Page 68 - Nada temas, dice ella

her by making her hurt to the bone, is transformed into a loving father: Teresa succeeds where Shreber fails. God no longer judges her, or at least less and less because he loves her.
The visions translate this saving al- chemy. First of all, the vision is only
a severe face disapproving of its overly offhand visitors; then it even becomes a toad that fattens without stop (per- haps an hallucination about the sex
of the visitor?); finally, it turns out to be the Man of Pain himself, such as the nun saw him in the statue of Christ in the convent’s courtyard: a martyred man whose sufferings she delightfully identifies with.
Delighted is the word: Teresa is at last united with ‘Christ as man’ (Cristo como hombre) and she appropriates him ‘certain that the Lord was inside me’ (dentro de mí). ‘I could not then doubt that he was in me or that I was myself lost in him’ (yo toda engolfada en él) (Life 10: 1). The senses thus exalted end up cancelling themselves out: the soul is incapable of ‘work’, of anything but ‘abandon’, an exquisite passivation in bliss: ‘One doesn’t feel anything, we take pleasure without knowing what we’re taking pleasure in’ (18: 1); ‘de- prived even of feeling’ (18: 4), ‘a kind of delirium’ (18: 13). It is a matter of the positive and negative, of jouissance and extreme pain, always the two together or alternating. The body is crushed and exiled in a fainting fit where the psyche is in turn shattered outside of
the self, before the soul is able to be- gin the narration of this state of ‘loss’. Teresa first tries out this narrative on her panicked and/or charmed confes- sors before writing it down and before they, Dominicans or Jesuits, author- ized her to write. Later they insisted that she do so. The acme of these vi- sions in which all the senses fuse and participate is found in the description of the Transfixion, restored in marble by Bernini (1646) and which Lacan delighted in. I will cite it here:
‘Oh, how often, when in this state, do I remember that verse of David: Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum, which I seem to see fulfilled literally in myself! (...) When these impulses are not very strong they appear to calm down a little, or, at any rate, the soul seeks some relief from them because it knows not what to do. (...) At other times the impulses are so strong that the soul is unable
to do either this or anything else. The entire body contracts and neither arm nor foot can be moved. If the subject is on his feet, he remains as though transported and cannot even breathe: all he does is to moan – not aloud, for that is impossible, but inwardly, out
of pain. It pleased the Lord that I should sometimes see the following vision. I would see beside me, on my left hand, an angel in bodily form. (...) He was not tall, but short, and very beautiful, his face so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest types
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