Hunger's Brides (66 page)
It won't be long. We are half a million now. Guadalupe, mother of our sorrows mother of our pain. Heal me. I am afraid.
So too cloaked in terrors these shitscared men in riot gear. SWAT bottlefly blue. Alien visors, plexiglass shields / black billyclubs clutched
to wield. Last gasp gasmasks-to-don for fear of extinction / for block after block they stand shoulder to shoulder as past we walk this alien avenue of skulls. How many skulls how many of us now is anyone keeping score isn't anyone keeping count / when does the indigent insurrection start? Cue the newsreel. Move along.
What are you writing there?âI said
move along
.
At the gates waits my deliverance from terror, my comic disbelief: BANCOMEXICO LES DA LA BIENVENIDA A LOS PELERINOS GUADALUPINOS.
â
Red, white and green, a huge banner. This is better much better this devil I know.
Gracias
BancoMexico, a thousand graces.
Inside the compound a fine cold drizzle falls purgatorial. Aztec dancers circle just inside the gates, solstice impending. Logdrums boomâechoes snuffed, fleshchoked in the dusthued mass. Clay pipes ⦠a sinister fluteshrill gaietyâsymphonic panther caged in too few notes. On the ground, prone, a small stiff girl. They lift her from the pavement pass her round lift her to the sky I lose sight of her in the sun's harsh emergency. Movealong humid humansea of faithâtwo hundred thousand eyes overflowing. Mine ⦠River of salt that wells us to the old Basilica above the newâ
Old Basilica. Terminus of a million hearts. We move through by the thousands by the hour, through the great doors. Some deep place in us knows already this strange mobwalk evolved for paying respects / homages to monumental art and kingly death. Where have I learned this shunting, metronomic shuffle, keeping time marking time dancing to time's forward rippleâinstant of momentum arrested, then, again, dancesteps for the leg-ironed ⦠shift, rock, glide. Hypnotic puppetry of unhinged hips and knees coaxed, tuggedâexpertly jigged.
We are a million now.
Floor smooth as a stone watercourse. River of whisper, hoarse glide of soles. Voices funnel up through my chestâsternum-tuned, resonantâup through the naveâ
A cough a whisper, a babyâits brief cry â¦
Slate. Stone.
Smoked light slants through a vaulted hush.
Incense, intense resins of pine ⦠this is
copal
burningâ¦.
Wet hair, sweatâplump fatty flowerscentâwhat are those
señora?
Her eyes a mass of seams narrow an instantâ
Nardo
, tuber rose ⦠have
you come from far to see her,
joven?
Yes very far, a distant galaxy. Her answering glance of shared piety, linked faith.
And we do share a faithâ
Old México
, this truly
exists
, still, for now, this motherland of contingencyâeggshell earth, famished sky, time recycled, spinning down to die. Time as cannibal dish, simmering, shrewdâapocalypse as not time but
place
. Guadalupe our public defender, all rise as the celestial court enters. Dusky maid / mistress of roses, mothershimmer of immanenceâ¦.
Then, unasked, unhoped, the brief miracle of a quiet mindâ¦.
Moment of mercy, grace. Blind reprieve.
Peace. Stay.
I sway forward without thought, without eyes.
Stay with me.
Slow feeling returns, old sweet pain of penshaft to callused fingerâwriter hold out your crooked hands.
It begins againâ
this
, this I must write as I'm carried pastâa children's exhibit a
crêche
of handmade paper faxpaper crêpe-paper garlands festoon an oval placard, petal-trimmed. It hangs at the neck of a
papier maché
effigy in white and black:
Sor Juana Offers Her Love to Guadalupe
.
Sor Juana offers â¦
Hello old friend.
But the shunting tide again carries us apartâI'll come for you wait for me. Just a little longer I promise. A day or two when I'm stronger. Thighspierced fasted and clean. I've come for you. I can be strong for you. Soon.
On we the million drift, and above the shuffling mass Indian headdresses bob like quail crests. On through the hall of happy endingsâ
exvotos
, tales with childlike picturesâtableaus of propitiation embroider the walls with little testaments and thanks to our mother intercessor stormshelter / opener of the way.
And Juanita standing guard at the hall of happy endingsâtell me it's an omen.
Tell me
.
12 December 1872: Thank you Guadalupe for saving our brother during a mine explosion â¦
12 December 1914: Thank you Mother for healing our daughter who was burned by kerosene â¦
12 December 1971 ⦠for saving our tractor from a grave engine fire â¦
12 December 1771 ⦠his wife and all the farm animals thank you for saving her husband from a deadly fever â¦
12 December 1763 ⦠from bandit rapists on the highway to Puebla â¦
12 December 1930 ⦠for helping our father escape from prisonâ¦. 1982 ⦠for the cure of syphilisâ¦. 1940 ⦠from a sinking shipâ¦. 1961 ⦠breast tumours so large she could not feed her newborn sonâ¦. 1827 a firing squadâ¦. 1931 trainwreckâ¦. 1786 the tempation of incestâ¦. 1867 a mine cave-inâ¦. 1894 for the rescue of our daughter from four months of
desequilibrio mentalâ¦
. 1794 gored by a bullâ¦. 1852 attacked by a maddened female burroâ¦. 1987 a chemical spillâ¦. surgery smallpox cholera plagueâ¦.
River of time river of mercy river of milk and honey / flow on sweet secret Nile / carry us home on the breath of god. I am hurt, I am heartsick, and broken.
carry me
I am weary I am yours please / I hunger I thirstâcarry meâI love I want I burn
sweet time, wrap me in your arms I can't go on.
Carry me.
At the exit across from the new Basilica, a Mass. We are two million now. A song surges up from the thronged amphitheatre, song for a hundred thousand corded throats, one monstrous organ, one slow hymn piped gasping belling through a hundred thousand souls. Calling so lightly to god.
But this music, this alien grace, I know this melody.
Blowin' in the Wind. Can this be happening?
How strange now, this sixties poetsong here and now and always. What is the language, what lyric are they singing to this Dylantune, what Mass can this be?
How can I write this?
I cannot go in there I cannot go down cannot go on I am too filled with you. In my eyes I heard you, in my ears I saw.
â
BancoMexico welcomes Guadalupe's pilgrims
SYCHIC
M
ASOCHIST
        From what Beulah termed the âfuckmuck' of twentieth-century psychoanalysis, an undeniably unsavoury industry has sprung, resorting to theories of psychosis, narcissism, lesbianism, masochism and even penis-envy in order to account for Sor Juana's prodigious hungers and accomplishments. Beulah, for complex reasons of her own, dubbed these new inquisitors âScarabs.'
  “⦠all human beingsâto differing degreesâbecome addicts of âpsychic masochismâ¦.'”
E
DMUNDO
B
ERGLER
â
A
CCORDING TO
F
REDO
A
RIAS DE LA
C
ANAL
(a disciple of Bergler, and another of Sor Juana's posthumous psychoanalysts), poets wish to be âpoisoned and devoured by the serpent,' and in turn wish to poison and devour it. The psychic mechanism is as follows:
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1) âI wish to be killed by the maternal breast.'
2) The daemon's reproach: âYou wish to be killed by your mother's breast.'
3) Defence of the âI': âOn the contrary, I wish to kill my mother's breast.'
4) The daemon's reproach: âYou have been aggressive towards your mother's image.'
5) The âI''s acceptance: âYes, I have been aggressive towards my mother's image for which I feel guilt and a desire to be punished.'
For Arias, the punishment consists in a desire to have the penis devoured, the penis which is the projection of the maternal breast. The symbol of the devouring penis is the asp. In sex, the vagina is the projection of the mouth, and the penis the projection of the maternal breast, and the semen a projection of milk. The whole represents an inversion and a form of revenge: the serpent (penis) poisons and devours and in turn is poisoned and devoured (by the vagina).
The source of aggression towards the mother is hunger: âYou are starving me.' Even when he is fed, the poet's anger remains: âEven when
you feed me you are poisoning me.' The poet says: âI will feed myself by fashioning objects of oral beauty ⦠milk and honey.'
And Arias continues:
In order to go more deeply into her [Sor Juana's] repressed curiosity or libidinized ignorance, one will have to take into account her mad hunger to know, to expound, and to put her learning on exhibition. And thus, in this so simple manner will we be able to induce and prove that this woman at her most tender age acquired what Bergler called psychic masochism; that is, that her fear of death, impotence and rejection she converted to unconscious pleasuresâ¦.
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â
From “The Superego” by Edmundo Bergler, as quoted in
Intento de un psicoanálisis de Inés Juana y otros ensayos Sorjuanistas
, by Fredo Arias de la Canal. Arias de la Canal, during his attempt to psychoanalyze Sor Juana, describes Bergler thus:“⦠the most brilliant mind of the twentieth century. A man who has given humanity the opportunity to know itself. It would be a tragedy that that humanity should come to destroy itself for not having understood this man ⦔
ELIRIOUS
T
RIUMPH
        Just as the Middle Ages wracked its mind inventing instruments of torture to apply to criminals, the seventeenth century underwent fevered contortions discovering ever more subtle and dolorous means to torment and mortify one's own body. Medieval man prosecutes, punishes and avenges crime in his neighbour; Baroque man hunts, finds, and wreaks vengeance for crime in himself. But in the convents of the 17th century, the masochistic modalities of asceticism have rightly celebrated their most cruel and delirious triumphâ¦.
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L
UDWIG
P
FANDL
,
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico's Tenth Muse
B
EULAH SURELY SAW THE IRONY:
In 1684 Sor Juana's friend Carlos Sigüenza received a commission to write a history of the aristocratic convent of the Immaculate Conception, a few blocks from Sor Juana's own. Long excerpts of Carlos's chronicle come down to us through one Ludwig Pfandl: German historian, the first of Sor Juana's psychoanalysts, and for Beulah, the dark prince of Scarabs.
Beneath the delirious triumphs detected by Pfandl lurks the old theme of convent as harem, and of the male ecclesiastics who visited them as sultan-stallions. A certain vein in Medieval literature fairly courses with the lubricities of nuns, monks and priests, of which Boccaccio provides among the more pleasing examples. The convent or monastery as house of corruption continues as a literary device beyond the Renaissance, finding perhaps its most influential expression in de Sade, whose treatment is stripped of the past's light smirking and tainted in the more sanguinary hues with which his name has become synonymous. Nor were dark tales of misconduct confined to the European side of the Atlantic. From their respective journeys across seventeenth-century America, an Englishman, Gage, and an Italian, Carreri, bring us snapshots (the latter's at least untainted by Gage's Protestant bias) of moral laxness and not infrequent scandals in many of Mexico City's convents. Gage writes:
It is ordinary for the Fryers
â
to visit their devoted nuns, and to spend whole days with them, hearing their music, feeding on their sweet-meats. And for this purpose they have many chambers which they call
Loquitorios, to talk in, with wooden bars between the nuns and them, and in these chambers are tables for the Fryers to dine at; and while they dine the nuns recreate them with their voices.
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