What do you say to someone who doesn't want to go on? But who knows, who can make
sense
of this. And just when did we start to presume some divine right to understand things?
The miracle is that we understand anything at all. In the end.
In her pages I have seen the Sistine Chapel made with Popsicle sticks, I have wandered with her ten years in the Amazon, to the ruins of the absolute book. I have tried to make sense of some small part of it. And now, maybe, I have.
You see, I always thought she'd called that night to ask for help. In all this time, in this season of thinking about nothing else, it never once occurred to me. It might have been the other way around.
What do you say to someone who doesn't want to go on? The man who would, the one who chooses to go forward is the man who lets himself be broken. So he can begin as new. That man begins in some small way as her creation, and sets out to make a life of his own. To make another start.
This ceremony, too, begins with the heart.
In recognition of the inimitable plumes of Europe,
whose praise has so increased my work's worth
    When, divine Spirits,
gentlest Swans, when
did my carelessness
merit your cares?
    Whence, to me, such elegies?
Whence, on me, such encomiums?
Can distance by so very much
have enhanced my likeness?
    Of what stature have you made me?
What Colossus forged,
that so ignores the height
of the original it dwarfs?
    I am not she whom you glimpsed in
the distance; rather you have given
me another self through your pens,
through your lips, another's breath.
    And abstracted from myself,
among your quills, I err,
not as I am, but in herâ
the one you sought to conjureâ¦.
1321 | Dante's The Divine Comedy is written not in Latin but in an Italian dialect. |
1325 | The Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, is founded on the site of present-day Mexico City. |
1428 *       | The Aztec poet-emperor Nezahualcóyotl creates the Council of Music, for the study of art, astronomy, medicine, literature and history. |
1440 | Cosimo de Medici founds the Florentine Academy, for the study of antiquity and the patronage of the arts and sciences. |
1478 | Ferdinand and Isabela receive papal approval to establish the Spanish Inquisition. |
1492 | Columbus discovers India somewhere near the Bahamas. |
1517 | Bartolomeo de las Casas, first Spanish priest ordained in the New World, begins a campaign against the oppression of the American Indians. |
1519 | Cortés lands on the shores of the Aztec empire. |
1520 | A guest of the Aztec Emperor, Hernán Cortés takes his host prisoner. |
1521 | The Aztec capital is sacked after a siege and naval blockade. |
1532 | A guest of the Inca Emperor, Francisco Pizarro takes his host prisoner. |
1543 | In Mexico, the apostolic Inquisitor Juan de Zumárraga is relieved of his position, for excess of zeal. |
1571 | The Spanish conquest of the Philippines is consolidated; Spain is a dominant power on four continents. |
1577 | Catholic mystic and poet John of the Cross is imprisoned in Toledo, Spain; composes Dark Night of the Soul subsequent to his escape. |
1583 | Examined at length by the Inquisition, The Interior Castle by Saint Teresa of Ãvila is published following her death. |
1588 | First performance of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus . |
1588 | The Spanish Armada is destroyed off the English coast |
1589 * | The grandfather of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is born in AndalusÃa, Spain. |
1600 | Philosopher Giordano Bruno, author of On the Infinite Universe and Worlds , dies at the stake in Rome following an eight-year trial. |
1600 | Shakespeare writes Julius Caesar and Hamlet . |
1615 | Cervantes completes Don Quixote . |
1618 | Start of Thirty Years' War. |
1624 * | Sor Juana's grandfather leaves for the New World. |
1630 | Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina creates the character of Don Juan in The Libertine of Seville and the Stone Guest . |
1633 | The Holy Office of the Inquisition begins the trial of Galileo. |
1634 | An affair involving Cardinal Richelieu of France, the Ursuline convent of Loudun, demonic possession of nuns, priestly satyriasis and exorcisms, culminates in Pastor Urbain Grandier's being burned alive at the stake. |
1648 | Sor Juana is born Juana Inés RamÃrez de Santillana y Asbaje in a mountain village near Mexico City. |
1648 | End of Thirty Years' War. |
1649 | Massive auto de fe conducted by the Inquisition in Mexico City. |
1650 | René Descartes dies at the palace of Queen Christina in Sweden. |
1659 | In Spain, the painter Velázquez is made Knight of the Order of Santiago. |
1660 | Peace of the Pyrenees: Louis XIV of France marries MarÃa Teresa, daughter of Spanish King Philip IV. |
1661 | Hunchbacked, mentally deficient Carlos, future King of Spain, is born to Philip IV and his niece, Queen Mariana. |
1664 | At the age of sixteen, the poetess Juana Inés RamÃrez de Santillana enters the Viceroyal Palace in Mexico City as handmaiden to the new Vice-Queen. |
1665 | In the year of his death, Philip IV loses Portugal, his army reduced from 15,000 to 8,000 in eight hours of battle. |
1665 | A royal edict is issued forbidding unauthorized books to enter the Americas. |
1666 | Antonio Núñez, a Jesuit officer of the Inquisition, is appointed Juana's confessor. |
1667 | John Milton completes Paradise Lost . |
1667 | Juana RamÃrez quits the palace for the convent of San José, and leaves three months later. |
1669 | Juana enters the convent of San Jerónimo, eventually choosing the religious name of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. |
1680 | Grandiose auto da fe in Madrid; the Queen Mother attends in the company of her dwarf Lucillo. Twelve burned alive. |
1680 | A comet, eventually to be named after Edmond Halley, appears over Europe and America. |
1680 | The celebrated poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is commissioned to create The Allegorical Neptune in welcome to the incoming viceroy and vice-queen, an auspicious beginning to Sor Juana's most productive period. |
1687 | Isaac Newton publishes his Principia Mathematica . |
1690 | Sor Juana's published theological arguments attract the notice of the Inquisition. |
1691 | Inquisition proceedings are instituted against a priest defending Sor Juana. |
1691 | August 23rd, a total eclipse of the sun. |
1692 | Floods, crop infestations, famine in Mexico. In June, a revolt against Spanish authority. |
1692 | Salem witch-hunts. Nineteen women hanged. |
1693 | The Archbishop of Mexico publishes an edict condemning the scandal and disorder in the city's twenty-two convents. Sor Juana ceases all writing and study. |
1694 | Sor Juana's defender is condemned by the Inquisition. March 5th: Sor Juana signs a statement of contrition in blood. |
1695 | Plague enters Mexico City. Death of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, aged forty-six. |
*
approximate dates
1.
Ovid,
Metamorphoses
, translated and with a preface by A. E. Watts, with etchings by Pablo Picasso (North Point Press, 1980), p. 62.
2.
The refrain of a poem by Sor Juana.
3.
â
Siglo de Oro's
latter, better half â¦' Evincing a certain editorial glee, I'd begun compiling lists of solecisms, errors of fact and anachronisms. But this one gave me pause. First, as a statement of personality it accorded well with widely documented instances of Sor Juana's bold self-awareness. In its devious way, the phrase was also accurate. Spain's
Siglo de Oro
was indeed its golden century, and Sor Juana was arguably the only great poet of its second half. Without her holding down the fort, as it were, it becomes merely a golden half-century. She is also, in the distaff sense, a âbetter half,' being the only great female poet of both that century and that side of the Atlantic divide.
But then what of the anachronisms with which the whole manuscript is rife? Five categories have so far emerged.
i) Unintentional. These are legion.
ii) Deliberate. These are few. (For example, moving the date of a trip or trial from 1678 to 1693.)
iii) Misleading. These seem like anachronisms, but may not be; the intent is evidently to challenge the historical knowledge of someone who reads to debunk. A seventeenth-century reference to cancer, or to a shuttlecock, feels anachronistic even if it isn't.
iv) Aggressive.
Aggressively anachronistic
is a term one might apply to the work as a whole (diction, topics, themes).
Should characters sound
modern
, or instead carry what amounts to a heavy accent that they themselves would not have heard? Which is to say, they will sound bracingly modern to themselves, and we, antiquated, to readers of the future. (Passing over, for a moment, the extent to which âmodern' is a construct of modernism.)
Is this, then, an objective portrayal of the seventeenth century, or one filtered by our time? The trap here is plain enough: unfiltered, objective portraits are never available to us, and acting as if they wereâin history or in fictionâis pretentious.
v) Chronic. (There was a temptation to call this category
meta-temporal
or simply
nonsensical.)
These anachronisms suggest a mission of historical fiction that is not just to lie by getting one's facts scrupulously straight, nor only to interrogate the concept of Fact as cultural artefact, nor even just to pose an alternative to history's account and
thereby a challenge to it, but rather to mount an inquiry into time itselfâits ultimate structure and our relationship with it.