Hunger's Brides (223 page)

3.
Possible allusion to the Mexican glyph for gold: a god defecating a yellowish excrement.

4.
Song of Songs, 2:5.

5.
Such deprivations are not of course unique to the Baroque; so if the following cases are cited here it is because they were found among the author's diaries, not among her research notes. “… The best known of these saints, Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), ate only a handful of herbs each day and occasionally shoved twigs down her throat to bring up any other food she was forced to eat. Thirteenth-century figures such as Mary of Oignes and Beatrice of Nazareth vomited from the mere smell of meat, and their throats swelled shut in the presence of food … Somewhat later, in the seventeenth century, Saint Veronica ate nothing at all for three days at a time but on Fridays permitted herself to chew on five orange seeds, in memory of the five wounds of Jesus … Many medieval women spoke of their ‘hunger' for God and their ‘inebriation' with the holy wine. Many fasted in order to feast at the ‘delicious banquet of God'… Angela of Fogligno … who drank pus from sores and ate scabs and lice from the bodies of the sick, spoke of the pus as being as ‘sweet as the eucharist …'” From Joan Jacobs Brumberg, discussing
anorexia mirabilis
in
Fasting Girls
(Harvard University Press, 1988).

6.
Appears to be a paraphrase, from Louise Bernice Halfe's
Blue Marrow
.

7.
Observation made by Margo Glantz in
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: ¿hagiografía
o
autobiografía?

8.
Beulah cut her hand in an accident at the museum erected at Sor Juana's birthplace in Nepantla.

9.
‘Poor Mexico: so near the United States, so far from God.'

10.
W.B. Yeats, “The Long-legged Fly.”

11.
Camille Paglia,
Sexual Personae
.

12.
Based on a translation by Alan Trueblood.

13.
Iain Sinclair,
Downriver
.

14.
Beulah's hatred of what we call coincidence was unrelenting. Judging by all the red
exclamation points in her notes, it is safe to say she set great store by the following: “The primitive-religious mind sees itself enmeshed in a vast, shimmering web of coincidence, with God, or the gods, at the centre and in each of its skeins. The early Greeks preserved this in their reverence for the inescapable net of Ananke and the golden net of Hephaistos. The madman too perceives a great web of coincidence and interconnection. The difference is that he, or she, and not God, inhabits the centre …” Carla Alt,
The New Schismatics: a History of Schizophrenia, Multiple Personality and Dissent
(Atlantis University Press: Atlantis City, NJ, 1956).

15.
At a young age one can get too much Jung. Arguably by mid-career even Jung had had too much Jung. The great Swiss Magus had by then found support for his theories of synchronicity in what he had gleaned from Chinese philosophy. In one of the first texts on synchronicity Beulah consults, she finds this gloss on the concept of the
Tao:
“The psyche and the cosmos are to each other like the inner world and the outer world. Therefore man participates by nature in all cosmic events, and is inwardly as well as outwardly interwoven with them …” (Robert Aziz,
C. G. Jung's Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity.)

Jung and a patient are out walking. As they enter a wood, Jung's patient is telling him about a dream she'd had as a child, a dream of a spectral fox coming down the stairs of her parents' house. At that moment, not fifty yards from Jung and his astonished patient, a real fox comes out of the underbrush and calmly walks ahead of them for several minutes. It appears to be leading them. Their conversation does not cause the fox to appear, but in a sense its appearance reflects that the path Jung and his analysand are following harmonizes the inner and outer worlds. The
Tao
, then, is that terrain or that path where the inner and outer intersect, or rather superimpose themselves, and synchronistic events are its signposts.

Joseph Needham: “The key word in Chinese thought is above all
Pattern…
. Symbolic correlations or correspondences all formed part of one colossal pattern. Things behaved in particular ways not necessarily because of prior actions or impulsions of other things, but because their position in the ever-moving cyclical universe was such that they were endowed with intrinsic natures … If they [things] did not behave in those particular ways they would lose their relational positions in the whole (which made them what they were), and turn into something other than themselves. They were thus parts in existential dependence upon the whole world-organism.”

Clearly then, our modern affliction, our great lie, was to have lost our relational position to the whole and to have become, therefore, other than ourselves. But for Beulah herself, more Jung now was the wrong kind of help. Eventually, Jung came to speculate that such patternings of mental and physical events indicated that they derived from a common psychophysical substrate, a
unus mundus
(a one-world). Robert
Aziz writes: “Through his study of the synchronistic patterning of events, the
unus mundus
thus became a living reality for Jung. What before were incommensurable opposites now linked. Opposites such as inner/outer, psychic/physical, symbolic/actual, and spiritual/worldly were now conjoined in psychophysical patterns of meaning …” Apparently Jung found himself becoming something of a lightning rod for such synchronistic events and began to keep a record of them. Aziz introduces the famous case of the golden scarab: “Seeking to circumvent the obstacle of his analysand's rationalism, Jung attempted to ‘ … sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding'… [When this] also proved unproductive … Jung could only hope ‘that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself.' Reflecting later upon the synchronistic experience that served to do just this, Jung writes:‘I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window…. She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab—a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the

dark room…. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer
(Cetonia aurata)
, whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, ‘Here is your scarab.'”

To even this casual sceptic, Beulah's mentor's knack for finding unities—this passenger pigeon's homing instinct on the One—for all its scientific trappings, looks suspiciously like the beginnings of mysticism. But she was prepared to go Jung one vastly better. If someone must take the blame for what happened next, blame it on Jung. (“The objective event may be very distant in time from the subjective event.”) Judging by their proximity in her notes, it is more than probable that, before she was … interrupted, she was about to try to connect the
unus mundus
of Jung, the
Totus Ubique
of Augustine and the
Tloque Nahuaque
of Nezahualcóyotl all in some vast mystical
holus bolus
. (Why try?—this is less clear. Because all things must be one? I am becoming unreasonable, but this makes me furious, this
waste
. How did she become so lost, get so hurt? What happened to her, that she should have so much, and throw it away?) On attempts to visualize the result: an Ur-reality tenously anchored on an unstable poetics of sub-atomic physics and numbers as primal archetypes, quantum entanglements of subjective and objective events distant in place and time caught up in a shimmering synchronistic web.

Skimming through Jung, Beulah had allowed herself to see a synchronistic patterning with a periodicity of three hundred years and a radius of three thousand miles spreading outward concentrically from … what? The cannonball of some rough beast
into a wading pool of Time? The passage of a great leviathan pulling three-hundred-year whirlpools in its wake? I struggle to understand this, that its Necessities had linked her fate with Sor Juana's, had linked Sor Juana's place and her time, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, with ours at its twilight. Or was even the end of an age grandiose enough? What was this apocalyptic moment—the death of an empire, a civilization, the end of history, of time itself? Or perhaps it was to be that instant, synchronistically sensed, in which the cosmic expansion pauses, on the verge of contraction? How big is big enough—
to make it worth it?
In the half-light of her room, Beulah seemed more or less to conceive of the anti-Christ as something like the degodding or disenchantment of the world, the extinction of wonder, the death of the Sublime at the hands of Transcendence. Whatever it was, according to Carla Alt's definition, Beulah was undeniably mad. But now the new logic of synchronicity impelled her towards another insane conclusion: that her role, her ultimate mission was to repair the web. To rehabilitate God. Or kill him.

16.
Adapted from Fernando Benítez,
Los demonios en el convento
, and Glantz. Along these lines, Margo Glantz quotes at length from a sermon printed in Mexico in 1686 by the widow of Bernardo Calderón, for the edification of her heirs.

17.
Plath,“Lady Lazarus”?

18.
A concise statistical treatment of cases coming before the Spanish Inquisition appears in Gustav Henningsen's “The Eloquence of Figures: Statistics of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions and Prespects for Social History” in
The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind
, ed. and with an introduction by Angel Alcalá.

19.
Henry Kamen,
Inquisition and Society in Spain
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), p. 184.

20.
Excerpt from Marturos's introductory remarks to an interdisciplinary symposium on Inquisitorial procedures and their legacy in modern settings. Published in
Inquisitive Minds
(Calgary: Crocus Press, 1993).

21.
The Art of War
.

22.
This was a thesis developed by Octavio Paz.

23.
WP. Anderson,“Surrogates and Heroes: the Contendings of Hellads and Hellenes,” in
Inquisitive Minds
, ed. Pedro Marturos (Crocus Press: Calgary, 1993).

24.
Calgary: Crocus Press, 1993.

25.
The structure of this and other scenes seems to have been cribbed from the work of Blake Brooker, resident playwright of Strontium Nanny.

26.
These stanzas are the continuation and conclusion of “To the Triumphs of Egypt” from Book Two. The formulations developed here—linking the cross of Serapis to the crucifix; the crucifix to the axes of a circle; the circle to the hieroglyph of eternity—are shocking not merely because they appear in a carol written to be sung on sacred occasions:
Octavio Paz has pointed out that these are the very subjects Giordano Bruno was dabbling in before his condemnation.

27.
“Dover Beach.”

28.
Jane Siberry.

29.
It appears Núñez is quoting himself here, from one of his books of instruction to nuns.

30.
From Dostoevski's “Grand Inquisitor,”
The Brothers Karamazov, passim
.

31.
Núñez is reciting the beginning of the Spanish
Requerimiento;
a legal requirement of the Conquest, it was read by the Conquistadors in Latin to the Indian populations about to be made war on.

32.
There is every likelihood that the “Protesta” is the last thing written by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

33.
Lacks attribution: The verses are clearly based on a model—but where the did the model come from?

34.
The principal translators traduced in this chapter are most obviously M. Lichtheim, W.K. Simpson and R.B. Parkinson. Beulah's correspondents, the Egypt scholars here identified as A and M, will almost certainly not want acknowledgement for what she has done with sources they had in good faith given her: the hieroglyphic Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom (c. 2500
B.C.E.
); hieratic forgeries of priests in the Ptolemaic period (c.300
B.C.E.
); snatches seemingly at random from love songs, royal inscriptions and funeral laments; the prophecies of Nefertiti and the Famine Stela; the “Dialogue of a Man with his Soul;” magical formulas of appeasement and propitiation. As for the resulting disorder, someone desperate to defend her might point out that a text narrated from the mind of Seth might, plausibly, be confused and chaotic. Perhaps the best that could be said for her methods is that Seth is a scavenger, and creates nothing on his own. The less-desperate-to-defend, however, might see this mish-mash as plagiarism-pretending-to-high-art-be, with the unit of plagiarism taken down to the level of meme. The obvious pomo dodge is that all texts draw on a constantly recycled fund of meanings; but this text seems almost entirely and perversely composed of phrases meant
not
this way by particular authors working with careful scholarship and seriousness to say something
else
, something
valid
. Or perhaps she does also, and I have understood nothing at all.

35.
The problems of translating sexual content from ancient sources has met with a number of solutions, from metaphor and euphemism to poeticization (the gold standard of which is Sir Richard Burton's use of “lingham”and “yoni” in his translation of the
Kama Sutra)
to Bowdlerization, and now to what here seems its opposite. To be fair, among Beulah's notes there is an unattributed photocopy of a translated hieroglyphic text that indicates she is not the first to work in this vein.