Hunger's Brides (25 page)

Finally, Sor Juana, a beautiful woman, could be permitted a little mirror-gazing.

I've been trying to show why Beulah needn't have read any great mystery into all this. To be fair, she was unlucky in a number of ways: in her adviser, evidently, but fatally so in her area of research, since it amplified so powerfully her own worst tendencies. The Baroque was besotted with myth and tricks of perception—the ceilings painted as if open to the sky, the cornices that turn out to be a painting, itself made to look like a sculpture, ad nauseam….

Beulah was also right about certain things. About my distaste for all things baroque, obviously. She was even right about why. All my lofty reservations aside, in the Baroque's lack of restraint there is something offensively, dangerously … unchaste. To some of my former students and colleagues this will come as something of a howler. But had I been more forceful in impressing the dangers upon her earlier I might have saved a career, at the very least.

If the Renaissance was the first new budding on a branch the Middle Ages had thought barren, the Church's reactionary Counter-Reformation was a flask—
a
fiasco
, slipped over that branch. The odd-shaped fruit of this suppression was the Baroque, like a pear grown
into a bottle whose too-rich liqueur shocks the austere palate of the monk who uncorks it. An era of monstrous vitality and tension, of florid camouflage and violent contradictions—of unbridled licence and brutal censure. Of a craving that yields to disgust. And in Spanish America, it derived an added intensity from the systematic suppression of indigenous cultures.
²⁹

Yet as if by miracle, in the verses of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the American Baroque
³⁰
found by far its finest and most graceful expression: a grafting of Greco-Roman myth to contemporary politics; of aboriginal vocabularies to European forms. In the play
The Divine Narcissus
, for instance, Sor Juana wrote a dramatic poem of astonishing originality and daring.

Christ as Narcissus is so startling, even today, that it's easy to overlook the subtle portrait of Echo as Lucifer, the fallen star of morning. Sor Juana's creation, Echo, is an altogether human figure, who cannot endure the indifference of a self-absorbed young god and slowly wastes away. In the process, her gift of speech comes to seem a parody and punishment—and here is the Baroque in all its perverse splendour: the most passionate speeches of Sor Juana's Echo resonate clearly and beautifully of the Song of Solomon.

Sung, as it were, by Mephistopheles.

Our time is not without splendours of its own: according to one feminist reading of the Bible, the Song of Solomon (or the Song of Songs) is ‘the Goddess's correction of Genesis.'
³²
Oh my.

It is all such a distressing
mess
. And not just for its deplorable taste.
³³
What we are facing is first and foremost a sickness of temperament. Out of this … mythomania, Beulah let herself be turned into yet another scholar projecting her own fetishes into the work. Mirrors,
myth, the Baroque, and now the Goddess. It wasn't completely her fault, I'll admit. Such a mix would have been lethal to a saint. Here one has only to imagine a monstrously florid garden … myths, their reflections, distortions—twining, tangling—like so many limbs in a bathhouse, sending tendrils back and forth in time.

Today, though, it is no longer acceptable to judge these things by external, even eternal, standards. Today we must infiltrate the subject's
own
value system, probe from within the matrix of her influences…. Alas, this also means insinuating ourselves into her story.

All right, why did Beulah
freely choose
to give myth such a central place in her work? First off, it must be admitted that myths were vital to Sor Juana herself. Echo, Isis, Phaëthon, St. Catherine—these became emblems for her, not just of her work but of her very life. Today this must seem aberrant to us, even bizarre. It would be like Sylvia Plath fusing her identity with Ariel or Lazarus;
³⁴
or T.S. Eliot at least half-seriously taking himself for the Fisher King. But Sor Juana was a child of her time.

She was also, arguably, the most mythologized mortal in human history.

During her own lifetime, on both sides of the Atlantic, she was hailed as the Mexican Athena, Sum of the Ten Sybils, Phoenix of America,
³⁵
Pythoness of Delphi—to list just these. She was looked upon, from near and far, as a creature of fable, a beautiful monster. A freak of nature on a diabolical continent. Today we automatically filter out the hyperbole; the Baroque did not, indeed could not—the two arcs were not separable. It is impossible for us to imagine calling anyone—say, Sontag or Atwood—‘Isis'without the ghost of a smile. Similarly with Simone Weil as St. Catherine, Anne Carson as Echo, Paglia as Lucifer, H. D. as Helen of Troy….
³⁶

The paradox is that it makes Sor Juana an oddly modern figure, the prototype of larger-than-life fame. And in this one respect, her century is perhaps more modern than our own: the Baroque would have had no trouble comprehending, and then wildly embracing, our bizarre obsession with global celebrity.
³⁷

Modernity has been described as an annihilation, an abolition of the past.
³⁸
In this, its self-absorption, the ‘modern' is also apocalyptic (in a mumbling, minor key) in considering itself an end time. Which may be why Eliot, modernism's early theorist, saw a need to re-establish
the importance of tradition in the poetic program—that the past is not dead. Beulah would have said this of myth. Neither was it for her quaint, in the postmodernist sense: an amusing theme park, a Chinatown in the shadow of skyscrapers, as it is in our home city.
³⁹
Our century's most demoralizing discovery has been the methodical, technological and largely cynical exploitation of myth and archetype.
⁴⁰
Here Beulah and I did not disagree. But she believed the genie could not be stuffed back—and should not be, since it derives its power from repression.
⁴¹

And here was one of the things we disagreed upon, sometimes violently. It
can
be stuffed back into the bottle. It must. And manning the frontier between fiction and truth is decent, honest work—unspectacular, painstaking, and yes, occasionally tedious. But it is the Great Wall; because beyond it, the barbarian says things about us that should never be said or heard or known.

So, granted, there were reasons to take an interest in myths. But why in the world would she take it into her head to
modify
them?

Here she might point to Ovid. In fact, this Roman poet writing eight centuries after Homer has done more than anyone to shape our notions of what a Greek myth feels like. Sor Juana was just one in a long line of poets to follow him. A century or so after her death, Keats's concern, in reworking the great myths, was to bring them ‘intimately alive' again, and in this might be found an echo of his medical training.
⁴²
A more recent touchstone in this work of resuscitation was Camus, who wrote that myths exist for each new generation to breathe life into them—something he himself did so brilliantly for Sisyphus. The impulse, I believe, was to keep myth supple and vital, to keep it from ossifying into fixed meanings and museum pieces.
⁴³

But I think Sallust, the Roman historian, came closest to what Beulah was after. Her notes show she was enamoured of something Sallust once said of myth, bandied about as an epigraph for the two thousand years since:
These things never happened, but are always
.

I think it is in this ‘always' that Beulah felt she could most closely approach her poet: taking up the same myths that had so impassioned and finally engulfed Sor Juana—and by turning them in her own hands, enter into them completely and step through the looking glass. Through the Smoking Mirror.

E
CHO
As recast by B. Limosneros …

There was pain—also mine—but pain he'd made, and laughter, his. There was rage—no shame, no fear. It's not that I was so dear to that hairy bleating fool, just a lazy, easy lay—not even pretty. Yet some say he did his best work on me that day. His ugly goat-seed nestled awhile then took. And somehow Iynx grew out of me, an elfin lynx-eyed beauty. A marvel to us both. In grace or looks like neither but most unlike her father, who'd stop by from time to time depending on the weather, amused to see child rearing child.

He smiled, said he came for conversation, called mine unequalled on all the island. If my tongue had been a sword … Still, I did what I could with words.

Him I never forgave, but Pan could play the pipes—that much I'll say. And there was more—of course the drinking problem, but he wasn't without talent, at least until Apollo, sly, wheedled away his gift to prophesy and Hermes stooped to lift—oh no, not steal!—while winy Pan, besotted, bent to kneel and, the barely stomached contents of a meal depositing, dropped his pipes beside a stream…. Poor Pan, too busy vomiting to notice Hermes scoop the miracle of reeds and peddle it to the god of wisdom, light and reason.

If music was my weakness—and Apollo's—it wasn't Iynx's. She'd wander off from glen to wooded glen, far from goats and flutes and men, learning forest lore in secrecy. Learning sorcery.

Enter Zeus. When Zeus wanted satisfaction he used my tongue. But not like that. His tastes were more refined, though not quite tame. Anyway, I was no longer young and he had always found me plain. Instead he used my storied tongue to divert the most jealous wife in history, already driven to distraction by his infidelities, by his passion to subvert. If I'd hated Hera half as much as Pan I might have had some fun, enjoyed the perks. Still, you couldn't bring yourself to pity Hera, not if you'd seen her with her ire up.

For instance once as she and Zeus indulged in another spate of lofty quibbling, this time over who feels more pleasure—woman or man—when they fornicate, she called upon a trembling Tiresias (who'd been for seven years a woman) to adjudicate their discordant concert of half-truth, spite and biases. Unlucky Tiresias sided with Zeus, saying the greater pleasure was hers. Hera in furious displeasure struck the mortal's eyes out for his lies.