The Mexican baroque (Part I)

The last several nights have been hard for Helena Iara... and of course, as an extension, for Rita and me, too.  The result has been several interesting philosophical "dialogues" at midnight, but no energy during the day to write them down.  This Sunday afternoon, however, Helena is talking calmly with Rita here on the back porch, where the sun is warming a cool early winter day, so I have a chance to relate a little bit about our talk about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the great 17th century Mexican poet, scientist, and philosopher.


As Helena and I have talked over the last six weeks (she turned six weeks old last Thursday!  Time both flies and drags at a time like this, which may turn into a lecture on Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty at some point), we've talked mostly about men doing philosophy.  But the clear night out the window as we sat in the hammock made me think of one of the great philosophical poems: Sor Juana's Primero Sueño (First Dream).  In a time when the philosophical or scientific treatise hadn't yet become the official way to do serious philosophy, many thinkers -- especially those in Southern Europe -- preferred to think through poems and plays and fiction.  So Sor Juana wrote her magnum opus, combining the most advanced science of the day, Greek and Aztec mythology, and her own concerns about politics and gender.


All of that is a lot for a little girl, of course, and though I tried to recite for her the magnificent first lines of the poem:

Piramidal, funesta, de la tierra
nacida sombra, al cielo encaminaba
de vanos obeliscos punta altiva,
escalar pretendiendo las estrellas;

The poem didn't attract her attention, but the story of Sor Juana, another smart little girl living across cultures, drew her eyes to mine again (I doubt that has anything to do with the content of my words, but much more the way I said them; I memorized parts of the poem long ago and my tongue tripped).  Juana Asbaje y Ramírez, I told Helena, was also born to parents who came from different worlds.  Now, I'm hardly a minor Spanish hidalgo, and Rita is certainly not from an Aztec family, but I don't think anyone is looking for exact parallels: what's more interesting is that both Juana Inés and Helena Iara have two rich cultures to draw upon from their birth.

The second part of the story is closer to Rita's life than it will be to Helena's: a smart girl from the countryside who desperately wanted to go to the city to escape provincial life, and as always when I talk about her mother, Helena Iara got even more interested (this is, of course, partly projected emotion on my part, but no less real for that).  For Juana, there were two ways that she could keep learning: in the court and in the monastery, and for her teenage years, the court served her well, where her wit and beauty helped her become lady-in-waiting to ever more powerful women.  The Mexican viceregal court in the 1660s wasn't that different from the intrigues and flirtations you see in Dangerous Liasons and other period films, but there was also an intellectual tinge to the place, and Juana's first poems made her a minor star.

The problem was, however, that sexy, clever ladies-in-waiting are kind of like teenage pop idols: they have a very limited life-span.  Once they became women, they had to either marry or become simple servants.  Neither option seemed a good one to Juana, so tried to opt out: she entered the convent.  In Rita' father's family, many aunts also saw becoming a nun as the only way a woman could continue to study, to escape the drudgery of country life and machismo.  Fortunately, by the time that Rita was finishing her teenage years, the university had become a live option for a poor, smart girl.  Juana Asbaje y Ramírez didn't have that option.

Perhaps to show her displeasure with the limited options available for a smart girl in Mexico in the 17th century, Helena Iara fell asleep, leaving me to tell the rest of the story another night.