Blood (23 page)

Michael Schuessler, a professor in the Department of Humanities at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, wrote about Sor Juana in the essay “The Reply to Sor Philothea,” published in 1999 in
Latin-American Literature and Its Times.
“Essentially,” Schuessler wrote, “there were three ‘career possibilities' for women of seventeenth-century New Spain. The first and most common was that of wife and mother; the second — less common, but far from disrespected — was that of the habit, life as a nun. The third was prostitution . . .”

Sor Juana chose to be a nun, entering the Convent of San Jerónimo in Mexico City in 1669. As noted by Octavio Paz, her most celebrated biographer, in the book
Sor Juana; or, The Traps of Faith,
“abruptly, she gives up worldly life and enters a convent — yet, far from renouncing the world entirely, she converts her cell into a study filled with books, works of art, and scientific instruments . . . She writes love poems, verses of songs and dance tunes, profane comedies, sacred poems, an essay in theology, and an autobiographical defense of the right of women to study and to cultivate their minds. She becomes famous, sees her plays performed, her poems published, and her genius applauded in all the Spanish dominions, half the Western World.”

In
The Answer
, Sor Juana wrote that in the convent, when her inclination to study was “snuffed out or hindered with every (spiritual) exercise known to religion, it exploded like gunpowder; and in my case the saying ‘privation gives rise to appetite' was proven true.”

Émile Martel is an award-winning French-Canadian poet from Montreal who has translated Sor Juana's work into French in a book called
Écrits profanes: un choix de textes.
Martel
told me that his favourite work by Sor Juana is a sonnet about a woman who sees a portrait of herself and then struggles to criticize, minimize, and deny her own beauty. In an English translation by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell, the sonnet carries a rather long but intriguing title: “She endeavours to expose the praises recorded in a portrait of the Poetess by truth, which she calls passion.”

In it, Sor Juana speaks of her own portrait as a “cunning trap to ensnare your sense.” There may well be beauty amidst the “clever arguments of tone and hue.” But, ultimately, admiring attractiveness in a portrait is

a foolish, erring diligence

a palsied will to please which, clearly seen,

is a corpse, is dust, is shadow and is gone.

In forcefully denying her own beauty (Octavio Paz describes her as having been beautiful), Sor Juana imagined her own destruction. She met her downfall, and paid for it with her own books — and blood — after infuriating the men who ruled her world of Catholicism. She had already generated petty jealousies among nuns who watched her become famous throughout the Spanish empire. At least once, they succeeded in preventing her from reading for a period of months. But her undoing — one of the traps of her faith, as Paz puts it — was set in motion when she defended the right of women to study, teach, and write in
The Answer,
an ardent response to a bishop (posing as a nun) who had criticized her for paying too much attention to earthly matters and too little attention to her faith. Sor Juana demolished the bishop's arguments one by one. To justify her own lifelong explorations of literature and science, she cited numerous people of faith — male figures such as Saint Augustine and Saint Jerome, and female figures such as the Queen of Sheba, the Roman goddess Minerva, and the Swedish Queen Christina Alexandra — who had done the same. But her response angered the men who ruled her world, and they saw to it that she was stripped of her earthly pleasures.

Sor Juana died of the plague after treating others who succumbed to the same fate. Octavio Paz notes that at the time of her death in 1695, the disease was commonly treated by means of bloodletting. In addition, he writes, as a member of the convent, Sor Juana would likely have been required to engage in self-flagellation — as did other nuns — in times of plague. “As they wound their way through the corridors and patios of the convent, singing and praying, they scourged and lashed themselves,” Paz writes. “A Christian version of the bacchantes and maenads: the nuns in the night shadows, half naked, bodies bleeding, singing and wailing.”

It is sad to imagine the seventeenth-century nun drawing her own blood to renounce the life of letters. Did she cut a finger on the hand used for writing? Did she nick her arm or leg? Was she alone in her study, reaching for a private, hidden section of skin never seen by others? Sor Juana does not say where or how she cut herself, and does not speak of any pain it might have caused. I imagine she interpreted any such self-inflicted wound as a way of doing penance, prostrating herself before her maker. It seems to dovetail perfectly with Paz's description of nuns flailing themselves and walking through the convent to wail and bleed under the cover of darkness. Some things feel safer in the absence of light. Removing our clothes. Kissing. Making love. And, for the Roman Catholic sisters of seventeenth-century Mexico, bleeding to pay for their sins.

Sor Juana has been the subject of countless essays, dissertations, and books. In 1990, the late Argentinian filmmaker María Luisa Bemberg released a feature film about Sor Juana, entitled
Yo, la peor de todas
. (In English, that means “I, the worst of all the world.”) The film's title borrowed from some of the last words that Sor Juana wrote. They came after her renunciation of writing. After she gave up her books. As Paz notes in
The Traps of Faith
, a few months before she died, Sor Juana entered these lines into her convent's Book of Professions: “In this place is to be noted the day, month and year of my death. For the love of God and his Most Holy Mother, I entreat my beloved sisters the nuns, who are here now and who shall be in the future, to commend me to God, for I have been and am the worst among them. Of them I ask forgiveness, for the love of God and his Mother. I, worst of all the world, Juana Inés de la Cruz.”

Why did Sor Juana go from being celebrated throughout the Spanish empire to being without books or writing implements in her final years, whispering toward the grave that she was the worst of all the world? Octavio Paz invokes two reasons. The first, he says, is the opposition between the intellectual life and the duties and obligations of the convent life. “The second is the fact that she was a woman,” he states. “The latter was the more decisive; if she had been a man, the zealous Princes of the Church would not have persecuted her.”

SOR JUANA SIGNED HER
LETTER
with her own blood to symbolize her sacrifice to God. Bloodshed usually shocks people. To be made socially acceptable, it must be marked by ritual. What might be illegal in one context — say, punching somebody in the eye and causing him to bleed profusely — will be cheered, praised, and remunerated if it unfolds during a heavyweight boxing match. Creating rules about bloodshed lets us quench our thirst for violence without self-castigation or concern that we are giving in to our most base instincts.

I want to examine the rituals governing bloodshed as a way of remembering that we always walk a razor's edge when it comes to what is characterized as civilized or uncivilized behaviour.

Consider the tradition of duelling. A long-time indulgence among aristocrats and the wealthy in Europe and North America, duelling was bound by rules of blood. The duel was a strange thing. If you were a gentleman, you played by the rules — and there were plenty of them. You never challenged another man to a duel for pleasure, but rather, to correct an insult to your honour. If someone called you a fool, slapped your face, or was rumoured to have slept with your wife, then, by George, bring out the duelling swords. (Or, after the eighteenth century, pistols.) You had to select your duelling weapons, which were supposed to be equal and lethal. On May 3, 1803, one pair of duelling men fought from gas balloons floating some nine hundred metres above the Tuileries Garden in Paris. The duellists fired at each other with guns. One was reported to have “fired his piece ineffectually,” but his antagonist proved to be a better shot. He pierced his adversary's balloon, which crashed down onto a house below, killing the opponent and his second. (In the world of duelling, a “second” is the person who escorts the duellist to and from his confrontation, and sees to it that the rituals are followed.)

Although the duel in balloons above the Tuileries ended the lives of two people, many other duels fought on the ground allowed an antagonist to save his honour and life by drawing his opponent's blood, or by having some of his own drawn. At the first sight of blood, opponents were offered the opportunity to step back from hostilities and consider the matter resolved. Thus the notion of drawing “first blood” was a way to skirt death and end a duel civilly.

First blood has also come to be identified with the idea of being the first to aggrieve another, or the first to be aggrieved. If someone has drawn your blood first, you have licence to return the violence — often dishing out far more than you received. In the 1982 action film
First Blood
, Sylvester Stallone — acting as Rambo — tries to contain his emotions after being traumatized as an American soldier captured by enemy forces in the Vietnam War. When the movie begins, he is back at home in the United States, drifting and trying to stay out of trouble. Pent up with rage and frustration, Rambo keeps it together until he is picked on by a sheriff. Rambo keeps a lid on his emotion, and displays no sign of violence until the sheriff draws first blood. After that, it's mayhem. Rambo carries out every manner of assault, death, and disorder, but the audience is led to root for him — and to accept the spectacle of violence that Rambo leaves in his wake — because his blood was drawn first.

We even attribute honour to animals that shed blood for our entertainment. In the bullfight, before the matador prepares to plunge his sword into the charging bull, the animal has already been weakened by repeated attacks from picadors. These armed men stab the bull while on horseback, making it bleed heavily before the final charge. In the eye of the crowd, a noble bull will maintain its fury and aggression even after suffering attacks that have left large quantities of blood to stream down its ribs. Ideally, the animal will be weakened in body, but not in spirit. The noble bull mounts a final charge, desperate to gore the lithe, nimble man with the red cape.

Audiences that watch cockfights seem to appreciate the very same thing: the undiminished, murderous intent of the cock, which charges forward and fights to the death, even as it is bleeding and being dismembered by a superior opponent.

Other animals have been made to fight to the death too, for human entertainment: dogfights are popular in much of the western hemisphere, as well as in Pakistan, India, and Japan. Some people pay to watch pit bulls rip apart feral hogs. In bear-baiting, the bears often have their teeth removed and claws filed before being matched against fighting dogs. Jack London's
The Call of the Wild
is narrated from the point of view of the dog Buck, who survives an attack by another dog and becomes an alpha male in a pack of sled dogs during the Yukon gold rush. Sled dogs then and now will rip each other to shreds if they spot a chance to pounce on another's weakness and rise in the hierarchy of the pack, thus giving rise to the expression “it's a dog-eat-dog world.”

THE THRILL OF WATCHING
beasts fight with nobility, even as they bleed, transfers into the human arena. I can think of no other professional team sport so obsessed with violence, and in which violence has such an overtly sanctioned role, as professional hockey. True, fighting will earn you a penalty. But it's part of the game, and fighting — along with the price of the penalty — is paradoxically used as a means to discipline players for displaying inappropriate aggression. Hockey teams even hire goons, whose primary role on the ice is to protect the more vulnerable members of their teams — the goalies and the high-scoring forwards — by fighting with those who dare to hurt them. The noise can be deafening in a hockey arena, but at no time is it more deafening than when two players break into a fight. The roar of the crowd makes me think of spectators at a gladiatorial duel in ancient Rome — but more on that later. Fighting is not countenanced in baseball, football, or basketball, but a hockey game without a fight will disappoint a diehard traditional fan.

Much has been written about the physical and psychological damage sustained by young men who are cast into the roles of hockey goons. In the summer of 2011, three former National Hockey League enforcers died: one from mixing painkillers with alcohol, one from suicide, and another from likely suicide. Despite the obvious dangers to the fighters, many hockey journalists, fans, coaches, and players continue to insist on the necessity of bloodshed. They claim that the threat of this violence prevents other violence from occurring on the ice.

Like duelling, fighting in hockey is highly ritualistic. Informal but very real rules are followed: each combatant should agree to fight, face the other directly, and drop his gloves; and it should end when the first fighter tumbles to the ice. Most fans and players accept fighting, and the misdemeanour usually warrants nothing more than a five-minute penalty. I cannot for the life of me understand why we allow men to brutalize each other like this in sport, and I do not believe for a moment that it is good for these combatants — in the moment, or later, when coping with head trauma and emotional stress.

Boxing and ultimate fighting (or fighting in cages) also stand out as some of the most bloodthirsty sports today. There are rules to be followed. You can throw a punch so hard that it kills your opponent — literally knocks him dead in the moment. That is within the rules. A knockout, or hitting an opponent so hard that he falls down and cannot get back up quickly and competently, is the ultimate and most manly way to win a boxing match. If you kill your opponent in the process, well, as long as it was a clean hit, it's one of the risks of the sport. Many boxers have died after taking excessive punishment in the ring. In 1982, a twenty-three-year-old South Korean boxer named Kim Duk-Koo slipped into a coma minutes after he lost a technical knockout to Ray Mancini at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Kim, who had grown up poor and been a shoeshine boy before becoming a professional boxer at the age of nineteen, died four days after the bout. As well, in a heavyweight boxing match in the Manchester arena in Calgary in 1913, Canadian brawler Arthur Pelkey knocked out his Nebraska opponent Luther McCarty in the first round. McCarty, who had been dubbed the next “Great White Hope,” died in the ring. The Royal Northwest Mounted Police charged Pelkey with manslaughter. Jurors acquitted the boxer and shook his hand after rendering their verdict, but Pelkey had been traumatized by the event and never won another fight.