Page 72 - Nada temas, dice ella

creature, water dethrones God of
his suprasensitive status and brings him down, if not to the role of gar- dener, than at least to that of the cos- mic element I taste and that nourishes me, touches me and that I touch.
Husserl said that ‘fiction constitutes the vital element of phenomenology as it does for all eidetic sciences’.4 From this we can gather that fiction ‘fertil- izes’ abstractions by using rich and exact sensorial elements transposed into clear images. Never perhaps has this value of fiction as a vital element for the ‘understanding of eternal truths’ been as justified as in Teresa’s use of water when putting her prayer states into words on paper. Hers is
a telling example of this quest for sublimation through words aspiring to re-sexualize by merging with the experience of regression-amorous exaltation.
To put it differently, the word water not only represents the encoun- ter of the Earth-woman saint with her heaven, but in the state of prayer, Teresa immerses herself above the barrier of word-signs in the psyche- soma. It’s through her fiction (better and differently than with her epilepsy) that she escapes the ‘powers’ (under- standing, memory, imagination). Thus, that which remains ‘words’ is no longer a signifier-signified separated from referent- things, as is customary with words-signs in an exterior real- ity. On the contrary, prayer, which
amalgamates the ego and the Other, also amalgamates the word and the thing: the speaking subject undergoes, or nearly undergoes a catastrophic mutism, the self ‘loses itself’, ‘liquefies’, ‘becomes delirious’. Half way between these two extremes, a thin membrane rather than a bar separates the word from the thing: they contaminate each other and alternately dissociate. The self loses itself and finds itself again, devastated and jubilant, between two waters. Collapse on one side, rapture on the other: the fluidity of the aquat- ic touch accurately translates this alternation.
Teresa plunges into her maternal language as if it were a bath consub- stantial with the experience of engen- dering a new self nestled in the Other, a self who loves the Other. This self absorbs the Other who in turn ab- sorbs the self. Water imposes itself as the absolute, inevitable fiction of the amorous touch: I am touched by the touch of someone else who touches me and whom I touch. Water: fiction of
the decanting between the being that is other and unspeakable intimacy, between Heaven and the vagina, the exterior and the internal organ.
Here water is neither a compari- son nor a metaphor but both at once, with one playing off the other like symmetrical opposites. There is even a cancelling out of water with fire and vice-versa, in a stack-up of contradic- tory images, losing the stream of logic
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