Hunger's Brides (221 page)

1.
An introduction to the themes of science and exploration in Sor Juana's
Martyr of the Sacrament
can be found in an article by Héctor Azar, “Sor Juana y el descubrimiento de América.”

2.
As a reminder to the Queen, Sor Juana's use of
Plus Ultra
here might have been twofold: When the first Hapsburg King of Spain, Charles I (1516–1556), sailed for Spain from the Netherlands to claim the throne, an armada of forty ships sailed with him. On his flagship was an image of the Pillars of Hercules and the young king's new motto,
Plus Ultra
, which came to represent Spain's ambition to rule both hemispheres and proved to be an ambition that outlasted the Hapsburgs. Philip V (formerly Philippe, duc d'Anjou), grandson of Louis XIV, and the first of the Spanish Bourbon kings, had the motto stamped onto the Spanish eight-
reales
coin.

3.
Apparent reference to the twelve labours of Herakles. The eleventh was to retrieve the apples of the Hesperides, the golden fruit given to Hera by Mother Earth as a wedding gift. The retrieval was actually performed by the Titan Atlas freed from the eternal task that was his punishment: to bear the world (or the celestial sphere) upon his back, a burden that Herakles offered to shoulder, proposing as a respite that Atlas grapple instead with the hundred-headed dragon guarding the golden tree. The Titan, having successfully retrieved the apples, very nearly did not take his burden back, and was only tricked into it by a Heraklean bit of table-turning.

4.
As the story goes, according to one of Beulah's trusty sources, Robert Graves: For excesses committed on the banks of the river Heracleius, Hera visited upon Herakles a fit of madness. In a god-sent delusion, he mistook six of his children and two of a friend's for enemies and in a berserk fury murdered them. Turning to the Pythoness at Delphi for a way to expiate his blood crime, he was sentenced to twelve years of labour for King Eurystheus. The legendary twelve labours.

5.
Beulah's oracle of preference, Robert Graves, lists three
daughters
born of Neptune to Amphitrite, the Triple Moon-Goddess: Triton (since masculinized), Rhode and Benthesicyme—lucky new moon; full harvest moon; dangerous old moon.

6.
One might infer that by ‘Ocean' the poet means Amphitrite, Queen of the Oceans, but finds it indelicate to say this directly, having already linked Amphitrite to the Vice-Queen.

7.
In chapters of great general interest, Octavio Paz's discussion of triumphal arches is particularly satisfying to those averse to the baroqueness of the Baroque. As one such reader, I followed Beulah's research notes here with attention. In the seventeenth century, the absolute monarch's divine right to rule was promoted as never before, precisely when more human claims to legitimacy were becoming ever more plainly incredible: inherent nobility, wisdom, courage in the field …

Baroque art, largely sponsored by monarchs and by princes of the Church, for the most part actively colluded in the promotion of its patron's claims to divinity or sanctity. The equation being: beauty = divinity/sanctity = the right to wealth and privilege. (Arguably the equation still holds, if high-concept advertising, political campaigns and the vast majority of Hollywood movies offer an indication.) Much as the godlike beauty of actor-models in their Elysian settings serve today, countless examples of seventeenth-century art drew on the gods of pagan antiquity, already secularized by the later Greeks. Thus, even as the pope was God's Vicar, the king in the guise of Jupiter or Neptune
might now be seen as His viceroy. So it was that Baroque theatre, painting and poetry made demi-gods of their patrons at a time when not a few were pushing the opposite threshold, of the sub-human.

Sor Juana participated in the norms of her time. As an artist dependent on her patrons she did at least her share of beautifying and sanctifying; nevertheless, as in so many areas, she diverts and subverts these norms to her own ends: she turns the canons and cameras of Baroque art, as it were, on herself. It is herself she beautifies, reifies and sanctifies, not so much for wealth (though she was not averse) or for power per se, but for the privilege to do as she wishes, for a woman's freedom of action and inquiry. As Paz points out,
Allegorical Neptune
is a riddle at the heart of which Sor Juana herself sits, on the throne of the goddess Isis, mother, widow, knowledge incarnadine, Man to the second power. Sophia, Ennoia, Athena (Wisdom, Thought, Mind) are all feminine for Sor Juana. This takes her well beyond even the tenets of Gnostic heresy.

8.
Why Neptune? The incoming Vice-King was Marquis de la Laguna, Marquis of the Lake. Surrounded by floating gardens, Mexico was built on an island and was in need of protection from floods made worse every year by logging and soil erosion. Neptune was the Roman (and therefore less pagan) version of Poseidon, who turned Delos from a floating island into a stable one; was master of earthquakes and flood; built the walls of Troy; invented navigation and first tamed horses; fathered monsters but also water figures such as his granddaughters the Danaïdes. Sor Juana followed Pausanias in making him father of Athena, which is not completely far-fetched: Athena was without dispute sired on the sea-nymph Metis, was born along the river Triton, and was raised by Triton, offspring of Neptune and Aphrodite. Next, with a little quick footwork of her own, Sor Juana made Neptune the son of Isis—Horus/Harpocrates, god of silence and of wise councils. Just as significantly, Sor Juana's verses of welcome made the incoming Vice-Queen Amphitrite, Neptune's consort, goddess of the sea, mother of all waters, of all life, creativity, wisdom; and alternatively Aphrodite/Venus, foam-born daughter of the sea, beauty embodied, morning star, Lucifer rising at dawn, antebellum and antibellum, as it were, to oppose the bellicose fires of the Apollonian Sun. In sum, it is perhaps in this rather more dangerous context that we are to read the strange if beautiful fragment of
Allegorical Neptune
that Beulah has selected, as it veers away from the rising sun of Christian patriarchy and in doing so, towards Gnostic heresy, or
plus ultra
.

9.
The line paraphrases Sor Juana's own lines on this topic.

10.
In a footnote to his translation of Sor Juana's
First Dream
, Trueblood writes of Nyctimene: “For tricking her father into incest with her, this girl of Lesbos was changed into an owl, a bird believed to drink the oil of holy lamps in order to extinguish them.” The oil, presumably, was olive oil, Athena's gift to Greece.

11.
For past generations of translators, the challenge with Sappho was to fill in the blanks. In Davenport's translation, the square brackets reflect the gaps in the extant text. But here, too, to subtract is also to add, though not by human hand: inflections of contingency, mortality, earthbound process, time …

12.
Quise ayunar de tus noticias
… line from a Romance written for the Countess of Paredes.

13.
Discalza
was the word in the original, which has been replaced with ‘barefoot' and this explanatory endnote: Roughly speaking, convents fell into two categories, and the
discalzas
were those convents conforming to the most austere rules of ‘death to the world' and penitence. One such was the convent of the Discalced Carmelites, which Sor Juana quickly left before coming to San Jerónimo.

14.
Machiavelli.

15.
The story is almost certainly that of Sor Juana's contemporary and compatriot Sor María de San José, a nun and mystic eventually known throughout New Spain.

16.
Many commentators have touched on the conjunction of the White Island, women and sacrifice in the Greek classical tradition. Beulah's principal source here appears to be Gregory Nagy's “The White Rock of Leukas.” But the legendary home of the Mexica (‘Aztlan') is also sometimes translated as White Island or Isle of Whiteness, their exodus from which was triggered by the Aztec war god's sacrifice of his sister. Curious (for her) that Beulah notes this fact but has made no discernible use of the parallel.

17.
Though Sor Juana and Sappho were each called the Tenth Muse, there are only one or two direct mentions of Sappho in all of Sor Juana's surviving works.

18. Transit to Venus's gardens,
organ of marble, your songster's
throat imprisons even the wind in
sweetest ecstasy.

Tendrils of crystal and ice,
alabaster arms that bewitch
fasting Tantalus's pendant desire,
banquets of sweetest misery …

19.
Beulah's adaptation of an adaptation by Dusquesne and of direct translations by Davenport and Barnstone.

20.
A wry allusion, perhaps, to one of the posts held by the painter Velázquez at the court of Philip IV.

21.
Matins being the last prayer of the night, Lauds the first in the morning. Though the Divine Office may vary widely, the hours at San Jerónimo may reasonably be supposed as follows: Lauds—daybreak. Prime—7
A.M.
Terce—9
A.M.
Sext—noon.
Nones—3
P.M
. Vespers—5
P.M
. Compline—8
P.M
. Matins varies the most, anywhere from 9
P.M
. to, say, 1
A.M.
at San Jerónimo, in particular.

22.
Bénassy-Birling (p. 226) appears to have provided the basis for speculations about the Godinez affair.

23.
In one of the great scandals of the early seventeenth century, the Ursuline convent at Loudun was reported to have been seized by mass visions of erotic congress with the Devil.

24.
Núñez writes these injunctions to nuns in his
Distribucion de las obras del dia
. Cited by Wissmer in
Coloquio Internacional: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y el pensamiento Novohispano
.

25.
The Council of Trent was convened to formulate responses to the Protestant Reformation. Among the reforms introduced: strict enclosure of nuns; no preaching except by approved ministers, especially not by women; institution of Inquisition Index of banned works.

26.
As Queen Christina's tutor, Descartes was called to answer questions at all hours of the night. Unused to the Swedish climate, Descartes caught cold one winter night and died shortly afterwards. Or so the legend goes.

27.
Probable source of the translation:
http://www.windweaver.com/christina
/.

28.
Clytie/Clytia was an Oceanid said to be in love with not Apollo but Helius, designated in Sor Juana's phrase as ‘father of lights.'

29.
The ontological distinction between the written and the oral in New Spain, as illustrated by the Conquest's
Requerimiento
, seems to be one first offered by Margo Glantz.

30.
The discussion of Aristophanes and Aeschylus appears to entwine observations made separately by Alan H. Sommerstein (on Aristophanes) and Richard Lattimore (on Aeschylus).

31.
In another translation, Aristophanes has Lysistrata refer to these as Milesian Six-Inch Ladies' Comforters and to lament the wartime constraints on the importation of leather phalluses from Miletus that cruelly increased the dissatisfaction of the women who waited….

32.
Translation by Lattimore.

33.
Translation by Sommerstein.

34.
According to Ovid, the spring's waters changed the hitherto male offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite into an androgyne, thence ‘hermaphrodite.' Hermaphroditus proceeded to put a more general curse on the spring: that any man entering it should emerge half-man. Therefore Sor Juana's reference has been thought a careless one, as regards her. But it may be a subtle way of suggesting that were one an androgyne already, the curse might be reversed.

Tarquin meanwhile, according to legend, committed the rape of Lucretia that led to her suicide.

35.
Sor Juana, Or the Traps of Faith
, a magisterial biography of one great Mexican poet by another, a book destined to become an instant landmark in both Sor Juana scholarship and the history of intellectual biography. All of the quotations remaining in this chapter are from Paz's work, notably from pp. 216–18, 482–84, 505–08.

36.
Based on their content, I would be tempted to place these letters closer to the end of Beulah's descent into the underworld, but logically they must have been written much sooner, so I place them here. Yet again I find myself stunned that she could crash so hard, then within a few days pick herself up and keep going, keep working, keep the holocaust raging in her mind concealed from the rest of us, from me. I have not been able yet to determine which of these letters—if any, or in what form—she might have actually sent. I have found no evidence that Mr. Paz ever replied.

37.
A discussion of Sor Juanas putative heretical quietism appears in Bénassy-Birling.

38.
That Sor Juana was the first in her time to return to an ancient notion of Beauty as the Fourth Transcendental is the thesis of Tavard, fully developed in
Sor Juana and the Theology of Beauty
.

39.
The phrase ‘this white Eden' in reference to Canada was used in a valedictory address, by a recent arrival from Vietnam, to an assembly of graduands at Bow Valley College in Calgary.

1.
Mexican cosmology is so complex that I undertake these few lines of gloss supremely confident of being fundamentally in error and in excellent company. Take a hard right at the Greeks. Abandon the concepts of monotheism and polytheism. Ponder instead a split such as numberlessness and multiplicity. Think not of a pantheon but of a palette—tones and hues, lights and darks. Think not of metamorphosis but of molecular biology, genetics, nuclear physics—valences and charges, base pairs and sequences of attributes … orbits. Imagine a series of masks but with no face behind them; the masks change and the constellation of attributes varies, depending on the context or season. Consider the metaphor of polarities, pairings of extremes—male/female, many/none, both/neither. One such pairing is Lord/Lady Two, the Lord and Lady of Duality itself, presiding over the highest level of heaven. Male/female pairings are common—it may be about androgyny, or it may be that this offers the most intuitive and natural emblem for the notion of elements in tension. Think hydrogen, think fission. The myth of the dragon twins may be an account of the forces unleashed when the pairings and constellations are broken, or may be an account of something else altogether….