Julia Kristeva - Teresa, My Love - An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

Hail Teresa, borderless woman, physical hysterical erotic epileptic, made word, made flesh, who unravels inside and outside herself, tides of images without pictures, tumults of words, cascades of florescence, a thousand tongues listening out for whom for what, listening to time etched in stone, eardrum larynx cry out write out, night and brightness, too much body yet disembodied, beyond matter, empty gaping matrix throbbing for the Beloved ever-present and yet never there, but there’s presence and presence , His in her, hers in Him, sensed felt buried, sensation without perception, dart or glass, pierced or transparent, that is the question, transverberated instead, and again inundated, La Madre being the most virile of monks, 33most canny of the herders of souls, a veritable twin of Christ, she is He, He is she, the Truth is me, or Him in the deepest part of me, me Teresa, a successful paranoiac, God is myself and what of it, what’s the matter? A free-for-all, who can beat that? Certainly not Schreber, not even Freud, awfully serious chap from Vienna, gloomy rather, a woman finds it easier to talk about these things, what things, well, her of course, her beside herself, obviously, in the throes of dread and delight, little butterfly expiring with indelible joy because Jesus has become it or rather her, butterfly-Jesus, woman-Jesus, I know someone who though she’s not a poet composes poems without trying, novels that are poems with an extra something, extra movements, I wonder whether it is really I, Teresa, speaking, the path that is pain, the Nothingness of everything, that everything which is nothing, do what is in you to do, but gaily, be cheerful, my daughters, for twenty years I vomited every morning, now it’s in the evenings and it’s harder to bring up, I have to provoke it with a feather or some such thing, like a baby a baby girl if you prefer latched on to the Other’s teat, mystic or is it spiritual marriage, young John of the Cross 34says there’s a difference, I don’t really see it, more like two sides of a coin, or like the Song of Songs, as always as ever she sings off-key but she writes true and carries on founding her convents, her girls, her Church, her own gestation, her game, a game of chess, games are allowed, oh yes, even in a cloister, especially in a cloister, God loves us to be playful, believe me, girls, Jesus loved women, what are the Doctors so scared of in us, yes, checkmate to God too, oh yes, Teresa or Molly Bloom, I am numb at last, I flow into the water of the garden, flow on by, all we do is feel pleasure, souls that love can see all the way into atoms, that’s right, for yes is all there is to souls like mine, mine sees as far as the infinite atoms that are atoms of love, the philosophers don’t have a clue, they become scholars, they recoil from your sensations, the best of them are mathematicians, tamers of infinity, and yet it’s as simple as that, oh yes, metaphors mutating into metamorphoses, or possibly the other way around, oh yes, Teresa, my sister, invisible, ecstatic, eccentric, beside yourself in you, beside myself in me, yes, Teresa, my love, yes.

It’s Christmas. People are buying trees, foie gras, oysters, gifts. Some will go to midnight Mass, millions are already clogging the freeways, apparently London is paralyzed by the weather (shame that the one destination that could tempt me is off limits due to global warming); there’s been a deadly pile-up in Gironde, three young people carjacked by a drunk in the 13th arrondissement, two dead, one critically injured. I’m staying put. The MPH ladies are of one mind for the vacation: they are trooping off for some thalassotherapy in Ouarzazate. For some unfathomable reason Morocco at Xmas is a magnet for the political class (“Of a right-wing bent,” my friend Dr. Marianne Baruch points out) and for women of a certain age.

Marianne is going as well, not looking forward to it much — but the alternative is “Not been there, not done that,” already the favorite expression of this Prozac-popping chronic depressive and proud of it. Ouarzazate wins: “Cheaper than Biarritz or Quiberon, and sure to be sunny, you know?” I do.

“So I guess Mme Leclercq will be staying put, as is her wont?” Our psychiatrist’s intent sympathy is trained on me. I must be looking even more oblivious than is my wont; Marianne is fishing for a smile.

“Don’t worry, I’m fine.”

“I’m not the kind who says, ‘it’s nothing, just a woman drowning.’”

She doesn’t miss a trick, that one. When Dr. Baruch wants to please me, she fires off one of those Exocets I myself taught her to use, in this case a line from La Fontaine. We are supposed to chortle together. Not me so much, because I don’t agree with her in the slightest. For the moment Teresa is my entertainment, she’s a great deal more engaging than anything else, including thalassotherapy, and since my one vice is curiosity I’m currently devouring all I can get hold of that has to do with my saint in particular and mystics in general. I feel well within my rights to fire back: “I’m not drowning, darling, I’m allowing myself to be seduced!”

But I’ve underestimated her again.

“Not Bruno, is it?” she says, with a censorious sniff.

Well I never! Has she overheard a phone call, or gone into my e-mails? Unlikely, it’s not her style. Did she spot that old exhibition catalog of works by the Beguines, which Zonabend found in an antique bookshop and gave to me the other day? 1“For company on your journey toward Teresa. Love, Bruno.” That surplus word “love” did not escape my notice. But Marianne can’t have seen the catalog or its inscription; I keep it at home, where I consult it religiously.

Got it: Bruno had Freud’s complete works delivered to me at the MPH address. The standard edition in English, twenty-four volumes accompanied by an “affectionate” note. A generous if somewhat ostentatious gift, and a peculiar one, because not only do I read English poorly, the MPH is also growing increasingly cognitivist, in line with the rest of our globalized planet, and disdainful of psychoanalysis. Zonabend decided to defy the international trend, he claimed, simply to “please me.”

Point noted. I got the message, and couldn’t help feeling a consequent twinge. My colleagues rapidly forgot about the anachronistic offering, except, as I now realize, for Dr. Baruch. In love and therefore jealous, my friend saw the whole thing in a flash, well before I woke up to the pickle I was in with my funny old publisher. Who has, sure enough, become rather more than that in recent days.

“Oh, stop fantasizing!” I stand up, to cut the conversation short. “Happy Christmas, happy hydrotherapy, happy New Year! Send me a card I might get before Easter!” I give her a warm, close hug, but I can sense that she’s not fooled.

Did I really seduce Bruno with my talk of saints? Or does mystical seduction itself make straight for its human target, publishers included, without need of assistance from me? Having lost, as the reader will recall, my faith in human relationships, I am inclined to favor the second hypothesis. Be that as it may, Bruno is a changed man since I mentioned Teresa to him. The Beguines catalog, the complete Freud; my middle-aged publisher is getting adventurous.