Page 73 - Nada temas, dice ella

of these multiple inversions and can- cellations in order to create, after all is said and done, a perceptible fluidity of meaning itself. But also to contam- inate us with the psychic, physical, cosmic and stylistic dynamic of its own metamorphoses, in the sense
of Baudelaire who refused the poet’s brain comparing himself to a tree. He claimed ‘to make (it) a reality’ (Para- dis artificiels) not to be like the other but to be the other. ‘Water is not like divine love, water is divine love and vice versa. And I am made of it, we are made of it, me, you and God Him- self’, such is the meaning of Teresa’s image of water which moves us away from stylistics to confront us with the work of the psyche-soma which the writer tries to convey.
C. To the incredulous sceptics of
the twenty-first century that we are, Teresa splits her intellectual-physical- psychic identity in and through the amorous transference with the Being who is All Other: God, the paternal figure of our childhood dreams, the elusive spouse of the Song of Songs.
By this deadly and pleasurable meta- morphosis which appeases the mel- ancholic pain of being inconsolably abandoned and separate, she appro- priates the Other Being in an infra- cognitive, psychosomatic contact. This in turn leads her to a dangerous and delicious regression outlined with masochistic pleasure. It’s not rhetoric
that helps us read her, but Aristotle’s brilliant revelation in On the Soul and Metaphysics, which posits touch as the most fundamental and universal of all the senses. If, in fact, every living body is a tactile body, the sense of touch functions so that ‘that with which I enter into contact, enters into contact with me’.5 Initially and through her fiction of water, Teresa, who sees her- self bathed by the Other, occults the mediation and fantasizes that she and her Husband are submerged in one another. But at the same time, by dif- fracting the water between God, the gardener and the four ways to make the source flow, she implicitly cri- tiques this immediacy; she distances herself from it and tries to unleash her painful yet jubilant auto-eroticism in an accumulation of physical, psychic and logical acts. Not water but the fic- tion of water diffuses the fiction of an absolute touch in a series of auxiliary parables (noria, well, water, gardener); she couples it with its contrary (fire), makes it provoke contradictory states, before looking for other images, then altogether losing interest in images, words, writing, and withdrawing from exchange and love. Would water, con- sequently, be as much a fiction of the divine’s sensorial impact on Teresa as it would a critique –unconscious, im- plicit, ironic – of this impact of the di- vine itself? Leading to the dissolution of the Ideal Father, of the Other in the praying nun, the writer?
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