Representation, reappropriation: The body of the image in the mystical text of Teresa of Avila

What follows is but the attempt to draw the lessons from the mystical and visionary text of Teresa of Ávila in order to consider today issues that concern us, questions that are asked of Aesthetics, and not only as theoretical discipline that theorises on the arts and considers the beautiful, but as a reflection on aísthesis, of sensitivity, of the sensitive edge exposed by a constituent relationship which installs the human in a world. Consideration, then, of the happening, of entering the world, creative experience. This essay seeks to consider the relationship between the image and the body via the visionary discourse of the mystics, because their writings question and lend shape to a large number of formulae of thought that can help us better understand the questions facing us today. Let us imagine that the mystics made of their body a frontier or a support where what by definition has no place could take place. Place: part of space occupied by a body (Newton), the boundary of a containing object (Aristotle). This then is what is addressed here, a question of boundaries. A poem is always a cross between body and image, between the heard, spoken word, and an imagination that represents it, a rhythm too that passes between the body and the written image, a cadence of accents and sounds, a transition fragmented into verse, broken. The verses below have a visionary content. They were written by Teresa of Jesus, the mystical Carmelite nun who lived in Spain between her birth in 1515 and her death in 1582: Soul, thou must seek thyself in Me And thou must seek for Me in thee. Such is the power of love’s impress, O soul, to grave thee on My heart, That any craftsman must confess He never could have the like success, However superlative his art. [...] And if perchance thou knowest not Whither to go in quest of Me,