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prevents them from crossing certain thresholds of power.
By creating herself through writing in a century when it is estimated that only 3% of women were literate, Teresa became her own work of art; she re- signified her own existential itinerary, taking it beyond the limits imposed by the bodies that discipline and pun- ish. She belonged to the bourgeoisie, read stories with her mother and had access to the libraries of her father and her uncle (a convert who became a hermit), and yet her awareness of her own vulnerability and her power, with all that it revealed and con- cealed, with what she said and wisely silenced is what drove her desire to create discourses that would reach
out to others and make them partici- pate in her experience.
Teresa, like Saint John of the Cross, tells us that contemplation is
a commitment to the mystery of life, to silence, to the soul prepared to receive without expecting anything in return. This receptiveness is the femi- nine dimension of all living beings, of men and women alike. Meditation and separation from discursive thought form a common substratum in Chris- tian and Sufi mysticism, in Buddhism and Vedic doctrine. Buddhism speaks of the void, Christianity of forget- ting oneself, and Hinduism of Advata as a teaching of non-duality, of the supreme identity of the self fused with the universe. These are different ways
of reaching the sublime through love and surrender, through giving up one’s own ego; a path for penetrating into the dark night of the soul.7 Surrender is acceptance of abandoning oneself to one’s loved one, of committing one- self to a teacher, as noted by the Sufi mystic Rumi,8 a teacher who doesn’t ask us to follow him but to follow ourselves. In this sense, the spiritual bond is designed to metamorphose into action, leading to the creation
of works, as we read in The Interior Castle: ‘This is the reason for prayer, my daughters, the purpose of this spiritual marriage: the birth always
of good works, good works.’9 For every being has his own vibration, his own light, his own power. Speaking of beings, Saint John of the Cross says that each in their own way sings to the God within them. From his words we may infer that we must all realise an aspect of divinity in our lives, we must all be our own works; anyone can be an artist, as Joseph Beuys would later declare.
Art is a kind of knowledge, a form of wisdom and an exercise of power. In art we must seek the presence
and the meaning that transcend the visual. We must move from visible im- ages to invisible traces, from explicit messages to hidden contents, and ask ourselves what ideological devices have prevented the emergence of great female artists or why great female writers seem to be the exception. By
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