KNOWING LOVE

Sister Juana Inez

FORMAL DEFINITION OF "TO KNOW"

1
a (1) :  to perceive directly :  have direct cognition of (2) :  to have understanding of knowing

oneself> (3) :  to recognize the nature of :  discern
b (1) :  to recognize as being the same as something previously known (2) :  to be acquainted or familiar with (3) :  to have experience of

2
a :  to be aware of the truth or factuality of :  be convinced or certain of
b :  to have a practical understanding of <knows how to write>

3
archaic :  to have sexual intercourse with

Oh, yeah!  The Biblical euphemism for sex!  But try working the definition the other direction.  “She looked at him, his head on her pillow, and recognized him for the first time.  But perhaps it was most important that she recognized herself, the truth of herself.  And she slipped out of bed.”  (That’s not a quote— I made it up.)

But I want to take this in a different direction, sort of.  My most recent juxtaposition of movies that told me something was two convent stories about “knowing.”  Of course, the point is supposed to be “knowing God.”  But then things get a little mixed up.  

One film is the classic “In This House of Brede” with Diana Rigg in the main role, which is so indelible that her role as Olenna Tyrell in “Game of Thrones” can’t help but echo it so many years later.  The other is a series about an Argentinian saint, quite real and celebrated:  “Juana Ines.”  

(http://www.tor.com/2010/11/19/faith-and-lies-two-fascinating-novels-about-nuns/  This review pairs the BOOK of Rumer Godden’s This House of Brede” with Gail Godwin’s “Unfinished Desires.”  (I haven't read it.)  I haven’t read Rumer Godden’s book for decades, but there once was a time I read right along the Vernon Branch Library’s “G” shelf, all the Godden books including her sister Jon’s novels. There are quite a few.

In spite of all the psych discussion of bonding, attachment, pheromones, limerence and so on, I still like the idea of “knowing” someone to signify “loving” them.  In today's hook-up culture, all is climax and then it’s over.  But if we’re talking “knowing,” there is no limit, the adventure continues so long as the loved person will allow it.  It can mean discovery even after death.

Since this is also a narcissistic culture, it is a convenient valence when one person wants to be known and supplies endless stories, explanations, past influences and present ideas, and all the other complexities of being human.  That’s the narcissist.  The other one, who in the myth is called “Echo” but in present psycho-jargon is called “enabler,” merely has to listen and remember.  

Girls are notorious for falling in love with horses during adolescence because horses are excellent mirrors, giving back the vibes they pick up.  And it is a physical relationship, even a dangerous one, which is always attractive during adolescence.  But at about the same time the same girls often fall in love with the idea of being a nun, of taking God for a lover.  Nevermind that God doesn’t exist.  Enabling a fantasy can be very fulfilling because one controls the plot.

Religious orders know about this, but they are sober institutions, each order with its own focus.  The House of Brede is meant to be an Anglican contemplative order: that is, the nuns spend their lives entirely cloistered and focused on prayer for the world.  Other orders are meant to teach or to heal.  The Catholic ones are always a problem for the Popes and for other male officials, because their good works build up power from the people's gratitude, as the people begin to love them, and cloisters can be hotbeds of dissent on the basis of sympathy rather than logic.

What the movies and novels love is the competition of human lovers with God-the-lover.  And then there is always the possibility of nun-and-nun pair-bonds.  All this was much more complex in the days of Sister Juana Inéz because it was a time of empire-forming when church and monarchy wrestled for control.  Also, Sister Juana Inéz wanted only to be a scholar but there was no convent with scholarship as a central calling, because women were supposed to be too simple and stupid to think properly.  If they clearly excelled, it was a challenge to the men.

Also, Sister Juana Inés was Mexican in part, as well as illegitimate, so she presented multiple challenges to order.  As an adolescent, she learned the Aztec language of Nahuatl, and wrote some short poems in that language.  She deals with the division between body and soul and uses imagery of sensual nature.  Octavio Paz wrote about her and so did many others, including Diane Ackerman and Alberta, Canada, novelist Paul Anderson.  

This series on Netflix will undoubtedly make Juana Inés far better known.  She survived in part because of the patronage of the Vicereine of Mexico, which in the film becomes a love affair with many lady-kisses exchanged.  Her supervisor, confessor, and possible oppressor becomes a dark knife-faced wolf with his own even darker inquisitor who despises women.  There are hints of SM as the religious people try to keep their bodies under control.  Always in the background, quietly, are the Indio with their shamanic understanding of healing and their own suffering by oppression.  Aztecs were never living in an idyllic world, particularly after Spain stripped their wealth, throwing the entire European balance of power off-orbit.

The only signs of Sister Juana Inéz’ scholarship are her books.  Things.  Nothing about her philosophical premises or worldview.  No scenes of her explaining, just bits of erotic poetry meant to be — like the Song of Solomon — symbols of religious devotion.  She does make rather defiant statements in the little play presented.  The Mother Superior is unsympathetic, worried about disfavor from authorities.

“In This House of Brede” is an ancestor of “Call the Midwife,” so the Mother Superior is a kind and generous woman, a worthy role model for a growing young woman who is trying to escape the consequences of her choice to join a dedicated life instead of a conventional marriage.  “Brede” notes the cruelty of throwing over the young man who loves the postulant, and then the new cruelty of her teasing him with the possibility of turning back to him.

Rumer Godden’s other convent tale is “Black Narcissus” (1947), quite different, with a focus on fabulous mountain scenery which is the numinous location of a teaching order, and a mature, charismatic male to challenge their cloister.  The source of evil is a mad sister, while the erotic woman is Jean Simmons with paint on her face.  Deborah Kerr loves good, becoming so much the nun in several roles, that we were all shocked when she rolled in the surf with Burt Lancaster, getting to “know” him.

It is not knowledge, but the pursuit of understanding that seduces us.

NARCISSUS AND ECHO: The Labyrinths of Interpretation

Who among us has not kissed a mirror?  It is at the far humanoid end of a chimpanzee’s capacities.  And yet Narcissus is one of the most powerful and interpretable of the classic Greek myths.  The Greek version told about the son of  two river gods, exceptionally proud, disdaining those who loved him. He was attracted to a reflecting pool where he saw his own reflection in the water and fell in love with it, not realizing it was merely an image. Unable to leave the beauty of his reflection, Narcissus died.  (Well, became a plant suitable for potting.)

One might talk about this in a geological way, saying that it is the nature of water to go on, to “love” the waterway, but that in his disdain Narcissus blocked the nature of living process, and therefore sank into the ground, the chthonic (deep earth) pool being a dark vortex only disguised by the obsidian surface.  (A Gaian watercourse that follows the contours of terrain even over the precipice must become a spray, a waterfall.)  

This is meta-level stuff, but old F-word -You-Know-Who managed to get out of the story a syndrome that emphasized childishness, or maybe selfishness, or possibly self-indulgent decadence, but never the kind of obsessively self-critical auto-Puritan that Freud himself was, reaching civilized-world-scale grandiosity in the process.  Some identify the classic Narcissus with the preening of high society, Oscar Wilde’s campy arrogance, or a movie star’s worried concern for image, but any youth could simply and innocently yearn for self-knowledge.

In the “queer” world, usually on the male side, Caravaggio was prompted to create this beautiful painting, the boy trying to decipher his difference from others.  Perhaps this cluster of cthonic Greek myths comes from memories of the hunter/gatherer days before people were forced into roles and made to pay homage in order to finance roads through forests.

Or the dynamic might be interpreted in this teasingly seductive ballet by Norman McLaren in which he elegantly traces THREE figures:  the beautiful young man, a beautiful young woman, and the man’s image from the pond, a ménage a trois.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7DlCdcH4Cc

The woman comes from the story of Echo.  There was a day when Narcissus was walking in the woods.  Echo, a story-telling mountain nymph, saw him, fell deeply in love, and followed him. Narcissus sensed he was being followed and shouted "Who's there?". Echo repeated "Who's there?"  He tried to find her.  At first she ran away but eventually revealed her identity and turned to embrace him, but then he stepped away.  He said, "Let us meet together." Echo, never being more eager to reply to anyone, repeats "Let's meet." 

She exits the woods in order to embrace Narcissus. He runs away from her outstretched arms and says, whilst running, "May I die before what’s mine is yours." She repeats only "what's mine is yours."  Heartbroken by Narcissus, Echo spent the rest of her life in lonely glens pining away for the love she never knew, crying until all that was left was her voice.  But that’s only part of a multiple labyrinth of tales, something like the modern winding thriller hooks of meeting others, misunderstanding them, wanting to part, finding too late that an embrace has locked one’s throat into the crook of a crushing elbow.

My own early story was Echo in love with Pan, the lecherous goat, who, when she escapes him, causes her to be torn to pieces by shepherds (pastoral) and strewn over the face of the earth.  But their children were Iambe (humorous poetry) and Iynx (not lynx cat, but iynx, a singing bird that stands for passionate but restless love).

So the meta-meta theme here is still the on-goingness, the wandering, the dreaming mix of images that express what words cannot:  specifically the changing ways of relationship, now coming together, now struggling to escape each other.  Too different to merge, too alike to forsake the lover.  This particular myth does not address lovers that seek to understand the “other” and by their scrutiny destroy the fragile bonds of acceptance.  This is a story about image and word, reflection and song, kindling and death.

In reality, it rained in the night, jeweling the grass.  Once again lightning struck the Baptist church next door, the explosion half-wakening me to smell the ozone zing. I’m going to end with a poem by Aad de Gids.  He is from the Netherlands so his multi-languages interpenetrate.  If you cannot decipher that -- and you only need to let the words suggest -- stop here.  But maybe this information will help.

In Greek mythology the Oneiroi (Dreams) were sons of Nyx (Night), and brothers of Hypnos (Sleep), Thanatos (Death), Geras (Old Age) and other beings, all produced via parthenogenesis (without sex). Cicero follows this tradition, but describes the sons of Nyx as fathered by Erebus (Darkness).[

oneiros après l'ondée  (Dreams After the Shower)

oneiros, relative of night, sleep and death, roams the evening in balmy

warmth, après l'ondée,with the raindrops still shuddering the longer on

roses' leaves than on the other plateformes vertigineux,the leaves with

smallest fur, greenshining lacquered leaves dripless, evening of vanishings

oneiros lost in his forgotten assignment yet lucky with his next of kin,

all hypnagogic narcotic lethal psychotic apparitions, swarming the fields

of evening in hypothetical greeces, grecian eyes laughing and crying at

once, endowed with the insatiable palate shivering in fragrance of roses

traveling fragrances of oldfashioned blushcoloured roses and ligustrum

of vining honeysuckle forgotten its heliotropism winding wildly around

the trellises other climbing plants or, grounded fundamentalists, offer to its

as insatiable as silent winding and asphyxiating, slow as to seem a caress

no rain is to fall anymore and the release of the vesperide perfumes for

poor oneiros a disdirective labyrinth of mystifications, as meaning escapes

incessantly into other meanings never to reach conclusion rather some light 

loose mappology of dynamics and energy as life seems this wasted time

caught yet inmidst of this dynamic contradances of dissipative meaning,

moments of seeming elucidation, happiness as the smell of carnations does

incorporate, fleetingly that is while also this is enlightenment, that it bears

the promise of ephemerality as "wasted time" is used time, time we lend

Borrowing words from friends, we let the echo die away into the roar of the waterfall, only to find it again in another place, inscribed in stone.  The stream that sinks into the swallowing pond, or flings itself over a cataract, are only dreams we feel and in the end have no names to save.  No words left in the scrabble box.  Gently, gently, we all go mad in the end, leaving through a gate of horn if true (a play on the Greek words for "horn" and "fulfil") or a gate of ivory if false (a play on the Greek words for "ivory" and "deceive").  The message we leave is written in “linear B.”  Some middle-aged woman, smoking late into the night at her dining room table and making notecards from old exam covers, will figure it out.