Mystical Readings (I): 'Take up your cross'

I was delighted by the script about the Mallorcan mystics (Leonard Muntaner, Ed.), ever since the writer and researcher Rosa Planas had explained to me that she worked there. I didn't expect to find the idols of a new faith: rather, I wanted to confirm the presumption that convent life had been, for many years, not only a cruel punishment from parents, husbands, et al. but also a dual and more universal, less anthropocentric and more magical alternative—life for Art.

Planas's research is exhaustive and illuminating: most of the great 'religious' women of Mallorca dedicated themselves to music, poetry, and thought. Thanks to her book, I'm adding some hidden predecessors to my list of living Mallorcan role models, which already includes the poet and storyteller Antònia Vicens—who has just published Take up your cross (Labreu Edicions). As a young woman, Vicens admired the feats of famous mystics and their writings. She, who writes from head to toe, cultivates the land in her farmyard, and lives sideways alongside non-human animals, has achieved (through devotion and effort) the capacity for interconnection, for unity with all living creatures. And if mysticism is the experience (real or imagined) of direct union with divinity, the absolute, or existence itself, it makes sense that creators cultivate it. The artist's profession is sacred, due to the total commitment it entails: the absolute belief in the value of an idea, despite the mystery—in Vicens' case, the power of words. Although it is a solitary and personal endeavor (even when it involves collective art), it only prevails if it manages to invoke (or evoke) something that summons (and moves) another. Above all, it involves recognizing an intuition that often leads us to altered states of consciousness, illuminations, and perhaps visionary experiences – it involves listening, looking, feeling, and 'speaking' attentively.

Margarita Amengual Campaner, born around 1888, was known as 'the seer of Costitx'. Witnesses say that when she prophesied to the disoriented or desperate people who visited her, "her language wasn't syntactically coordinated"; that she used invented expressions; and that she prayed in verse. Similarly, Vicens has distilled language to such an extreme that it doesn't seem far-fetched to compare his artistic practice with the 'process of angelization' attributed to the mystic (and poet) from Costitx. More than visionary experiences, however, Vicens now reveals his 'opinions': his own name being "like the reverberation / of the light / of the fire / upon a multitude of children / who wander / madly / through the ruined / city"; he converses with the ancestors "amidst the murmur of the trees"; She listens to the pleasant atmosphere and deciphers the murmur "of someone praying. And not the wind scattering rose petals"; she perceives the "echoes/of a bloody battle." While the poet asks us not to listen to "the shrieks of those who shed their blood for love," the poetic voice demands in the interpreter's hand, the sibyl, that she assume her destiny.

Born into a working-class family unable to provide a dowry for the convent where she was placed, Caterina Maura Pou (1664-1735) was tragically condemned to illiteracy. But, clinging to a mysterious energy, she learned to read, and soon composed couplets and wrote verses with the souls in purgatory. The people of Palma loved, admired, and venerated her. Her story evokes Vicens's "The Library": the private sanctuary, intimately desired and achieved through sacrifice, would become the family chapel before which her parents also showed reverence (and before which we are filled with awe). Her clairvoyance regarding her own future and each person's contribution to the collective reality; her determination to answer Patti Smith's questions: "How will I shape my soul?", "What will I write and what will I commit myself to?"; these elements link the mystical with the artistic, through the pursuit of knowledge without utilitarianism or hidden agendas.

“It was just a small, insignificant house with a straggling garden, but for me it was a mystical, silvery, sacred place,” says Patti; “My room was four dark walls, and I could draw a garden with words,” Antonia replies. Through the invisible currents of Art, having broken free “at the mercy of the Eclipses,” the writer from Santa Ana and the Chicago artist Patti Smith meet with their respective latest books in a telepathic plaza; and a fascinating capacity for self-conclusion propels them toward a new journey, another language, an unknown stage. (To be continued...)