Juana de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana (1648-1695) was a Spanish criolla born in San Miguel Nepantla, near Mexico City. A Hieronymite nun, she was often referred to as “The Tenth Muse” and “The Phoenix of America” by her contemporaries. Later known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, she was probably the greatest poet of the colonial period in the Americas. To me, she is not only the ultimate example of a beautiful eccentric, but her life is a parable around the question of how an artist negotiates their work between isolation and engagement with the world.
In what is considered the most influential biographical and literary study of her work, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe, Octavio Paz focuses on several important aspects about the historical context within which Sor Juana emerged. Of these, two are particularly relevant. First is the deeply conservative nature of the New Spain in the 17th century: an inquisition-minded and strictly regimented society where the only possible life path for a young woman of Sor Juana’s station was either marriage or religious life. Sor Juana’s genius and superb intellect, likely vastly greater than that of any men of her time, was evident from her teenage years (she was a child prodigy); because of her insatiable intellectual curiosity, life in the convent constituted the only way for her to dedicate herself to study, reading and writing.
The second aspect that Paz focuses on in his book is the belated cultural isolation of the New Spain from the rest of the world. The great advances in science and thought that were beginning to shape the modern era (Isaac Newton, Galileo’s and Kepler’s astronomy replacing astrology, and the philosophical thought of Pascal and Descartes) were largely or almost entirely unknown to the new world. Not only did knowledge travel slowly to the New Spain and its dissemination mechanisms were severely limited to few available books, but these were heavily censored by the catholic church. As a result, the Nueva España existed in a bubble of its own, and scientific knowledge and proto-modern philosophical ideas were replaced by religion and the study of antiquity. It was a society that had been forcefully separated from its indigenous roots (however alive they still remained) and in its place it experienced the imposition of an organizational structure that followed and normalized the 16th century ideas of the counter-reformation. As a result, as Octavio Paz describes it, those who lived in the New Spain “naturally breathe the world of strangeness because they themselves were, and knew themselves to be, strange.”
In the case of Sor Juana, this cultural isolation did not prevent her from becoming one of the most important writers of the Golden Age of the Spanish baroque period, but her artistic language had to be nourished by what was available — not only by embracing the literary forms that were fashionable (and acceptable) at the time such as sonnets and comedies, but, as mentioned previously, resorting to classical and biblical literature, ancient philosophy, and mythological sources for her references. Much of this material aligned her with hermetic thought, as displayed in what is widely considered her masterpiece, the metaphysical poem Primero Sueño. It is sometimes surmised, but it remains unproven, that Sor Juana might have known of the rationalist philosophy of Descartes as shown in her philosophical views (had she known of these works, she might not have even been able to mention it publicly) as expressed in the proto-feminist Respuesta a Sor Filotea, a public letter to the bishop of Puebla (using a pseudonym) that led to the church forbidding her to continue her intellectual work. This prohibition led to the confiscation of her 4,000 books, her censure and order to undergo penance, and her stopping to write altogether in 1693. It is widely believed that her mandated artistic death left her with little desire to continue living: two years later Sor Juana died while helping other nuns during a plague.
One can only wonder what kind of poet Sor Juana would have become had she been able to rid herself from those cultural chains and had she been able to travel and create freely. It is even the more extraordinary that she produced the body of work that she did even with the limitations imposed on her. Even within the confinement of the convent where she lived, she amassed a large library which must have been an absolutely vital source for her; the library is visible in the posthumous portrait made of her by the artist Miguel Cabrera. In that small cell, surrounded by all those books, some of the most important poetry of the 17th century was written.
And now will I briefly digress but will circle back to Sor Juana.
For many years I have been obsessed by an 1982 article by the Australian analytic philosopher Frank Jackson, who developed something known as “the knowledge argument”, also known as “Mary’s Room” — a thought experiment that goes something like this: Mary is a scientist who lives in a black and white world contained within a room. She studies color and knows everything there is to know about it, every scientific fact, every minute detail about perception and light, but she has never seen color with her own eyes. When she steps out the room and sees color for the first time in her life, is there something new she would know?
This thought experiment was created as a challenge to the theory of physicalism— the belief that the whole universe, including mental processes, are physical events. Jackson’s critique, as described by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “aims to establish that conscious experience involves non-physical properties. It rests on the idea that someone who has complete physical knowledge about another conscious being might yet lack knowledge about how it feels to have the experiences of that being.” Jackson describes this kind of knowledge as “epiphenomenal qualia” — stuff that we experience that is incommunicable, such as the smell of a rose or the taste of pineapple. This is, in fact, perfectly understandable when one thinks of the art experience. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but certainly no amount of words can ever replace our personal experience of it.
You might be wondering by now: what in the world does this 1982 thought experiment have to do with a 17th century Mexican nun?
In Primero Sueño, which is one of the most complex poems ever written in the Spanish language, Sor Juana builds in essence a metaphor of the attainment of absolute knowledge (an obsession within the hermetic tradition); a dream which, in the form of a spiritual journey fueled by the desire to know. She knows there is a world to discover on the other side, but she can’t reach it.
I think of a transposed version of Mary’s room as applied to the convento de San Jerónimo. I see Sor Juana as the scientist living in that grayscale world of colonial Mexico; her monochrome reality being the dominant colonial worldview of the past; the color being the inaccessible present being built by others elsewhere (in that, and unfortunately in most cases, men) who are freer than her. Sor Juana intuitively knows that there is color out there but she can’t corroborate, nor experience it, on her own; she dreams that she can attain it and hold it in her hands. Her story represents, in a way, the example of how many artists sometimes work in isolation, sometimes aware (or not) of the anxiety of finding themselves dialoging with ghosts. She proved that cultural confinement is no obstacle for a true artistic genius.
I think of this often because I confess I sometimes relate (in a small, humble way) to those feelings of isolation. I worked for many years managing a kind of newsroom of the art world, organizing conversations with artists and thinkers at the forefront of the art practice. I was mainly a stage manager, but had the privilege to listen intently to all those conversations. Now that is behind me, and while I am free (and by myself) in the studio, I am also keenly aware and I am no longer partaking in many of those dialogues. I also realize this is not special, but rather consistent with the rule: to an extent, we all often feel out of place, we all feel, at times, left outside of the conversation. And the question is: how up to date should we all remain? To what extent is this information and ability to engage with it necessary, or vital? I would never advocate in good conscience for solipsistic isolationism, which generally is nefarious for an artist and results mostly in bitterness (and most of us will never be as talented as Sor Juana to overcome it), but her story might also offer a cautionary tale for equating keeping up with fashions as the formula to make relevant art. Sor Juana made greater works in black and white than countless poets in a full-colored world ever did.
So should we consider the knowledge argument itself while thinking of Sor Juana’s case, I offer an alternate, contrarian (and, dare I say, postcolonial) interpretive twist to it: it consists in contesting the idea that the color world can replace, or necessarily improve, the picture of the black and white one. Mary’s true knowledge was her authentic experience of her black and white world, and the sudden discovery of a colorful world does not in any way render the experience of the monochrome world as inauthentic. Should the true color world have ostensibly been revealed to her later does not change the fact that her native experience of the black and white world would now have to be supplanted by the color one; for Mary to think that the color world is the “real” one would be a mistake. How many times we question, for example, the excessively, Disney-fied colorful depictions of life? Just as colors in commercials are brighter in order to entice us, at the same time we know the world that they depict is not real.
Sor Juana might have agreed. She believed (and in this she was uniquely modern) that the hell-bent attempt for authenticity in art, which is to mean its desire to represent a (color) reality, can never replace (black and white) experience, and the attempt at representation can never be something other than artifice.
And speaking of the seduction of color, she expressed this best in one of her most famous poems, written after seeing a painted portrait of hers:
Este que ves, engaño colorido,
que, del arte ostentando los primores,
con falsos silogismos de colores
es cauteloso engaño del sentido;
éste, en quien la lisonja ha pretendido
excusar de los años los horrores,
y venciendo del tiempo los rigores
triunfar de la vejez y del olvido,
es un vano artificio del cuidado,
es una flor al viento delicada,
es un resguardo inútil para el hado:
es una necia diligencia errada,
es un afán caduco y, bien mirado,
es cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada.
--
This that you see, this brightly-hued pretense,
here by the grace of art rendered appealing,
through specious feats of colorful deceiving
is cleverly deployed to cheat the sense;
this, in which flattery’s munificence
has sought to mask the blows the years are dealing
so as to conquer time, thereby concealing
the horrors wrought by age and negligence,
is effort undertaken for no gain,
is a frail flower in the windy squall,
is a defense from fate mounted in vain,
is labor mad and wasted, doomed to fall,
is a fool’s errand, and, regarded plain,
is corpse, is dust, is dark, is not at all.
(Translation by Rhina P. Espaillat)