Scirinz (a running sore): particular and ecstatic scripts of the

body by mystic women in the Middle Ages and early modern

Europe

Sriwhana Spong

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Fine Arts, the University of Auckland, 2021.

i

!bstract

This research project visits the site of mysticism through works by mystic women of the Middle

Ages and the early modern period in Europe. It explores the manner of speaking that emerges

in these texts, which are translations of their authors’ direct encounter with the divine.

The Lingua Ignota, a secret language received by the twelfth-century German mystic Hildegard

of Bingen (1098–1179), and the Interior Castle, written in 1577 by the sixteenth-century

Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), are focused on as works of ‘particular and

ecstatic invention’ that bypass ecclesiastical structures. They are explored in relation to

Édouard Glissant’s concept of errantry, and I argue that these texts reveal an errantry produced

through enjoyment.

Through these two works, which privilege experiential knowledge because of the

circumstances of their authors, and considering filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s statement that

family background and personal experience allow one to begin to understand a structure ‘from

within ourselves out’, I examine the view from a body like mine, one put in motion by the

categories of ‘East’ and ‘West’. I argue that the particular and ecstatic works of Hildegard and

Teresa, which draw on first-hand experience to produce scripts of the body as it moves always

in relation to an other, offer ways in which a body like mine might approach the subjects she

films.

ii

"edication

To Gede. Thanks for all the stories.

iii

!cknowledgements

First, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to my supervisors Simon Ingram and Kate

Briggs for their support, patience, and generous encouragement.

This project was completed in London through three lockdowns, and I am incredibly grateful

to my sister Christabel who, with both of us having to work from home, graciously put up with

my constant presence for the best part of a year.

I spent many happy hours researching at the Warburg Institute and would like to acknowledge

their dedicated guardianship of Aby Warburg’s personal library. I will greatly miss wandering

the shelves, especially the Magic section, whose fascinating diversity was a constant reminder

that categories always leak.

To the curators Ned McConnell, Tendai John-Mutambu, Sorcha Carey, and Natasha Conland,

who worked with me on the exhibitions at the Pumphouse Gallery, the Govett-Brewster Art

Gallery, the Edinburgh Arts Festival, and the Auckland Art Gallery where A hook but no fish

and Interior Castle (a blueprint) were shown—thank you for the many conversations and your

engagement with the work. My thanks also to the writer Wong Binghao—our long zoom calls

in lockdown, your questions and insightful observations sparked many thoughts that roam

through this thesis.

I would like to recognise the incredible work of Frances Duncan, who designed the sound for

both films—they would be nothing without her input; Sandra Kassenaar for her smart and

beautiful design of the Elizabeth Ignota typeface, which winds its way through this document;

and Marc Swadel for coming to the rescue when my Bolex broke on a beach in Wales.

And last but by no means least, I would like to thank Gasworks for all that they do; Vera Mey

for her empathy and support; Alice Walter, my ‘H’, who led me to large piles of horse dung

and solitary tadpoles; to Philip Ewe and Alice Mendelowitz; and to Gede for all the stories.

iv

#able $f %ontents

Abstract ………………………………………………………………………… i

Dedication ………………………………………………………………………... ii

Acknowledgments ...……………………………………………………………………… iii

Introduction ………………………………………………………………………... 1

Chapter One: Having-seen-snake: An encounter in the Allegheny Cemetery

and Michel de Certeau’s squaring of the mystic circle ……….…….. 5

Chapter Two: A hook but no fish: The strange and irregular practices

of Hildegard of Bingen .……………………………………………... 23

Chapter Three: castle-crystal (a blueprint) …………………………………...……… 31

Scirinz (a running sore) ..…………………………………….. 31

i-land .……………………………………………………….. 41

Now spectral, now animal ..…………………………………. 58

Conclusion ..……………………………………………………………………... 70

Moist and Restless: Text by Sriwhana Spong, Elizabeth Ignota font designed

by Sandra Kassenaar ..………………………………………………. 74

Elizabeth Ignota ……………………...……………………………………………….. 79

Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………. 84

1

&ntroduction

&n volume two of The Mystic Fable, the French Jesuit scholar Michel de Certeau asks

what mystic documents are ‘capable of inaugurating in the epistemological space of our

disciplines of work. Out of their strangeness (or what remains) can something be born?’1 What

can this ‘strange science’,2 attached to a Judeo-Christian tradition which fizzled out as God as

the object of love was replaced by the other, have to offer a practice enacted within the field of

art, located in the house of Western art history?

Mystics is, de Certeau argues, a ‘manner of speaking’ obsessed with the question: What is the

body? Amy Hollywood claims in Sensible Ecstasy (2002) that the first women to write in the

West were Christian mystics: ‘women who claimed to have extraordinary experiences of the

divine and/or union with God that both authorised their writing and served as its subject

matter.’3 The documents they produced, which for reasons of circumstance privileged

experiential knowledge, became key texts within what was later delineated as the ‘mystic’ field.

As a substitute for the biblical commentary they were excluded from, the text these women

interpreted was the trace left by the direct encounter with divine presence, and thus their

writings are what de Certeau describes as ‘scripts of the body’.4 Viewed in this way, he argues,

mystic literature is cinematographic (the writing of movement, from ancient Greek kìnema

‘movement’ and gràphein ‘to write’).

These scripts of the body document the trace left by an encounter with an other (the divine); a

trace that represents both intimate connection and an uncrossable distance. Thus these texts

document the futile practice of attempting to put into language that which escapes it. But in

this futility, in this stuttering, swooning, hesitant effort to translate the imprint left in the body

by an other, these women pursue paths of ‘particular and ecstatic invention’—so named by

1 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume Two: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael

B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 4. 2 De Certeau, 3. 3 Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 7. 4 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael

B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 81.

2

Édouard Glissant, who argues that after the Enlightenment, these indirect and often heretical

modes of knowledge production will give way to ‘rationalizing bodies of thought and then to

the absolute generalisation of systematic thought.’5 In bypassing ecclesiastical structures by

witnessing and arguing for an intimate and personal connection with the divine, these writers

run the gauntlet of heresy and enact an errantry. While they cannot be seen as precursors to

contemporary feminism, in privileging experiential knowledge to authorise and inform their

texts, these writers offer views from their bodies that one might be able to explore through

Donna Haraway’s vision of a feminist objectivity comprised of situated knowledges. These

mystic scripts of the body offer ‘views from a body’ that is ‘a complex, contradictory,

structuring, and structured body’,6 producing knowledge from a location different to the

assumed location of objectivity: that view from above, which Haraway describes in her essay

‘Situated Knowledges’ (1988) as ‘the god trick’, representing ‘perfect language, perfect

communication, final order.’7

In these writings of movement, the distinctions between inside and outside collapse. The

sixteenth-century Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila argues that to move inward on an interior

journey, such as she sets out in the Interior Castle (1577), is to also give onto the world. She

asks: ‘What hope can we have of being able to rest in other people’s homes if we cannot rest

in our own?’8 When asked how her family background and personal experience has influenced

her work, the filmmaker, writer, and composer Trinh T. Minh-ha responds: ‘There is not much,

in the kind of education we receive here in the West, that emphasizes or even recognizes the

importance of constantly having contact with what is actually within ourselves, or of

understanding a structure from within ourselves out.’9

This research project focuses on two mystic works, the Lingua Ignota, a secret language

received by the twelfth-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), and the

Interior Castle, written in 1577 by the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila (1515–

1582), to see what might be ‘born’ from a mystic manner of speaking. These works come to us

5 Édouard Glissant, Treatise on the Whole-World, trans. Celia Britton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,

2020), 58. 6 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial

Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 589. 7 Haraway, 589. 8 Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, trans. E. Allison Peers (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2007), 67. 9 Trinh T. Minh-ha and Nancy N. Chen ‘“Speaking Nearby”: A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha’, Visual

Anthropology Review 8, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 87.

3

from very specific historical contexts, but in being attempts to translate a body’s intimate

connection to and uncrossable distance from an other, I argue that these texts offer ways of

approaching a subject that do not simplify nor reduce but are, using Haraway’s description of

translation, ‘interpretive, critical, and partial’.10 What might these scripts of the body, which

translate how particular bodies move toward and are moved by an agent, rather than setting out

to define it, propose in terms of an approach that allows for both the opacity of the filmmaker

and the thing they set out to frame.

Chapter one, ‘Having-seen-snake: An encounter in the Allegheny Cemetery and Michel de

Certeau’s squaring of the mystic circle’, begins with an attempt to describe a personal

experience that might be called ‘mystical’ as the term is generally understood today:

extraordinary phenomena that contrast strongly with ordinary life. Michel de Certeau’s The

Mystic Fable is a key text that situates my explorations within a Judeo-Christian tradition. A

reading of de Certeau’s examination of mysticism cannot be separated from the method he uses

to approach his subject: by ‘squaring the mystic circle’, he creates an interdisciplinary frame

inside of which a territory is demarcated where ‘mystics’ might appear. I compare his approach

to that of the filmmaker Agnès Varda in her film Jane B. For Agnès V., a portrait of the pop

icon Jane Birken, where ‘a picture appears with a hole in the middle.’11

Chapter two, ‘A hook but no fish: The strange and irregular practices of Hildegard of Bingen’,

was written while filming A hook but no fish (2017–18). It focuses on the Lingua Ignota, a

personal language that the twelfth-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen claimed to have

received. This language, comprising around 1012 new names for things in an already-spelled-

out world, is just one facet of a prolific mystic practice: Hildegard was a writer and composer,

who presented her many visions in stunning illustrations, wrote on the medicinal properties of

plants, and founded two convents. Her diverse explorations reflect the often multidisciplinary

nature of mystic practices, which must move through other mediums in order to translate what

cannot be said. In Hildegard’s work, we witness what Elvia Wilk describes in her essay ‘The

Word Made Fresh’ (2018) as female mysticism’s ability to offer ‘a foundation for non-

anthropocentric knowledge that is not at all opposed to other types of knowledge.’12

10 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges’, 589. 11 Agnes Varda, Jane B. for Agnès V. 1988, 1h 45min, France. 12 Elvia Wilk, ‘The Word Made Fresh: Mystical Encounter and the New Weird Divine’, e-flux Journal 92, June

2018, (last accessed December 19, 2020), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/92/205298/the-word-made-fresh-

mystical-encounter-and-the-new-weird-divine/

4

Chapter three, ‘castle-crystal (a blueprint)’, was written to accompany the film Interior Castle

(a blueprint) (2019–20). Here, I focus on the need for mystic women in the Middle Ages and

the early modern period in Europe to privilege experiential knowledge and what this necessity

produced in the Interior Castle (1577), a book written by the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic

Teresa of Ávila, whose writing de Certeau considered to be the pinnacle of a pre-Enlightenment

mystic form. The book was written to help guide Teresa’s sisters toward an intimate experience

of the divine through prayer. It imagines the soul as a castle formed from a single diamond and

comprising seven dwelling places, which Teresa urges her reader to enter: ‘Enter, then, enter

within yourselves, my daughters; and get right away from your own trifling good works.’13

This fictional architecture endlessly oscillates between transparency and opacity, and I explore

this unfixed, shimmering image in relation to my experience of being Pakeha and Indonesian.

I argue that the Interior Castle is a place of resistance and errantry set in motion by distance

and delight, and in an attempt to understand ‘a structure from within ourselves out’, I draw on

a personal history of being raised within Evangelical Christianity. Here, my own script of the

body gives onto Teresa’s Interior Castle, where, while reading her text, I enter into her and

find I have stumbled into me.

This research project documents my attempts to approach the slippery subject of ‘mysticism’

from a position that is particular and partial. It is a view from this body, extended through the

writings and practices of others, and therefore I have allowed the biographical and the personal

to form part of its texture. In response to Michel de Certeau’s question of what might be born

from these documents and their strangeness, this research project sets out to see what ideas and

imaginings they might birth in a twenty-first-century body like mine, and what approaches their

‘manner of speaking’ might offer to the filmmaker tasked with framing an other—approaches

that might allow for the irreducibility of both the filmmaker and the thing she moves toward.

13 Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, 78.

5

!"v#$%-&''$-&$"(': !n encounter in the !llegheny "emetery and #ichel de "erteau’s squaring of the mystic circle

& want to share with you an experience I had in the summer—a Pittsburgh summer—

of 2016. An encounter that occurred in the all-sounding silence of the unverifiable, in the

cacophony of waters at the threshold of language just before it is fed into the intricate plumbing

of signs and symbols.

On my first day in the city, I went for a walk, passing the large brick Heinz factory and George

Warhola Scrap Metal—a reminder I was in Warhol country—zigzagging over several of its 446

bridges, and ending up after a few hours in the Allegheny Cemetery. Wandering around its 300

acres, one gets a sense of the city’s wealth, built on industry—first steel, later technology. Deer

graze among Egyptian-themed mausoleums, neoclassical family crypts, and marble obelisks.

In a lower part of the cemetery, you arrive at a flat area where the tombstones are smaller, and

further on you come across an expanse of small plaques fastened flat to the ground, barely

peeking over the newly-shorn grass, each marked with a miniature American flag. The men of

government and industry lie under marble crosses, Gothic-revival spires, sculptures of women

in allegorical poses, statues of men writing or in military uniform, and life-sized weeping

angels. They are accorded the symbols of heaven, while the soldiers below lie under plaques

level with the grass, each decorated with a fluttering red-white-and-blue.

But how to move on to what happened next?

It’s late spring, 2016, and I’m sitting in a lecture theatre at the Free University in Dahlem,

Berlin, where I’ve come to hear Hélène Cixous speak. The auditorium is full and expectant.

6

First is the usual introduction given by a member of staff, which finds that forgettable balance

between the effusive and the polite. And then, taking her seat, Hélène begins:

Ayyyyyyy-yayyyy-yay-yay-yay!

Her cry cuts through the auditorium. I don’t remember anything she said after that. It’s like her

cry surged ahead and swallowed all language in its wake. All I remember is the gentle slope of

the glassy auditorium, the shattering of expected procedures, and being captivated-liberated:

Carried-awayyyyyyyy-yayyyy-yay-yay-yay!

I’m standing in the cut grass thinking about the little-plaque deaths as opposed to the weeping-

angel ones.

Ayyyyyyy-yayyyy-yay-yay-yay!

Colours bloom, bursting into the blinding white of all colours. In a snap. A brightness whose

edges shimmer with colour. In a snap. A sudden humming stillness. In a snap. A loud silence,

like the sound of all sounds all at once. In a snap. Captivated-liberated, suddenly skinless and

still.

Carried-awayyyyyyyy-yayyyy-yay-yay-yay!

I wanted to try and put across to you what happened, but there is a divide between the

impression of the encounter and the words that I manage to claw from my mind’s inventory.

Creature. Creature sensed not ‘seen’. Sensed in the blindness of eyes thrown open like a jacket

without a zipper on a windy day, where, as one creature to another, I respond in my

creatureliness and then words catch up. I think I time travelled in a way—I rushed ahead of

language, and then I was snapped back.

•

7

'ere is another attempt. I do remember it being very hot, and I remember hundreds of

small handwaving flags fluttering over the grass. Or were the flags still, drooping in the sad-

expectant way that thick nylon falls, never completely flat, still a little buoyant? And then, how

to say this, like a flag suddenly snapped open by a gust of wind, a sudden surge of colour. And

then, as if my pupils dilated like apertures opened too wide, over-exposing the entire image,

the rows of flags are swallowed by light. Some instinct lunges forward, outpaces language,

which dissolves, secondary and quickly shed. And just as quickly, it reassembles itself. And

between this disintegration and reassembly, the smallest glimpse of a body beyond civilising

structures—perhaps? Consciousness indignantly surges back up, demanding breath, and with

it the small flags wave into view like a ‘welcome home’ parade. And amidst this celebration,

something at my feet bursts into focus. The thing now has shape, which produces an instant

reaction that differs from the just-prior response—whose root lies in the Latin re- (again)

spondeō (I promise)—of humming stillness. And now, this returned-to-I edges gingerly and

quickly away.

She is a wide-open aperture and an unending vibrating surface, absorbing all light and sound,

seeing everything and seeing nothing, hearing everything and hearing nothing. She is not even

she. No ‘I’, no ‘grass’, no ‘heat’. Just eardrums drumming away in all-sounding silence.

Motionless, like a marble obelisk, but also hazy, like the heat rising off the cement path,

overcome by a startling life force that swallows language. And then: snake! Like a door

slamming shut when a surprise breeze rushes through a house opened wide to the summer.

How does language feel? First it has a shadow. Then it cuts.

Snake/snip/I/snip

‘Snake’ slides down like a slow-moving shutter lowered against the sun on a hot afternoon. It

rolls down and slices. And its cut creates distance. For the first time, I am afraid. But this

cutting is also what allows me to ‘see’ you lying there in the grass, on your belly, unblinking.

It’s a conundrum.

•

8

#here are three photos of the event, which compose a kind of sequence—act as a sort

of witness. The first is of the soldiers’ graves. This is time-stamped ‘12 July 2016 at 1:47:09

PM’ (fig. 1). The second is a rare selfie. I’m wearing an extremely wide-brimmed hat that

frames my head like a halo, obscuring the background. This is time-stamped ‘12 July 2016 at

1:47:27 PM’ (fig. 2). The third is of a slim black garter snake with yellow stripes running the

length of its body. This is time-stamped ‘12 July 2016 at 1:48:10 PM’ (fig. 3). And between

figs. 2 and 3 lies a measurement of the event: forty-three seconds.

That evening, while scrolling through Facebook, with eerie synchronicity I stumble across a

recently published interview with George Saunders in the White Review: ‘It’s kind of like, if

you see a snake and it scares the shit out of you, typing, “Suddenly I saw a snake” doesn’t get

it—has nothing to do with what you felt in that instant. How to use or exploit or get at that

(having-seen-snake) energy? The energy of what you actually felt in that instant?’1 That

having-seen-snake energy, like a sudden life impulse which startles and whose ‘isness is not a

matter of negotiation’2—we are still working out how to ‘get at that.’

•

1 Aidan Ryan and George Saunders, ‘Interview with George Saunders’, The White Review, June 2016, (last

accessed December 15, 2020), https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-george-saunders/ 2 Ariana Reines, ‘Reborn Again’, Art Forum, April 22, 2020, (last accessed December 15, 2020),

https://www.artforum.com/slant/ariana-reines-s-new-moon-column-82779

9

Figure 1. The Allegheny Cemetery, Pittsburgh, 12 July 2016, 1:47:09 pm

10

Figure 2. The Allegheny Cemetery, Pittsburgh, 12 July 2016, 1:47:27 pm

11

Figure 3. The Allegheny Cemetery, Pittsburgh, 12 July 2016, 1:48:10 pm

12

Two meters away, about two running steps, my body miraculously responded and I

froze before I could even articulate ‘cobra’ in my mind. Once I regained control over

my body I backed slowly away, my eyes riveted on the snake. Forgetting the photo of

Mt. Kenya, I took a shaky photo of the wary snake instead.3

!nthropologist Lynne Isbell’s experience, described in her book The Fruit, the Tree,

and the Serpent (2009), uncannily resembles my own encounter in the Allegheny Cemetery. It

led to the development of her Snake Detection Theory, which suggests that snakes were

responsible for the way vision developed as the most dominant sense in primates. According

to Isbell, all vertebrates share the superior colliculus (SC) pulvinar visual system. This is linked

to non-conscious vision and is important for detecting and avoiding predators quickly, without

need of assessment. It is also connected to the response mechanism of freezing. The more

recent lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) visual system appears in mammals and lets them edit

out objects in the environment, perceiving and identifying risk—we are never not editing. As

Donna Haraway writes in her essay ‘Situated Knowledges’ (1988), all eyes are ‘active

perceptual systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing, that is ways of life.’4

And she argues, in searching for a feminist objectivity, that these translations, situated as they

are, are not ‘allegories of infinite mobility and interchangeability but of elaborate specificity

and difference and the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from

another’s point of view.’5

So, how does a snake see? Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score (2014) that

below the rational human brain lies two older brains. The oldest of these and the part already

active when we are born is the reptilian brain, which is tasked with detecting danger and

maintaining basic life-sustaining systems.6 Just above it lies the mammalian brain, which is the

seat of the emotions. Between figs. 2 and 3, for forty-three seconds, an ancient system of

detection erupts in the present, producing a slim moment of sensing, sensing as perhaps a snake

does, as perhaps my vertebrate ancestors did, crawling out of sea pools, draped in scales and

mud, under a low sky: a gurgling mass of things finding form.

3 Lynne A. Isbell, The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 95. 4 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial

Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 583. 5 Haraway, 583. 6 Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma

(London: Penguin Random House, 2015), 55–57.

13

But what of the compulsion both of us felt to photograph the snake? According to Isbell,

humans are the only species that point declaratively, which is a developmental precursor to

language. To declaratively point is to direct attention to something, to share it with others.

Conversely, to imperatively point is to point directly at an object one wants. It has been

hypothesised that cooperative communication created the need for declarative pointing. The

pointer desires that others feel an emotion, gain information, and act. And Isbell speculates—

based on tests that show we point faster and more accurately at targets in the lower visual field

and respond quicker to people pointing down rather than up—that only one predator, the

venomous snake, could have created such selective pressure on the visual systems of our human

ancestors.

•

!n iPhone is my index finger. Without you here, I take a photograph—this insistent

urge to share channelled through technology and multiplied by views. Marguerite Duras

declared: ‘Love can be made only among three.’7 The act of pointing declaratively gestures to

something and in doing so draws you, me, and the thing pointed at together. It is not the direct

line of the imperative, to be shortened as quickly and as expediently as possible, but a relational

tracing that articulates a dynamic between us. This might also be the location of the mystic,

standing at the threshold between language and the ineffable, declaratively pointing to

something I can’t quite see, announcing themselves and me and it, tracing a triad, a ground

between three that moves, shimmering with intimacy and distance, kinship and difference, the

particular and the cosmic.

•

7 Marguerite Duras quoted in Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth

Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 196–97.

14

Who is this mystic, the figure declaratively pointing to something I can’t quite make

out, and what is this ‘mystics’ that they do? What happened in the Allegheny Cemetery could

be classified as mystical as the term is generally understood today: extraordinary phenomena

that contrast strongly with ordinary life. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1917),

William James proposes four ways of recognising a mystic experience: Ineffability (a direct

experience that language is inadequate at describing); Noetic quality (a state of feeling and a

state of knowledge or insight, as inarticulate as this insight remains); Transiency (the state does

not last long); Passivity (one is overcome beyond their will). For James, these four states carry

an importance that modifies ‘the inner life of the subject beyond the times of their recurrence.’8

Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard, in their preface to Mystics: Presence and Aporia

(2003), argue that the concept of a mystic experience as an extraordinary experience separated

from ordinary life runs counter to Dionysian mystical theology where ‘experience as such,

including ordinary everyday experience, is so gracious (or gratuitous) as to be itself somehow

mystical.’9 And the French Jesuit scholar Michel de Certeau argues in The Mystic Fable (1982)

that extraordinary experiences can happen outside of a mystical life, but what the mystic

engages in is a practice that opens up a journey which transforms life itself. Thus, the initial

encounter unfolds through diverse practices in an attempt to discover what initially occurred.

De Certeau describes this process, this movement beyond the event, as a ‘discursive unfolding,

a reorganization of the known through a confrontation with other kinds of knowledges or

modes of knowing.’10 Mystics is what the event opens up. And the site of the event and this

opening up is the body.

The mystic, according to de Certeau, is one who must somehow use language to point to

something that language is unable to hold. The prophet Mohammed describes this paradoxical

place, moved by the correspondence between language and what it cannot say, as a garden:

‘Between my pulpit and my tomb, there opens a garden from the gardens of paradise.’11 The

pulpit here, according to Federico Campagna in Technic and Magic (2019), is the place of law,

where dogma resides, where things are placed into endlessly digestible categories, while the

8 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being the Glifford Lectures

on Natural Religion, Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902 (New York: Longmans, Green, And Co, 1917),

370–71. 9 Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard, eds., Mystics: Presence and Aporia (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2003), viii. 10 De Certeau, ‘Mysticism’, 19. 11 Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 176.

15

tomb symbolises the impenetrability of the ineffable, that which cannot be expressed in words.

Here, in this garden—a place both wild and cultivated—we might encounter the sixteenth-

century Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila writing an itinerary through her interior world

fictionalised as a castle made of crystal; here, foraging amongst the medicinal herbs, we might

meet the twelfth-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, renaming things in her Lingua

Ignota (unknown language); here, assuming a multiplicity of identities—mystic, mother,

business owner, pilgrim, author—is Margery Kempe, writing The Book of Margery Kempe

(1501), considered to be the first autobiography in the English language. Here, in fact, we find

many women writing. Amy Hollywood claims in Sensible Ecstasy (2002) that the first women

to write in the West were Christian mystics: ‘women who claimed to have extraordinary

experiences of the divine and/or union with God that both authorised their writing and served

as its subject matter.’12

This garden, situated between the word as law and the ineffable, is for the woman mystic her

body. Here, the encounter with divine presence takes place. This body was classified as passive,

irrational, emotional, lustful, and disordered in theological, philosophical, and scientific

thought, and confined and disciplined as such. This classification was in binary opposition to

the intellect, activity, rationality, reason, self-control, judgement, and order that men were seen

to represent. The exclusion of women from theological knowledge, biblical commentary, and

any formal education in Latin (the official language of the Church) meant that first-hand

experience was prioritised by women mystic writers, who found authority in their direct

encounters with the divine, an authority that created sites of resistance to the dismissal of

passive-irrational-emotional-lustful-disordered. And Gordon Rudy takes care to point out in

The Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages (2014) that ‘experience’ is a

slippery concept and, in writing about their religious encounters, these women ‘do not merely

transcribe what happens to them, they do complex intellectual work ’ 13 in order to articulate

concepts, solve problems, guide others, influence, and persuade. Through the privileging of

experiential knowledge, mystic women writers translated their religious encounters in a manner

that, like a body, like a garden, was both wild and cultivated.

If we now step out of this garden and onto the path of chronology, we find our mystics writing

at a point in Western history that for the Martinican poet, novelist, and theorist Édouard

12 Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 7. 13 Gordon Rudy, The Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 2014), 10.

16

Glissant marks the struggle between the particular ‘wandering thought’ of mystical experience

and the universal ‘systematic thought’ of Christian rationality in an approach to knowledge. He

argues that while both approaches can be considered quests for ‘total knowledge’—the

Universal or the Cosmos—what is at stake is the mode: ‘particular or ecstatic invention will

give way to rationalizing bodies of thought and then to the absolute generalisation of systematic

thought.’14 For de Certeau, Teresa of Ávila’s writing represents both the pinnacle of a mystic

style and the moment when it begins to disappear, situated as she is in the Enlightenment’s

predawn. Glissant asks: ‘Why, in this search for knowledge, have the paths of the non-

generalizing, of the esoteric for instance (which is always marked by the sign of the ambiguous

and the unpredictable), and the mystical, in any case of heresy, gradually given way to the

striving towards totalitarian generalization?’15 And Julia Kristeva asks: ‘Why is it mysticism

that attracts me, that attracts us, when we attempt to break free of instrumental rationalism, or

to loosen the vise of fundamentalist manipulation?’16 And I ask: What compels me to this

mystic style, where the body wounds language?

•

‘#his book does not lay claim to any special jurisdiction over its domain.’17 The first

sentence of The Mystic Fable professes a strange position for Michel de Certeau’s research. It

relinquishes any authority over its subject from the outset. He studies mystic texts that speak

of a presence he cannot speak of: he discovers that ‘what should be there is missing.’18 And

this presence, (of God), he adds in parentheses, which moves through the medium of mystic

texts, is not a stable referent by which they can be organised. The presence they give speech to

cannot be separated from each text that gives it voice. This presence moves differently, speaks

differently in each script of the body that allows it to emerge in language: ‘But what name or

what identity should be ascribed to that “thing”, taken independently of the work—in each case

14 Édouard Glissant, Treatise on the Whole-World, trans. Celia Britton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press),

58. 15 Glissant, Treatise on the Whole-World, 61. 16 Julia Kristeva, Teresa, My Love, trans. Lorna Scott Fox (NY: Columbia University Press, 2015), 48. 17 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael

B. Smith (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1. 18 De Certeau, 1.

17

local—of letting it appear?’19 And Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard, in trying to edit

their book on essays titled Mystics, admit that ‘the more lucidly we describe mystics . . . the

more elusive it seems.’20

The mystic tradition was not isolated as an area of knowledge until the early seventeenth

century. Prior to this, the adjective ‘mystical’ was used to describe a variety of objects and

knowledges within a Christian world. But in a slowly emerging secular world, mysticism

gradually came to be isolated as an ‘experiential knowledge’ detached from theology and the

institution of the Church. ‘Mystic’ came to represent practices that diverged from expected and

usual paths of knowledge, and within its corpus de Certeau found, writes his translator

Marsanne Brammer, ‘not a body of doctrines but a heterogeneous ensemble of discursive and

experiential practices.’21 Mysticism is, Brammer continues, ‘neither a religion nor a

philosophy, but is grounded in lived experiences and practices that are heterogeneous,

nonlinear, particular, and often non-discursive.’22 How to approach it then? De Certeau

employs a method he calls ‘squaring the mystic circle’ as a means of demarcating a territory in

which mystics occurs. He constructs an interdisciplinary frame composed of four different

areas of enquiry, four different approaches: contemporary eroticism, psychoanalysis,

historiography, and the literary genre of the fable. This frame produces a space in which his

subject might appear. However, once again, de Certeau admits the impossibility of getting

much closer to his subject: ‘It is a form whose matter overflows. At least this explanation of

my “interests”, in circumscribing the framework within which a representation is to be

produced, will allow us to see the way the subject crosses the stage, escapes, and goes

beyond’23—an overflow he likens to painting.

•

#he Fourth Dimension (2001), by the writer, theorist, composer, and filmmaker Trinh

19 De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One, 15. 20 Kessler and Sheppard, Mystics: Presence and Aporia, x. 21 Marsanne Brammer, ‘Thinking Practice: Michel de Certeau and the Theorization of Mysticism’, Diacritics

22, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 29. 22 Brammer, 29. 23 De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One, 4.

18

T. Minh-ha, was filmed in Japan and is a portrait of the country framed from a position Trinh

describes as ‘speaking nearby’ rather than ‘speaking about’, a position that always reflects on

itself. Trinh’s ‘speaking nearby’ might be described as declarative rather than imperative

pointing—‘One cannot just point a camera at it to catch it: the very effort to do so will kill

it’24—opening up a place for her subject to emerge between the filmmaker, what her camera

points at, and the viewer. In a Q&A I attended after a screening of the film at the ICA, London,

in 2017, Trinh described her film like an onion, in the centre of which one sometimes finds an

onion-shaped hole. At least, this is what I vividly remember her saying. In a transcript of the

interview I later found online, this comment has either been edited out or was never said in the

first place. The Fourth Dimension is a portrait of an uncapturable subject—as the flesh of the

film grows, so does a void. ‘Void’ for Trinh is the void as it is understood in the spiritual sense,

where possibilities are always being renewed and things resist classification, rather than the

negative notion of the void common to dualistic Western thought. Trinh’s film opens up a space

for her subject to appear, a subject not arrested or reified, but shimmering in the space created

between three, changing form with each viewer and the never static subjectivity of the

filmmaker.

Jane B. For Agnès V. (1988), is Agnès Varda’s portrait of the model, singer, and actress Jane

Birken between the ages of forty and forty-one. Its sharply frivolous and tender texture is

composed of the various ways one might approach a subject: fictional scenes, documentary-

like footage, conversations between the director and the actor about how to continue:

Jane Birkin: What now? Where do we go?

Agnès Varda: We agreed the film would wander—we’d step off somewhere and stop

along the way.

JB: What if we lose our way?

AV: I like mazes. I like finding out where I’ve been at the exit.

. . .

JB: Can you get out of this? We just film bits and pieces?

24 Trinh T. Minh-ha and Nancy N. Chen ‘“Speaking Nearby”: A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha’, Visual

Anthropology Review 8, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 87.

19

AV: It’s like a jigsaw: a piece here, a piece there. A picture appears with a hole in the

middle.25

A picture appears with a hole in the middle.

‘Jane B.’ is the title of a song written by Serge Gainsbourg where Jane Birkin lists her age

(between twenty and twenty-one), the colour of her hair (chestnut), her sex (female), and the

time she was reported missing (at twenty to five this morning). ‘Jane B.’ reappears in Jane B.

For Agnès V. exactly twenty years later, but this time, rather than the muse for Gainsbourg’s

insouciant tale of murder, she is now Jane Birkin for Agnès Varda, Jane Birkin as Agnès Varda

frames her. And the hole in the middle of the picture? The entity named ‘Jane Birkin’, a

presence hinted at between the frames, elusive and uncapturable. It is this entity that Varda

allows to emerge through the collapsing of genre and authorship: Both Jane. B and Agnès. V

discuss where to take the film, dissolving any idea of a single author; documentary-style scenes

of Jane. B in her domestic surroundings are juxtaposed with fictional vignettes where both she

and Agnès. V play characters, including the comedic duo Laurel and Hardy; Jane. B speaks of

her hatred of being filmed while looking in a mirror. Contradictions pile up, and Varda’s

subject absconds, leaving a hole in the centre of a skin of images: a twentieth-century shrine

for a popular icon, where a presence, a latent image, leaves its discernible trace.

•

#he artifacts are neatly arranged in glass museum cabinets. Lit low and warm in the

dark room, they shimmer like an ornate alphabet I can’t decipher. I am what Hélène Cixous,

speaking of the Germany of her forebears, calls a ghost citizen, an always-future citizen: ‘I

rediscover her. I return to her, in the future. I belong to her. I don’t expect her to be mine.’

Cixous grew up in Algeria hearing the German tongue of her grandmother. I grew up on

images, women in gold headdresses piled high with flowers, whose wing-tipped eyes looked

out at me from the windows of the local Flight Centre. I did a school project on the archipelago,

snipping around the edges of these glossy images—palm trees, sandy beaches, tropical fruits

sliced open—sticking them back together, the surrounding text setting out hotel amenities and

25 Agnes Varda, Jane B. for Agnès V. 1988, 1h 45min, France.

20

prices left discarded on the floor. Snip/snip/snip. A little world of spectral shards, firmly stuck

to the cardboard with glue, all the air bubbles worked out by my palms and fingertips to make

everything satisfyingly smooth. Sutured islands, claiming space as a fiction—but still space

nonetheless. A few years later—culture shock—but it looks nothing like the images! And how

many images there are. The historian Adrian Vickers argues in Bali: A Paradise Created (2012)

that no other place has been constructed by the Western imagination like Bali: ‘More than any

other tropical island, Bali has become the most exotic of exotic locations. . . . Over three

centuries the West has constructed a complex and gorgeous image of the island that has come

to take over even Balinese thought.’26

At the time, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had a no-filming policy: movement

as the antithesis of collection. I made a rudimentary pinhole camera using a cartridge of super-

8 film and hid it in a bag with a hole cut out of it. A hole within a hole for the cutting out of an

image from the museum. Halberd Head with Nagas and Blades, Indonesia (Java), Eastern

Javanese period, Singasari Kingdom, ca. second half of the 13th century, copper alloy. Samuel

Eilenberg Collection. Gift of Samuel Eilenberg 1996. 1996.468 a,b (2007) is a sixty-nine

second video filmed in front of a thirteenth-century Javanese copper halberd head decorated

with Nagas, giant serpents from the underworld. Aiming at the object behind the glass, I wound

the super-8 cartridge by hand, rotating the dial usually turned by the mechanisms of the camera.

Only the circular frame of the pinhole, bouncing light, and the erratic rhythm of my hand

winding on the film was recorded. But the copper alloy serpent can be seen in its refusal to be

caught, in its non-reproducibility; it’s also there in the title and the interplay of familiarity

(blades, Indonesia, copper, 1996, gift) and distance (Indonesia, Sigarasi, Samual Eilenberg)

that a name produces.

•

(or forty-three seconds, I disappear.

26 Adrian Vickers, Bali: A Paradise Created (Hong Kong: Tuttle Publishing, 2012), 17.

21

Carried-awayyyyyyyy-yayyyy-yay-yay-yay!

An isness leaps out, unbridled, in response to an other. Snakes only attack if threatened, and

my reptilian brain, quicker than my prefrontal cortex, seems to recognise (remember) this. A

contract is made between creatures: to be still and to pass on by. But here’s the conundrum:

language, reasserting itself, embarrassed at being so swiftly outpaced, brings fear onto the

scene. But its return is also what allows me to ‘see’ you lying there, on your belly, unblinking.

How many times does a body hold? Consider all its different temporalities: the time it takes

for a fingernail to grow, for scar tissue to collect, for goosebumps to rise, and bruises to flower.

I meet another time in me, am outpaced by it (this previously unencountered time of I). It

bounds into unedited, unprocessed time, capturing a latent image that I (now returned to I) am

still trying to make out in the developer of memory and the stop bath of words. But I find only

faint glints held in the uncutness of a gelatinous-mouthfeel. This strange non-negotiable isness

within the specificity of my body: I swear, for forty-three seconds, I was only the world. Which

is to say, snake-sriwhana-a-summer’s-day-ayyyy-yay-yay-yay-

•

)cript-like creature, all vertebrae, all strength and flexibility, like a little dancer, leaving

your ‘vivid yet unverifiable’27 imprint. Perhaps tasked, like others before you, with carrying

messages from the volcanic underworld to the surface. Tell me:

What is it that silence would speak into the word?

Speech falls away, leaving a voiceless promise: No biting, no bloodshed.

27 Jan Verwoert, ‘Sad or Sorry? Imperial Gestures, Good Ideas and the Need to Speak. (Some Thoughts on

Authority)’. Mousse Magazine 45, October–November 2014, (last accessed December 19, 2020),

http://moussemagazine.it/jan-verwoert-sad-sorry-2014/

22

A contract between creatures.

And then I am returned to I, that is to language, which brings fear but also this desire to tell

you all about it.

Your name slides down into me.

It cuts in and slices us apart.

But in this cutting, you now appear to me, lying there on your belly, unblinking—like the silent

black contour of a word

u

n

d

o

n

e

It’s a conundrum.

23

) *++( ,-. $+ /#&*: $he strange and irregular practices of %ildegard of &ingen

& am now familiar with the climb up the hill, the view out past the walls, how the sun

lights the ruins of the monastery during the first week of autumn. I know that early morning

fog absorbs the space, soaking it up like a large grey sponge and flattening it both spatially and

sonically, and because of this you’ll need 50 ASA film in the hours before 11 am. I know shade

darkens the hill until the sun lies directly above, between midday and 2 pm, and you’ll now

need 250 ASA film, while the clouds passing swiftly overhead will cause your camera’s

aperture to shift wildly between f/8 and f/2.4. I know that the cell where Hildegard was interned

would have received the first light, being at the eastern-most part of the monastery, as pointed

out to me by the gardener. I believe there was a window in her cell, but I don’t know whether

it faced out, giving her a view over the valley, opening up the small chamber to shards of

sunlight and the birdsong that now competes with the noise of planes flying overhead toward

Frankfurt Airport, or whether this window faced inward, toward the chapel, and therefore only

picked up draughts and muffled prayer. However, I do know that after midday, the sun slides

across the lawn to where the main chapel used to be, casting long shadows from trees that may

or may not have been there when the twelfth-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen first

began dictating her visions at the age of forty-two. The mid-afternoon light falls sharply on the

walls that remain of the cell Hildegard was later moved to when the growing numbers of

women at the monastery meant she was in need of more space. This has the clearest view of

the valley, being situated closest to the side of the hill. If no outward facing window allowed

light to pass beyond the thick walls of the cell, it would have at least warmed the stones that

24

enclosed her. At 3 pm in late September, the west side is lit up; here is Hildegard’s garden, but

as I’m told by the gardener who is both possessive of the grounds he tends and eager to share

information with anyone who catches his eye, this garden has nothing to do with where

Hildegard was interned. It is, as he says, ‘falsch’.

•

& ’m drawn to the windows that remain of the monastery. They are not large open voids,

but filled in, leaving only narrow chinks through which one peers out at trees and sky. They

look very much like eyes squinting at the sun or the visor of a medieval helmet, as if to protect

Hildegard and her nuns from the dangers of the fecundity outside. I begin to film these, working

out what to expose: the wall or the interior of the recess, with its thin, suspicious slits of light?

I open the aperture and engage the shutter for a count of twenty seconds. It snaps shut, and the

film waits in its dark enclosure to be imprinted by the next image.

•

For in the text I know the inner meaning of the exposition of the Psalter and the Gospel

and other books shown to me in this vision, which touches my heart and soul like a

consuming fire, teaching me these profundities of exposition. But it does not teach me

writings in the German tongue—these I do not know—and I only know how to read for

the simple meaning, not for any textual analysis. Give me an answer as to what you

think, for I am a person ignorant of all teaching in external matters; I am taught

inwardly, in my soul. Therefore I speak as one in doubt. . . . And sometimes, because I

keep quiet, I am laid low by the vision and confined to my sickbed, unable to raise

myself up.1

1 Hildegard of Bingen, Selected Writings, trans. Mark Atherton (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 3.

25

'ildegard’s visions overwhelmed her with ‘so great a light that her soul trembled’,2

making her sick, sending her to bed, from where she eventually rose with resolve—to move

her sisters to their own monastery in Rupertsberg. The trip from Disibodenberg is about an

hour by car going at 120 kilometres per hour on the flat German autobahn. Moving a dozen or

so sisters, their dowries and their maids, would have been no easy task. Leaving in the first

place was no easy task. In order to begin to write down her visions, Hildegard had to first get

permission: Brother Volmar had a chat with Abbot Kuno, who talked to Archbishop Henry,

who then spoke to Pope Eugene III who, with the encouragement of Bernard, confirmed that,

yes, it was indeed God speaking through her. And so, because this voice now commanded that

she leave, Hildegard was eventually allowed to depart the monastery where she had been

interned as a young girl. At this point it’s hard to know just who was authorising whom.

Regardless, Hildegard’s visions are an aperture through which she escapes, taking her sisters

with her. We read of strange goings-on at Rupertsberg through a letter written around 1148 by

Tengswich, the mistress of a foundation of canonesses:

We have, however, also heard about strange and irregular practices that you

countenance. They say that on feast days your virgins stand in the church with unbound

hair when singing the psalms and that as part of their dress they wear white silk veils,

so long that they touch the floor. Moreover, it is said that they wear crowns of gold

filigree . . . and that they adorn their fingers with golden rings. And all this despite the

express prohibition of the great shepherd of the Church, who writes in admonition: Let

women comport themselves with modesty .3

And Hildegard replies, addressing all women with the voice of the Living Light who she says

speaks through her:

O, woman, what a splendid being you are! For you have set your foundation in the sun,

and have conquered the world.4

2 Hildegard quoted in Katherine Foxhall, ‘Making Modern Migraine Medieval: Men of Science, Hildegard of

Bingen and the Life of a Retrospective Diagnosis’, Medical History 58, no. 3 (July 2014): 359, (last accessed 19

December, 2020), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4103393/ 3 Tengswich, quoted in The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen: Volume I and II, trans. Joseph L Baird and Radd K

Ehrman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 127. 4 Hildegard of Bingen, The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, 7.

26

•

We are incandescent on feast days for no one but the Living Light. For who will see

us locked away behind these walls? Who will witness the joyful hours spent planning costumes

(the whispers), loosening our hair (the relief), and putting on crowns of filigree and rings of

gold (the felicity)? Through these strange and irregular practices, Hildegard—body of silver

halide crystals exposed to latent visions of cosmic eggs, flaming labia, winged chimeras, an

unknown language—our light-sensitive medium, receiving lucid imprints of the unverifiable,

escapes with her sisters.

•

'ildegard’s Lingua Ignota (unknown language) offers two meanings for zamzia: ‘land,

one’s own’ and ‘basement’.5 For our mystic, interned in a cell under the chapel at

Disibodenberg, the basement is her land. Her personal language of a thousand names is a

window onto this place. With it she flings open Latin sentences, creating gaps and abscesses

that she elbows her glossary into, stealing the adjectives and verbs needed to let her nouns

move. She breaks into the official language of the Church with a private tongue, biting off what

she needs. She infects the fixed, classical form of Latin, which she was excluded from formally

learning, and lets her life pour into the breaches she makes. And the source of this Lingua

Ignota? Her words abound with z’s and s’s. And as German was her mother tongue, this would

make sense. But onomatopoeia too perhaps? ZzzzzzzzzzzzzssssssssssssS. The snap of

electricity. Apparently scientists from the University of Munich discovered in Hildegard’s cell

‘as high an electromagnetic energy source as exists anywhere in Europe.’6 Was it this

5 All translations of the Lingua Ignota are taken from the Wiesbaden Codex (ca. 1200), translated by Sarah L.

Higley in ‘The Riesencodex Lingua Ignota with Additions from the Berlin MS’, in Sarah L. Higley, Hildegard

of Bingen’s Unknown Language (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 161–188. 6 Matthew Fox, Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen (Vermont: Bear & Company, 2002), 46.

27

concentration of electromagnetic energy that informed her visions so alive with starbursts and

fire balls?

Hildegard makes it known that her source is the Living Light. But this cannot be! Historians

put her in her place:

An arbitrary groundless invention. . . . A compensatory response to a lack of formal

education. . . . Its purpose seems unclear and groundless, and its audacity, no matter

how divinely granted, is immodest for a virgin and an abbess. . . . If proper language

use is to be laid down by law, then those who name the world must come from a divine

and usually male authority or from a committee of scholars like the 18th-century

English prescriptive grammarians. . . . Its pointlessness offers grounds for doubt. . . .

The mere expression of disease.7

•

& s there somewhere we might turn to help illuminate the possibilities of the Lingua

Ignota’s pointlessness?

Suddenly I was filled with a turbulence that knocked the wind out of me and inspired

me to wild acts. ‘Write.’ When I say ‘writing’ seized me, it wasn’t a sentence that had

managed to seduce me, there was absolutely nothing written, not a letter, not a line. But

in the depths of the flesh, the attack. Pushed. Not penetrated. Invested. Set in motion.

The attack was imperious: ‘Write!’ Even though I was only a meagre anonymous

mouse. I knew vividly the awful jolt that galvanises the prophet, wakened in mid-life

by an order from above.8

7 Various historians quoted in Sarah L Higley, Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2007), 4–6; and in Foxhall, ‘Making Modern Migraine Medieval’. 8 Hélène Cixous, ‘Coming to Writing’, in Coming to Writing and Other Essays, eds. Hélène Cixous and

Deborah Jenson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 9.

28

Hélène Cixous’s description of how she came to writing bears a resemblance to Hildegard’s

own journey toward writing at forty-two:

But I, though I saw and heard these things, refused to write for a long time through

doubt and bad opinion and the diversity of human words, not with stubbornness but in

the exercise of humility, until, laid low by the scourge of God, I fell upon a bed of

sickness; then, compelled at last by many illnesses, . . . I set my hand to the writing.

. . . And I spoke and wrote these things not by the invention of my heart or that of any

other person, but as by the secret mysteries of God I heard and received them in the

heavenly places. And again I heard a voice from Heaven saying to me, ‘Cry out

therefore, and write thus!’9

Cixous describes the voice that pushes her to write as ‘Life in person’.10 And in a few lines that

might help shed light on the possibilities of the Lingua Ignota’s pointlessness, she writes: ‘For

a long time now, the names that are only right for the urge to possess have not been right for

naming the being who equals life. All the names of Life suit it, all the names put together don’t

suffice to designate it.’11 And she warns: ‘This is what my body teaches me: first of all, be wary

of names; they are nothing but social tools, rigid concepts, little cages of meaning assigned, as

you know, to keep us from getting mixed up with each other.’12

Is the Lingua Ignota perhaps an act of praise? A renaming of the already-spelled-out world that

only the men around Hildegard have direct access to, an opening of their little cages of meaning

and a renaming that points to what escapes: Life’s fecundity, its irreducibility, its viriditas? In

her hymn ‘O ignis Spiritus paracliti’, we encounter the line terra viriditatem sudat, which has

been translated in different ways, but the one I like best is, ‘the earth sweats germinating power

from its very pores.’13 Hildegard put the Latin word viriditas, variously translated as

‘greenness’, ‘freshness’, ‘vitality’, and ‘growth’, to a variety of uses within her cosmology that

frustrates any attempt to pin it down to a single meaning. The Lingua Ignota, with a

9 Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), 60–61. 10 Cixous, ‘Coming to Writing’, 44. 11 Cixous, 44. 12 Cixous, 49. 13 Fox, Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen, 44.

29

pointlessness that does not allow it to possess, seems designed to soak up this viriditas, the

earth’s sweaty excess—to speak what overflows.

On the second day of filming at Disibodenberg, a group of women arrive on a tour bus to sing

a medley of Hildegard’s songs. All of us up on the hill that day stop poking around in the ruins

and tune in. The last two syllables of many of her words form a trochee, a stressed syllable

followed by an unstressed one, giving them a sing-song quality. Can a hymn be just one word?

Hildegard calls out to a thousand things with a new name for each. She cleans and dusts them

with the breath of a new name: fulzia (marigold), nasunz (decorative seams), kolezia (throat),

noizbiz (night raven). She freshens them with a green-sapling-word. She trills the distance

between them with a song. She plucks out her eyes and inserts her luzpomphia, her word for

eyeball that holds an apple (pomziaz), or half an apple, at its core. With her golden-apple eyes,

she takes a bite out of Latin and inserts her song, offering new names for the Life that sparks

in the gaps, a life that crackles—ZzzzzzzzzzzzzssssssssssssS

•

! specific place unfolds, noun by noun, in the Wiesbaden Codex (ca. 1200), a

manuscript containing Hildegard’s collected works. In the Lingua Ignota’s list of names,

running from Aigonz (God) to cauiz (cricket), a window opens onto the things around

Hildegard, what she moved through and what moved her. What made her curious. What she

framed. Wandering through the glossary, one catches a glimpse of Hildegard through the things

her body was linked to: tools, garments, buildings, birds. Rather than merely a rudimentary list,

something of the world’s immeasurability is felt in the precision and variety of the everyday

objects it names. A nulsiz (needle) pokes its way from her time into mine like a glinting endash,

as worthy of a new name as God.

One wonders about what escapes her Lingua Ignota. For example, there are lists for birds and

insects but no list for mammals. Surely a squirrel darted away, a mouse was killed, a cow was

eaten, a cat meowed in heat? One finds a fishhook (kanfur) but no fish, a plough (ranchil) but

30

not the oxen needed to pull it; there is a mule driver (virzunz) but no mule, a swineherd

(garazin) but no swine, a shepherd (scaliziz) but no sheep. Is it perhaps a prophetic language

for a time such as ours, in its aridity? Probably not—but this list of nouns, in its specificity

opens up a rich imaginary. There are lists for farming equipment, wine and beer brewing tools,

‘entertainers, sinners, and criminals’, architectural details, skin diseases, parts of the human

body (our mystic does not blush), and my favourite, her list for ‘birds, a bat, and a gryphon’.

Her curiosity ran in many directions. Unsurprisingly, her longest list is for plants. With its 184

names, it exudes abundance. There are fruits and thorns, flowers and spices, vegetables and

herbs. Many of which would have been found in the woods and fields around the monastery,

or in its garden, others are from further afield.

But it is in her aviary that Hildegard truly leaves the confines of Disibodenberg. She takes flight

on the wings of the argumzio (gryphon), rides out at seventy kilometres per hour on the back

of a gugurunz (ostrich), and rises up from her dreams with the call of the nazischo (rooster).

She names what is common to her patch of earth and also flies out into the world, naming

things from other places (myth and continents). She steals in order to fly, inserting her own

words into Latin sentences, attaching dusty verbs to newly-named things, enacting the thievery

and the flying that Cixous says women writers do: They ‘fly the coop, take pleasure in jumbling

the order of space, in disorientating it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and

values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning property upside down.’14

•

While wandering around, looking for things to film, I tripped over a small pile of dirt

and looking down with annoyance, saw another architectural remnant nestled amongst the ruins

of the monastery. This mole hill was one of a dozen that I now noticed scattered all over the

lawn, which were flattened each day by the gardener, only to exuberantly resurface in a new

spot. Each little hill, easily missed, is evidence of a sprawling underground network of tunnels

and chambers dug by those creatures for whom sight is the least important sense. These poor-

14 Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer

1976): 887.

31

sighted underground dwellers, singular in nature, like our mystic interned in her zamzia,

studiously carve tunnels and chambers and openings into the earthy darkness, aerating the soil

from which all life bursts.

0"&.1'-023&."1 (" ,1-'42#$.)

I. 5 cirinz (a running sore)

#he mystic woman who wrote in the Middle Ages and early modern Europe was

largely banned from engaging in the biblical commentary that authorised the texts of her male

contemporaries. And so, instead of interpreting scripture, she translated the impressions left in

her body by the religious experience. In this process of translating the vellum of her own body,

language took on a somatic quality. In Fragmentation and Redemption (1991), the historian

Caroline Bynum notes a difference in the way men and women wrote of their religious

experiences: ‘The male voice is impersonal. It is striking to note that, however fulsome or

startling their imagery, men write of “the mystical experience”, giving a general description of

what may be used as a theory or yardstick, whereas women write of “my mystical experience”,

speaking directly of something that may have occurred to them alone .’1

While writing by mystic women from this period has no direct connection with contemporary

feminism, perhaps by looking at their texts as translations of first-hand experiences, we might

be able to pull up alongside Donna Haraway’s argument in her essay ‘Situated Knowledges’

(1988) that feminism loves the ‘sciences and politics of interpretation, translation, stuttering,

1 Caroline Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval

Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 190.

32

and the partly understood’.2 For Haraway, translation is an interpretive, critical, and partial

process that contributes to a feminist objectivity, which she describes as situated knowledges.

She envisions an objectivity formed by the ‘view from a body’ connected to a network of

different positions, within which a rational knowledge is produced in a process of ongoing

critical interpretation that resists simplification and closure: ‘the only way to find a larger vision

is to be somewhere in particular.’3 Objectivity, Haraway argues, cannot be practiced from the

standpoint of ‘the master, the Man, the One God, whose Eye produces, appropriates, and orders

all difference.’4 This view from nowhere produces irrational, irresponsible, and indifferent

understanding toward the fantasy of fixed, perfect, and final order. One example of this could

be the Christian Right, whose belief in the inerrancy of the Bible as the spoken word of God

has produced an apocalyptic grand narrative, the violent fruits of which we currently see

unfolding in the US today. Haraway’s situated knowledges promise instead an objectivity

accountable to ‘translations and solidarities linking the cacophonous visions and visionary

voices that characterise the knowledges of the subjugated.’5

I’ve inhabited two bodies that I can count, and surely many more besides. But what I mean

here by two bodies is two vastly different ways of visualising the world, which in turn create

distinct responses and actions. My young body was shaped and disciplined by Pentecostal

Christianity, the Evangelical kind, imported to Aotearoa New Zealand in the 80s from the US.

This dogmatic system of belief interacted with my biological body and created a view of the

world from above, producing a body seen as autonomous from its environment, a body that

would experience the Second Coming and be raptured in its lifetime—a body in the world but

not of the world, as they used to say. The second body left this ideology but was surprised to

find so much of it still deeply inscribed. The Bible, viewed as the inerrant Word of God by the

Christian Right, is etched fiercely, especially if the body being etched is that of a young girl.

Tattooed deeply, it leaves sticky welts that need tending to (or like the repressed, they crack

open again and again), and this tending to is slow work. There is no flipping the script.

There’s a long period when she can’t leave the house. When she doesn’t even leave the bed.

Everywhere feels like a trap. She imagines a house being slowly taken apart, nail by nail. This

2 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial

Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 589. 3 Haraway, 590. 4 Haraway, 587. 5 Haraway, 590.

33

image she holds on to is a visualisation of the processes she feels taking place internally. Her

bed becomes the bare foundations of an old dogma, a stage now waiting for an action that she’s

too scared to take. She realizes, lying there, that any action she does take will already be

infected. Having studied ballet since she was young, her body has been colonized by a style of

dance that emerged out of fifteenth-century Italian swordplay and was later formalized in the

French court of Louis IV, where the highly-stylised technique of French fencing became

embedded in the basic ballet positions. Her muscles and ligaments have been fashioned into a

dancer’s physique that connects her body to a history of European sword fighting. Inscriptions

upon inscriptions upon inscriptions, disciplines upon disciplines upon disciplines.

She lies on her bed in the dark and watches the moon slowly progress, one slat at a time, beyond

the blinds of her teenage bedroom, as the camellia hedge outside her window turns black, then

grey, then green as the sun slowly progresses one slat at a time, beyond the blinds of her teenage

bedroom, as the camellia hedge outside her window turns green, then purple, then black. Day

after day, they coax from her a trust. Guided by these celestial bodies, her bed now a raft, she

begins to navigate this new body, which is also a new world.

Your eyes behind your veil are doves.6

Says the lover to the beloved. Your eyes are live doves by the water streams, says the beloved

of the lover. Milk and honey are under your tongue, says one to the other. That honey, viscous,

caught her off guard. Golden, it came toward her, better than an angel. And from behind the

ornate lattice of letters, the lover whispers: See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone.

Under a fig tree, in the grass, she comes across two breasts, like two fauns—like two fauns?—

and pomegranates, which she’s never seen, let alone tasted. They call to her from the page.

Your eyes behind your veil are doves. She tries out having birds for eyes. After school, she

takes these darting avian eyes, very tired now, up to the teacher and opens the Book to the

Song. First, what are those, she grazes pomegranate with her sticky finger, her bird eyes

focused for a moment. Ok, she nods when the teacher tells her it is a red fruit with lots of seeds.

Ok, so what’s this book about? It symbolises your relationship with God. A shadow passes.

The birds launch off her pupils and fly away. There’s a great deal of confusion at this moment

6 ‘Song of Songs’, New International Version, (last accessed December 19, 2020),

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Song%20of%20Songs%201-8&version=NIV

34

because she’s always been told that God is her Father, and so something’s not quite adding up.

It makes her feel a little sick. They’ve prepared her for this moment: no one wants to be Thomas

with his finger doubtfully circling Christ’s wound. But she’s already stuck her fingers in, tasted

pomegranate, and her eyes have taken flight.

Song of Songs is an anomaly in the Bible. It is not interested in Law, nor does it seemingly

teach wisdom, although it is the last of the ‘wisdom books’ before the voices of the major

prophets burn a righteous path to the New Testament. Variously interpreted as allegorical,

dramatic, and cultic, today it is generally read as a love poem with no religious implications,

which celebrates sexual love through the declarations of its lovers, whose encounters are

witnessed by a chorus of women. My Pentecostal school took the allegorical line, but of all the

weekly memory verses the entire school had to learn and recite each Friday, one by one, in

front of the teacher’s desk, never once was one picked from the Song. One is left to imagine

this line of students, winding through the school like a garland, reciting, one after the other, ‘I

am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valley.’

This weekly recitation of verses was just one way the Book was written into our bodies. As

Elizabeth Grosz writes in Volatile Bodies (1994), the civilised body is socially inscribed,

permeably and impermeably, in different ways, according to sex, class, race, and culture, both

subtly and violently. She points to Franz Kafka’s hauntingly cruel execution device in The

Penal Colony as a fictionalising of the brutality with which bodies are written by and made

answerable to systems of power. In Kafka’s story, the prisoner is unaware they have been

condemned until, millimetre by millimetre, needles tattoo a ‘sentence’ deeper and deeper into

the flesh. At around the sixth hour, the body comprehends its punishment in an illumination

that offers no salvation. Fundamentalism is language absolute. Like the condemned in Kafka’s

tale, the young girl is disciplined until she is the dogmatic script of the institution through and

through. When her body, twisted into its sentence, poses no resistance. And, finally, empty and

transparent (saved and pure), she is ready to be filled with the Word. She is unaware that her

original crime was the fact of her very own body, that the very material through which she

encounters the world is both the source and ground of her punishment.

The watchmen found me;

They took away my cloak,

Those watchmen of the walls!

35

And while the dogmatic script of the Evangelical Church, now writ deep, can never be flipped,

it can (over time) learn to hold other scripts, scripts that run like honey. The Song of Songs is

a dangerous viscosity, whose words drip with aloe, run red with pomegranate, disperse in a

cloud of cinnamon, and quiver under two foals and a thigh. This is only to say that resistance

can be sparked by the song of a body’s enjoyment. That pomegranates can ignite a revolt. ‘You

must change your life’ is not just the last line of a poem7 but poetry itself, which does not

describe an experience but is an experience, one that can indeed change a life.

•

#he Christian fundamentalist movement began its spread across North America in the

first decade of the twentieth century, and its evangelical successors have striven to place its

doctrine at the centre of politics and culture in the US and abroad ever since. The movement

believed in a sweeping, grand apocalyptic narrative and understood itself to be engaged in a

battle of good versus evil, toward the vision of a perfect and absolute world. Biblical inerrancy

meant the Bible was treated like a manual, where individual verses were seen as ‘pieces of data

that they could extract, classify, cross-reference, quantify, place in taxonomies and then

reassemble, to form something new.’8 And like text, like body. At Hebron Christian College,

a school in the quiet suburb of Mt Albert, Auckland, which followed the conservative teachings

of Bill Gothard, an evangelical Christian minister from the US, our work was not so much

marked as our characters. In accordance with a worldview that saw us permanently engaged in

a battle between good and evil, everything was read through this binary: thoughts, actions,

speech, dress, who you interacted with in the ‘outside’ world, what you watched, what you

listened to. It was believed that the body was in constant danger of being tempted, or inciting

temptation (if female), so that its links to things, its curiosities, were as heavily policed as the

body itself. This not only disenfranchises the young girl from her body, it also separates her

7 Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, 1918, poets.org, (last accessed December 19, 2020),

https://poets.org/poem/archaic-torso-apollo 8 Matthew Avery Sutton, ‘The Day Christian Fundamentalism Was Born’, The New York Times, May 25, 2019,

(last accessed December 19, 2020), www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/opinion/the-day-christian-fundamentalism-

was-born.html

36

body from the world it inhabits. As she becomes like a piece of data—able to be judged and

quantified, always running the gauntlet between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, which she always loses—

the world also becomes data to be classified, judged, and made to fit an apocalyptic grand

narrative.

The inscriptions written into the body of this young girl are indistinguishable from the

severances made between her body and what it desires to connect with. Everything she

encounters is a sign to be deciphered, a text to be read, the wealth of its materiality a temptation

to be avoided. Binaries break her off from the linkages (curiosities) that would extend her body

out into the world. Distanced from the now of her senses, she is left stranded in a future

apocalypse. Her image of these end times is constructed by the movies they show her: a

deserted road lined with trees; a metal drum on fire; a woman lying face-down, a shoe beside

her. Her body is severed from the links that make the body what it is: rather than an organic

totality, Grosz argues that the body is an ‘assemblage of organs, processes, pleasures, passions,

activities, behaviours linked by fine lines and unpredictable networks to other elements,

segments, and assemblages,’9 which is a life.

This script, this running sore, curving through the body and its amputations, cannot be flipped.

But the body is also a ground of resistance. The Song’s viscosity, its refusal to be one form,

draws our young girl to it. Energies cut off externally, move inward. Interior worlds,

daydreams, and fictions are spaces of survival for a young girl cauterized—spaces that cannot

be turned into data. If she had encountered the Song on its own, outside of religious dogma, it

may not have been so compelling, but in this context, the Song creates a glitch where a moral

code cannot be discerned. The enjoyment that swells in it cannot be classified into either the

‘right’ or ‘wrong’ that she is familiar with. This inability to categorize the Song creates a

malfunction in the grand apocalyptic narrative. A window is thrown open onto a garden from

which the scent of cedar rises.

The body, for Silvia Federici, is a site of resistance where a natural limit to repression is created,

not by culture and language, but through evolution: ‘the need for sun, for the blue sky and the

green of trees, for the smell of the woods and the oceans, the need for touching, smelling,

9 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,

1994), 120.

37

sleeping, making love.’10 She describes a resistance founded on the body’s need for pleasure—

touching, smelling, sleeping, making love. The Song celebrates this need through the dialogue

of its two lovers and the chorus of women who witness their enjoyment—and the young girl,

stumbling through the books of wisdom on her way to the prophets, finds herself a perplexed

yet welcome witness also. The enjoyment she encounters in the Song opens up a glitch in the

disciplining machine of Evangelical Christianity. The Song sings of something the machine

cannot convincingly process. As it turns out, a song of the body’s enjoyment is enough to spark

a revolt. Federici’s ‘natural limit’ appears to be located at the point where the body reaches for

an other, for the blue sky and the green of trees, for the smell of the woods and the oceans. This

natural limit is a body’s need for connection, a need to extend beyond itself through linkages

that refuse a self-contained, autonomous, organic totality, demanding instead an itinerary of

connections: A body like that of the beloved, linked to the world through endless metaphors

and similes in a cacophony of the cataphatic, which makes her vast and irreducible, where she

appears from every angle like a reflection of the cosmos.

She watches the moon rise and lower, the camelia hedge shift from oily purple to grey to green

until, one day, brushing against it on her way to the mailbox, it bristles, no longer simply data.

The loss of a certain picture of the world means a new position to navigate from, means new

linkages to be made, means new scripts and an endless reckoning with old scripts etched deep.

•

)he imagines the soul as a castle made of crystal and urges her sisters inside—Enter,

then, enter within yourselves, my daughters; and get right away from your own trifling good

works11—guiding them through six mansions, until they reach a seventh. Here dwells the

divine, whose presence is described in metaphors that allow it to be touched and tasted: the

sun, the savoury heart of a palmetto, a wine cellar, a creature with divine breasts out of which

flow streams of milk. This cosmic building, described in the Interior Castle (1577) by the

10 Silvia Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin:Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in

Contemporary Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2020), 119–20. 11 Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, trans. E. Allison Peers (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2007), 78.

38

sixteenth-century Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila, holds a knowledge that can only be accessed

through enjoyment. Indeed, it is an imperative: ‘you will revel.’12 In the epilogue, she offers

this interior world, accessed through prayer and contemplation, to her sisters as a consolation.

Here, they can take their delight (Michel de Certeau translates this as ‘revel’, which I like very

much) at any hour, without the scrutiny of their superiors:

And considering how strictly you are cloistered, my sisters, how few opportunities you

have of recreation and how insufficient in number are your houses, I think it will be a

great consolation for you, in some of your convents, to take your delight in this Interior

Castle, for you can enter it and walk about in it at any time without asking leave of your

superiors.13

The delights encountered here are translations of Teresa’s direct religious experiences drawn

through language: The sun! A wine cellar! Gardens and fountains! The Interior Castle is

described by de Certeau as ‘a place of enjoyment whose vocabulary is entirely corporeal.’14

Teresa was not taught Latin, the official language of the Church. How to speak then? She finds

a way. She sounds out Latin quotes phonetically, rendering them almost indecipherable.15 She

untethers them, rolls them around in her mouth, and sends them back out onto the bright plains

of her page, where they are subsequently corralled and shot by future editors and translators.

She wrote in Castilian, the everyday language of the home, of the market, of gossip. She

approaches a sixteenth-century god with a language considered not up to the task: ‘The

vernacular appeared simply and totally inadequate. Its use, it would seem, could end only in a

complete enfeeblement of meaning and a general abasement of values.’16 Unfurling her mother

tongue, she wraps it around the divine. She explores concepts and spiritual matters usually

addressed in Latin using her local dialect, at times hesitantly—so many doubts peck at her

text—other times savouring and enjoying, literally feeling things out through her phonetic

toying with Latin. The Interior Castle is a somatic script of Teresa’s body put in motion by

12 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael

B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 198. 13 Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, 298. 14 De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One, 199. 15 J. M. Cohen, introduction to The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself, by Teresa of Ávila, trans. J. M.

Cohen (London: Penguin Books, 1957), 12. 16 Geoffrey Shepherd, ‘English Versions of the Scriptures before Wyclif’, in The Cambridge History of the

Bible: Volume 2, The West from the Fathers to the Reformation, ed. G.W.H. Lampe (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1969), 366.

39

intimacy and distance, moved by rapture and the pain of separation that inevitably follows.

Thoughts double up on themselves, retreat, ‘are in rather a jumbled state’,17 or burst onto the

page, ecstatic and bold. In the prologue, she asserts her lack of mastery: ‘For I write as

mechanically as birds taught to speak, which . . . repeat the same things again and again.’18 In

its imperfection, in its ‘enfeeblement’ and ‘debasement of values’, the Interior Castle maintains

a necessary distance to that which it seeks to know.

‘All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward,’19 wrote Nietzsche.

Think of her cloistered sisters ‘with few opportunities . . . of recreation’, excluded from formal

education, and watched by superiors. Think of all those instincts cauterized—but where do they

go? Teresa offers them a way out, inward. She believes her sisters experience great suffering

because they ‘fail to realize there is an interior world close at hand’, and ‘so we suffer terrible

trials because we do not understand ourselves.’20 Julia Kristeva argues in Teresa, My Love that

while the Spanish mystic is no precursor to psychoanalysis, she dissects her thoughts and

sensations with an intelligence and wit that has resonances with the psychoanalytic process.21

Teresa’s crystal castle is an image that guides her sisters toward an understanding of self

through prayer and contemplation, where they might discover their own houses ‘full of good

things’. And this itinerary is not world-fleeing, but space-producing. For Teresa, to move

inward is to also extend outward: ‘What hope can we have of being able to rest in other people’s

homes if we cannot rest in our own?’22 she asks. Being the writer she was, the Interior Castle

could arguably be seen as a sixteenth-century ‘room of one’s own’, a place of creative thought

for her sisters who have limited freedoms. Her fictional castle, established on the foundations

of her own experience, offers her sisters a way of discharging energies that cannot be

discharged externally, and she gives their bodies back to them as a site of enjoyment—which

is to say that she offers them a means of survival.

17 Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, 79. 18 Teresa of Ávila, 35. 19 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage

Books), 84–85, quoted in Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 124. 20 Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, 98. 21 Julia Kristeva, Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, trans. Lorna Scott Fox (New York:

Columbia University Press, 2015), 69. 22 Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, 67.

40

Her lungs a scroll

Her ribs its keeper

Her veins a script

Her heart its metre

Now crystal

Now castle

Now spectral

Now animal

She is a script. She is a guide. She is an architecture. She is a place. She is the 200 pages I turn

as I enter her image of the soul. She is who I wander into and find I have wandered into me.

The Interior Castle is a script of Teresa’s body moved by the direct religious encounter. It

records her struggle to carry the trace of this encounter into language so her sisters may share

in it also. The theologian Ernst Troeltsch argues that mysticism is an anti-institutional form

because of its insistence upon a direct religious experience, and Caroline Bynum adds that this

individualism means it is ‘always a rebellion against or a bypassing of ecclesiastical

structures.’ 23 Teresa’s direct religious experience, encountered at the level of her body and

translated into manifold delights, is what establishes and authorises the place from which she

speaks. Enjoyment encountered and pursued, ignites an errantry from ecclesiastical structures

and ‘those half-learned men whose shortcomings have cost me very dear.’24 Take your delight,

she urges her sisters, and in interior worlds born of Teresa’s crystal castle, they revel in

irreducible singularities, whenever they wish, without taking leave of their superiors.

23 Caroline Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 64–65. 24 Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, 130.

41

II. 6 -land

& struggle with your texts. You see, I’d call myself a reluctant reader. I have a problem

with faith. Or, I had a problem with faith. I believed as a child, and then I stopped. But I think

your ‘manner of speaking’ allows for an errantry, a vertiginous temporality, and a heterogeneity

of what today we might call ‘genre’ that works for a body like mine.

For a body like mine?

A sentence as an answer is difficult. But an answer can be as simple as a name. I was given

‘Sriwhana’ by my mother, who spelled it wrong—or rather, chose to misspell it because she

thought it looked better with a tall letter. The ‘h’ is an axe that severs ‘sriwana’ and renders it

wrong: a slice and a suturing that forever marks my position as near to but distanced from my

Indonesian heritage. It cuts and connects, like a slice in film. The arch of ‘h’ opens up a passage

into the severance it makes through which grammatical correctness absconds. On the chair of

‘h’, I navigate this misspelling, whose wings extend on either side, looking for a place to land.

‘H’ cleaves my name with a hole breathed into it on the whim of my mother and writes a new

one. Or perhaps marks me as hers? She speaks hhhhhhhhh with her mother tongue into my

father’s tongue and corrodes it with her breath. She defaces it, makes it her own. Familiar with

nonstandardness when it comes to language, my mother speaks in tongues. She even has a

translator. I once asked her how to do it. ‘You say what you hear,’ she said. I waited for words

but none came, so I reached for sounds, which is not how it’s done. When she speaks in tongues,

a voice rolls out that touches nothing I know. My mother speaks in tongues / a cousin growls

when a spirit enters their body: Christianity / Hinduism, single vertebra in a story that runs the

length of my spine. Like rocks, like knots in a net, never mixing, they form the ecology of i-

land. This i-land that is I and place and the movement between us, marking our intimacy and

distance.

For a body like mine?

42

Evicted by a question, just waiting for the bus. Here comes the man about to serve me my

notice:

‘Where are you from?’

New Zealand

‘Yes, but where are you really from?’

Evicted by a question, I clutch fragments of island, like a clacking skeleton made from the

city’s late-night leg bones. My 2 am chicken, clacking half-gnawed, with deep-fried skin still

flapping: These are the monsters fragments make.

‘Yes, but where are you really from?’

I hold up my monster chicken:

An egg conceived on a packsaddle that leaves at dawn

(fils de bast)

The old man frowns:

Well, you’re very pretty.

Silt sinks to the bottom of a life, a riddle to now sift through:

What is the measure of the distance that makes me inauthentically a New Zealander, the

measure of the distance that makes me authentically a New Zealander?

Dropped in a Balinese context

A man once wrote in a review

A double riddle:

What is the measure of the distance that makes me inauthentically Indonesian, the measure of

the distance that makes me authentically Indonesian?

43

Futile questions. Equations designed to never add up but to keep me busy with the working

out.

Also:

a) Dropped from where?

b) Where does one context begin and another end?

c) How far is too far?

d) How close is not close enough?

e) And for whom?

Trinh T. Minh-ha writes: ‘Of all the layers that form the open (never finite) totality of “I”,

which is to be filtered out as superfluous, fake, corrupt, and which to be called pure, true, real,

genuine, original, authentic? Which, indeed, since all interchange, revolving in an endless

process.’25

Also: ‘Every path I/i take is edged with thorns.’26

Self-exoticisation?

asks the curator—

an elusive identity is suspicious.

A young girl stuffs cut-up images inside her head.

•

& n her article ‘Living on the borderline: how I embraced my mixed-race status after

years of denial’, the journalist Georgina Lawton describes her experience growing up ‘brown-

25 Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘Difference: “A Special Third World Women Issue”’, in Woman, Native, Other

(Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1989), 94. 26 Trinh, 89.

44

skinned in a white family’ as ‘straddling the borders of race and liminality my whole life.’27

Liminality describes a state of ambiguity between two stages in a rite of passage. In

Fragmentation and Redemption, Bynum challenges the idea put forward by the historian Victor

Turner that religious experiences by women in the medieval period were liminal: ‘If one looks

with women rather than at women, women’s lives are not liminal to women.’ She continues:

‘Only men’s stories are full social dramas; only men’s symbols are full reversals. Women are

fully liminal only to men.’28 I understand where Lawson is coming from when she uses

liminality to describe her experience because I’ve used it myself. But now I can’t help asking:

liminal to whom?

A body forms where categories leak.

Teresa struggles to begin the task asked of her, to write down her experience of prayer as a

guide for her sisters, for as she is told by her superiors, ‘women understand better the language

of other women.’29 How to write a guide for prayer—an act with doubt and uncertainty at its

very core?

While I was beseeching Our Lord today that He would speak through me, since I could

find nothing to say and had no idea how to begin to carry out the obligation laid upon

me by obedience, I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single

diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms. 30

In the dimness, formations ever-so-slowly creep upwards and downwards, drip by drip. A

landscape is formed from miniscule grains. Our guide lists the materials—lava, mud, peat,

sand, and the crystallized urine of the packrat—as we float through the glistening chamber,

past walls of sweating rock. Categories (interior, exterior, spirit, flesh, action, contemplation,

self, other) leak, crystallising in an interior castle that becomes the foundation from which

Teresa begins to write. But the image she works from is slippery. It is the inverse of a fortified

castle—all her sisters are invited in, as many as will hear her words. This castle and its contents

are available to any body; indeed, the only way to encounter it is through the flesh. She guides

27 Georgina Lawton, ‘Living on the borderline: how I embraced my mixed-race status after years of denial’, The

Guardian, August 2017, (last accessed December 19, 2020), www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/26/

living- on-the-borderline-how-i-embraced-my-mixed-race-status-after-years-of-denial 28 Caroline Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 47–49. 29 De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One, 192. 30 Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, 41.

45

her sisters toward its central chamber, which holds the sun, so bright that nothing can be seen;

the savoury heart of a palmetto, which can be eaten; a cellar full of wine to be enjoyed—her

interior is her own absconding.

As we travel through the castle, there is an interplay between that which can be disclosed and

that which is perhaps better left for us to discover on our own: ‘For even in ourselves there are

deep secrets that we cannot fathom.’31 The text remains opaque in parts, even to itself. Making

a blueprint of it is futile—I tried, others have tried. It is an image that cannot be pinned down.

Sometimes it changes its skin entirely in rapid detours through metaphors—this Orient pearl,

this tree. It is an image of something assembled, stone by stone, and something formed through

natural processes of heat and pressure. For de Certeau, Teresa’s castle is both plural and

singular, reducible to neither a crystal nor a castle, and this irreducibility sets the image in

motion. He writes this movement into a new name: castle-crystal. This name composes a

shimmering form, endlessly oscillating between the human-made and the mineral, the sayable

and the unsayable, transparency and opacity, interior and exterior—it is not fixed and absolute,

nor one or the other, but one and the other. The castle-crystal is elusive; it shifts with each step.

Now a single diamond, now extending in multiple directions; now crystal, now castle; now

indestructible and enclosed, now opening out into seven dwelling places, now many more, both

above and below and around. It is a form comprised of two elements put in motion by the

difference/distance between them, which operates as a metaphor for the fluctuating and

dynamic dialogue that connects Teresa to the divine other in her. This shimmering, endlessly

oscillating image illustrates the practice of prayer, whose timbre shifts with faith and doubt:

‘Prayer counts on that expectation of the other. But it is not sure of it.’32 What remains constant

in Teresa’s domain of prayer is the understanding that there is no me without thee—an endless

address where nothing can be taken for granted.

•

31 Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, 106. 32 De Certeau, 187.

46

)he leans against her father’s iron gate, a strange concoction that is vaguely Baroque.

It smells of rust and iron, the almost bloody smell of rust devouring iron, or as the alchemists

used to say, ‘rust loving iron’, and she ponders an alchemy that would transmute noble metals

into base metals, and not the other way around, and all the empires that would crumble if such

a transfiguration were to take place. She runs her tongue across her upper canine teeth, which

should have been filed flat at puberty but remain sharp, meaning that in this setting she has not

yet transitioned from animal to human. She is a scamizio (trickster), a shape-shifter,

shimmering on the endless sea of meaning, changing from one setting to the next, now animal,

now human. Here, she is both disrupted and a disruption, like the half-wild dogs who would

quietly wait outside her door in the burning lavender of the morning. Polite, even stately, once

fed, they would run down to the beach and in a flick of time that rolled like sand under a heavy

paw, would turn on each other, teeth barred, three dogs on one, one against one, drawing blood

with eyes turning over until the whites rolled into the sea.

•

(ather:

The filial thread snags on the colonial chimera of métissage, a French word generally translated

as ‘interracial union’33 and used to describe racial intermixing within a colony. As to why she

retains métissage in her translation of Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, Betsy Wing

explains that more neutral terms such as ‘crossing’, ‘braiding’, and ‘intermixing’, ignore

difference. Métissage for Glissant is the meeting and synthesis of two differences in an initial

encounter or shock that opens up the possibility of creolization, which for the Martinican writer

was a dynamic process of ongoing métissage, where difference continues to function and

multiply. For Glissant, ‘métissage moves from a narrow range of racial intermixing to become

33 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of

Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia’, in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, eds.

Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (California: University of California Press, 1997), 198.

47

a relational practice affirming the multiplicity and diversity of its components.’34 For the

French Indochina and Dutch East Indies colonial territories of the nineteenth to mid-twentieth

century, the so-called ‘mixed-blood problem’ complicated the criteria used to identify

Europeanness. The métis population held an ambiguous position: they offered the promise of

specially moulded citizens for the colonial state while simultaneously posing as a possible

threat. Métissage created a group of citizens who transgressed what had once been clear divides

between ruler and ruled, presenting the colonisers with a ‘cultural density of class, gender, and

national issues’ that ‘exposed the arbitrary logic by which the categories of control were

made.’35 Métissage diverted and diluted bloodlines and formed bodies where categories leaked,

creating an accumulation of energy at odds with filial linearity. Indeed, translations such as

‘crossing’, ‘intermixing’, and ‘braiding’ stabilise and neutralise the complex density of

transgressions created by métissage into the violent-peace of a generalised and generally

silencing blend. Glissant’s use of métissage retains the complex density of transgressions, the

multiplicities and diversities, which the meeting of difference makes possible.

•

! beach at night. Torches open up a volume between sand and sky where two

ceremonies take place, side by side, for my step-grandfather who was Chinese Balinese. When

we arrived, a pyre was already set up on which sat a miniature paper house filled with all the

things he might need in the afterlife. Next to it, close but with enough distance to delineate

them, bodies in white, flickering like moths, attended to something on the ground. Once set

alight, the glow from the pyre, with its little house, furnishings, and red paper sports car, caught

the edges of these busy figures, drawing across them with growing intensity, until I could make

out what they were tending to. Now, brightly lit, the group picked up a small boat in which

they had placed an effigy and walked down to the sea, slipping back into glaucous whisps as

they moved beyond the fire’s throw. Others followed, carrying large cardboard boxes of oil

and rice. As they reached the water, I lost visibility, but it was whispered that the boat with its

34 Betsy Wing, notes to Poetics of Relation, by Édouard Glissant, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 2010), 214. 35 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers’, 225.

48

boxes—I now heard deep splashes—were being sent off to the afterlife. A burning paper house

and a small vessel floating toward the horizon. Two ceremonies for the one life, side by side,

specific in their differences—swirling ash and waves, a blaze and the endless shadow of the

sea, a burning instant and an unknown length of time. How far to the underworld?

One ceremony gives its light to the other, which moves into and away from this glow. Each

ceremony offers up their own rituals against a shared score of sparks and spitting wood, the

bright twinkle of a priest’s bell, the crash and slurp of waves. Ash scatters across the beach, a

boat heads out to sea, sodden cardboard disintegrates, and escaping grains of rice thread a path

to the horizon, like tiny hyphens bridging the world to the afterlife while marking their distance.

A distance crossed by the slow needle of a small vessel going out on the tide and the sudden

burst of thin paper catching light. In neither fusion nor confusion, two ceremonies trace their

movements inside this grotto carved momentarily into the night by fire.

A flash from my father’s camera bursts in on a long prayer, rolling from throats now dust

through throats now flesh, like a snake endlessly shedding its skin. My sister’s opalescent

fingernails point out relatives, satiated flames sigh and dim, a child laughs, is shushed, incense

smoke waves across the vellum of air. Figures in half-light and full light stand around

gossiping, praying, watching, singing. We send the dead to the afterlife with nails painted at

the mall, cardboard boxes hurled into the sea, in a white sarong, its edges printed with flames,

purchased en route from the shop up the road. The invariable meets the endlessly variable, the

important meets the incidental, here on this beach, on her page.

•

We reached the summit quickly, but the trip back down was hard. The hollow clack,

clack we made away from the crater as the scoria rolled underfoot. We travelled to the east of

the island, to a part of the coast where Made inherited land. She wonders what to do with it

because it’s rocky, making it unproductive and not much good for tourism. She points to the

rugged landscape humming on the ultrasound, turning the monitor so I can better see its many

craters. I can’t really tell what I’m looking at, but I nod anyway. ‘Inhospitable’, she calls it,

still pointing to my insides splayed across the screen like a black-and-white fax of gravel. In

49

this inhospitable place, my revelling cells burrow beyond their designated limits into the uterine

wall—and sometimes further still. This indiscriminate excess, which eats away at my womb,

creates a pockmarked organ, like the crust on hot larva, where time is both supple and brittle.

I am a divergence: two bloodlines blown off course for a few seasons. Subsequently rerouted

back to clear trajectories of filiation and legitimacy, they continue on. But the two lines now

meet in the bulge of a knot, a little huddle of secrets: It’s best if I don’t go with Made to the

market in the morning because she doesn’t want to be looked at; wing-tipped eyes peer over

fans at a wedding; heads nod in the direction of my father’s indiscretion. This is only to say

that illegitimacy has its own temporality. It erupts onto the scene, diverting energy away from

the main root. It flickers across people’s faces as they try and connect the dots. The ground of

the bastard is not the marriage bed, that stage on which affiliation to land and blood are enacted,

but is an improvised bed, one that moves: the bastard, the fils de bast, is the child of a mule

driver who uses a packsaddle for a pillow and leaves at dawn.

My roots coil through black sand and bird song. When you call me, the tūī, the same one whose

incessant song drove us all crazy that one summer, is all I hear. But, like a propagated cutting,

there are other roots that move through water like seaweed, tentatively growing in the direction

of things less familiar, hesitantly coiling around family stories, afraid that the rainy season

might wash them back to the sea. ‘Identity’, writes Édouard Glissant in Poetics of Relation

(1990), ‘is no longer completely within the root but also in Relation.’36 For Glissant, root

identity is founded in the idea of self and territory, whereas the errant is a figure who moves

away from the totalitarian root in a rhizomatic rootedness—through water, through air, through

stories—that grows in constant transformative negotiation with bodies, with places, with one’s

history. A poetics of Relation is, Glissant writes, a state where ‘each and every identity is

extended through a relationship with the Other.’37 It is an ethics of contact and translation,

which is not inconsistent with the ‘will to identity, which is, after all, nothing other than the

search for a freedom within particular surroundings.’38 Glissant’s translator Betsy Wing

describes his use of errantry as idiosyncratic: rather than a directionless wandering, one always

moves in relation to the other. Glissant leaves Relation deliberately amorphous, approaching it

through fragments, associations, and the inclusion of different types of writing. Rather than a

36 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 18. 37 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 11. 38 Glissant, 20.

50

definition, he writes an experience of Relation, which one swims in—feeling it, thinking it,

chiming with its rich bioluminescence of resonances. It asks for a generous reader, one who

finds themselves actively participating in the generosity of perception, rather than the ‘seizing’

of comprehension, that constitutes understanding in Relation. The French term Glissant forms

for this type of understanding is donner-avec. Wing translates this as gives-on-and-with,39

which she admits is unwieldy. To me it sounds like a window that gives onto a view, a door

that gives onto a garden: separate yet inseparable, moved by the other—its light, its fragrance.

While reading Poetics of Relation, one encounters in Glissant’s wanderings what he calls a

‘baroque shudder’40: the renouncement through proliferation and bypasses of any rationalist

ambition to summarise and unify the world. He convulses ‘rational’ and draws out relation.

A divergent temporality swells in my body, dilating in the orbit of my pelvic bone, making me

both a beginning and a full-stop, a new line and a dead end. Through stories, I piece together

some sense of a family narrative, fragments gathered here and there—I take any scraps like a

stray animal, such as ‘he liked to drink beer’, ‘the Dutch gave him an ashtray in the shape of a

heart’—but there is another story that now gathers in the body. Gnarled and ornate, this

Baroque womb set atop the diadem of my pelvis links me to an island. An inheritance: my

grandmother suffered multiple miscarriages, which is a common side effect of adenomyosis—

‘a two-thirds chance’, my doctor said as she handed me a photocopied sheet of information,

adding ‘don’t Google it.’ This inhospitable womb, carved by the incomprehensible expanse of

genetic time into a dead end, simultaneously connects me and, in its revelling cells, frees me

from linearity: this interior rubble is my solitariness and my solidarity, my specificity and my

connection—specific but not unique (grandmother). Just one bloom on the family anadem of

irregular wombs, going back who knows how far—flawed pearls glimmering away in the deep

magnetic swirls of ancestry.

•

39 Betsy Wing, translator’s introduction to Poetics of Relation, by Édouard Glissant, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), xiv. 40 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 77.

51

This scoria womb

my broken loom

•

*y cells revel. Bump into walls. Doggedly eat their way through. Move on to where

they shouldn’t. The moon with her tidal hems brings me back in relation with the ambivalence

of the natural world. My belly softly burns. I become brittle and soft. A body taken in and out

with the sea.

My head sounds just as if it were full of brimming rivers, and then as if all the water in

those rivers came suddenly rushing downward; and a host of little birds seem to be

whistling, not in the ears, but in the upper part of the head.41

Teresa’s body, the everyday bits, her strained nerves, headaches, inability to focus, share the

page with advice for her sisters and complex thoughts on prayer and the inner life. She often

interrupts herself. She confesses that she has ‘quite forgotten what I was writing about’,42 that

she is ‘not sure if those are the exact words, but I think they are.’43 She admits to almost giving

up, ‘I have been in a state of great confusion and have wondered if it will not be better for me

in a few words to bring my account of this Mansion to an end’,44 then shrugs, ‘at all events I

may perhaps be dead when this comes to be seen.’45 She breaks into her own sentences, ‘Oh,

God help me!’, diverting them with exclamations, ‘Oh humility, humility!’, and frustrations,

‘all I say falls short of the truth.’46 As we follow Teresa through the Interior Castle, she

suddenly departs like a startled bird, rushing us to the surface of the page with an expression

of doubt or a reference to the very exertion of writing itself—‘I am straining every nerve,

sisters, to explain to you this operation of love.’47 De Certeau comments on a ‘barbarism’ to be

41 Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, 99. 42 Teresa of Ávila, 105. 43 Teresa of Ávila, 68. 44 Teresa of Ávila, 263. 45 Teresa of Ávila, 264. 46 Teresa of Ávila, 253. 47 Teresa of Ávila, 173.

52

found in mystic texts, where a sudden declaration or inspiration scatters order and interrupts

linear flow.48 These ‘barbarisms’ puncture Teresa’s itinerary just as her encounter with the

divine ‘makes a deep wound . . . in the soul’s most intimate depths.’49 These lesions open the

text up to the particularities of Teresa’s body as she writes, and in doing so enact a live

temporality, where as far as our imaginations may have wandered into her cosmic architecture,

she continuously draws us back to the materiality of her body—just as, in a medieval

imaginary, Christ’s wounds were reminders of his humanity. Caroline Bynum writes in

Fragmentation and Redemption that ‘the woman writer’s sense of herself as female was less a

sense of herself as evil or as not-male than a sense of herself as physical. And women saw the

humanity-physicality that linked them to Christ as in continuity with, rather than in contrast to,

their own ordinary experience of physical and social vulnerability.’50

In Teresa’s efforts to draw her religious experience through language, metaphors pile up.

Frustrations too. It is a next to impossible task. But a trace of the one she pursues does emerge—

not in what is said about it, but in what it does, namely, the disruptions it makes in the very

language that seeks to comprehend it. In ‘The Task of the Translator’, Walter Benjamin writes

that the translator needs to allow for their language to be ‘powerfully affected by the foreign

tongue’.51 The foreignness of the divine tongue as witnessed in the Interior Castle is an unruly

presence, interrupting the continuum of interpretation and diverting onward linear flow. For

Teresa, the divine is experienced not through the mouths of her superiors, but through the

imprint it leaves on her body: ‘when He that has wounded [the soul] draws out the arrow, the

bowels seem to come with it, so deeply does it feel this love.’52 She encounters God at the level

of her bowels, and spiritual discourse finds itself returned to the body, from which Christian

rationality, wiping itself clean of the muck of the vernacular, departed for the mind, clothed in

the sharp, formal contours of Latin. And the divine, who moves her mind and her bowels,

passes through the Interior Castle, creating disturbances and denying a perfect, fixed, ordered

text.

In claiming an experience of God that was direct and personal, Christian mystic women

produced texts that are elaborate, particular, ecstatic, and heretical. Teresa ran the gauntlet,

48 De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One, 146. 49 Teresa of Ávila, 253. 50 Caroline Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 172. 51 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), 81. 52 Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, 173–74.

53

needing to strike a balance between her ideas of radical intimacy and prudence, which was an

endless game with ‘those half-learned men.’53 Her efforts were viewed warily—she was

described by a papal legate as a ‘restless wanderer, disobedient, and stubborn femina who,

under the title of devotion, invented bad doctrines.’54 Like her mystic sisters, Teresa wanders

always in relation to the divine, bypassing ecclesiastical structures in an errantry moved by the

rapture and withdrawal of the direct religious encounter. Each mansion in the Interior Castle

is described by its distance and proximity, marked by degrees of light and shadow, to the divine

who dwells in the central chamber. Amy Hollywood argues that for Luce Irigaray, mysticism

is ‘rooted in the particularity of the body even as it moves through the senses toward an intimate

apprehension of other beings.’55 Hesitantly, ecstatically, wearily, joyfully, in pain, in turmoil,

in doubt, at peace—physically, emotionally, and intellectually—mystic texts describe a body

always moving in relation to an other. They are scripts of bodies drawing close and yet failing

to close the gap, set in motion by intimacy and distance. For Walter Benjamin, ‘all translation

is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages.’56

As translations of direct religious encounters, mystic texts are a coming to terms with distance.

•

#he other night a group of us on Zoom were asked how we are accountable to place in

our work. I thought of my accountability to you, archipelago, or better, my attention to our

proximities and distances, to how you recede or draw near depending on the atmospheric

conditions. How does one move toward something while being attentive to distance: the

distance my brother jokingly labels me with when he calls me bule (tourist)?

When I consider the work of the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, whose writing focuses on

the interior worlds of her female characters and is often described as ‘mystical’, I think of eggs

and a cockroach, but mostly eggs. To me, every work of hers holds an egg. She never cracks

53 Teresa of Ávila, 130. 54 Amy E. Leonard, ‘Female Religious Orders’, in A Companion to the Reformation World, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia

(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 240. 55 Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5. 56 Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, 75.

54

the egg in a single text, she returns, again and again and again, until everything holds eggness.

There’s always the feeling that something is about to crack—the mind of a housewife, the

exoskeleton of a cockroach, a bright future—and often it does. Hélène Cixous describes the

approach of Lispector to the things in her stories as political: ‘it is the living space, the

betweenus, that we must take care to keep.’57 Lispector approaches them in a way that ‘leaves

space for the other’.58 How? By viewing them as agents that exert a force of their own, rather

than passive objects to be grasped. Cixous describes what happens next: by ‘letting ourselves

be called to it, the thing leads us to a space composed of the thing and of us.’59 This perceiving

of the thing as an entity that acts (calls, leads), might be considered similar to the ‘generosity

of perception’ in Glissant’s poetics of Relation, where ‘every subject is an object and every

object a subject.’60 Lispector dedicates The Passion According to G.H to ‘possible readers’

who ‘know that the approach, of whatever it may be, happens gradually and painstakingly.’61

I studied your contours after school in brochures from the Newmarket Flight Centre. I visited.

I ate your animals off bamboo skewers. I drank your arak and, desperately hungover, listened

to my family whispering outside the bedroom door, worried you were slowly embalming my

organs (it happens), sending irate messages to my brother on the family WhatsApp—in

Indonesian, so I couldn’t read them. Racing through your warm nights on his scooter,

wondering who I would have been if I had wandered young in you? What you would have

written into me of yourself. But now, I think—now, I can move toward you, which is its own

thing. High on the spirit of your rice, which they warn tourists away from (because of possible

embalming), we rip through you, my brother knowing your streets, passing your bright shops,

your vendors in clouds of smoke, into inky patches where nothing shines except for our

headlight, low-pitched cricket, chirping over your small bridges, entangled in your back streets.

Tenuous and treacherous: I keep an eye on my Western eyes (impossible to pluck out) and try

to care for the distance betweenus. This accountability to distancings, this approach undertaken

neither rightly nor wrongly but gradually and painstakingly, is a learning from you where I

learn, i-land, that you will never say no.

57 Hélène Cixous, ‘Clarice Lispector’, in Coming to Writing and Other Essays, eds. Hélène Cixous and Deborah

Jenson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 62. 58 Cixous, ‘Clarice Lispector’, 62. 59 Cixous, 62. 60 Betsy Wing, translator’s introduction to Poetics of Relation, by Édouard Glissant, xx. 61 Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H, trans. Idra Novey (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2014), xi.

55

But first, one must attempt to understand the place from which an approach is to be made.

While guiding her sisters through the Interior Castle, Teresa reminds them that to move into

the interior is to also move in the exterior world: ‘we suffer terrible trials because we do not

understand ourselves’,62 and therefore ‘what hope can we have of being able to rest in other

people’s homes if we cannot rest in our own?’63 In answer to a question on how her family

background and personal experience have influenced her work, the filmmaker Trinh-T. Minh-

ha replied:

There is not much, in the kind of education we receive here in the West, that emphasizes

or even recognizes the importance of constantly having contact with what is actually

within ourselves, or of understanding a structure from within ourselves out. The

tendency is always to relate to a situation or to an object as if it is only outside of oneself.

Whereas elsewhere, in Vietnam, or in other Asian and African cultures for example,

one often learns to ‘know the world inwardly’, so that the deeper we go in ourselves,

the wider we go in society.64

•

What holds together the dissimilarities that move in the Interior Castle: Teresa’s

doubts as to her ability to translate her experiences and the assurance that what she writes is of

use to her sisters; her obedience to those who command her to write and her sharp-eyed critique

of those ‘half-learned men’; her vow of chastity and the eroticism of her encounter with the

divine presence; her adherence to the Church and her insistence on a direct, personal connection

that bypasses ecclesiastical structures; the fictional and the investigative; the particular and the

cosmic? Teresa’s ‘I’ is what allows various positions to be brought together in the text because

it is not fixed but always locates itself in relation to an other: ‘I speaks only if it is awaited,’65

writes de Certeau. ‘I’ founds the place from where the woman mystic speaks, a place not

grounded in the biblical commentary that authorised the texts of her male contemporaries nor

62 Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, 98. 63 Teresa of Ávila, 67. 64 Trinh T. Minh-ha and Nancy N. Chen, ‘Speaking Nearby’, 87. 65 De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One, 187.

56

supported by the status they enjoyed. Teresa’s ‘I’ is the castle-crystal, this flickering image of

the soul, which forms the place from where her text unfolds. Flying through the many

metaphors she draws on to transmit something of her first-hand experience with the

unknowable, with nothing to grip on to, I experience the tremors of uncertainty that move

through Teresa’s efforts to bring into language that which resists it. The partial, contradictory,

and complex ‘I’ of the text, asks for a certain reader, one willing to experience a domain that

is strange and uncertain, frustrating even, but to risk it anyway.

Hélène Cixous’s lecture ‘I say Allemagne’, given at Berlin’s ICI conference ‘Untying the

Mother Tongue’ in 2016, sets me off on a journey. I move, like uprooted seaweed, through a

voice identified by Cixous as the ‘child in me’, which carries us both from Germany to Algiers

to France and back, through different languages, sung, spoken, whispered, forgotten, denied.

We eddy in time, from here to her, to her grandparents, through memories and historical events,

which quickly become a rip tide suddenly pulling me past where my feet can touch the

bottom—and as I see the shoreline of expected ‘lecture’ receding, I wonder to myself, is this

good? This question hits the surface like a sea bird. I feel the tip of its sharp beak like a needle,

where the entry causes no pain but the withdrawal of blood a moment later does: is this good?

I trace the outline of ‘good’. I realise this question is more revealing of myself and suddenly

makes visible the scales I brought with me to the event, which I now observe as if for the first

time. Like a Siren—‘to be two, as two, to be the other with myself, to always have the helping

hand of a supplement, to never be enclosed in the cell of the proper-to-myself, of the

national . . . to overflow at will’66—she sings. And as we set out on the voice of her ‘child in

me’, she offers a gentle challenge: to leave the scales at the shore and to put on a new set of

scales, which is a skin I can swim in.

•

66 Hélène Cixous, ‘I say Allemagne’. Keynote presented at the conference ‘Untying the Mother Tongue: On

Language, Affect, and the Unconscious’, organized by Federico Dal Bo and Antonio Castore, ICI Berlin, May

12, 2016, (last accessed December 19, 2020), https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/helene-cixous-i-say-allemagne/

57

#hese scales I swim in are the measurement of an enjoyment found in a view from this

body as it navigates the complexities and contradictions of métissage and tries to retain the

possibilities its shock opens up. I dive in, leaving on the shore that cumbersome set of scales

which measures the view seen from above. In these scales, which flash in the sun when I leap

and leave silver afterimages in dark waters, I move in i-land: this i that always wanders in

relation to you, island, and is inseparable from the distance betweenus that sets the state of you

and i in motion, to be two, as two, shimmering, never fixed, never nation.

58

III. 7ow spectral, now animal

!t the limits of my flesh, apertures widen. In my palms little machines whirl, eyes open

and snap shut, and silver halide crystals gently held in animal gelatine are caressed by light and

transformed into fragile silver visions of its touch. But one must be careful: In The Mirror of

Simple Souls (c. 1300), the French mystic Marguerite Porete (1250–1310) maps seven states

toward union with the divine. The fifth state opens up quickly into the sixth state, the ‘Far-Near

of Rapture’, like a spark ‘swift as a lightning flash and a rapid closing in which one cannot

remain for long, nor could she ever have a teacher able to speak of this.’67 This opening must

rapidly close so that one can return. Too much light, and the image is over-exposed. Something

must remain of the world’s contours—something must remain to be shared.

Sparks, lightning flashes, and rapid closings: the film camera operates within a certain radius.

To transform silver salts into an image, a certain proximity is needed. What enters the frame

must be in some relation to the (camera) body that films it. Someone on a photography forum

asks: ‘At what distance can a figure of a person no longer be captured?’ Canonmanon7 replies:

‘Any camera on a tripod can see Andromeda galaxy, which is 2.5 x 106 lt-yr from Earth. The

light landing on the sensor is from 2.5 million light-years away.’ According to Canonmanon7,

the space I am situated in that is documentable by ‘any camera on a tripod’ encompasses a zone

with a roughly five-kilometre radius, which extends just over five feet down (if standing at

ground level) and 2.5 x 106 lt-yr above. Light from today and from 2.5 million light-years away

transforms the crystals on my film into a latent image of metallic silver atoms. Vertigo: ‘No

sooner do I see an egg than I have seen an egg for the last three thousand years,’68 writes

Lispector.

Each morning, Made opens up the world around her to a world outside of time. She places her

offerings for gods and ancestors on the footpath outside the gate, on a ledge, on the family

67 Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A, J. C. Marler, and Judith

Grant (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 78. 68 Clarice Lispector, ‘The Egg and the Chicken’, in The Foreign Legion: Stories and Chronicles, trans. Giovanni

Pontiero (New York, New Directions, 1986), 47.

59

shrine, where a vertiginous and dynamic temporality unfurls. She composes sacred spaces

using whatever is close at hand, fruit from the market, rice from the kitchen, flowers and leaves

from the courtyard floor, cigarettes before they reach my father’s lips. A lit stick of incense

marks the duration of the aperture that opens up between her offering and the spirit realm. Once

the smoke clears, the opening snaps shut, and the little offering gives itself over to the street

dogs. Each element in Made’s offerings refers to a certain proximity and temporality, while

opening up to another time entirely.

•

"oes light from the interior reach this dwelling? I’m sure it did in the last one, but now

here we are back in darkness. I try and track the castle’s architecture, trace out a map, but it’s

frustratingly impossible. How to draw an architecture of the senses? Having guided us through

various doors, Teresa decides in the seventh mansion to do away with them altogether: ‘I say

there is no need of a door because all that has so far been described seems to have come through

the medium of the senses.’69 How to make a blueprint of an architecture that can only be traced

in metaphors and endless detours. In the sixth chamber, while finding ways to best describe the

state of rapture and the imprint it leaves behind, Teresa leads us past Jacob’s ladder and

Moses’s burning bush to the house of the Duchess of Alba, where we find ourselves in a room

surrounded by an ‘infinite variety of glassware, and earthenware, and all kinds of things, set

out in such a way that you can see almost all of them as you enter’70—an overwhelming sight

she cannot remember in much detail:

Although I was there for some time, there was so much to be seen that I could not

remember it all, so that I could no more recall what was in those rooms than if I had never

seen them, nor could I say what the things were made of; I can only remember having

seen them as a whole. It is just like that here.71

69 Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, 272. 70 Teresa of Ávila, 192. 71 Teresa of Ávila, 192.

60

Here Teresa offers a description that works as both a fairly convincing image of the impression

rapture might leave in its wake and a way of understanding her castle of the soul. Just as she is

unable to give a detailed itemisation of the Duchess’s glassware, it is not a detailed plan that

she sets out to give in the Interior Castle, one that can be mapped—it is instead like the fragile

and shimmering impression made by an infinite variety of glassware. Her castle-crystal is an

image of the soul as singular and comprised of infinite variety. Her interior bursts with a

vastness that is cosmic.

This image of the soul as both singular and full of infinite variety is formed by the style of the

text that produces it. The castle-crystal flickers into view in a cataphatic deluge of metaphors

and a confluence of approaches, where the biographical, the fictional, and the expository roll

into and around one another, diverted by countless exclamations and intruded upon by

headaches, nerves, doubts—forming an impression of the self as situated and multiple, limited

and teeming with forms. One is reminded of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous sculpture the

Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52), where we witness the pre-Baroque shudder of excess and

enjoyment, diversion and detour, that moves through Teresa’s text. For Glissant, the Baroque

enacted a disturbance against a rationalist ambition to master reality: ‘Baroque art mustered

bypasses, proliferation, spatial redundancy, anything that flouted the alleged unicity of the

thing known and the knowing of it.’72

Her marble habit is folded under and over in an itinerary rippling out in many directions. My

eyes cannot fix the scene; they are compelled to rove, to wander over a diverse terrain. Smooth

areas softly dimpled with only a few depressions swell into rolling furrows with deep, shadowy

interiors like conch shells listening in on areas creased like paper with thin, sharp ridges which

catch the crumpled light like lightning fingers touching large folds that double up on

themselves into valleys, streams, rocky outcrops, a smooth sandy shore, caverns, little summits,

a bouquet of carnations, a crumpled Kleenex tissue, a dove in a dust bath. An eddying habit, a

vibrating surface, a flawed Baroque pearl. Compared to the softer tunic of the angel hovering

above her, rippled by a wind which blows in the direction of the arrow heading for her entrails,

the fabric of Teresa’s tunic is thicker, courser, and its folds and creases are multi-directional.

It is not moved by an outside force but an internal one—it is her interior sensations, in their

dissimilarities, made visible.

72 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 78.

61

The baroque as an expression of ‘whatever scatters and comes together’73 can be found in

Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. Here, various types of writing—‘the familiar, the

poetic, the hortatory, the aphoristic, the expository’74—create a textual métissage, where

diverse styles come together in a single work. In the relation of these different types of writing,

where analytic thought roves from linearity, Glissant’s work enacts its own ‘right to opacity’,

an irreducibility that leaves in this reader an amorphous impression of Relation instead of any

clear definition, rather like the shimmering image left by the Duchess of Alba’s infinite variety

of glassware.

•

& never met my grandfather I Gusti Made Rundu, who was a painter. The last time I

was in Bali, I asked my dad if he could tell me about him and if it would be ok to record our

conversations. In listening back to the recordings, I find in my father’s oral stories a diversity

of approaches, circularities and bypasses, toward the synthesis of a portrait of sorts:

The night, like all nights here, is warm, and we sit outside. We watch the bats rise out of the

trees in the courtyard, flicker across the sky and head out. I set up the recorder and ask you to

talk about your father who was a painter and a tailor. Listening to the recording a few weeks

later in the studio, I realise that I accidently angled the microphone away from your mouth, so

instead of amplifying your voice, it sounds like gauze through which the noise from the

compound and the street outside passes. Amongst this tapestry of sounds—clicking cicadas,

rustling palm leaves, and endless scooters—you weave a night story that wanders off course,

circles back to the subject, loses track of where we are, is interrupted by visitors or one of the

dogs looking for a pat.

Over there, you point to the platform Made uses to make offerings, over there, that’s where he

used to paint, where you used to help him prepare the canvases, with an aside—he wasn’t like

a real artist, he just did what the tourists wanted. He would stay up late drinking coffee, reading

73 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 91. 74 Betsy Wing, translator’s introduction to Poetics of Relation, by Édouard Glissant, xix.

62

the Ramayana and painting scenes from it. The one painting we keep wefting our way back to

across the warp of the evening is from this tale—a painting with lots of monkeys, you say. It

was so good, you say. Because of the tails that all intertwined. Again, we thread our way back.

You wish you knew where it was. And again—you wonder who owns it now. We keep

returning to these hairy knots of caudal vertebrae that will never be unpicked. It looked crowded

and really alive. You even smile when you talk about it, describing the tapioca powder mixed

with hot water used to cover the entire canvas, the tails drawn in pencil outlines then filled in

with black ink and lastly colour. I hook onto them too, and we swing through the evening on

the undulating spine of your story, chattering, a portrait written in tails which grasp hold of

memories, observations, the colonial history of Indonesia, political views, regrets,

superstitions, throw-away comments, a challenge—cause his work is much, much more better,

has a character. I hope you can do that. In the future?

We travel at night, circling a figure, little asides—did you know that if a gecko croaks it means

the speaker is lying—and ruminations. There is laughter and bitterness, frustration with

authorities who won’t allow for a timely cremation, the indignity of burial. The Dutch get their

own scene and the Japanese too, and don’t forget the parties. He leans over his canvas till the

early hours, drinking coffee, while his three dogs sleep—but you also have three dogs Gede?

We swing through the tale of a life. There is a certain itinerary that unfolds in the dark. I catch

glimpses of our painter-tailor through diverse routes but find him always entangled—with the

courtyard, the tails of monkeys, the Ramayana, the Dutch, art collectors, parties, three dogs,

tubes of black paint from China . . .

My father is a shadow-master in the late hours, weaving stories that trace the silhouette of his

father. Wounds haunt it. The past leaves tracks in the body that stories get snagged on. To

remember is to bump into hurts and defences that texture and produce memory, trigger certain

emotions, cause one to get swept away on the coil of a monkey’s tail or pick at certain details

whose importance eludes the listener. Tonight, my father is both the shadow-master and the

show, spectral and animal, projecting out into the courtyard shadowed histories cut from me

and which he now returns to me in fragments, pulled from the night air through circuitous

routes and diverse pathways. A family tale is like a weeping sore, oozing into the night, where

the balmy air slowly dries it, creating a thickening scab, which we continue to pick at and tend

to, together. This scirinz, this running sore, is what also nourishes the story, otherwise we have

nothing to talk about, you know?

63

A cut in film marks not an ending but a shift or transition. In my father’s night stories, I gather

the shimmering impression of an ancestral place from a multiplicity of glimmering shards.

These oral texts transition rapidly, are interrupted by neighbours, diverted by a sound. The

present moment breaks in and precipitates yet another transition: a car going too fast past the

house is—cut—how I learn about what happened to my grandmother—cut. The cut is not a

closure but an opening that forms connections. The cut allows partial and proximate views to

give onto each other, like windows onto a view, separate and inseparable, in a shivering caudal

vertebrae of film which holds the now in the continuous. In my father’s stories, we never get

anywhere fast. They are not what Caroline Bynum calls the ‘full social dramas’ of ‘men’s

stories’.75 They are a mapping of the body and its linkages, to the past, to a place, to other

human and nonhuman bodies, to the ‘thorns of life’.76

•

'ow to approach Teresa’s Interior Castle, this slippery architecture of the senses which

resists representation, through the medium of film? Teresa’s confluence of approaches—the

biographical, the fictional, and the expository—created through the privileging of experiential

knowledge and intruded upon by ‘inspirations’ as she translates her body’s movements into a

script of its encounter with an other, and Glissant’s textual métissage through the use of various

types of writing within a single text, might perhaps offer a way?

The histories, mechanisms, and processes of the iPhone, SLR digital camera, and 16 mm Bolex

produce images particular to each technology. Fruits, furry and glistening, ask for the richness

of colour that only chemicals make; a tadpole spotted gulping along the surface of a pond needs

the spontaneity an iPhone provides; a digital SLR camera offers more control over the image.

Each technology demands different working processes. 16 mm film involves planning. These

are shots you live with, visualising them inside the mind projected at a distance, like Teresa’s

fictional castle. I see fruits staining a tablecloth as her hands tear apart their skins with gusto,

75 Caroline Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 49. 76 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Donald H. Remain and

Neil Fraistat (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002), 300.

64

getting to the centre; her fingers sink into the flesh, emerge glistening and gloopy—an anti-

still-life, a different kind of economy. A non-conquering, non-territorial, mapping of delight.

A map no conquistador would have ever taken to sea. The juices spill, just as categories always

leak. I decide this should be shot on 16 mm film, the depth of colour mimicking the richness

of Dutch still-life painting. With the iPhone, things glimpsed in the moment and the prosaic

stuff which fills our days can be easily recorded. One evening, on the bus home from the studio,

I catch my hand reflected in the window, looking like the disembodied hands in the margins of

illuminated manuscripts. South London moves by in the background, accompanied by Emma

Hignett’s polite, metallic voice announcing each stop, placing my floating hand in a specific

location at each point along the route: Vestry Road, Southampton Way, Harris Academy,

Peckham Library, Peckham Post Office. The iPhone allows for a spontaneity that catches

something in the moment as it passes. A digital SLR camera enables one to spend time working

out a shot, repeating takes and playing with depth of field and different lenses. Alice and I drive

to a piece of shoreline and set up a scene of me crawling along a difficult terrain of rocks and

rock pools. Alice encourages multiple takes. With each one, I understand the site better, but

each pass becomes more difficult as bruises develop, the cold sets in, and a stag party of men

gather to watch. It’s not until around the nineth take that a resistance emerges, and as Alice

noted, my action shifts from being a performance for the camera to something else, something

more like a pilgrimage, a physical struggle. In the shower afterwards, I realise my bruised legs

(fig. 5) look like the fruit-stained tablecloth from the earlier 16 mm shoot (fig. 4). Each of these

technologies allows me to approach the subject through different modes that engage the body

in a variety of ways. The fabric of Interior Castle (a blueprint), its Baroque habit, is built from

the contemplative and the spontaneous, the accidental and the planned, the everyday and the

cinematic, crystals and pixels, great physical effort and casualness—mapping not just interior

movements but the way a body interacts with the external world.

I crawl toward my subject—a shimmering premodern image of the soul—through what my

camera can document. My body gives onto the interior castle through sparks, apertures,

lightning flashes, and rapid closings, crystals, pixels, and animal gelatine. According to

Canonmanon7, my body is situated within a measurable and completely immeasurable zone,

where light bounces off objects I witness in the moment and is emitted by objects from 2.5

million light-years away. The iPhone, SLR digital camera, and 16 mm Bolex document this

particular zone that I inhabit at any one time in their various ways. Their apertures are openings

connected to my body’s visual system, and I move toward the castle through what is proximate

65

and temporal, through what impressions these machines are able to record. It is a zone that

could also be described as both located and cosmic.

Through the act of translation, which is a coming to terms with distance, the castle-crystal

remains always at a remove from the filmmaker, while being inseparable from the body that

carries it over to film, that produces it within a frame. Just as mystic texts are scripts of the

body as it moves toward and is moved by an other, film, likewise, can be seen as a script of the

filmmaker’s body as it moves toward and is moved by its subject. It is a medium through which

the filmmaker gives onto the other. Interior Castle (a blueprint) records not the thing

approached, but the approach itself; it is a script of this movement. Like my father’s night

stories, I move in detours through various technologies, histories, and processes toward the

castle, which is also an agent that acts: Teresa’s Interior Castle causes me to consider a suitable

approach, thus directly challenging and changing my usual processes and methods.

A song rises up toward the end. It is the first stanza of the Bhomāntaka, a twelfth-century

Javanese epic poem by an unknown author. In the first stanza, the poet prays that a temple for

the God of Love be built from poetic language:

Let his temple be built of poetic language thus, and be made a worthy place for the

deity of amorous longing to be given a visible form,

For in the invisible world Anangga (the Bodiless) is what he is called by the musing

poet who is expert in allegorical narrative.77

The unknown author writes a song where the Bodiless might come and dwell on Earth. Long

syllables roll out like tendrils and are punctured by short syllables like new leaves. A latticed

arbour, composed of sixty-two varieties of metre, unfurls on holy ground, where, in the dappled

interior of its song, you might encounter Anangga. In the introduction to their 2005 translation

of the text, A. Teeuw and S.O. Robson write: ‘Just like a temple which is a well-thought out

building, made of well-ordered, skilfully worked stones and provided with ornament, reliefs,

images, colours, a language temple is a creation built up of sounds, words, sentences, similes,

77 A. Teeuw and S.O. Robson, eds., Bhomāntaka: The Death of Bhoma, trans. Teeuw and Robson (Leiden:

KITLV Press, 2005), 69.

66

figures of speech, rhythmic and metrical patterns.’78 And dwelling in this temple of song,

carpentered by the tongue of the unknown ‘language priest’,79 is that which flies from language.

The Interior Castle and the Bhomāntaka are two works from completely different contexts that

make up the spine of I. They both establish inside their texts a dwelling place for the divine. I

bring them together like distinct vertebra in the spine of the timeline, where they give onto each

other along the trembling continuous ‘now’ of the film, like windows that give onto a view,

separate but moved by proximity.

•

78 A. Teeuw and S.O. Robson, Bhomāntaka, 1. 79 ‘The kawi as a language priest works on par with other priests who utilize prayers and mantras, sacrifices and

rites, asceticism and meditation. All these priests have their own ways and means, but the goal is always the

same: to bring about communication between the divine and the human world.’ A. Teeuw and S.O. Robson,

Bhomāntaka, 1.

67

Figure 4. Still from Interior Castle (a blueprint), 16 mm film transferred to HD video, HD video, 2019–20

68

Figure 4. Legs after filming scene for Interior Castle (a blueprint), Alice’s bathroom, 2019

69

& point declaratively to show you something, but my fingertip is now an aperture, and

you are scattered across locations and time zones. I record the area around my body—a roughly

five-kilometre radius, which extends five feet down and 2.5 x 106 lt-yr above—in silver halide

crystals held tenderly in a gelatine layer of cattle bones and pig skin. This proximity,

alchemised into mineral and held in animal, trembling at twenty-four vertebrae a second, gives

onto an other. Cut. Into this, the crisp, contrasted digital image, divided into data, into pixels

of colour, each with its own set numerical value. Cut. Fragments give onto other fragments,

forming a spine made from shuddering proximities, hard as crystal and vibrating in the air,80

tracing the filmmaker’s approach toward her subject: a medium through which the body

extends, precariously, like a prayer, in the direction of an other.

80 Clarice Lispector, Água Viva, trans. Stefan Tobler (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2012), 4.

70

%onclusion

#his research project was a response to Michel de Certeau’s question in the Mystic

Fable as to what might be born out of the strangeness of mystic documents from the Judeo-

Christian tradition. The corpus of documents corralled into the field of mysticism is vast and

varied, revealing the heterogeneous spaces from which they emerged. The works produced by

mystic women in the Middle Ages and early modern Europe were authored by bodies that were

politically and socially vulnerable, and what they set out to achieve was likewise vulnerable:

the translation of first-hand experiences of the unknowable. These translations formed somatic

texts that, in their insistence on the direct religious encounter, created rebellious and anti-

institutional forms.

I focused on two documents from this mystic corpus, the Lingua Ignota, a personal language

received by the German mystic Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), and the Interior Castle, a

book authored in 1577 by the Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582). In the Lingua

Ignota, Hildegard renames the already-spelled-out world which the men who grant her

permission to write have direct access to. And she steals verbs and adjectives from the Latin

she has been excluded from learning, infecting the official language of the Church with her

own private speech. In an attempt to approach the Lingua Ignota through the medium of film,

I explored Michel de Certeau’s methodology of constructing an interdisciplinary frame

composed of four different areas of enquiry—contemporary eroticism, psychoanalysis,

historiography, and the literary genre of the fable—as a means of demarcating a territory in

which his subject of mysticism might appear. The resulting film, A hook but no fish (2017–18),

explores Hildegard’s private language through four different routes: research undertaken at the

Warburg Library in London; a site visit to the place where Hildegard was interned as a child;

the account of a personal experience; and speculative imaginings as to whether the Lingua

Ignota might have been a prophetic language written for an arid time such as ours, where rivers

run dry, mammals no longer exist, and only technology and tools survive. These routes were

documented using different technologies: 16 mm film, iPhone footage, and a desktop

recording. The film begins with footage taken at the ruins of Disibodenberg in Germany,

71

documenting the location she presumably renamed in the Lingua Ignota, its light (limix), its

shadow (tonziz), its stones (staurinz), its steps (gramizel), its September (scandidoz), and

witnesses the viriditas (greenness) of the hilltop monastery. The film then moves from

Disibodenberg to a fictionalised character called ‘H’, to the desktop of an unnamed narrator

who shares a personal story, before transitioning into speculation on the possibility of

reencountering something through a new name.

The second document I focused on was the Interior Castle (1577) by the Spanish mystic Teresa

of Ávila, which imagines the soul as a castle made of crystal that one enters through prayer and

contemplation. Compelled by circumstances to privilege experiential knowledge and write in

the vernacular, Teresa approaches the unknowable through a synthesis of different modes: the

biographical, the fictional, and the expository roll into and around one another, broken up by

‘inspirations’ and the body’s day-to-day aches and pains. The film Interior Castle (a blueprint)

(2019–20) set out to translate Teresa’s premodern image of the soul, a futile exercise, one that

de Certeau warns many have attempted, unsuccessfully. Various takes of a crawling action

wind their way through the film, which was created using three different technologies: 16 mm

Bolex, the iPhone, and digital SLR. Each camera creates an image particular to its mechanisms,

while allowing the filmmaker diverse ways of approaching a subject—slowly, carefully,

spontaneously, painfully, casually, lightly. ‘Mystical literature’, writes de Certeau, ‘composes

scripts of the body.’1 If the Interior Castle can be seen as a script of Teresa’s body as she traces

the impressions the direct religious experience leaves on her body, which always moves in

relation to an other then, I argue, Interior Castle (a blueprint) might be considered a script of

the filmmaker’s body as it moves in relation to its subject. In overlaid subtitles, two people

discuss what happened to Teresa’s body after she died. They list the places her cut and

fragmented body was sent to, bringing locatable coordinates to the somatic fluctuations of the

Interior Castle. As Elvia Wilk notes, ‘writing a mystical text is an inherently futile practice (as

is reading one).’2 As is making a film about one, it turns out. Futile practices do not produce

results. They fail to contain; they are, etymologically, brittle, fragile containers that leak.

1 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael

B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 81. 2 Elvia Wilk, ‘The Word Made Fresh: Mystical Encounter and the New Weird Divine’, e-flux Journal 92, June

2018, (last accessed December 19, 2020), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/92/205298/the-word-made-fresh-

mystical-encounter-and-the-new-weird-divine/

72

As is this body. The place I approach my subject from is a body where categories leak. Mystic

women writers produced knowledge through the translation of first-hand encounters and the

privileging of experiential knowledge. The challenge in undertaking this project was to give

myself permission to do the same—to not dismiss biography, but to work with it in order to, as

Trinh T. Minh-ha writes, understand ‘from within ourselves out’. By letting my own script of

the body give onto Teresa’s Interior Castle and Hildegard’s Lingua Ignota, two observations

were made.

The first was that both documents bear witness to a bypassing of ecclesiastical structures

through enjoyment. What is an invented language, such as the Lingua Ignota, if not a private

delight? And as Teresa attempts to translate her experience of religious rapture, the Interior

Castle bubbles over, cataphatic and mercurial, with the fullness of things to be enjoyed. It is an

image born from an encounter that carries Teresa away (for a moment), a delight so precious

to her that its pursuit is worth the risk, the risk of being labelled an inventor of bad doctrines,

the risk of being read and found wanting by the Spanish Inquisition. Enjoyment is a dangerous

business, it seems. I found that my experience of being raised in Evangelical Christianity,

whose disciplining machine could not process the enjoyment that spills over in the Song of

Songs, creating a glitch in its apocalyptic grand narrative, gave me an empathic understanding

of how enjoyment—a single song even—has the power to spark errantry and a bypassing of

the authoritarian and the totalitarian, which I argue is witnessed in these documents.

The second observation was more of an illumination encountered through Teresa’s image of

the soul as a castle made of crystal, an image which ‘flashes up’3 from the past to be recognised

by a body like mine, a body thrown off filial timelines and linear narratives, a body always in

an endless negotiation with distance and intimacy in relation to place. Prior to embarking on

this project, I used to think I had to patch the leaks, to close the distances created by being

raised within a Pakeha family, estranged from my Balinese heritage. There’s a sense when

ticking the minority box on the sheet (Asian other) that closing distance will reward one with

the sense of authenticity these categories seem to demand. In de Certeau’s naming of Teresa’s

fictional architecture as a ‘castle-crystal’, a state rather than a form is produced, where two

things are put in endless motion by intimacy and distance, reducible to neither castle nor crystal.

3 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations (London, Pimlico, 1999), 247.

73

Like Édouard Glissant’s métissage, it is a meeting of two differences, which opens up a creative

space that sparks endless possibilities.

Through Michel de Certeu’s interdisciplinary framing of the subject of mysticism, Teresa of

Ávila’s script of the body, with its confluence of styles, endlessly interrupted, and Glissant’s

textual métissage, I found a method for framing the film subject by employing various

approaches. And the ‘particular and ecstatic invention’ of the Lingua Ignota and the Interior

Castle, in being documents produced primarily through the direct experiences of their authors,

suggested a place to approach the subject from: the view from a body, in this particular case a

body formed where categories (‘East’/‘West’) leak and put in endless motion by intimacy and

distance to the Indonesian Archipelago. And just as texts by mystic women in the Middle Ages

and early modern Europe are ‘scripts of the body’ that trace their writers’ movements always

in relation to an other, my films might likewise be viewed as scripts of my body as it gives onto

the thing it frames. Film, here, instead of a representation of the thing approached, can be seen

as a document of the filmmaker’s movements as she extends through the medium of film in the

direction of an other—a stuttering, shuddering, partial, leaking channel of twenty-four

vertebrae a second—which is also how, both spectral and animal, I give onto the island of my

father. And I formed from Teresa’s crystal castle (this fictional place that authorises her

speaking), de Certeau’s compound ‘castle-crystal’, and Glissant’s métissage (a meeting of two

differences that sparks possibilities, both rooted and open), a place named i-land, which is i

and island, separate and inseparable, continuously moved by distance and delight, shimmering,

never fixed, which is both a place to make from and a method of approach.

74

MOIST AND RESTLESS,

TEEMING WITH FORMS

!"#$%& (MANGE), !%#'("& (ULCER), !)*'(+, (BLACK STAIN), ,-%&%$ (BLISTER)

CRYING, ROARING, WEEPING, SHE WAS

("%#.,#$ (A ROOM

WITH AN OPEN FIRE),

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79

+lizabeth &gnota

+lizabeth Ignota is a font designed by Sandra Kassenaar, especially commissioned for

the publication H (2018), edited by Sriwhana Spong and including texts by Ned McConnell,

Kate Briggs, Jan Verwoert, Francesco Ventrella, Vera Mey, and Sriwhana Spong. Kassenaar

began by exploring the twenty-three letters of Hildegard of Bingen’s Litterae Ignotae

(unknown letters), in which Hildegard’s Lingua Ignota (unknown language) was written.

Kassenaar’s resulting hand-drawn sketches were then combined with the 1933 font Elizabeth-

Antiqua by the German typographer Elizabeth Friedlander. Friedlander, one of the first women

to design a typeface, had been commissioned by the Bauer Type Foundry in Frankfurt to create

what was to be Friedlander-Antiqua. However, Hitler’s rise to power just as the font was being

prepared for casting made the use of Friedlander’s recognisably Jewish name inadvisable, and

so Elizabeth-Antiqua was chosen instead.

Kassenaar’s sketches based on Hildegard’s Litterae Ignotae are grafted onto Friedlander’s font

like a vine with thin coiled tendrils, appearing to wrap around the letters and almost obscure

them. Or, looked at again, Friedlander’s font now appears to serve as a rubbing, picking up and

preserving the trace of the Litterae Ignotae, whose tendrils are now held in the frottage

Kassenaar has made using Friedlander’s letters. Elizabeth Ignota brings together the alphabets

of Hildegard and Friedlander to create a typeface that simultaneously discloses and devours.

While commissioned especially for the publication H, and used by myself for page works and

posters, Elizabeth Ignota is also available to be used in other projects that share an affinity with

the concepts behind the typeface. In 2019, Kassenaar incorporated Elizabeth Ignota into her

design for the exhibition Love in a Mist: The Politics of Fertility, curated by Malkit Shoshan,

at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Elizabeth Ignota is thus a collaborative

work that can be incorporated into other projects by a network of thinkers and makers. It is a

work that is functional and conceptual, disperses, disappears, and gives onto other works.

80

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84

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