London and Paris, “Ekphrasis and Cathexis” Fall and Winter 1990
Exphrasis
I was born in the Marian Year—the year the Vatican proclaimed “The Year of Mary.” In Ireland, this means that at the entrance of every Irish town you’ll find a shrine dedicated to the Virgin from that year. Some are ostentatious—near Galway a passionless statue two stories high, its facial features soft and expressionless, surrounded by tailored gardens, amoretti, and cherubs. But there are smaller windowbox and doorway shrines that look every day of 36 years old—worn and dirty, surrounded by dead flowers, faded photographs, and candles.
On Grecian roadsides there are what at first look like elaborate mailboxes—glass boxes on white-painted wooden posts. Inside there’s the portrait of a saint, a white votary candle, a bottle of holy water, and the photograph of a young man or woman. Family members and friends erect these roadside shrines at the site of traffic fatalities, like the small white crosses on mountainsides and dusty country roads in Mexico, or beside Route 89 in northern Montana.
It is August, 1990. I’m not looking for anything in particular when I come upon a white-bordered photograph of Emmy Hennings in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Hennings was mistress and later wife of Hugo Ball, the brilliant Dada poet; Heloise to his Abelard. The photo was taken in Munich in 1913, three years before they would open the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.
It is June, 1916. Hugo Ball appears at the Cabaret dressed in a cardboard papal costume of blue tubular legs, scarlet-gold wings, and a tall, striped stovepipe hat. While reading “Karawane” and other “nonsense” incantations, Ball experiences a sudden panic: he no longer recognizes his surroundings, his friends, or his own libretto. Struggling to finish the performance (because of his costume he must be carried offstage), Ball hallucinates that he is preaching from a Catholic altar and falls into the priestly rhythms he’d known as a child. He also feels as if he suddenly understands everything all at once, as if he’s been lifted into a completely different universe.
By 1917, the Cabaret Voltaire is closed. Three years later, Ball returns to the church and Hennings reluctantly follows with him, more Heloise than ever.
In the “Beatlemania” exhibit of the Liverpool Museum, there’s a short video of various crowd scenes accompanied by some studio narration. It begins with a clip so startling it seems to be in slow motion—a grainy black-and-white film shot up into the light. Leaning over a balcony, a young teenage girl screams: her face hollow, her eyes wide with white light, shaking her head back and forth, her hair snapping from shoulder to shoulder, her mouth round with screaming, her hands cupped and held palm up in front of her the way a child asks to be picked up. Then she turns away, her small hands reaching out to the young girl standing next to her, perhaps a complete stranger, burying her face into her hair, screaming for Paul.
I stand nervously as people pass, pretending to be interested in something on the wall, waiting for the clip to loop around again, to see it again. I realize that at this moment she was ruined forever—that nothing would ever make her feel that way again.
There’s also a clip of John returning from India after Brian Epstein’s death. You can see John’s eyes following the movement of the reporter’s mouth as if each word is important, as if he has no idea what’s coming next. He answers in single words and long silences, because that’s all that’s necessary. It isn’t a press conference; it’s real and he’s really there. And empty. He’s looking at the world as if he doesn’t know, as if at any moment the mystery will unravel, and the only way to catch it is to be there.
And I was ruined when I realized it wasn’t only that at any moment the world could open but that at any moment I could open, too. And facing that face, feeling and remembering that possibility, all the tumblers of my life fell into place and made sense—the instability of my relationships, my Hamletic career, my artistic silence—all of it designed to remain at that moment when everything, but most importantly nothing was possible.
In the Merseyside National Museum there’s a painting of Merlin, blank-eyed, his hands limp, his head on his shoulder as if he’s falling asleep, his body slumped on the embankment. Nimue stands in front of him, looking back over her shoulder, in a purple gown so thin it ripples like waves across her thighs and knees. In a certain light the wet material against her flesh looks like leather or a lizard’s skin. Like Botticelli’s Venus, her body is elongated, stretched, unreal, its tiny head impossibly snakelike. The artist, Edward Burne-Jones, was in love with his model, the sculptress Maria Zambaco, when he painted her as Nimue and himself as Merlin, destroyed, behind her.
In Arthurian legends, Nimue is a shifting, obscure enchantress who was mistress to the prophetic poet Merlin. In Celtic tales, she is known as Rhiannon. Merlin fell in love with Nimue and taught her all of his secrets, despite the fact that although he lived his life in reverse he knew that loving her would bring him to his end. Finally when he had taught Nimue all that he knew, she entombed him inside a giant boulder with one of his own spells, where he couldn’t move his fingers or mouth to reverse the spell.
You can see the interviewer’s nervousness. He stammers and quickly turns to George, whose gaze is firmly in the distance. But the photographer stays with John, who continues to listen and wait, and then fades away into a nothingness inside his own head. Not as if he’s removed himself but rather that he’s returned to himself, waiting. She’s reading a book and only for a moment pauses to look over her shoulder at Merlin, dissolving into clay.
Burne-Jones was one of the last of the Pre-Raphaelites. His mother died a few days after his birth and his older sister died shortly thereafter. Following their deaths, his father plunged into a depression so deep that he basically forgot about the boy. As an art student, Burne-Jones was drawn to the melancholy attenuated figures of the fifth-century Florentine painters Filippino Lippi and Sandro Botticelli. Many of their images seem to float—almost weightless and transparent—in his later paintings.
It wasn’t until he first came across Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s watercolor “Dante Drawing an Angel on the First Anniversary of Beatrice’s Death” that Burne-Jones decided to become a painter. And in a way, everything you need to know about Burne-Jones’s paintings is here. The grieving poet holds a drawing he has made of his lost love when he’s interrupted by some townspeople who have arrived on official business. It’s all there—the elongated figures, the confined composition, the saturated tones, the blended beauty of medievalism and the modern. In Rosetti’s painting Dante refuses to look up at or acknowledge his guests. Burne-Jones Jones would take this refusal to accommodate practical reality one step further when he wrote to a friend, “Whenever I hear the word ‘science,’ I shall paint another angel.”
If it’s true what someone wrote, that in 1966, Bob Dylan could turn an aside into a criticism of an entire social system, John Lennon’s look here does not call anything into question. It is itself a question.
Sigmund Freud coined the term “cathexis.” One day you’re eating dinner when a stray phrase from a popular song catches your attention. You feel yourself expand, enfolding the lyrics of the song, incorporating them, investing them with meaning, with emotional content.
Or you’re at a party. You stumble into a conversation with a woman standing next to you, and there’s an energy, a vividness that suddenly catches your attention. The party recedes and she comes into focus, like a hologram becoming flesh. You feel it as an exchange of energy that flows out of you as attention and feeling. But you’re not controlling it—you’re not doing it, it’s doing it by itself and you don’t really have a choice, you’re just watching it happen. It’s as if you’re creating each other in that moment—by expanding our sense of self in order to include her, we somehow change her as well. It’s like the experience of really hearing the song on the radio—you expand to include it, but in this case she expands to include you as well. You feel challenged and witnessed, pulled into significance. And, like an electrical shock, there are two sensations running through your body—one is excitement at what is happening, and the other is fear. You want your safety back.
Cathexis is another word for being alive. It’s the opposite of Thanatos, or the death force, which pulls everything into order. Our obsession with order is our desire to be dead. We don’t really like being alive—the uncertainty, the continual stepping off into mystery. We prefer to reach for the pen without thinking, of spending our days half asleep. The greatest tragedy of life is not death but what dies within us while we’re still alive.
I’m looking for the face of Emmy Hennings, the high cheekbones, the thick hair, the parted lips, the air of someone who averts her gaze because she wants to remain inside her private world. The lifted chin of Emmy Hennings says I will never be an object. Turning away from the lens she remains forever inside the music somewhere behind her.
Her shoulders drawn back, her arms pulled back, the muscles relaxed as if she’s looking for the wings she knows are there but no one can see, or may not even be there.
She’s never sure. She’s worn black again, black as her hair, black as the lines she’s drawn so carefully above her eyes.
Hugo Ball’s ears and bow tie and what kind of a haircut is that, anyway? He refuses to look at the camera, but he also doesn’t look away.
Hugo Ball compared Emmy Hennings’ ghostly face to the human skull he carried in his pocket. He’d painted its cheekbones with roses and forget-me-nots. “Her living head reminds me of that dead one,” he said. “When I look at her I want to paint flowers on her hollow cheeks.”
From a review of her 1912 cabaret show I discover her hair was actually yellow, cropped; that she wore, even then, a minute dark velvet dress. She’s described as hysteria itself, hypnotizing with morphine absinthe, a violent distortion of the Gothic, or “A woman has infinities but one need not confuse the erotic with prostitution.”
Painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti while still in his teens created the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and remained their remote and celestial inspiration, almost a muse, well beyond his death. He also painted portraits of his lovers, most memorably Elizabeth Siddel as Beatrice. Later, after he abandoned Elizabeth for Jane Morris and she overdosed on laudanum, he began to paint her again, this time obsessively. With each painting she became an even more impossible ideal. In his last portraits of her he painted her as almost a transparency, overstuffed with light. Later, when his addiction worsened and he stopped painting altogether and became desperate for money, he dug up her coffin so that he could rescue a manuscript of poems he’d written and put under her blouse before they’d buried her.
Jane Morris often posed as La Belle Iseult for her husband, William—best friend of Edward Burne-Jones and founder of England’s Arts and Crafts Movement. But for Rosetti she was more Persephone, a dark combination of goddess and female fatale. In his photographs of her, she appears listless, sometimes draped over furniture, something of a nothing. By the end of his life (paralyzed and partially deaf at 54), Rosetti was consuming 180 grains of the hypnotic chloral-hydrate a day, washed down with straight whiskey. It was at this time that he introduced Burne-Jones to a friend as “one of the nicest young men in Dreamland.”
How does anyone invest a painting with so much passionate detail, so much life? Burne-Jones was in love with his model and he painted her as he saw her and he painted himself the way he felt when he looked at her. Her eyes are languid, liquid, leaking. Everything about her is water. She stands on the edge of water.
Hugo Ball defined art as a living thing, available in every moment. He moved the place where art occurs into the mind or at least somewhere beyond the senses, whatever you want to call it—and considered it anything that opened the mind to wonder—that woke it up. As such, the place it was least likely to occur was in a museum where we passively observe frozen, distant objects as a kind of a sedative, whose main shared characteristic is their absence of threat.
Having opened that door, Ball began a journey that led him back to the Church he knew as a child, because, unlike art, it stood in relation to him and would not fall. And he insisted that his wife return to the church as well.
But she was most beautiful when she was in motion, when her eyes were immense cathedrals of no sound; when her fingers were red with amphetamine light.
Burne-Jones would paint Merlin and Nimue in this pose many times throughout his career—the first in 1857 and the fifth in 1873. After his final version he collapsed and, unable to rise from bed, he was nursed for several months by his wife Georgie (whose letters remain shimmering highwires of intelligence and tension), who was by then the lover of his best friend William Morris, husband of Jane Morris, who was by then lover, model, and muse for Dante Gabriel Rosetti.
According to Richard Hueselbeck, who was there, the discovery of the word “Dada” occurred precisely at the moment in 1914 when Hennings was building a Catholic altar in her room. In the Dada programs from the years 1915 to 1920, Henning’s name is always listed as performing “silence.” But some traces of her do exist, such as “Prison,” a poem from 1916:
We pull ourselves toward Death with the cord of hope.
Ravens are envious of our prison yards.
Our never-kissed lips quiver.
Powerless solitude, you are magnificent.
The world lies outside there, life roars out there.
There men are permitted to go where they like.
Once we belonged to them.
Now we are forgotten and presumed dead.
At night, we dream of miracles over our bare beds.
During the days, we move like frightened animals.
We mournfully look through the iron railings
And have nothing left to lose
But the life God gave us.
Only Death lies in our hand.
The freedom no one can take from us:
To go into the unknown land.
Some of the girls, to be sure, are there for the spectacle. Self-conscious, they interrupt their screams to smile at the camera. Some wear costumes and carry crayoned signs or repeat silly schoolgirl choreography—and there’s always a ringleader, who forces herself between the camera and her friends.
In the Liverpool Museum the curator tells me the name of Burne-Jones’s model is Mary Zambaco. In a descriptive catalog for the Tate Gallery’s collection of Pre-Raphaelite art, her name is given as Maria Zambaco. Gay Daly in her biography of the Pre-Raphaelites and their models explains that she was born Maria, but Burne-Jones anglicized her name into Mary. In a biography of William Morris her name is given as Marie. The solution is clear: never read more than one version of any story.
* * *
Cathexis
Peter Abelard was the greatest French logician and scholastic philosopher of the 12th century. The eldest son of a minor bureaucrat, young Peter left home and became an itinerant student of philosophy, gravitating toward rebellious religious thinkers who had been condemned by the Church.
Shortly after arriving in Paris, he publicly challenged William of Champeaux, the most famous teacher of his time at the University, and won the argument, which meant that William had to leave Paris and turn his post over to Abelard.
Rising quickly in the University, Abelard became a canon of the church. This was the first step of what everyone assumed would be his natural rise to a bishopric, and from a bishopric to an archbishopric, and from there perhaps one day to the papacy itself.
Heloise was born in 1101. Orphaned while still a child, she was sent away to a convent by her uncle Fulbert. Fulbert was at the time building the Cathedral of Notre Dame as slowly as possible while selling (and probably manufacturing) holy relics. When she was sixteen, Fulbert’s wanderings took him past her convent where he discovered that she had spent her days inside the convent’s libraries, teaching herself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and French. She was especially drawn to the sciences, literature, and philosophy. He was so charmed by her that he brought her back to Paris, as entertainment.
Women were not allowed to attend university at the time, so it was doubly shocking when Abelard took the young girl on as his private student. In addition, he was also one of the most famous (and visible) citizens of Paris. He was also, by contemporary accounts, handsome and humorous, conceited, boastful, insolent, and self-centered.
In return, Fulbert offered Abelard room and board, and Abelard quickly moved into the room next to Heloise, on the second level where the servants and children and animals slept, away from the main house. They quickly became lovers.
It didn’t take Abelard long to realize that he had as much to learn from Heloise as she had from him. In his autobiography he admits that he relied on her knowledge of Greek to read the few Platonic dialogues that had made their way to Paris.
Their first collaboration (although it was published solely under Abelard’s name) was entitled Sic et Non—Yes and No (acknowledged as the first text of scholastic theology). It consisted of 158 instances where the Bible directly contradicted itself on matters of doctrine. Although for most of its length it reads like a direct attack on the Bible’s purported infallibility as the word of God, it was saved from being declared heretical (a real threat in those days) by a final paragraph at odds with the rest of the manuscript. It claimed that this proved how great God was—that he was so large that he even included contradiction.
By this time, Heloise’s “feminine delicacy,” as he described it in his biography, turned his physical desire—at the advanced age of 40—into “a tenderness surpassing in sweetness.” He spent his nights with Heloise and his days composing love songs to her. He lost all interest in philosophy and stopped going to classes.
He quickly became physically worn-out by their lovemaking and his lack of sleep, and he describes his lectures as dull and uninspired. None of his students challenged him in debate because they knew that if he lost he’d be forced to leave his post. Instead, they would ask him only about love, and he would answer with a new poem or one of his new love songs. Soon these songs and poems were sung on the streets of Paris, where Fulbert undoubtedly heard them. Finally the talk of the town became so loud that even Fulbert could no longer ignore it, and one night he waited outside Heloise’s window and caught them in flagrante delicto, and Abelard was sent packing.
By then Heloise was pregnant, beaten daily, and forced to remain inside her bedroom. Eventually Abelard learned of the beatings and broke into her house one night and kidnapped her, and they rode north to his sister’s farm, where she was taken on as a household servant. It was a tough assignment for a teenager who’d grown accustomed to living at the center of Paris, but Abelard told her it was only a temporary situation, and then he returned to Paris to try to make a deal with Fulbert.
Abelard asked Fulbert to agree to a secret marriage, knowing he would not refuse. A secret marriage was not unknown, but there were many risks and no real benefits for someone of Abelard’s stature. Commonly when a mistress became pregnant (and most of the monks had mistresses, and many of them lived openly with women), they were out in the streets, no questions asked. Even if he had become attached to Heloise, a more common solution would be to set her up in a house and visit her discreetly until she no longer interested him.
As Abelard expected, Fulbert was delighted with the suggestion of a secret marriage, and Abelard returned with the good news to Heloise. He arrived at his sister’s farm three days late for the birth of their son. Heloise had named him Astrolabe, after a primitive version of the sextant. She told Abelard that God had given them something they could hold in their hands against the sun as the physical manifestation of the purity of their love.
But she had no interest in becoming Abelard’s wife. She knew that to risk even a secret marriage was to jeopardize his future success in the church. She also knew that under church law if Abelard ever did become a priest—which any further advancement necessitated—she would have to become a nun. She also believed that Fulbert would never be satisfied with a secret marriage, and that he would find some way to leak the story until all of Paris knew, including members of the church. Abelard and Fulbert’s enemies would ensure that they were publicly denounced, and then the church would have to do something. A hearing would be held, witnesses would be called, and the church would condemn Abelard, force him into exile, and send Heloise to a convent.
But she had a simpler solution: They would change nothing—she’d remain his mistress and they would live as man and wife in their old rooms, under the guise of student and teacher. They would bring Astrolabe to Paris and he would be adopted and raised as Fulbert’s child—Fulbert wouldn’t dare risk a scandal. They had money—if they offered enough, Fulbert would agree to anything. Then they would be able to enjoy each other and risk nothing but public censure. If his love for her was as pure as hers, surely what others thought mattered not at all.
But Abelard was insistent. For a woman to risk such a situation in 12th century France by choice is almost unthinkable. She would have had no rights whatsoever and could be disposed of or replaced at whim. In addition, he knew that if he were to die before her, neither she nor their son could inherit anything. So one day they left Astrolabe with his sister and returned to Paris, stopping on the way to wed in a small Breton chapel. Upon their arrival in Paris they separated, Heloise returning to live with Fulbert, Abelard taking bachelor’s quarters.
But Fulbert, as Heloise predicted, couldn’t resist claiming Abelard as a member of the family, and began spreading rumors on the street. Confronted publicly, Heloise denied Fulbert, for which she was beaten almost constantly in an effort to get her to recant.
When Abelard was informed of what was happening, he broke into her house again and carried her away to the convent at Argenteuil where she’d spent her childhood. There, at his suggestion, she disguised herself as a nun.
Heloise was excited by this masquerade, especially when Abelard came to visit. As a man and woman of the cloth, they were only able to be alone behind the locked doors of the chapel. And so that’s where they made love—in the shadows of the confessional, against a wall in the refectory, and once even upon the altar, her habit lifted above her waist. Looking at the cross above them, she surrendered herself totally to Abelard and knew in her heart that she was guiltless because they were man and wife. Surely God would rejoice in these acts of love and devotion in His house. Once she thought she even saw the face of Christ smile down upon them from the cross.
When word got back to Fulbert of Heloise’s return to the abbey, he believed (as everyone did) that Abelard had abandoned her to the convent as a disposed mistress. This was such an insult to Fulbert that he hired four thugs from the local Mafiosa to break into Abelard’s apartment and hold him down while Fulbert sawed off his genitals.
When Heloise learned of Abelard’s injuries, she rushed to her husband, but Abelard refused to see her. He sent word through intermediaries that there was a holy symmetry in his emasculation: He’d sinned with the flesh that God had given him, and so God had justly taken it back. In addition, he had betrayed Fulbert under his own roof and in his daughter’s bed, and so the form of Abelard’s punishment—in his bed and under his own roof—had been decided in its beginning.
And this was largely Paris’s conclusion as well. Why would God allow Abelard to be punished in such a public way if it was not divine retribution? Praying or forgiveness would never heal this injury. And it was clear that Abelard had deceived and betrayed his host—an elder of the church and a sacred architect chosen by God—as well as taking advantage of a young orphan who had just been released from a convent. Not only had he sinned, but he had put a young girl’s soul at risk of eternal damnation.
But Heloise was a teenager in love. Her love was like a cleansing fire that made her feel holy and sacred. Surely their love could heal even this.
But for Abelard she had become an instrument of the devil and he disbelieved every word she said. She must, he insisted under religious and secular law, obey her husband’s command and leave Paris immediately, take religious vows, and retire to a convent. Even after Heloise vowed to do as he commanded, he delayed his own ordination until she proved she was willing to go through with her promise.
Upset that Abelard no longer trusted her word, Heloise left Paris immediately and became love’s martyr as Abelard instructed. By all accounts she remained throughout her life loving and generous, eager and tender. She would not see Abelard again until twenty years later when one day his horse happened to pass in front of her convent on his way to Paris. He did not stop.
Abelard left Paris with his students and built a monastery in a forest wilderness miles from civilization. He named the monastery Paraclete, after the Holy Spirit, who he considered his protector. Many years later, when the Paraclete had grown too popular for him, he abandoned it and built another monastery even more remote and uncomfortable. Before he left, he ceded title of the monastery to Heloise, who had risen through the ranks of her convent—through her skill and wisdom if not her piety—to become head abbess.
In 1132, Abelard was to write his story as an open letter to a friend, calling the work, the first known autobiography, Historia Calamitatum Medrum—The History of My Calamities. In it he wrote of their relationship:
There was in Paris at the time a young girl named Heloise…. In looks she did not rank lowest, while in the extent of her learning she stood supreme. I considered all the usual attractions for a lover and decided she was the one to bring to my bed, confident that I should have easy success; for at that time I had youth and exceptional good looks as well as my great reputation to recommend me, and feared no rebuff from any woman I might choose to honor with my love…. All on fire with desire for this girl I sought an opportunity of getting to know her through private daily meetings and so more easily winning her over; and with this end in view I came to an arrangement with her uncle … whereby he should take me into his house…. Need I say more? We were united, first under one roof, then in heart; and so with our lessons as a pretext we abandoned ourselves entirely to love. Her studies allowed us to withdraw in private, as love desired, and then with our books open before us, more kissing than teaching. My hands strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages; love drew our eyes to look on each other more than reading kept them on our texts…. In short, our desires left no stage of love-making untried, and if love could devise something new, we welcomed it. We entered on each joy the more eagerly for our previous inexperience, and were less easily sated.
When a copy found its way to Heloise, she wrote the first of her remarkable letters to Abelard, their only communication since they’d parted fifteen years before.
You know, beloved, as the whole world knows, how much I have lost in you…. You alone have the power to make me sad, to bring me happiness or comfort…. I have carried out all your orders…. When I was powerless to oppose you in anything, I found strength at your command to destroy myself. I did more, strange to say—my love rose to such heights of madness it robbed itself of what it most desired beyond hope of recovery, when immediately at your bidding I changed my clothing along with my mind, in order to prove you the sole possessor of my body and will alike.
God knows I never sought anything in you except yourself; I wanted simply you, nothing of yours. I looked for no marriage-bond, no marriage portion, and it was not my own pleasure and wishes I sought to gratify, as you well know, but yours. The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word mistress, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine…. I believed that the more I humbled myself on your account, the more gratitude I should win from you, and also the less damage I should do to the brightness of your reputation.
But you kept silent about most of my arguments for preferring love to wedlock and freedom to chains. God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honor me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more honorable to me to be called not his Empress but your whore.
For a man’s worth does not rest on his wealth or power; these depend on fortune…. And a woman should realize that if she marries a rich man more readily than a poor one … she is offering herself for sale. Certainly any woman who comes to marry through desires of this kind deserves wages, not gratitude. But what error permitted other women, plain truth permitted me…. Every wife, every young girl desired you in absence and was on fire in your presence; queens and great ladies envied me my joys and my bed.
[But] tell me one thing, if you can. Why after our entry into religion, which was your decision alone, have I been so neglected and forgotten by you that I have neither a word from you … nor the consolation of a letter in absence?
Up to now I had thought I deserved much of you, seeing that I carried out everything for your sake and continue up to the present moment in complete obedience to you. It was not any sense of vocation that brought me as a young girl to accept the austerities of the cloister, but your bidding alone, and if I deserve no gratitude from you, you may judge for yourself how my labors are in vain. I can expect no reward from God, for it is certain that I have done nothing as yet for love of him.
To this outpouring of emotion, Abelard coolly replied:
If since our conversion from the world to God I have not yet written you any word of comfort or advice, it must not be attributed to indifference on my part but to your own good sense, in which I have always had such confidence that I did not think anything was needed…. If, on the other hand, in your humility you think differently, and you feel that you have need of my instruction and writings in matters pertaining to God, write to me what you want, so that I may answer as God permits me.
But it was not in matters pertaining to God that Heloise wanted instruction. Even so, this slight nod from Abelard was enough for Heloise to open her heart completely. Her letters became dangerous.
In my case, the pleasures of loves that we shared have been too sweet—they can never displease me, and can scarcely be banished from my thoughts. Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened longings and fantasies which will not even let me sleep. Even during the celebration of the Mass, when our prayers should be purer, lewd visions of those pleasures take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on prayers. I should be groaning over the sins I have committed, but I can only sigh for what I have lost. Everything we did and also the times and places are stamped on my heart along with your image, so that I live through it all again with you. Even in sleep I know no respite. Sometimes my thoughts are betrayed in a movement of my body, or they break out in an unguarded word.
But for me, youth and passion and experience of pleasures which were so delightful intensify the torments of the flesh and longings of desire, and the assault is the more overwhelming as the nature they attack is the weaker.
Men call me chaste; they do not know the hypocrite I am…. I can win praise in the eyes of men but deserve none before God, who searches our hearts and loins and sees in our darkness. I am judged religious at a time when there is little in religion that is not hypocrisy….
As God knows, I have feared to offend you rather than God, and tried to please you more than him. It was your command, not love of God that made me take the veil. Look at the unhappy life I lead, pitiable beyond any other, if in this world I must endure so much in vain, with no hope of future reward. For a long time my pretence deceived you, as it did many, so that you mistook hypocrisy for piety….
Although through most of Abelard’s second reply he maintained the cool distance he had in the first, even he stumbled a little in his reply:
After our marriage, when you were living in the cloister with the nuns at Argenteuil and I came one day to visit you privately, you know what my uncontrollable desire did with you there, actually in a corner of the refectory, since we had nowhere else to go. You know the depths of shame to which my unbridled lust had consigned our bodies, until no reverence for decency or for God … could keep me from wallowing in this mire. So intense were the fires of lust that bound me to you that I set those wretched, obscene pleasures, which we blush even to name, above God as above myself. My love, which brought us both to sin, should be called lust, not love. I took my fill of my wretched pleasures in you, and this was the sum total of my love.
In her third letter, Heloise reached out to Abelard one last time in an attempt to be heard and acknowledged:
For nothing is less under our control than the heart—having no power to command it we are forced to obey. And so when its impulses move us, none of us can stop their sudden promptings from easily breaking out, and even more easily overflowing into words which are the every-ready indications of the heart’s emotions: as it is written [in the Bible], “A Man’s words are spoken from the overflowing of the heart.” I will therefore hold my hand from writing words which I cannot restrain my tongue from speaking; would that a grieving heart would be as ready to obey as a writer’s hand!
I have your picture in my room. I never pass by it without stopping to look at it; and yet when you were present with me, I scarce ever cast my eyes upon it. If a picture which is but a mute representation of an object can give such pleasure, what cannot letters inspire? They have souls, they can speak, they have in them all force which expresses the transport of the heart; they have all the fire of our passions, they can raise them as much as if the persons themselves were present; they have all the softness and delicacy of speech, and sometimes a boldness of expression even beyond it…. But I am no longer ashamed that my passion has had no bounds for you, for I have done more than all this. I have hated myself that I might love you; I came hither to ruin myself in perpetual imprisonment, that I might make you live quiet and easy…. oh! think of me; do not forget me; remember my love, my fidelity, my constancy; love me as your mistress, cherish me as your child, your sister, your wife. Consider that I still love you, and yet strive to avoid loving you. What a word, what a design is this! I shake with horror, and my heart revolts against what I say. I shall blot all my paper with tears. I end my long letter, wishing you, if you can desire it (would to Heaven I could), for ever adieu.
And then, the envelope sealed, Heloise gave up. The rest of their correspondence concerns practical and religious matters.
Abelard soon found himself in open conflict with Bernard of Clairvaux, the man the pope had chosen to succeed him at the University of Paris. Bernard’s continual harassment culminated in Abelard’s being brought before a tribunal and declared a heretic in 1141. His health failed him the next year and he died on a desperate journey to the Vatican to defend himself.
The folklore surrounding the lovers is that after his death, Abelard’s body was stolen by Peter the Venerable, one of his few friends at the end of his life, and secretly delivered to Heloise. Heloise buried Abelard in sacred ground behind the convent in defiance of the official church, which had proclaimed him a sinner who had died unrepentant, and thus must be buried in common ground. But when the church was certain that Heloise would keep quiet about the situation, and that digging up Abelard’s body would only create a sensation, they decided to look the other way, at least as long as Heloise was alive. And she outlived them all and died on May 16th, 1164, 22 years after Abelard’s death.
* * * *
It is December 20th, 1990. Young couples walk in the rain through Paris’s Pere Lachaise cemetery the week before Christmas, searching for the tomb of Heloise and Abelard. Most of them carry two roses woven together—one red and one white—to toss through its open window, in hopes the lovers will bless their marriage. The window is tiny and the growing pile of failed roses gathers in the rain.
Are the letters genuine? According to Will Durant, one of the last twentieth-century historians to mention them, the oldest manuscripts date from the 13th century. He believed them to be one of the “most brilliant forgeries in history, unreliable in fact, but an imperishable part of the romantic literature of France.”
I close the letters and walk through the cemetery, not stopping until I hear the birds singing above me. I look up into the sky’s metallic blue but I can’t see them. They are lost in the clouds, flying south.
* * *
Emmy Hennings died in 1948 in Magliaso, Italy. The last two decades of her life were spent in a tiny room above a grocery store. In order to survive she worked in a nearby factory. Like Heloise, Hennings outlived her husband by 22 years.
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