Theresa of Avila

“Look at her,” Lacan said, with a lascivious smirk, “she’s coming, there’s no doubt.”

But his point (a loaded term, if ever there was one, given the angel’s blazing arrow) wasn’t that such mystical experience should be reduced to a holy fucking, no matter what Freud thought. Rather, that there is no there there. Where does it come from? From Sappho’s dismembered soul, to Eliot’s hyacinth girl, “looking into the heart of light, the silence”, cognition escapes us. Perhaps that blaze through the hindbrain is mere chemistry, that catches the breath and raises the eyes to heaven, but so too is water.