this pain reaches to the soul’s very depths and that when He who wounds it draws out the arrow, it indeed seems, in accord with the deep love the soul feels, that God is drawing these very depths after Him. I was thinking now that it’s as though, from this fire enkindled in the brazier that is my God, a spark leapt forth and so struck the soul that the flaming fire was felt by it. And since the spark was not enough to set the soul on fire, and the fire is so delightful, the soul is left with that pain; but the spark merely by touching the soul produces that effect. It seems to me this is the best comparison I have come up with. This delightful pain — and it is not pain—is not continuous, although sometimes it lasts a long while; at other times it goes away quickly. This depends on the way the Lord wishes to communicate it, for it is not something that can be procured in any human way. But even though it sometimes lasts for a long while, it comes and goes. To sum up, it is never permanent. For this reason it doesn’t set the soul on fire; but just as the fire is about to start, the spark goes out and the soul is left with the desire to suffer again that loving pain the spark causes.4
Teresa’s body — as passionate and amorous as David’s or Esther’s, or that of the Sulamitess in the Song of Songs — falls back upon the Word. A gem of European memory, her text is steeped in Scripture, while her fiery verve rhythms a great movement in Catholic history: the baroque revolution. Might she also, unlikely as it may seem, be our contemporary?
Teresa’s “torment” is “beatific,” she experiences its ambivalence as “spiritual joy.” Such a fabulous autoeroticism, strained through Old Testament passions and sublimated by New Testament ideals, does not eschew “corporeal form.” “Christ’s humanity” was a theme of sixteenth-century piety; Erasmists, alumbrados (Spanish Illuminati), Jewish converts, and plenty of believing women embraced it. Thus Teresa’s ecstasies were immediately and indiscriminately formed of words, images, and physical sensations pertaining to both the spirit and the flesh: “the body doesn’t fail to share in some of it, and even a great deal,” she admitted. The experience, too, is a double one straightaway: while being the passive “object” of her transports, the nun is also the penetrating “subject,” who approaches “graces” and “raptures” with an astounding, unprecedented lucidity. Lost and found, inside and out and vice versa, this woman was a flux, a constant stream, and water would be the undulating metaphor of her thought: “I…am so fond of this element that I have observed it more attentively than other things.”5
I ran into her again on the cover of a Lacan Seminar, while doing my MA in psychology.6 I’d already admired Bernini’s sculpture, whose voluptuousness so stirred the susceptible Stendhal,7 in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome — long before this learned publication promised to tell us everything about female jouissance and its insatiable cry for “More!” Every summer, docile cultural tourists that we were, my small family spent vacations plowing up and down the Italian peninsula. I didn’t know very much in those days about the illustrious Carmelite nun, but at the La Procure bookshop, opposite the church of Saint-Sulpice, I had purchased her Collected Works—two onion-leafed volumes fat with unreadable prose. The kind of impulse buy you commit on the eve of a solitary weekend, instantly banished to the top of the bookcase and as soon forgotten.
I may as well tell you right away, I’m not a believer. I was christened as a matter of course, but Jesus was never a dinner-table topic at our house. My father was a general practitioner in the 13th arrondissement, and my mother taught literature at the lycée in Sceaux. Everyone worked too hard to see much of one another or to talk; it was a standard secular family of a kind very common in France, efficient and rational. Any discussions revolved, on Mother’s side, around literary prizes and the horrors of the world — much the same thing, perhaps. Whereas my father, who purported to be a left-leaning Gaullist, was forever grumbling about how France would never recover from the Algerian war, or how beggars were ruining the city center, or how some people believed in nothing but their doctor: a big mistake, as he was in a position to know. Anxious to spare Mother and me the “trials of life,” he’d made sure to give us “nothing but the best, my darlings.” That was his hobbyhorse, being more of an elitist than a republican, to put it mildly; he was proud of his success at providing for us, as he saw it. Meanwhile Mother, a fan of Colette and Françoise Sagan, was forever feeling let down by the latest Goncourt, Renaudot, or Femina book prizes, whose standards were so “dreadfully mediocre,” and pushing for the three of us to travel abroad, preferably to Italy, which was not a common destination in those days. I would listen with half an ear. I was pretty independent for an only child. It was May 1968, and my mind was elsewhere.
I love the night. I’m not an insomniac, but I’ve been regularly waking up around 2 A.M. ever since my father passed away, ten years ago this September. My mother faded away barely fifteen months after that, that’s apparently how it is when people love each other — not that love had been particularly noticeable in their case. I had never found them terribly interesting; you don’t when you’re a child, so it hadn’t occurred to me they might seem interesting to each other. Nowadays I listen to France Info and Jazz 89.9 or 88.2 as a cuddly toy substitute. Rocked by the sounds of the world, I doze without really dropping off, until the alarm clock rings.
I love the night, its furtive, underwater life of news flashes and rhythmic beats snagging memories at random, or semidreams, because a no-body opens up to nothing, and I only feel good when I’m rid of myself. Was my brain saturated by the latest dreary debate on the clash of civilizations, secularism versus head scarves? Or was it some dream that still escapes me? Anyhow, one night I fished up a word from my chance dives into the murky depths, the word “mystical,” which gave me such a stomach cramp that I rolled out of bed at first light. Where had that popped up from? I was hardly likely to have heard the word “mystical” on France Info, or Jazz point something.