Page 69 - Nada temas, dice ella

of angel who seem to be all afire. They must be those who are called cheru- bim ... In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my en- trails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, nor will one’s soul be content with anything less than God. It is not bodily pain, but spiritual, though the body has a share in it – indeed, a great share. But, when this pain of which I am now speaking begins, the Lord seems to transport the soul and to send it into an ecstasy, so that it cannot possibly suffer or have any pain because it immediately begins to experience fruition.’1
Her ‘torture’ is ‘bliss’, and this amalgam of pleasure and auto-erotic pain unites in a spiritual jouissance or ‘fruition’ as she says, a kind of mas- sive masturbation well aware of the ‘corporal form’ with lips hemmed in the ideals of the Bible and the Gospels. In this era radiating with the likes of Erasmus, the ‘Illuminated’, converted Jews and numerous women called alumbrados, the Humanity of Christ was in the air. Teresa’s ecstasies are composed of words, images, physical
sensations, mind and body, body and mind, all without distinction: ‘the body has a share in it: indeed, a great share’. The experience is also dual: ‘object’
of her transports, the Carmelite mys- tic is no less a ‘subject’ as well: her graces and raptures are rendered with astonishing lucidity. Lost and found again, inside and out, and vice-versa, Teresa is a fluid, a constant streaming of water which is her element: ‘I have a particular attraction to this element and I have observed it with close at- tention.’ Her thought as well takes the form of a flowing metaphor.
The enigma of Teresa is less in her raptures than in the narrative she makes of them: do the raptures only exist in these narratives? Regardless of whether they were in fact bouts of epilepsy, what interests us is the filter- ing of shock, of the release of drives, through the sieve of Catholic code,
in Teresa’s Castilian language. It was this that both allowed for her biologic- al survival and secured her place in our cultural memory. She is complete- ly conscious of this: ‘making this fic- tion (hacer esta ficción) to be given for understanding’, wrote the Carmelite in Way of Perfection (28: 10).
Regarding Teresa’s ‘fiction’, I will first examine the state her religion called ecstatic and that I would qualify as a regression to what Winnicott referred to as the ‘psyche-soma’. I will then look at her use of the water metaphor, which I will explain is not
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